Posts by TDog

Army and Navy have both asked for right to repair, now Senators want to give it to them

Re: Will need to make the repairs Squaddy Proof

And if you think this level of stupidity is bad, just ask why Putin's great invasion stalled on the road to Kiev.

Semiconductor industry could short out as copper runs dry

Lustrous

"demand for the lustrous metal i"

My arse, It forms stable oxides in air, so if it were lustrous it wouldn't be for long. Perhaps the author is confusing it with silver, which has better conuctivity at room temperature and stays lustrous just so long as it is kept polished

Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed

Re: How long????

Did you actually listen to the hearings? I'm retired and I did. If Sir Win can get out a fair and equitable report by next year I shall be most impressed. Remeber that whilst many of these people have been, and probably correctily damned in the the general view it is a principle of law that they are allowed to defend themselves. (Well, they were "assisting" the enquiry, even when they had been subpoenad. "Thank you for helping us today" with no mention it was being done with a gun at their head. Contenpt of court allows Sir Win to send them to the clinc without a jury trial.

There are only two major things that concern me re justice.

1) The police have already indicated that they have in excess of 30 persons of interest but cannot procede with their investigations until the enquiry reports.

2) Paula Vennels has a potential case of contempt of parliament outstanding as she knowingly and deliberately lied to the select commitee investigating the scandal. Until Parliament acts on this or waives its priviledge then it has a prior claim on her, and no prosecution can be brought agaist her (IANAL and this is simply my understanding of this).

UK to buy nuclear-capable F-35As that can't be refueled from RAF tankers

More a interservice political deal

Strangely, over a five to ten year period the average spend on RAF, RN and Army used to work out about 30,30,30 plus a little bit for the important things. Having tactical nukes removed from the RAF reduced their roles to deep penetration (as shown by desert storm, to be vastly successful) or close air support (combat, not support roles) which is another way of committing suicide. So the nuclear capable bit gives the RAF additional bidding rights for the odd ten percent. And, of course, they are now part of the UK's Nuclear Deterrant.

SpaceX's Starship explodes again ... while still on the ground

Re: Starship - a poem by Baldrick

ORION Starship - a poem by Baldrick

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM...

FFY

UK dumps £2.5 billion into fusion pipe dream that's already cost millions

Re: exceeded the amount of energy that went into the reaction chamber

Actually Elgaar intensly disliked the song. He thought it was too jingoistic / nationalistic

Europe is Russian to sanction Putin's pals over 'hybrid' threats

No longer part of Europe!

If we are not part of Europe, what are we? Did Trump grab us along with Greenland in a yet to be reported act from God?

Automatic UK-to-US English converter produced amazing mistakes by the vanload

Re: Surely simpler to stick with correct English

I'd forgotten that, have a plus 1.

Does UK's Online Safety Act cover misinformation? Well, that depends

Re: Speed, that's the truth.

"the legal truth", as opposed to PRAVDA which means official truth. I'm sure there is a grain of truth in there somewhere.

Developer scored huge own goal by deleting almost every football fan in Europe

Re: Deleted nearly every football fan in Europe

The letters, or national identifiers, you can have are:

UNITED KINGDOM, United Kingdom or UK

GREAT BRITAIN, Great Britain or GB...

Source, as above.

(oops)

Pentagon kills off HR IT project after 780% budget overrun, years of delays

Equal Opportunity

""I need lethal machine learning models," Hegseth said. "Not equitable machine learning models." "

Alas, the days of equal opportunity killers seems to be coming to an end. Could be a bit sad, as training for equitability implies discrimination against biases. That implies identifying those biases. That may well have been an opportune mode of target sifting.

Surprise! People don't want AI deciding who gets a kidney transplant and who dies or endures years of misery

Diana

My first serious girlfriend had kidney failure. She was in her very early twenties. Pain management wasn't what it was today and you couldn't go to Switzerland. So she tried to kill herself and failed. That meant she would never get a transplant as she might do the same again. (Intellectually I understand and agree with that decision). But of course she knew that and after a couple of years she succeded in her prior ambition.

Still miss you Diana.

Seems to me it doesn't matter what you do, someone will get screwed, And I think that is the first Topic I have initiated here.

Judge says Meta must defend claim it stripped copyright info from Llama's training fodder

Re: What if ...

Having been accused of plagiarism by the open university (the quote was referenced, in italics rather than plain text, but comitted the heinous crime of not having an end quote, I am able to speak about the processes that the OU used. It used an automated software detector without any human overview. It generated an automatic warning without any human overview. I checked the OU's minutes of their executive board meeting which authorised this use of software and it was noted in the minutes that things like this could happen. Strangely there was no discussion as to mitigation nor was there a clear path to follow to resolve such issues.

