Posts by GrumpyOldBloke

Oz intel committee: Crypto-busting is only bad if you're a commie, and we're not by the way

They fenced off the grassy knoll remember. National security!

Stand for nothing Bill has repeatedly said - bi partisan on national security. If the LNP wraps it up in the flag then Labor will vote for it. It's only a pretend duopoly.

Oz to turn pirates into vampires: You won't see their images in mirrors

Re: So Australia is....

Don't need brown envelopes in Australia, corruption at the top is more or less legal and certainly expected. At least two state and a federal elections coming up and the worlds best economic managers haven't got any money. So come buy a piece of paradise. A (surprisingly) small political donation is all that is required.

Oz digital health agency tightens medical record access as watchdog warns of crim honeypot

Re: Not just law enforcement

And we haven't even got to 5-eyes and the data sharing implications there yet.

It's 2018 so, of course, climate.news is sold to climate change deniers

Perhaps AC got down voted for his fake news viewpoint. While flat earth is fairly easy to disprove, homeopathy - the traditional system of medicine in many parts of Asia for thousands of years - cannot be dismissed so easily. The scientific approach would be for AC to propose his theory, construct and conduct a series of tests and observations to prove his theory and then publish the results to let others pick over the method and the conclusions. One wrong step and his theory is disproved and we all go back to a state of healthy skepticism of all such claims - for and against.

Simply claiming as AC implies that homeopathy is idiotic with no supporting evidence is mere belief or prejudice - what we might call fake news - and worthy of many down votes.

Australia defies trend for network sales slide, shovels cash at Cisco

Re: Evidence of vain hope ?

Unless it is evidence of the demands government is putting on the economy. Santa has a list of who's been naught and who's been nice and Dutton obviously wants that list at any price.

Imagine a patent on organizing computer files being used against online shopping sites. Oh, it's still happening

Did your patent describe a mechanism to remain a viable financial entity while trolling said large companies in one of the most expensive games on Earth.

Marriage of AI, Google chips will save diabetics from a lot of pricks

Re: Thank you.

While you are waiting on Google to add your blood chemistry to the list of things it shares about you, have you seen the current shoulder patch solution?

Referring to an article from Feb-17 in an august medical journal:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4225676/Diabetes-patch-ends-pain-finger-prick-tests.html

Edit: I see Noel Morgan's comment below also refers to this device.

Australian Senate committee dumps on digital transformation

> Without any central vision, the report said, technology becomes “solely a way to realise efficiencies and cut costs

There is a central vision: Technology is a way to spy on people and extort money from the poor. Poor who may or may not have fallen foul of complexity and unreality engineered into government laws.

Look at the enthusiasm with which the government embraces 5-eyes and its attendant evils. There is your vision.

What does it take for an OpenAI bot to best Dota 2 heroes? 128,000 CPU cores, 256 Nvidia GPUs

Re: How many orders of magnitude

Of course this is not about playing Dota. This is about playing WW3 Syria, Iran, Russia and China when the other half of the team get the robots up and running. The skills learnt here are already useful, not useful enough against teams of humans but that is useful to know as well.

White House calls its own China tech cash-inject ban 'fake news'

Re: Bah!

That's unfair. The wall is still a work in progress.

Trump is just waiting for enough Latin Americans to arrive on US soil to build his side of it.

Now Microsoft ports Windows 10, Linux to homegrown CPU design

Re: Well, it's Microsoft

Patents, patents, patents!

Boffins offer to make speculative execution great again with Spectre-Meltdown CPU fix

Re: Hard as I try...

> and mandatory programming standards

There's your problem right there.

If you criminalise side channel attacks then only criminals will have side channel attacks.

Wires, chips, and LEDs: US trade bigwigs detail Chinese kit that's going to cost a lot more

Re: Every one

Perhaps the third one is that you can't run trade surpluses if you are the global reserve currency.

AT&T gets clearance to devour Time Warner for $85 BEEEELION

Re: Wasn't ...

And yet here is the bride again looking lovely in off-white with aging husband number two. A telco that thinks owing a media company will bring the customers flocking. Two lonely hearts whose only cultural fit is that they both remember the good times. AT&T's logo looks a bit like the little blue pill so I am sure the old boy has one last ye-haa left in hm before the hairpiece slips off, the glasses fog up, his back gives out and his shareholder offspring wonder where the inheritance went.

UK digital secretary throws cold water over bid for laws on kids' use of social media

Can't spy on them if they are not online.

