Posts by Uffish

AI's next battlefield is literally the battlefield: In 20 years, bots will fight our wars – Army boffin

AI ? We don't need no steenking AI.

The M18A1 Claymore mine has the words "FRONT TOWARD ENEMY" embossed on the front. That is all you need for the killing game.

US may have by far the world's biggest military budget but it's not showing in security

Re: They're not much good at communication either

But Google is very good at finding things;

"694913.pdf" gives "https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf" as the first response.

edit:

... and the second response was "https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/694913/dwp-ss030-security-standard-oracle-database-security.pdf" _ what is it with 694913 and cybersecurity?

Decoding the Chinese Super Micro super spy-chip super-scandal: What do we know – and who is telling the truth?

Re: Second chip added, bollocks

"all part of the info wars going on" Upvoted for that - whether you are right or wrong.

Quit that job and earn $185k... cleaning up San Francisco's notoriously crappy sidewalks

Re: homeless druggies

'Twas ever thus - actually the percentage of 'homeless druggies' was not always the same, maybe there is a solution.

Spies still super upset they can't get at your encrypted comms data

Re: Secure communications

You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. Oh, you do have something to hide ...

Intel rips up microcode security fix license that banned benchmarking

Re: Not in that lawyer's law school

Corporate lawyers do what they are asked to do. Blame the Intel Marketing Dept.

Former NSA top hacker names the filthy four of nation-state hacking

I just go with...

... every country just trying to further its own interests. Nothing new, just the technology.

Now that's a dodgy Giza: Eggheads claim Great Pyramid can focus electromagnetic waves

Re: off-air standard

Hi M0LPT, Dept. of Superfluous Clarification here - shouldn't that be 'on-air standard'.

Re: cardboard replica of the Great Pyramid

... full size I hope?

LG G7 ThinkQ: Ropey AI, but a feast for sore eyes and ears

Re: Mobile

The word, used as a noun, belongs to Alexander Calder.

Re: May we please stop calling them phones?

But, but, my phone is a phone not a fondleslab.

Re: "budget (£50) earphones"

Sorry, I lost interest at that point.

‘Elders of the Internet’ apologise for social media, recommend Trump filters to fix it

Re: Pentahol

or Pentothal.

Geoboffins spot hundreds of ghost dunes on Mars

Re: Deal with it..

I would love to deal with it for you, just how big a budget have you got, and are you planning on coming along as well?

Galileo, here we go again. My my, the Brits are gonna miss EU

Re: NATO...

But you could use it in combination with glonass and gps. Might even help with accuracy if things got tricky and all of them were set to random dither mode. Would the average of three falsified positions be closer to the real position? I don't know and I don't care, it's to hot to care.

BOFH: Is everybody ready for the meeting? Grab a crayon – let's get technical

Re: Technical, English and Idiot.

My moderately fluent version of French, after thirty years of working in France, is a mix of basic French from half-remembered O level and a book on irregular verbs (the 'Jip en Janneke') plus a lot of 'argot' (the 'Bootwerker'). Works fine but causes some amusement in polite society.

MSDN unleashes a fresh round of unintentional innuendo bingo

re: "handy peers"

@AC

I don't know which school you went to but compared to the schools I went to in the 50's and 60's you were sadly under informed and mistaken.

Microsoft Edge bug odyssey shows why we can't have nice things

Re: Horribly Optimistic

This is Microsoft - you are being horribly optimistic. And of course they were testing the fix.

And Mozilla were better.

Oddly enough, when a Tesla accelerates at a barrier, someone dies: Autopilot report lands

Re: autopilot age gap

I'm old generation and autopilot means nothing to me in the context of cars but I can quite believe that the Tesla Marketing Dept is very attached to the 'autopilot' designation - for all the wrong reasons.

As an engineer, if I wanted a self driving car I'd take a taxi or if I was a plutocrat I'd have a chauffeur and a car. I would probably enjoy driving a Tesla but I would rip out the 'auto-da-fé' before I drove it.

I would rather not have an accident in a car but the hurt would be worse if it was some sodding, half baked, handful of assorted transducers and a huge touch screen, marketing department driven, programmable controller that caused the accident.

Foot-long £1 sausage roll arrives

Re: "may contain..."

Don't go talking like that in France or the AAAAA will get you.

http://aaaaa-asso.fr/

(Andouillette - Wikipedia will explain)

Four hydrogen + eight caesium clocks = one almost-proven Einstein theory

Re: This is why science rocks

May I remind you that bollocks are a perfectly good food, if you want to eat them and, speaking for myself, pretty damn good in their intended function and place in (on ?) a body.

Homeopathy, on the other hand, is a mostly harmless pastime for the slightly neurotic.

This time experiment however seems to be one of the more boring* bits of science but I raise a glass to all who participated in the experiment, profound thanks and hearty congratulations on getting the result and the astonishing precision of the result.

*boring - I think it took a lot of work, nothing against rocking, but for science you need work.

Visa Europe fscks up Friday night with other GDPR: 'God Dammit, Payment Refused'

Other cards are available.

I noticed in another journal that we are advised to keep note of any expenses associated with the Visa titsup. Would the annual fees for alternative cards be considered a legitimate claim on Visa.

UK's Royal Navy accepts missile-blasting missile as Gulf clouds gather

Re: additional energy

Giant waterwheels operated by falling rain.

There, I've solved your problem for you, you just have to do some technical work or something and hey presto, we will be self sufficient in energy.

Drone 'swarm' buzzed off FBI surveillance bods, says tech bloke

Re:drop in module

For a 100 km UHF line of sight range I have two questions, what is the "full power' of the transmitter(s) and what is the height of the drone ? I would think that one or both of those values should be 'unusual'.