Sort of,

"Oh look, you're fucked", followed by

"Oh look, you are fucked".

UK must give more to ESA to get benefits of space industry boom, says Brian Cox

Re: Um....

And they have no interest in being commercially successful at the risk of internal stress. Multifunded by nations they are a soft ride to a safe future, whereas those in it for profit rather than prestige or overnment subsidy seem to me more efficacious in the medium term. Blue Origin, SpaceX and a host of small rocket entryists, many of whom will presumably be subjected to those commercial pressures.

How the collapse of local cloud provider caused biz continuity issues in UK government

I have to disagree

" Private sector welfare and disability assessment, another outsourcing failure".

My daughter who has severe fibromyalgia along with major arthritis issues had absolutely no issues what togever to get PIP. Admittedly I had to go to the original hearing as:

* her representative in her initial hearing (appeal rejected)

* her representative in her appeal hearing (appeal rejected)

* Write her request for permission to appeal to a Tier 1 tribunal (unpaid for all of this)

* Read her response from the request to appeal to that appeal (this bit is just unbelievable) Appeal denied as it wasn't necessary; 5 major flaws in law in a three page judgement.

* Attend the new phone heard case along with my wife, which was cancelled 15mins before the appeal as apparently no one had noticed that the three judges had been recused from th original case. (Well I did but apparently that was insufficient until the court had already been assembled - when someone finally bothered to read the papers. We had no prior notice of the panel, and so could not challenge it in advance) My wife took an unpaid day off work, leading to about 20-30 patients being cancelled at relatively short notice, with no compensation for their fuck up, but they sent my daughter an email which said they couldn't send it to me as I wasn't her representative [ Want to take a bet on that ] but no offer of compensation nor any sugestion that they would do anything to ensure this didn't happen again (like, read the paperwork, you know, it can't be that hard. Perhaps between important things like making a cuppa , or sucking the arse of the boss).

* Getting a letter which said they had decided there were no problems, ands thus removing all support. The Dr involved assumed that my daughter had walked to the shops, refused to listen to me as "they were now getting somewhere". After she had demonstrated that she had the forensic skills of a dead wasp I could finally ask a simple question; "how did you get to the shops, {name}", to which she replied "You drove me there". And how often have you done this ("not sure but 2 or three times in the last year"). This was followed on by "I see from your medical reccords provided that you have an almost normal range of motion of your arms, how do you explain that?" Again she would not let me help her with her desire to read that was which not there. Eventually I got a chance to make the point that this was passive movement (i.e. someone moving her arms, did not describe the pain involved as it was an assessment for osseus blocks), and got the response: "Oh I didn't notice that." Being the noce friendly chap that I am and bloody furious I asked the tribunal to adjurn until a competant medical advisor could be found. And then asked her where she qualified and if that was there normal standard.)

* eventually getting a letter from DWP who said that they had agreed my daughter needed the highest level of attendance allowance buts the tribunal had decided she didn't need mobility allowance. Which also stated "In view of previous decisions I have decided to overide that action

So no, I think you are as deluded as the system if you think there are any issues at all.

(Oh, and BTW, before I entered IT I was a clinician, and if I had made most of the mistakes they did then I would have been suspended, if not struck off.

So, it may or not be private, but fuck them all.

+1 for accuracy.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: Keeping a backup...

Been their, particularly with Access DB's. And as I have said before, never script a change to a SQL database with an Alter statement. Use the create instead. Then when you actually hit run through stupidity or an all nighter, it will whinge and tell you "object already exists' Only took me about 5 years of fuck ups to drill that into whatever thinks between my ears.

Re: Ouch!!!

How do they rise up?

Reminds me of many marching songs - they really made a difference in keeping in step after far too many bloody miles.

Blue Origin spins up lunar gravity for New Shepard flight

Re: Extremely unique...

So far, a unique response. But should someone reply to you too, it's uniquity shall disapear with the sands of time. So limited temporal uniqueness. Almost almost unique.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: First Amendment

No body seems to have provided any evidence that the alleged offence (writing the blog) occured in the UK. If it didn't then what jurisprudence does the UK governent have to hear the case? And since libel has to be published, if the alleged libeler typed a letter in the UK which was published in the US, would the UK have jurisprudence? If it does not then what is the difference between the keystrokes being made in the UK, but the upload to a server occurring outside the UK, such as Russia, Albania, or, maybe the US to name but three honorable and trustworthy states...?

