Posts by TDog

I was fired for blowing the whistle on cult's status in Google unit, says contractor

Was one of the cult members Nehemiah Scudder?

Whatever you do, don't show initiative if you value your job

Re: jumping out of plane with no parachute

Well I've jumped out of a fucking plane with two parachutes,

And neither worked as well as I could have wanted.

The first didn't tell me I was in a shitty place until the wind blew me across the combine harvester storage area [No, I am serious] and the second couldn't get me out of the mess when I found the first wasn't working. Still here with some small bits of titanium generously donated by the taxpayer via the NHS, and I have now a life (not so very long left) concern about however many parachutes you can have, if they

* Come too far down the decision tree

* Don't understand the interdependanilty risks

* Don't take the external environment [just where are those fucking combine harvester storeyards]

* Don't understand the risks [So what is so bad about being 30 feet above a group of parked harvesters when you are dropping at 15 - 30 feet per second (big fat bugger on a T10)]

* And finally for me, but there are lots more: Not all risks are combine harvesters, the NHS can't fix everything.

Japan's asteroid probe reportedly found 20 amino acids

Re: A statistician would argue ....

Human life can't last forever because it (the universe) existed priorly without human life. Assuming an inifinite life for the universe then human life's finite duration is effectively zero compared to an infinity. Thus we never existed anyway. So much for the strong anthropic principle.

Small nuclear reactors produce '35x more waste' than big plants

Re: Size?

No - it may be valuable in the future. What has the sun done to upset you? Fire it in small quantities in cometary like orbits - something like spinlaunch would be ideal for this - encase the hot stuff in a suitable material and keep that wheel spinning.

50 launchers whanging out 10 launches each of 50kg high level waste per day could get rid of it into cometary like orbits in about 25 years (250,000 tonnes of high level waste around). That's not long, it just becomes an engineering problem.

Re: even more safer to operate?

Just remember, more people died at Chapwuidick than Three Mile Island.

Google Russia goes broke after bank account snatched

Re: Very bad idea

To be fair, we did wander all overf Germany, by land and air, blowing it to shit. But that was a war...Oh.

Human-made hopper out-leaps rival robots in artificial jumping contest

Re: The next hurdle

Nor at Moon ambient surface temperature and atmospheric pressure does rubber (freezes or looses volatiles and melts) and to a lesser extent carbon fibre. On the more heavy side of things you would know exactly where to find it, just where it was left.

NASA's modified Boeing 747 SP SOFIA to be grounded for good

Re: I'm puzzled...

Following in the screams of the soon to be ex passengers and crew.

Twitter faces existential threat from world's richest techbro

You couldn't care less

I can think of nothing that would make me care more...

And can we please have a sarcasm icon, and perhaps a think about it icon?

Ex IT chief at Homeland Security watchdog stole US govt software to pirate

Uncle Sam's Software

Was good enough to warrant stealing it? Bloody hell, what went wrong when they built it?

Buying a USB adapter: Pennies. Knowing where to stick it: Priceless

Re: Seems ok

Well if either is a vicar they probably could...

Cooler heads needed in heated E2EE debate, says think tank

4. When a tart with a heart of gold opens a hose of ill repute

Does that mean she / he pulls you off with the stockings?

Tongue in cheek

Surely the best way is to ensure e2ee and then, as the service provider create a second layer of encryption over that. Thus my e2ee service will nor know your keys but will ensure that the transport layer data is securely overencrypted.

So when HMG or similar or quasi-legal entities request access we can deliver that on proof of warrant. This will protect against casual hackers whilst ensuring that your already encrypted messages are secure against attack <g>.

Thus we can protect against non authorised interception whilst leaving your safety in your own hands...

And for a small extra fee we can produce significantly different large prime numbers preventing against near prime number identification.

How could this be an issue?