We wanted a camera, they gave us the eye of Gemini – and an eSIM

Re: Fail

Flounce all you like, I like it and am saving up. The reason is that smartphones are too fiddly and laptops are too big. I have a smallish tablet that is perfect except that it doesn't have a keyboard.

Blighty stuffs itself in Galileo airlock and dares Europe to pull the lever

Re: "our politicians actually followed our instructions"

I sometimes drop my guard when driving and follow the instructions of the GPS without thinking - usually followed by a pretty dangerous moment or two before I can get back to a rational course.

Grande Bretagne

Emmanuel Macron has already announced that London is the sixth biggest French city.

Sysadmin unplugged wrong server, ran away, hoped nobody noticed

Re: Cable Ties

"And ziptied cables are an abomination..." How about modifying a beautifully, waxed-thread, laced bunch of cables for real frustration.

Scissors cut paper. Paper wraps rock. Lab-made enzyme eats plastic

Re: It is just me that's noticed.....

I remember when beer was less than 1 shilling a pint.

More to the point, try keeping count of the bits of plastic you throw away each day - yoghurt pots, snack wrappers, bubble wrap and polystyrene popcorn packaging, toothpaste tubes etc,etc,etc - all carefully made, high spec materials made to be thrown away.

El Reg needs you – to help build an automated beer-transporting robot

Re: What's wrong with a fridge...

... it needs a cannon and an app.

https://hackaday.com/2011/01/01/beer-shooting-dorm-fridge/#more-32335

GCHQ boss calls out Russia for 'industrial scale disinformation'

Re: Both are lieing...

I would hope that at least the GCHQ bod would be lying.

Re: plus ça change ...

What has changed is that "Eastern Block" tractor production statistics broadcast by a radio station that identified itself at regular intervals have been replaced by often successfully disguised disinformation about "Western Block" matters. The intent has changed.

2018's Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon laptop is a lovely lappie

No dvd drive; no keypad; and Windows 10

1: Meh

2: Good point.

3: This point should be taken to the International Court of Justice as soon as possible.

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

First comes Hubris - then comes Nemesis

Good, old fashioned, observational psychology.

Re: Cloudy

All your data are belong to US, says US.

There, I've put that in a wider context for the benefit of US administration types.

Who had Intel in the 'discrimination lawsuit' pool? Congratulations

Re: Collect data!

Where I worked, before retirement, the max, min and median salaries were periodically published by the unions (France, they even have a union for management).

For some reason, you lot love 'em. So here are the many ThinkPads of 2018

Re: QC

Maybe the production line supervisor said "Get that laptop finished asap".

Something to look forward to

Thanks for giving me a preview of my 'new' home laptop in five to eight years time.

Apple, if you want to win in education, look at what sucks about iPads

Re: "type their exams"

Depends on whether there is a spell checker or not.

SpaceX blasted massive plasma hole in Earth's ionosphere

Re: Bombasticisms

Did the article say the earth was permanently damaged? It did say that GPS readings were slightly affected. No big deal, except maybe for all of the precision measurements that were taken under the 'hole'. I know that if I had been surveying some affected area during that time I would be obliged to go out and at least check my measurements, just for insurance purposes.

Are you Falcon sure, Elon? Musk vows Big Rocket will go up 2019

Re: Spring is coming, the windbags are starting to blow

What Mr. Musk said is that his self-driving cars would be "200 per cent safer than a person by the end of next year". I interpret that to mean that next year he will fit bloody great, cast iron bumpers (fenders) to front and back of his cars. That way, in an accident, the cars should be ok, humans not so much ok.

Brit semiconductor tech ended up in Chinese naval railgun – report

re: "catching up"

The US military industrial complex has been known to catch up on technology by some pretty dubious means also, and as for buying up companies to get at the good technology, well ....

You can't expect others not to do what is almost standard practice in the field.

Did somebody say Brexit? Cambridge Analytica grilled: Brit MPs' Fake News probe

Re: The Dark side of political campaigning

Yes, ethics don't seem to feature in this companies business and I'm sure they would do as much as they could get away with, or the customer was willing to pay for, but there is one point that puzzles me. Would you even listen to, let alone be influenced by, a cold call from and automatic spieling machine?

I would like to know because I have an absolute fortune locked up in a Nigerian bank and I am looking for a few investors to help me liberate it.

Vatican sets up dedicated exorcism training course

Ghostbusters

I hate to be prosaic about an activity with so much comic potential but no one wants exorcism until it there are problems for humans, and providing a successful exorcism service requires happier humans after the exorcism. That requires some considerable skill however you look at it, hence the recommendation of an apprenticeship period.

Brexit to better bumpkin broadband, 4G coverage for farmers – Gove

Costed

My suspicion is that Gove is betting that we stop paying money to the EU the moment that the EU stops paying money to us. My betting is that this will not happen and the sticklanders will find that no money at all is available for their infrastructure for a number of years.

Teensy plastic shields are the big new thing in 2018's laptop crop

Re: Hole punch chad

Little disks punched from black electrical tape also work fine for cameras and all the little holes with always-on microphones behind.

Flight Simulator's DRM fighter nosedives into Chrome's cache

Re: They're not first and won't be the last.

German Democratic People's Republic ? Guards with dogs and machine guns, judges with instructions as to the outcome of the trial, prisons with very bad reputations ?

Google says it is a European directive, that doesn't have the same dissuasive power. It only frightens the bean-counters.

What's that, Adobe? A Photoshop for faking voices?

Re: "high end music editing"

Including taking a razor blade to 1/4" tape (admittedly at 15"/sec) 50 years ago.

Of course a mystery website attacking city-run broadband was run by an ISP. Of course

Re: Gates anti-gun agenda

As an occasional visitor to the USA, thanks Bill (and all the others), much appreciated..