Re: First Amendment

It's also a crime against microwaves;

We told Post Office about system problems at the highest level, Fujitsu tells Horizon Inquiry

Re: Lessons ?

I was once in court over a poll tax bill and challenged the veracity of the statements produced by Birmingham City Council's computer system. An affadavit was produced by their chief IT honcho to the effect that "the system was working in the normal manner...". I challenged that, pointing out that wording merely meant that the system was working as usual, not accurately. The basic response from the lay magistrate was something along the lines of "Oh dear" and the court paused whilst the professional lawyer who advised the court (clerk of the court) informed the magistrate of the consequences of acting on that information - that literally thousands of bills and fines might have to be repayed.

Eventually I sugested that I could help resolve the issue by agreeing to pay the £21,37 without prejudice and justice continued in its sureal manner. Best half day I ever took off from work - the entertainment value was superb. When I got to the court there were literally over 1000 cases to be heard and only 1 defendant attending. Me. I had anticipated waiting for ever whilst all of the cases for defendants whose names staarted with A-->M were tried but instead the clerk of the court simply said "is anyone here defending a case" and I stood alone. All the others were dealt with as a single entity in abstentia and as having pleaded guilty.

Ah, the theatre of Justice being seen to be done.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

My main issue with smart meters is they can be remotely controlled. Too much sparky stuff being used in my county, London isn't getting enough for their high speed trading systems, quickly, reduce the number of users of sparky stuff. "No problemo, I have a little switch..."

NATO tests aquatic drones to protect cables, coastlines

It may well be 60K drone hours - running a flotilla of drones simultaneously.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Trouble is it leaves you a complete hostage to others. Imagine, you have just finished 5 years of seminal work on spermiferous tubules. It is your lifetime achievement and your doctoral thesis. You submit it for publication and... The publication notices that your uni's subscription to Word is 6 days out of date - the work is withdrawn and your doctorate viva canceled. All for want of a horseshoe.

Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused

Re: Computer wiped every month ?

Aye, and since Ogham has no notation for numbers you won't ever be sure of exactly what you are getting.

NHS would be hit by 'significant' costs if UK loses EU data status, warn Lords

Re: Erm

I'm sorry to but into what is almost a private fightclub but might I point out that the value of EC co-operation on medicines was such that they, under the aegis of Ursula Van Lieden, attempted to hijack vaccines that had been developed in Cambridge and produced in Belgium for their own citizens (mertitocrats and beurocrats first?) against their own rules and only backed down under extreme pressure. The NHS is not perfect or good at many things including treating me, but at least I don't have to worry about them stealing (sorry, misappropriating) my medicines for their political convenience.

First time's the charm: SpaceX catches a descending Super Heavy Booster

Re: 70 meters tall?

Shirley the question should be "how many metres are 70 Giraffes, and where are the feet placed on the Giraffe immediately underfoot. The image of Giraffes teetering on each others heads (facing backwards and forwards to avoid toppling) is strangely compelling.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Doesn't scale

2 obvious reasons

1) Keeping the beam tight, possibly including issues with thermal atmospheric blooming.

2) Providing sufficient energy in the beam ("22 MJ of stored energy into an electric current pulse"), does not describe how much energy was in the actual beam. At physically larger sizes initial bloom from the target will tend to prevent the beam hitting the solid target beneath the vapourised material. I would like to see some scaling evaluations, not just small scale testing.

Boeing union workers in US reject contract: 96% vote to strike

I's seriously worse than that. Their previous settlement was a pay cut that left them earning less than barristers. So this doesn't really do anything other than partially reinstate the saus quo ante.

SpaceX tries to wash away Texas pollution allegations

Dihydrogen Monoxide

Is not only toxic in doses less than 1Kg through inhalation but is also a very powerful greenhhouse gas. There are far too many systems taking relatively innocuous methane (which has an upper atmospheric lifetime of a few years) and converting it to Dihydrogen Monoxide which has no measurable half life in the atmosphere). This must stop NOW!!!!!!! Please won't someone think of the children (who are already composed of about 60% by mass of this toxic chemical).

Please?

EVs continue to grow but private buyers are steering clear, say motor trade figures

Re: "cost and lack of charging infrastructure"

i thought the green sticker referred to "little green men", universally known to be caused by nuclear power and or anal probing aliens

Azure VMs ruined by CrowdStrike patchpocalypse? Microsoft has recovery tips

How many wake up calls do we need?