Microsoft Visual Studio: Cluttering up developer disks for 25 years

No 2 till 5

I recollect being very confused when VS 6 came out - I seemed to have missed 4 editions. On querying this I was told it was to achieve numerical consistency with Office. Glad to see that still happens.

Ukraine's nuclear plants: Chernobyl off diesel power, explosions explained

Did I miss something?

I thought power was supposed to go from the power plant to the grid?

Something must have happened whilst I was asleep. They'll be telling me the Soviets are invading next. Sighs, still no sarcasm icon.

We have redundancy, we have batteries, what could possibly go wrong?

Re: Enterprising thieves

I was expecting "Someone stole the trench".

IT blamed after HR forgets to install sockets in new office

Re: Business as usual

And requires literacy.

Saving a loved one from a document disaster

Re: old kit and wp software

Viagra will help with a floppy, not around then so you just had to lie back and think of Brigit Bardot.

20 years of .NET: Reflecting on Microsoft's not-Java

Re: Easier games to play

I turn to drink before.

Reality check: We should not expect our communications to remain private

Re: "Saying if you don't want it on the internet, don't put it up there is too trite a response"

Well there are a couple of things to consider here:

To paraphrase Douglas Adams - "Mostly Harmless"

So if you keep flagging up flags (I see what I did there) you will eventually get labelled as not a problem. We are seeing this in the UK now - with shed loads of targets we now find MI5 having to use arbitrary rules as to which ones to whack off (sorry, meant follow).

In the mid eighties I was a member of Compuserve MilForum and often spoke on the phone to American and other colleagues about all sorts of things including I know nor whatever. An aquaintance of mine asked if that were deliberate. I sort of stated I didn't realise that it mattered, to which his reply was something along the lines of "well no one listens to you any more".

Of course I didn't understand that and carried on with my normal life.

But this story sort of indicates the issues of using AI driven interpretations of reality. Yes Facebook (sory, bollixia) can keep track of data - and can make serious estimations of you and your intents. If you don't put y9ur stuff up they can do the same. But the key issue to me is ownership, (and spoofing just for fun.). They can have as many predictive systems as they like, you can have as many games as you like. When they come up with:

"You should join this group"

"Biil Blogs has changed his gender by self descrption and now wishes to be known as MaryFuckwit" you as the recimpient have multiple choices

You can ignore it, which may leae to even more enticing reasons to be a target

You can respond with a meaningful response (not reccomended)

Or you can respond with arbitrary statements designed to make the AI lifes untennable. And I think I need to think about it again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96rC4X_KWl4

How can we recruit for the future if it takes an hour to send an email, asks Air Force AI bigwig in plea for better IT

Re: Big Biscuits

At least the computers will stay safe and dry. Unlike at least 2 F35's.

UK's new Brexit Freedom Bill promises already-slated GDPR reform, easier gene editing rules

Quis Custodiet?

"The programme will also develop a tool for businesses, hosted on GOV.UK, that will help firms to identify the regulations that are relevant to them and understand what actions they need to take in response," the paper said."

No doubt driven by AI.

Crack team of boffins hash out how e-scooters should sound – but they need your help*

Ride of the Valkyries

Interspersed with random "I love the smell of napalm in the morning" quotes.

Web daddy Tim Berners-Lee on privacy, data sharing, and the web's future

Re: "bank transactions go to your Solid pod"

And if there is a conflict between your copy and the banks? Guess who the bank will believe.

Open source, closed wallets, big profits – nobody wins the OSS rock, paper, scissors game

Tragedy of the commons

And how does this prevent the above? Bad users will make a relative competetive advantage by not contributing with no loss to themselves. There is a reason why taxation is compulsory and also why most of accountants spend significant time understanding and using the most "efficient prayers" to the system. Some small subset of creators find their products make more and more demands on their time and are used excessively, beyond their expectations. Most don't. The religious model given is in many ways apt; few gods are bothered by the prayers of many.

