Posts by Roj Blake

Some English hospitals doubt Palantir's utility: We'd 'lose functionality rather than gain it'

Re: No!

So a bit like Alex Johnson taking credit for rental bikes in London when they were Red Ken's idea?

Mars may have vast underground oceans and enough H₂O to make it a water world

Re: Just cheese

I was fitted up!

Re: Just cheese

According to a documentary I once saw, the commander of a UK lunar mission considers the moon to mostly be like no cheese he's ever tasted but with one area being reminiscent of Camembert

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Capitalism is dying

Solution:

1) Properly tax Amazon et al

2) A wealth tax on anyone with over £10M

3) Universal Basic Income

4) Four day working week

LegoGPT is here to make your blocky dreams come true

Ava Pun

She must be joking!

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

Re: Major selling points

Yes!

Here you go:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-deaths-by-country

The proportion of deaths by stabbing is five times higher in the USA than in the UK.

Happy to help.

Elon Musk’s xAI to pull about half of its smog-belching turbines powering Colossus

Re: Deployed 35 generators instead of the 15 originally reported

And then he asked Grok how many generators were there!

Citrix finds new use for virtualization: Avoiding PC price hikes caused by tariffs

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

OpenAI caves to pressure, keeps nonprofit in charge

Profit?

It's not as though OpenAI has ever or will ever make a profit, so this seems like a pointless debate.

Open source AI hiring bots favor men, leave women hanging by the phone

It's always worth remembering that Labour received more votes in their 2019 general election disaster than they did in their 2024 landslide.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Re: Fooled me.

And sugar!

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Re: Damn.

Florida is talking about legalising child labour, so that's one solution.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: But, but, but...

It was Cameron's coalition government that sold the RM.

Techie diagnosed hardware fault by checking customer's coffee

Re: It was forced on them by manglement

They also (allegedly) had a policy for a while of answering the phone with the name of the office - so "good morning, Wang London" or "good afternoon, Wang Los Angeles" etc. You get the idea. Very quickly, their Cologne office was exempted from this policy.

Booby-trapped Alpine Quest Android app geolocates Russian soldiers

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

India gets Google to unbundle Android and the Play Store on Smart TVs

$2.4 million

How many seconds of revenue is that?

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Re: Impeach him, imprison the other

Rigged voting machines, you say? You mean like the time the CEO of Diebold promised to deliver Ohio's electoral college votes to Bush Jr?

Re: Just another Trump lie

Hi Kwasi!

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: China, some suggestions

Or in the football pundit sense of no worthwhile games being played before the advent of the Premier League

TalkTalk Business pulls disappearing act on customer emails

Calling them clowns is frankly insulting.

To clowns.

"Rock-solid resilience"

Crumbly limestone is a rock.

Don't delete that mystery empty folder. Windows put it there as a security fix

Re: But

Presumably where you store the plans for the new bypass?

UK's answer to DARPA sprouts new ideas, like programmable plants

Re: Finally....

At least with triffids you know where they are, thanks to those "Heavy Plant Crossing" road signs.

Re: Which British Agency

You mean like the SPBDMs that spatter my car on an all too regular basis?

DERA

It's worth mentioning that the UK used to have a DARPA equivalent called DERA, but it got privatised and renamed as Qinetiq

Ex-Meta exec tells Senate Zuck dangled US citizen data in bid to enter China

Re: Ethics?

Isn't it that county to the thouth of Thuffolk?

Oracle says its cloud was in fact compromised

Re: EU fines

You leave Larry the Cat out of this!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_(cat)

Samsung trumps USA's tariffs by making displays in Mexico, and elsewhere if needed

Re: AI that can do things including monitoring a home

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. "

~ George Orwell, 1984

Orwell was wrong in one respect. You can be sure that Samsung's AI is definitely monitoring you at any given moment.

China hits back at America with retaliatory tariffs, export controls on rare earth minerals

Re: Meanwhile...

"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos"

~ H.J.Simpson.

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Re: Space 1999 - The Reboot!

Space:1999 was originally intended to be a UFO spinoff.

Raspberry Pi not affected by Trump tariffs yet while China-tied rivals feel the heat

Re: Hmm

You're right, Trump did handle the pandemic badly. In the same four year period the UK rate rose from 4.6% to 4.9%. In France, the rate actually dropped!

Also: in the four years prior to Trump taking office, the rate fell from 8.0% to 4.7%. In fact, before the pandemic, it had been falling steadily since late 2009. Trump can hardly claim credit for the trend in the early part of his presidency that had been happening for years prior to it.

Re: Hmm

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the US unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2017 when Trump entered office, and 6.4% in January 2021 when he left it.

System builders say server prices set to spike as Trump plays customs cowboy

Re: In other news

The ancient Greeks considered the sky to be bronze-coloured.

Microsoft's many Outlooks are confusing users – including its own employees

Re: Security

I would give you "Six" thumbs up for the reference, but one will have to do.

Coke Analogy

No matter which version of Outlook you open it's not so much Coke Zero or Caffeine-Free Coke as New Coke.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

Re: Nazi Rocket Scientists

I hear SpaceX has a few.

Re: Insane

Excellent acronym, have one on me ->

Datacenters near Heathrow seemingly stay up as substation fire closes airport

Re: Questions will doubtless be asked

Good luck walking from Hatton Cross station to the T2/T3 one, you would need to trespass on the airport!

Re: How?

If benefits are such a great alternative to working, why haven't you quit your job?

Two things:

1) Most people on benefits are employed.

2) The amount of benefit fraud is less than the amount not claimed.

Re: sure safety-critical airport functions

That makes no sense. Terminal 2 is right next to Terminal 3 in the middle of the airport, while Terminal 4 is way over by the Southern perimeter

Tesla Cybertruck recall #8: Exterior trim peels itself off, again

"Cant Rail"

Did your autocorrect replace a u with an a?

CISA fires, now rehires and immediately benches security crew on full pay

Re: Elect a clown, you live in a circus.

The current UK government's landslide victory was achieved with just 33.7% of the votes cast.

Amazon accused of using algorithms to push warehouse workers to breaking point

Sorry to Bother You

The movie Sorry to Bother You was meant as a warning, not a manual!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You

Trump fires Democrat FTC commissioners, presaging big tech policy shifts

"In a surprise Tuesday move"

The most surprising thing about the move is that it happened on a Tuesday.

Court filing: DOGE aide broke Treasury policy by emailing unencrypted database

Re: At the minor end

SIS is MI6, not MI5 (which is officially known as the Security Service)

What's the weather like where you are in downtown Kazan?

AI bubble? What AI bubble? Datacenter investors all in despite whispers of a pop

Microsoft

According to DCD, MS have been quietly cancelling planned data centres - https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-cancels-200mw-of-ai-data-center-leases-report

OK, Google: Are you killing Assistant and replacing it with Gemini?

Re: Subs mean an off switch

And that's why they won't do it. Given a choice between losing the data of millions of users and giving away the means of collecting that data for free, they'll choose the latter every time.

Apple's alleged UK encryption battle sparks political and privacy backlash

Re: GAFA may have the upper hand here.

In fairness, the Lib Dems did put in a written question regarding TCNs a short while after this all came to light.

We did not have Brave clashing with Rupert Murdoch on our 2025 bingo card, but there it is

Re: Reminds me of another litigious nuisance

And Eurotrash wasn't even one of Murdoch's shows!