And even more terrifyingling, How many have we got left?

Re: feline overlords

+1 for Hitchikers reference

Brit tech tycoon Mike Lynch cleared of all charges in US Autonomy fraud trial

HP still has a damages claim in the civil courts.

So what happens next? USA states no fraud; UK rules an offence committed. HP claims damages in UK. Will this be the nominal £1 paid into court rather than (from recollection) £4Bn?

Ex-Space Shuttle boss corrects the record on Hubble upgrade mission

Re: Obsoleted?

Torpedo, spotting and Reconnaissance Mk 2; better known as the Swordfish. Simply the ultimate naval strike aircraft of WW2, in terms of kills per airframe.

Re: Obsoleted?

Strangely enough, scrapping the TSR2 may have been the correct decision. It had a very niche role; instant sunshine over Moscow or similar places. From memory, it was not a bomb truck, which was what the Tornado IDS was. As such, although not as aesthetically pleasing or unique as the TSR2, the Tornado was a far better in service aircraft than the TSR2 would have been. Bonus point question; which iconic aircraft was the original TSR2?

IT consultant-cum-developer in court over hiding COVID-19 loan

Liquidation

I chose to liquidate my company instead, due to my advancing (does it ever do anything otherwise?) age, and rely on the parliamentary assurances given by the PM "other sources of support".

After a much longer delay I was refused those sources of support (Universal Credit), because "the law doesn't allow us to give it to you". And that was the full explanation I was given. Perhaps I should have taken the loans and fled to Yorkshire, nobody gets extradited from Yorkshire.

Judge refuses to Ctrl-Z divorce order made by a misclick

Re: Does it work the other way round?

Or even worse (or better perhaps) A+B+C, and D+D. D+D is acceptable to the software in a civil partnership, or should be as there is no reason why Peter Jones should not get hooked up with Peter Jones.

Tired techie 'fixed' a server, blamed Microsoft, and got away with it

Re: "this largely undocumented hellhole of keys and strings and dwords."

That's where I got my Turner - in a box of unsorted prints priced at about £5.00 each. Browsed through them and with trembling hands bought that one. And cringed as the shop assistent tried to fold it to fit into a large envelope. Fortunately I sort of said, "don't worry" and put it in my carrier bag.

Why making pretend people with AGI is a waste of energy

Rossum

Well according to Rossum, who invented the things in Čapek's original play, they were humanoid, sociopathic "Radius: I don’t want any master. I want to be master over others." and ultimately fatal for the human race. So yes, in 1921 that is the expectation of Robots (slaves in slavic) and so the 1950's simply reflected reality in their descriptions. It is you modernists, with your anarchic tendencies to throw away the past in search of the new reality, that are straining the bounds of historical reality beyond their elastic limit. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/origin-word-robot-rur/#:~:text=The%20word%20itself%20derives%20from,were%20neither%20metallic%20nor%20mechanical.

Britain enters period of mourning as Greggs unable to process payments

Re: Ok adding my not so consipracy take...

Well Martin,

if you are a girl, of suitable age and temperament you may screw me. It's a kind offer but on reflection my wife would probably not allow it. But thank you for the thought. I'm sure, in time, if you persist enough you will find someone of a suitable gender for your personal preferences who will live a happy and fullfilling life with you. But whilst you are searching, ixnay on the exitbray. It;s a very polarising issue. Good luck.

Tech support done bad sure makes it hard to do tech support good

Reading Docs

I was technical lead on the Ericsson dealer network project, Ericson had been learning pseudo-staff management from Sun Life of Canada. So we had fields for 1st emloyees birthday, second employees birthday and other such bullshit down to about 10 employees. One of the questions I asked was "What happens if there are more than 10 employees?" and was told "Oh shit". And of course these values were all held in a single data row on a SQL-Server 6.5 system... Normalisation was apparently what happened when you changed countries, like becoming English rather than Scottish.

So I had an incredibly short deadline to meet <2 months to have a working system. In a spirit of informed hatred a USA company was competing with us for the contract - we were supposed to share things but the mutual hatred meant that was improbable at best.

It was decided that the best testers of each system would be their competitors and whilst I was doing some tidying up I got a phone call from the States - telling me I had fucked up bigtime, and they were going to win as our system didn't work at all. They sent me some screen shots to prove it, and they were right. It didn't bloody well work on IE2, which is what they were testing our system on.

Now if they had only read the spec carefully they might have noticed that IE3 was required.