Chinese tech giant ZTE is back in business – plus or minus $1.4bn and its entire board

Re: Don't forget

> better results than his predecessors

The Chinese will have considered the costs and the benefits and will already have the workarounds and the honeypots in place. The importance of replicating rather than buying US technology has just been reaffirmed and China now has a 'clean' company to facilitate its acquisition. Independent companies to trade with Iran and Nth Korea will already be set up. This is a $1.4B donation to give the US president face in return for ... ?

Britain's new F-35s arrive in UK as US.gov auditor sounds reliability warning klaxon

Nope, not yet. After such a long time in the air have to first work out how to get them to Turkey for maintenance.

UK's first transatlantic F-35 delivery flight delayed by weather

Re: Which is more expendable?

> 4-5 years, you could get a new plane a lot quicker than that.

Any other plane maybe.

Another F35 could hover over him and keep him warm.

Great time to shift bytes: International bandwidth prices are in free fall

Re: Meanwhile...

We haven't seen what sort of bandwidth the sexbots will need for cloud processing and updates. Always on 5-senses processing and responses. I expect those things to be hungry (or I will wan't my money back).

UK military may recruit wheezy, alcoholic keyboard warriors

A conscientious ejector?

Re: Colour blindness?

So long as you are not responsible for red flagging potential terrorists I don't see a problem.

To be on the safe side ask you colleagues which are the red flags and use those ones liberally.

By liberally I mean a lot rather than just on white males.

nbn™ CEO didn't mean to offend gamers, just brand them unwelcome bandwidth-hogs

The residential evening internet peak has been known about for years. The counter to it is to diversify your customer base so that the investment required to support daytime business customers can be reused at night. However, if you don't have many daytime business customers to justify further investment or are constrained by poor financial planning or technology choices then I guess there is no other choice but to blame (implied) young people. It is what all governments in Australia do and they seem to get away with it.

Nadella tells worried GitHub devs: Judge us by our actions

Re: Cost

Opportunities: Mining the code for patents. Mining the code for good ideas that can be re-purposed for the Microsoft brand. Mining the code in order to build a better code writer AI (with patents) and attempt to lock (Enterprise) development into Microsoft tools. Copyright opportunities. Talent opportunities. Mindshare opportunities. Marketing, financial and expert assistance to projects that favour Microsoft brands.

Your F-35s need spare bits? Computer says we'll have you sorted in... a couple of years

That's the cost. If an intelligent nation had to build one would they end up with an F35.

Re: Israel F35

Didn't the F35 used in an Israeli raid get hit by a bird in Oct-17. It was reported that while it made it back to base it's condition was pronounced terminal. The plane not the bird.

Re: I'll have some of that business please

> each software upgrade will be typed in manually by a technician seated in the plane with a wired keyboard in her/his lap.

That was the original approach but led to problems. Critical code tended to be stubbed:

eject() {

return false;

}

closeCanopy {

return false;

}

Now they use paired programming for critical systems. The junior programmer seated in the plane with a wired keyboard in her/his lap. The mentor sitting in a bunker 300 yards away with a remote video feed, a wireless keyboard and some sort of good luck charm like a bobbing Elvis.

Chinese president Xi seeks innovation independence

Re: A President-For-Life Communist Country? Read Some History Please.

@ Dave 126. Not sure China is at ease with the president for life concept being reintroduced, memories of Mao and the cult of personality. There was considerable debate within China on this topic before the outcome was officially accepted. President Xi may have a different definition of at-ease than the rest of us.This inability to suffer a free exchange of ideas, the norm throughout Asia and a growing problem in the West, pretty much condemns a culture of innovation and that is before we get to the myriad of problems with connections and corruption.

Re: A President-For-Life Communist Country? Read Some History Please.

What Mr Marx (third cousin to the Rothschilds') failed to mention was that the wealth can't be distributed more evenly because in a debt based fiat currency the wealth is created out of thin air by the bankers as debt and must return to the bankers as an expression of real effort and value when due. Missing this important point, Marx was little more than a dreamer.

Did you even sweat, tho? Plaintiffs told to amend claims in Apple headphones suit

Re: Found the solution. Tim Cook give me a shout if you are reading this

I read the first bit "It consists of a wire between the headphones"

And thought, yup that'll do it.

nbn™ isn’t fixing HFC, it’s ‘optimising’ it

Re: A rate of 100,000 a month

- spare ntd

- book of excuses

- first aid kit

Was the skill in selling a 'failing' network or was the skill in keeping the best frequencies for itself and making NBN take the noisy frequencies at the lower end of the spectrum. It would be funny if it wasn't our money and if it wasn't the same federal government negotiating our international trade deals.