And I have yet to notice as stringent expectations placed on gods as maintainers of FOS software. In fact it is close to the opposite - when things go wrong we call it "an act of God". When software goes wrong it can be and has been called any damn thing whatever but there is an expectation of responsibility and FIX IT NOW.

Spruce up your CV or just bin it? Survey finds recruiters are considering alternatives

It is on my CV

I've been on both sides of the tracks and as an employer as early as windows NT4 I have had candidates, chosen by their CV's, who have replied to detailed questions as to how something vaguely complex was done have replied "It is on my CV that I have done this." Wasting my time and theirs. Given aditional chances to explain how it was done one got the same or similar answer.

Nowadays, being both lactose and twat intolerant I would throw them out with a never darken my doorstep again, you POS. But in those earlier days being soft and tolerant I would simply invite them to leave.

RAF shoots down 'terrorist drone' over US-owned special ops base in Syria

Surely you would shoot up an ostrich

Actual metal being welded in support of the UK's first orbital 'launch platform'

So was that a shitehawk then?

Virgin Media fined £50,000 after spamming 451,000 who didn't want marketing emails

Popular

I'd target them with rotten vegetables if I liked them (they are softer). Now a nice rock hard cabbage, fresh from the freezer...

How do you call support when the telephones go TITSUP*?

NHS Trust fund

Our community NHS service shared a building with the district health authority - which meant that when we became a trust we had to allocate the phones to either us or them. The lass doing it did a marvelous job and had sorted out about 1000 but couldn't identify 3 lines. She asked me if I could help as BT, as one would expect, couldn't.

So I said "ring them - I'll do it". First two were faxes but probably didn't cost more than £100 per year on a 24 million pound budget. Executive decision made by me - ignore them - it's not worth worrying about.

Last phone call went to the Director of Public Health (i.e. top medical bod in the district hierarchy). I recognised his voice but he didn't mine. He was very scared. I rapidly expained that this was an exploratory call re Trust separation. By now I had cottoned on to this being the major crisis phone line. To relieve his concerns I said "I'll just put it down as another fax with a do not disconnect note, shall I?"

That was one very relieved DPH.

Nuclear fusion firm Pulsar fires up a UK-built hybrid rocket engine

Re: SpinLaunch

Well as the launch vehicle breaks the membrane keeping the air out of the vacuum chamber the air will rush in to the chamber. This will create a turbulent force on the rotating arm which I assume has sufficient aerodynamic properties not to excessively oscillate and snap.

The electric motor could be used to slow the arm down as a brake but going from memory they were talking of several days to achieve full rotational velocity - so electrodynamic brakeing alone would presumably take the same time to slow it down - doubling the reuse time.

Of course if the rotor is as light as is feasible then since most of it is travelling relatively slowly then releasing a projectile massing 20 times the mass of the rotor arm would result in well in excess of 95% of the energy stored being released in that projectile leaving relatively little to be dispersed.

Phone jammers made my model plane smash into parked lorry, fumes hobbyist

Re: Failsafe?

Good idea, that way you would not see your pride and joy disappearing into the distance. (And I used to fly free flight models).

HPE picks Taiwan as 'global strategic hub for next-generation technology'

Katyn Massacre

I don't quite understand your comment about "they were just too arrogant to see reality." Are you talking about the Poles?

I would have thought the Poles had a very good view of reality - they were terrified of the Soviet Union and it was the betrayal of Poland by the SU that lead in part, to its rapid collapse. To sort of copy a German phrase with considerably more accuracy "Stabbed in the back".

Of course for the minimum of 22000 intelectuals including officers, civil dignitaries, priests etc., they weren't just stabbed in the back but also shot in the neck.

As you say:

" its [a] common and completely fallacious practice to misinterpret historical events in one context to try to prove a point in another".

140,000-plus drivers sent $60m in compensation checks after Amazon 'stole their tips'

Re: Once again

This wasn't a misunderstanding this was theft.