I read the briefing notes for testing and in them it was made clear that the debug results were not to be shared other than with Ericsson. So i didn't. I did ring one of their chaps whom I knew quite well and enquired whether or not the system was required to work on IE2 and was told "certainly not - we want the latest and greatest features of IE3". So I closed the call having sort of mentioned that it would be a good idea for them to look for the identifying features of the Browser used for testing...

Yep - read both manuals and specs and ensure you're doing what is requested.

War of the workstations: How the lowest bidders shaped today's tech landscape

Re: A successful pathogen

An optimaxed pathogen would

* be mild and not affect the host greatly

* be integrated into the host in every place

* make the host totally dependent on it

* give evolutionary advantages that outweigh the disadvantages to the host

* be easily spread and reproducible

* NOT BE YELLOW (shout out to explosions and ire)

(Ignoring the yellow bit, sort of looks like mitochondria and possibly may other inclusion organelles). Or even more interestingly cowpox, which supplanted smallpox cos it found an evolutionary niche that precluded smallpox from entering the host.

Another optimaxed pathogen that was hostile to the host would

* not kill the host untill the R factor was significantly greater than 2

-+

Philips recalls 340 MRI machines because they may explode in an emergency

Re: Speculation

It's helium. It will just about go straight through a rubber anyway. That's why those condom wearing pornstars always had squeaky voices.

Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix

Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage

Done that for 30 years +, along with, and this is particularly useful.

NEVER SCRIPT EDITS IN SQL SERVER

Instead script creates and make edits in them. If you hit the run button by mistake the create will fail whinging about object already exists, and once you are ready simply change the create to an edit. Saved my ass often enough to be worth the small amount of extra effort, particularly if some bugger interupts you in mid flow.

And speaking of mid flow, never stand next to a co-worker in the urinals. That way neither of you will be disappointed.

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

Re: Not difficult

Or a different boiler.

I am on your side. No matter what the legislature states in it's words, entry conditions favour the big players. They can afford the costs of doing it. Imagine applying for a small project as an individual. Total size, maybe £15M. Now imagine the costs of bidding; this is just a guess but I suspect you must include:

Equal opportunity compliance proof.

Gender reassignment policy proof.

All of the green requirements including

* Disposal of waste products policy

* Costed global warming impact statements

* Policies w.r.t. employees who are whistleblowers about breach of any policy

* 3 years audited tax returns as a small enterprise

Proofs of (if you are a small team of 3-4 people making a "we can do this bid, and we should do it cos it is important):

* 3 similar projects performed with full washups on how it was done and the top 3 catastrophes in each project:

* these as usually something like "We got Earl Grey tea, rather than English breakfast"

* Mr. Jones didn't particularly work well with us but we learned to get along

Suboptions

a) He died of old age.

b) We came to a mutual understanding (no comment at all about how this happened)

c) After a while he was moved and his replacement was really motivated to finalise the solution (no comment at all about how this happened).

d) The project was not as successful as we had originally projected but with the institutionalised and localised hostility it can be seen that our success was particularly noticable

And so on and so on.

And now you are a big firm like Crapita wanting to ensure you keep the small jobs because:

* They are relatively easy

* They are relatively likely not to fail

* There are a lot more of them

* And once we are in their, we are in.

* And we have a shed load, a garage load, and a green house load of ex civil servants, who spent years designing these barriers to entry, and for a small cost to us, can negate the barriers with a magic wand of knowing what is wanted. (Don't waste time answering the questions, just include all this shit from here, here, oh, and most importantly here. Don't worry about what it says; as long as it ticks the right boxes, no-one will check anyway.)

* And, of course, finally, here, cut and paste it from our previous 321 applications last month.

I don't know the answer, but I do note that regulatory barriers tend to increase, not decrease. And this ensures that new entries can be crowded out.

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

Well as all the prior literature tends to sugest "Anal Probing", for probes, (or maybe that is just too much of sexstories.com) could I please request that we melt the gold disc showing them where to find us. And if we can't do that, could we please melt the bit that shows the invitingly present USB(456231 C (Version 278/56/021), insertion point.

World's largest nuclear fusion reactor comes online in Japan

Re: I worry the "clean" nature may be being overstated here

Just to add a little more information. And this came as part of my OU degree in STEM. The electricity which is used in heat pumps costs about 4* the price of the gas that it replaces in a gas boiler. Thus even with an annual efficiency of 3 (a good value) this indicates that the user will pay about 4/3 the price that would have been paid had gas been used. The green advantage is often touted but as electricity production --> green then there is little to no net green effect. Of course, were the system to be running on dirty electricity the green effect would exist.