Posts by Dr Fidget

Think tank calls for monitoring of Chinese AI-enabled products

Who are ASPI?

"ASPI is an independent, non-partisan think tank that produces expert and timely advice for Australia’s strategic and defence leaders." - at least that's what they say about themselves.

Based in Canberra and Washington DC - Hmm.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

Willy waving

Why don't they just post the length of their dicks?

IBM's motto is 'Think' – its CEO reckons AI can do that as well as some workers

Including the CEO?

First one to be replaced by an AI chatbot (a simple one should suffice) should be the CEO - and probably most, if not all, of the board

Why UK watchdog abandoned its Apple monopoly probe

Re: So now the UK is out of the EU...

More likely Rishi or one of his mates has shares in Apple

Scientists speak their brains: Please don’t call us boffins

Re: Hmmm

‘I’ll tell you,’ said Vimes. ‘A monarch’s an absolute ruler, right? The head honcho—’

‘Unless he’s a queen,’ said Carrot.

Vimes glared at him, and then nodded.

‘Okay, or the head honchette—’

‘No, that’d only apply if she was a young woman. Queens tend to be older. She’d have to be a … a honcharina? No, that’s for very young princesses. No. Um. A honchesa, I think.’

Men At Arms, Terry Pratchett

Subsidies? All UK chip industry needs is tax, rule tweaks, claims rightwing thinktank

Surely there's a 'chum' somewhere

I thought the Tory way of handling things like this was to find a 'chum' (Eton old-boy, neighbour down the road, somebody I met at the golf club, ...) who may make a decent donation to the party (or the PM of the day) and bung them a few £millions, no questions asked.

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

Boondoggle

It'll be just another massive handout to a Tory part donor or one of the PM's chums. Later, it will turn out to be a massive failure/cock-up but, by then, Rishi won't be PM and we'll all be told to get over a minor bit of fiscal 'carelessness' by the Daily Mail etc.

Brit civil service claims there's enough money for mammoth ERP refresh project

Re: IR35

Especially if they make nice big donations to the Conservative Party

EU takes another step towards US data-sharing agreement

Who's national security?

"access to personal data from Europe by US intelligence agencies would be limited to what is necessary and proportionate to protect national security." - as defined by?

San Francisco politicians to vote on policy endorsing lethal force for robots

Yet again - Sir Terry said it so well

“Once you had a good excuse, you opened the door to bad excuses.”

― Terry Pratchett, Thud!

Is it time to retire C and C++ for Rust in new programs?

Re: Wait a minute ...

What's in it for Micro$oft?

Your job was probably outsourced for exactly the reason you suspected

Outsourced CEOs

Funny how it's so difficult to outsource board members such as CEOs

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Words & actions

When words and actions disagree, believe the actions - 'nuff said.

Logitech's MX Mechanical keyboard, Master 3S mouse

Re: Corporate user?

Not to mention that the roll-out will be to senior management first (so they can sign the emails their secretary wrote for them) and last of all any worker who actually uses a keyboard all day.

UK Home Office dangles £20m for national gun licence database system

Re: Database?

And proof that they went to Eton - or live down the road from a Cabinet Minister

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

Blue streak?

I'm old enough to remember Blue Streak - cancelled after £billions spent 'cos it cost too much

Pension cold-calling financial services biz cops largest ever fine from UK data watchdog

Failed cronyism

Serves them right for not giving Boris the Liar a big enough bung

Hitting underground pipes and cables costs the UK £2.4bn a year. We need a data platform for that, says government

Eton OB?

So did the CEO of Atkins go to Eton with Boris the Liar or does Atkins run the sweet shop at the end of one of his cronies streets?

Intel's €80bn European chip plant investment plan not bound for UK because Brexit

Need an Eton OB

If Intel had en Eton old boy on the board he could get a decent backhander from Bojo no problem

You want me to do WHAT in that prepaid envelope?

It's important, really importan

In 2015 my results came back requesting another sample - end result, positive. Then a colonoscopy showing up a tumour.

At this point I had NO SYMPTOMS whatsoever.

I ended up with a stay in hospital, a loss of 50cm of lower bowel, an incision running from sternum to groin held together with 36 stables and an ileostomy bag for 6 months while the gut healed.

Not a lot of fun but if it hadn't been for this test I'd be DEAD now!

O2 UK overcharged exiting customers by £40.7m over 7+ years: Ofcom slams senior managers, fines it £10.5m

O2 Engineers

Since early January I've had b*gger all phone signal at home and all I see from O2 is a "Looks like a nearby phone mast isn’t working as it should, sorry. Our engineers are likely to be on the case already, and your service might come and go until we fix it." message.

I assume that O2 engineers wear a tutu, have little wings and a twinkly wand - or is that the fairies at the bottom of my garden?

UK.gov awards seats on £2bn 'digital outcomes' framework to suppliers – one of which doesn't even have a website

Re: So..