Remember the 'guy in a jetpack' seen flying close to passenger jets? Probably just balloons, says FBI

seriously impressive

Several thousand feet up - no obvious fuel supply - One would have expected some tangible splats as fuel along with the pilot expired. Have they tried looking for smelly holes in the ground, or perhaps houses?

I'm diabetic. I'd rather risk my shared health data being stolen than a double amputation

Institute of Aviation Medicine, Farborough

When I worked there in the early 80's one of the ethical dilemmas I was told about was about 3rd Reich records from experiments on concentration and death camp victims. They were deiliberately exposed to hypothermia, anoxia and or included in rich oxygen atmospheres and then set on fire. These were attempts to improve treatment of victims who were sailors, pilots, etc who had suffered from the above conditions, usually as a result of combat. They did not anaesthetize the test subjects as this might have created "unrealisitic" results.

This data was recovered at the end of the war and was available to use. Using it would have saved lives but it had been gathered and created in manners that were totally unacceptable. Multiple organisations had access to this data and I cannot comment on what actions were taked by others. I was told that the IAM reproduced the results using pigs which were anaesthetised. I never saw the original test results nor the reproductions and will not comment on the exactitude of the above statements.

I was also informed that the IAM used the 3rd Reich results to guide the tests to reduce the number of tests that were required to help protect aircrew in anoxic and rich oxygen atmospheres - that always struck me as hypocrisy; look we will do these so as not to use this evil data but we will reduce our testing based on the same data.

This ramble is meant to help convey my own personal beliefs that health and similar data will be found in the wild, will be used to both make money and benefit individuals and countries (reducing health care costs and having healthier citizens should do that) and that I would personally rather give my data away in the hope and expectation that it may do some good (sleep apnea, type II diabetes, male, mid 60's, very severe psoriasis and psoriatic arthritis) than die feeling warm safe and comfortable that no-one knows who I am.

There are always uncomfortable and unpleasant truths in history, as many in medicine as any other subject. Some may know who Henrietta Lacks was. We still abuse bits of her for convenience, suitability and any other damn reason we find appropriate. As an aside I find it dryly funny that so many complain that insufficient testing is done on minority groups when she herself was of African origin in USA.

The greater good can be used to justify the acts of the 3rd Reich. It can be used to justify using the data of the 3rd Reich. We were all bloody happy to use it post WW2 (operation paperclip etc) but we deplore how it was created. For me - in the UK - make the data freely available. If you use it you may not make profits from it just as Astra Zenica has done. That is not a tight enough process; it has a sunset clause but it could be made better. I pay my government to handle group problems for me. That is their job not mine. Hey, HMG - put the right laws in place on using the data and then, and only then, go to opt out. You've already done it on organ donation after death, now do it on health information prior to death.

Ethereum dev admits helping North Korea mine crypto-bucks, faces 20 years jail

Well the middle kingdom seems to have lots of balls, and by my standards acts like bollocks.

Their hyperinflationary building spree seems to be coming back to cause them issues - now the only question is how far they should be pushed. Personally I would push them all the way into the economic catastrophe they have caused upon themselves. I see absolutely no reason to give them an easy way out when they have made it quite clear that they are determined to live in a world that only matches to their model of the world. I feel sad about the sequalae that will affect their own populace but am always mindful of how they would treat me and my fellow [Liberals, Tories, Socialists, Anarchists. etc] had they control over my state.

The only way I am aware of is using their rules of Social Darwinism to allow them to fail. I would like to know a plausible alternative and shall watch the comments with interest.

Electron-to-joule conversion formulae? Cute. Welcome to the school of hard knocks

Re: "a multitude of fresh qualifications counted for naught"

"It is necessary for technical reasons that these warheads be stored upside down; that is to say, with the top at the bottom and the bottom at the top. In order that there may be no doubt as to which is the bottom and which is the top, it will be seen to that the bottom of each warhead is immediately labelled with the word TOP."

