Posts by spacecadet66

Tesla's Cybertruck may not be so stainless after all

So what I take from this is, you could use ordinary water, or better yet salt water, to paint a message on a Cybertruck that would only be visible some time later when the rust started to show. Just going to file that fact away for later reference.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: Being remote is career limiting

> so a win for the shareholders I guess

Exactly...over the short term. It's a classic "eating your seed corn" strategy. Of course it'll backfire in the long run, but at that point, the responsible parties expect to be long gone, running some other organization into the ground.

A Space Shuttle goes vertical for one last time

Re: Skyhooks

Sorry, broke the last left-handed screwdriver opening a stubborn can of polka-dot paint.

Re: That's what they want you to believe

The best evidence for this is that there's no hint of any of this happening at all: means they've been very thorough about covering their tracks.

Tech world won't have long to fall in line when EU signs off on AI Act

What does "need" ever have to do with it? Why did anything three years ago "need" a blockchain stapled on? It's the flavor of the month, it's yet another iteration of the Gartner Hype Cycle and fashion-driven development. Eventually trial and error will shake out the five or ten things that LLMs are actually good for, at which time people will be flocking around a different and newer shiny thing.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

It's not so often that you hear a Master Of The Universe admit that he thinks the rest of us are livestock.

Brit unis hit in Blackbaud hack inform students that their data was nicked, which has gone as well as you might expect

Re: Of course, the storage was actually illegal

Nowhere in the story does it say that the data was stored in US servers. The hacked servers are described as "self-hosted," so if the servers were administered by the universities, the onus of GPDR compliance was on them.

Which doesn't make any of this look any better for Blackbaud, of course.

Capita's bespoke British Army recruiting IT cost military 25k applicants after switch-on

Re: I get it...

I feel like the Germans have the right idea here. Thanks to some deliberate postwar social engineering, the Bundeswehr is seen as a low-prestige employer of last resort. It certainly beats the "SuPpOrT tEh TrOoPs!" mentality prevalent in the USA.

Re: 25,000 fewer applications to join the military in the following year

If I were Putin (which I am not, I am in fact Gülşat Mämmedowa), I wouldn't bother with anything as difficult as plotting. I'd just sit back and let plain old ordinary corruption continue to run its course.

So what you're saying with this headline is, Capita has done a public service for once.

Re: I get it...

"You do know that there are lots of people who join the army specifically to fight and become warriors don't you?"

Yes. And what they actually become is security guards for the oligopoly.

Raytheon techie who took home radar secrets gets 18 months in the clink in surprise time fraud probe twist

I believe you'll find he lives in Sharon, Massachusetts. Not Sharon, Maryland. The postal abbreviation for Massachusetts is MA so this is a common mistake.

Congrats, First American Title Insurance, you've made technology history. For all the wrong reasons

Well it's not like there's a handy top-10 list, that you might expect all Web developers to be familiar with, of common Internet security flaws...[checks notes]...oh wait there is.

https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/, the instant blunder is #5, "Broken Access Control."

Hopefully the penalty in this case will be high enough to make people sit up and take notice.

Sick of AI engines scraping your pics for facial recognition? Here's a way to Fawkes them right up

I'm not usually one for banning technologies, but I think I would make an exception for facial recognition. I can't think of a single non-pernicious use for them (and no, I do not trust the police with them, don't @ me.)

Unfortunately, the people most likely to do the banning are also very interested in facial recognition.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

“From my perspective, every early space company goes through these anomalies and you learn from it,"

Such as scrappy startup Boeing--founded 1916 and involved in the US space program since the 60s. I assume there are rocket scientists working at NASA: this guy is not one of them.

Machine-learning models trained on pre-COVID data are now completely out of whack, says Gartner

The reasons why data from the interwar period might not be the best basis for a contemporary prediction model are left as an exercise for the reader.

1 in 5 STEM bros whinge they can't catch a break in tech world they run

Re: If only you knew...

As have I. As have I.

Why do I suspect that for 9 out of 10 of those 1 in 5, they aren't nearly as good at what they do as they think they are.

Leaky credit report biz face massive fines if US senators get their way

Re: No chance

Yes, it would be a shame if there were serious consequences for a serious blunder.

Memo man Damore is back – with lawyers: Now Google sued for 'punishing' white men

I wonder how much this suit has to do with Danmore's conviction of the righteousness of his cause, versus Dhillon's political ambitions. My guess is the ratio is somewhere near a tad :: a whole lot.

I also don't see a path to him actually winning the case. Leaving aside the question of whether his arguments actually have any merit, he's facing Google's legal department and a Santa Clara County jury.

I'd never heard of him before 30-odd minutes ago, but the coincidence was too good to pass up.

Re: I hope that he wins

Yes, Google sure looks like it's in bad shape.

Happened to find a related article in another fine British paper:

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/politics/politics-headlines/this-is-discrimination-against-twats-says-toby-young-20180109142012

Re: Funny how...

Nice, nice. Stick some old clothes on that strawman and stick it in the field, that'll keep the birds away.

Re: Funny how...

It means "left-ish person I don't like."