Trump’s new ZTE tweets trump old ZTE tweets

I vote for shrewdest negotiator in history, goes nicely with the stable genius theme

Though at the end of all this I expect at least half of the Earth to be glass.

Let's kick the tyres on Google's Android P... It's not an overheating wreck, but UX is tappy

Don't put the 6P under CPU load or you may discover the boot loop of death.

Microsoft vows to bridge phones to PCs, and this time it means it. Honest.

Re: There is a reason for no one achieving this.

The problem is Google not Microsoft. It would be easy to include RDP in the Android build, we already have Microsoft's MTP so why not one more MS protocol. RDP functions can be added to rooted Android devices so there is no great technical barrier to overcome. Google's vision for Android is a data slurping toy for selfies and cat videos.

UK Parliament roars: Oi! Zuck! Get in here for a grilling – or you'll get a Tower of London tour

Yup, publicity whores. They do like to be seen with famous people

Doom and Super Mario could be a lot tougher now AI is building levels

Queue the lawsuits from Nintendo.

Australian SigInt spooks won't get power to spy on locals

Re: Be Afraid

Hopefully the work being done by Get-Up will put an end to that horror scenario.

However, the small government libs are sure to have others standing behind Peter to take up the mantle of a large all powerful federal apparatus. After all that is where the money is.

Supreme Court to dig into Google's very cosy $8.5m deal with lawyers over web search leak

Re: America Fuck Yeah

America was never about the little guys. If you weren't in with the big guys you were prey.

if dev == woman then dont_be(asshole): Stack Overflow tries again to be more friendly to non-male non-pasty coders

Re: noob at StackExchange myself

Obviously those couple of dozen thousand reputation points are a sign of privilege, an obvious power imbalance. Rather than be intimidated, believe in yourself. Stand your ground. Be proud of your diversity of views. It's not called stack overflow for nothing. /sarc.

Penguins in a sandbox: Google nudges Linux apps toward Chrome OS

I am not aware of Linux slowing down over time.

Windows, most definitely.

Linux, no.

Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, oi oi oi! Tech zillionaire Ray's backdoor crypto for the Feds is Clipper chip v2

Re: Making Non-compliant Encryption Illegal

Without constant access to the surrendered keys to try decrypt every message, by the time the government voyeurs arrive at your name on the list it will be too late to realise that you were non-confirming and past communications are out of reach. To mitigate this, keys cannot be held in some magic government assured escrow but must be on the network and constantly tested against every message.

Qual-gone: 1,200+ axed from Snapdragon, Centriq giant Qualcomm

Re: Put a stake in it

Our stakeholders are our most important asset.

OK, this time it's for real: The last available IPv4 address block has gone

Re: "Nobody uses it..."

IPV6 is supported by most major operating systems. However, if you do try to use it on your network you run into non-standard IPV6 implementations; Android in general and Samsung Android in particular.

Facebook’s in real trouble now: Australia’s opened a probe

Re: Couple of million bucks?

Why bother? Learn how to gain a political advantage over your opponents. Donation shakedown. If it can elect Trump then maybe the LNP have a chance. Help educate our politicians that the internet isn't just for pr0n. Opportunities for our ministry of everything. In short, something clever happened and Canberra is scrambling to understand it and to see how it can either profit from it or make it illegal.

What's silent but violent and costs $250m? Yes, it's Lockheed Martin's super-quiet, supersonic X-plane for NASA

Re: Only $247.5m?

$247.5m Enough to make a video, stock up the drinks cabinet, call the girls and begin lobbying for the real money.

Super Cali goes ballistic, Starbucks is on notice: Expensive milky coffee is something quite cancerous

Looking at the following site there appear to be a number of states with childhood vaccination rates lower than CA. CA already has SB277 removing personal and religious belief exemptions - with reports that drug companies donated millions to CA lawmakers before the vaccine debate. Perhaps the publicity around SB277 caused some parents to begin weighing the risks of vaccination against the benefits.

www.aap.org/en-us/advocacy-and-policy/aap-health-initiatives/immunizations/Pages/Across-America.aspx

It's baaack – WannaCry nasty soars through Boeing's computers

A disaster, for who?

Australian Senate passes meaningless motion that says encryption is very useful

Who are Labor kidding, nothing but puppets.

Bipartisan on national security. Wouldn't want Bill wedged before an election.