British Admiralty, 1960s.

Quoted by David Langford - The Leaky Establishment

Icon for obvious reasons. Good funny book.

RIP Sir Clive Sinclair: British home computer trailblazer dies aged 81

Re: Literally a legend

My first Atari 800 ending up programming lighting rigs for the Welsh National Opera. It was the one with the aluminium chassis. I never got paid for it - a mate borrowed it when he got a job with them. But (obligatory Sir Clive bit) also had ZX81 and several spectra some of which worked semi consistently (responding to the Jack Tramiel bit. Also had 520, 1040 and Amiga's from the 64 upwards)

And no I never worked in IT at all (well maybe just for 40 years).

This is AUKUS for China – US, UK, Australia reveal defence tech-sharing pact

Honest Government Ads

Should any of you cognoscenti not have come across the above I most heartily recommend them to you.

General link

https://www.youtube.com/user/thejuicemedia

Sample link

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_0zFEtPbiA

Catch of the day... for Google, anyway: Transatlantic Cornwall cable hauled ashore

Re: cable effort

Couldn't you just have built the new garden building nearer? Or hired a mini-digger<g>

Big Blue's quantum rainmaker jumps to room-temp diamond quantum accelerator company

No - only 7 1/2 since it will be speeded up by desktop quantum computing. (Although the lag induced by the fibreoptic links which keep the desktop boxes safe from the 20 Tesla + fields in the (fill in your preferred containment shape here) may slow things down a bit.

Of course if "spooky action at a distance" (TM Albert Einstein) can be involved then forget the fibreoptic issue.

UK promises big data law shake-up... while also keeping the EU happy, of course. What could go wrong?

Pre canned release

What is a post canned release?

UK's Surveillance Camera Commissioner grills Hikvision on China human rights abuses

Cocktail party effect

Well now that you have flagged up the previous owners occupation you can probably expect all of the old stored history to be re-assessed. So unless this is some obscure form of self-swatting just hope that no interesting documents or sticks still remain forgotten stuffed down a sofa

Pi calculated to '62.8 trillion digits' with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space

Re: is knowing pi to a bazillion places useful for anything?

But then of course, Heisenberg comes along and moves the atom, making the universe bigger or smaller...

Russian Arm SoC now shipping in Russian PCs running Russian Linux

Re: ambition comes at a price on the desktop

Don't rest it on your lap. Particularly if you are male. If you are into personal horror google (other search engines are available) scrotal hyperthermia laptop computers. DON'T look at the pictures.

Activist raided by police after downloading London property firm's 'confidential' meeting minutes from Google Search

Bit dodgy

In UK resisting arrest can be an offence. So if, for example you chucked a brick at someone and the police arrested you then you could be resisting arrest if you took a swing at the officer. The police (pre CPS days) may well decide they had insufficient evidence to prove you chucked the brick but you could still be guilty of resisting arrest.

So not necessarily evil or malicious. I understand that in some countries the officer just checks the colour of the suspect and either bludgeons, suffocates or shoots the alleged perpetrator dependant on the targets hue.

Wireless powersats promise clean, permanent, abundant energy. Sound familiar?

Boeing

If the above built the planes the same way they build their crew capsules they'd miss the bloody beam!

Brain-computer interface researchers warn of a 'bleak' cyberpunk future – unless we tread carefully

Sex

Just like the web, and usenet (alt.sex.whatever) at least 50% will be sex and or porn related. We are hardwired that way.

Euro space boffins hatch comms satellite hijack plan to save Earth from extinction

Re: Use nuke warheads

Why use proximity fuze? We could use smart control systems along with a penetrator to bury the warhead in the asteroid. We could do that with Pershing II as a land based ballistic missile system 40 years ago. We could also arrange immediate detonation if it was an impenetrable target. That way at least half of the energy would be deviation causing.