Hold on to your aaSes: Yup, Windows 10 'as a service' is incoming

Speaking as an uppity Linux bigot, I'd like to say that "service" is not the word I would have chosen here.

Yahooooo! says! its! email! is! scrahoooo-ed!

Don't put yourself to the trouble on our account.

Time's up: Grace period for Germany's internet hate speech law ends

Re: C'mon Reg...

This nonsense again...yeah, that was the name. Congratulations, Sherlock Holmes, you're the first to hear about this.

Re: C'mon Reg...

Nope. Maybe go to the library and ask if they have any history books of the 30s with lots of pictures.

US senators rail against effort to sneak through creepy mass spying bill

"The version most likely of passing into law is called the USA Liberty Act..."

In the words of a not-very-wise man (*), "Oh, come on!"

(*) G. O. Bluth

New battery boffinry could 'triple range' of electric vehicles

As opposed to a car with an internal combustion engine...

Kentucky lawmaker pushes smut filter law (update: maybe not)

So predictable.

"One of the most important patterns of conservative message-making is projection. Projection is a psychological notion; it roughly means attacking someone by falsely claiming that they are attacking you. Conservative strategists engage in projection constantly."

--"What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong with It?" http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html

Did you unwittingly support the destruction of net neutrality rules?

Re: Strange pattern

Yeah, whatever happened to that guy anyway?

Your next laptop will feature 'CMF' technology

Mine already has CMF, at least judging by how often I shake my fist at it and yell "Compile, mother f****er!"

I hope they don't get rid of the LRF support though.

Verizon whips out Big Johnson to lure FCC into axing US states' net neutrality, privacy rules

Re: State's Rights?

They're for _certain_ states' rights, such as the right to have public facilities segregated by race, which is where the phrase came from. And they like a government small enough to fit into a woman's uterus and keep an eye on matters there.

German Firefox users to test recommendation engine 'a bit like thought-reading'

This is going to go over poorly

Mainly because they picked the worst possible country to run their experiment in. Germans tend to be very, very touchy about privacy.

ISIS and Jack Daniel's: One of these things is not like the other

I can see how you could mistake a Jack Daniels flag for a Daesh one, if you'd never seen the JD logo and also you couldn't tell Arabic writing from English and also you had a very tiny brain.

That said, I'm not sure I'd want to live next to someone so proud of drinking the stuff. I used to drink that brand too, but then I turned 16.

Welcome to the future: Bluetooth jackets you can only wash 10 times. Gee, thanks, Google

It's not about "need," it's about "I had $350 to blow on this."

The interesting thing: we have here an item made by people with far more money and technical acumen than common sense, who don't have to worry about working hard enough to break a sweat, and who live in a place where it gets cool enough to wear a light jacket. If you didn't know Silicon Valley existed, you could now deduce its existence.

Database biz MongoDB files to go public, hopes to raise a cool $100m

It's been a rough week, so thanks for the laugh, MongoDB!

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Respect to them for trying to kill "learnings." I would also personally favor having "ask" as a noun be punishable by, let's say, six months in jail.

I'm still going to google the living shit out of things on the Internet.

VW engineer sent to the clink for three years for emissions-busting code

Re: Code of Ethics

And "USA medical industry made of cheese" gets "About 1,670,000 results." What's your point?

Re: "I was only following orders"

IANAML, but the law is very clear on this point: no it isn't. That point was, coincidentally, also established in Germany--specifically in the Nuremberg trials. Here in the USA, William Calley famously attempted an "only following orders" defense when tried for his part in the My Lai massacre. This also failed. Today, the UCMJ (the code of laws pertaining strictly to the military in the USA) makes it clear that members of the military only have a duty to obey _lawful_ orders.

Nice try though.

Re: Code of Ethics

"Everyone else is doing it" is another excuse that most of us grow out of using by adulthood.

(And no, I don't think any of those three are OK. Since you ask.)

Re: "Until you go to court how do you know it's illegal?"

"The engineers obviously were deeply involved in this business, but surely it's the management who decided to 1) instruct engineers to develop cheating software and 2) deploy the cheating software, who are the real villains here."

Yes, but he, the engineer, had an ethical duty that he reneged on. This particular ethical duty is backed up by a law, which is why he's in jail today. In a just world he wouldn't be the last one to wind up a guest of the state, but "I was only following orders" is a weak-sauce excuse that couldn't and shouldn't have cleared him here.

Retail serfs to vanish, all thanks to automation

Re: I find it...

"I also still wonder why we don't get discounts at the self service tills when we're saving the store money."

When a business finds a way to cut their costs, they have a choice between two courses of action:

(a) Pass the savings on to the customer

(b) Pocket the savings

Guess which alternative virtually every business since the dawn of time has elected for.

Vodafone won't pay employee expenses for cups of coffee

Re: Whats the issue?

So either the management is both callous and shortsighted, or Vodafone is in dire financial straits. Either way, it's a bad look.

Pennywise and pound foolish

They've managed to save possibly several thousand pounds. Congratulations! Just don't count on your employees to ever do more than the bare minimum to avoid the sack.