The UK is a Banana Republic

Arm at 30: From Cambridge to the world, one plucky British startup changed everything

British?

Maybe it was a British startup and maybe it's mostly based in the UK but it's actually owned by a Japanese conglomerate SoftBank Group

NHS: Thanks for the free work, Linux nerds, now face our trademark cops

Probably just got leaned on

More likely is that word came down from on high (Microshaft or one of it's pwned clones) as a cease and desist order otherwise the licence fees for Windoze are just going to go up and up.

Major shareholder: BT CEO Gavin Patterson should step down

Caveat emptor

"The value of shares may go down as well as up"

Media mogul Murdoch's 'Sky dataset' swallow poses 'grave threat'

No problem

This is Rupert Murdoch we're talking about (News of the World, Sun etc.) - he has a history of being untrustworthy. How can any decent Government, concerned about Democracy and the rights of their citizens, even contemplate allowing him even more control of the propaganda sources? Oh, I forgot, he OWNS this British Government as he did the previous one, and the one before that, and the one before that ...

France and UK want to make web firms liable for users' content

Stupid - but ...

I know it's stupid, you know it's stupid, I'll bet even they know it's stupid but it keeps the Daily Mail/Sun/French equivalent readers happy because they're stupid

Google's Grumpy code makes Python Go

NIH

Of course Google could have joined in Python development and made a better tool for porting 2.7 to 3 rather than inventing YAL (Yet Another Language)

Apple's CEO Tim Cook declines invitation to discuss EU tax ruling with Irish parliament

Power shift

Just another reminder about the shift of power from democratically elected governments to multinational corporations.

Microsoft just got its Linux Foundation platinum card, becomes top level member

So Microshaft is also going to show its love for Linux by ending the threat to sue over patent infringements when it won't say what those infringements are?

When words and actions disagree - believe the actions

Re: Great news!

Did I miss the <sarcasm> tags?

Samsung Note 7: Probably the best phone in the world. Yeah – you heard right

Re: Still doesn't have front facing speakers..

Nor replaceable battery

Are EU having a laugh? Europe passes hopeless cyber-commerce rules

Re: They aren't entirely mad.

Don't know about other countries but I've got a couple of 14 ltr cans of 'family' olive oil (i.e. from the sister-in-law's olives) sat waiting for me in Crete. When I went into one of the couriers to get some idea of the cost of shipping they just said it just wasn't worth the cost of shipping it to the UK.

Hypersonic flight test hits Mach 7.5

They reckoned with Concorde it took more time to get on and off the plane than it took to cross the Atlantic. With this sort of system it's going to take more time to get on and off the plane than to fly round the world.

Spot the bottleneck here?

Being told to get to the airport ages before the flight is due to depart, queueing up for ages to hand over hold baggage, queueing up again for airport security which is completely inconsistent (on one flight to Crete I went through 3 sets of airport security and got different results from each)

Sod faster aeroplanes, I'd rather not spend most of my trip stuck in the "hurry up and wait" system for boarding and leaving and I'd definitely prefer more comfortable seats, a bit of leg room, larger windows and not having the flight crew keep waking me up to see if I've changed my mind about buying a blow up model of the plane.

Greenpeace leaks TTIP texts, reveals strained negotiations

Re: Good old EU

When words and actions disagree, believe the actions

Microsoft, Google bury hatchet – surprisingly, not in each other

I believe the word you're looking for here is Cartel.

Britain is sending a huge nuclear waste shipment to America. Why?

"Sellafield"? I thought that'd been re-branded as "Leafy Green Meadows" sometime after the last leak.

Now you can tailor Swift – on Ubuntu

Re: Where's debs?

Where's the source?

Let Europeans sue America for slurping their data – US Senate

Why just Europe?

Drunk? Need a slash? Avoid walls in Hackney

Does it also work on dog pee?

Rip up secretive patent royalty deals, says new tech'n'biz coalition

Conspicuous by their absence - Microsoft, Apple, Google ...

Jail incompetent council folk who leak our data, thunders furious BBW

No problem

Of course, if these services had been properly privatised and run by (say) G4S, we'd hear all about these breaches and the directors would obviously be brought to court </sarcasm>

Britain needs more tech immigrants, quango tells UK.gov

Training - what's that?

Anything bar train your own staff.

Once upon a time when there were significant levels of corporation taxes it made sense to put money back into a business to do such things as train staff and invest in new equipment as that was tax deductable. Now it's all based on short term milking as much money from the profits as possible to the shareholders who'll just move on when the business looks like it's failing.

I'll build a Hyperloop railgun tube-way in Texas, Elon Musk vows

It's the track stupid.

The problem with this idea is the same problem monorails have - the track, specifically the points.

It's simple building a special, fancy track to run point-to-point but a real rail network needs to switch traffic from track to track. In fact in a point-to-point system being able to switch traffic between tracks is esssential unless you want to close the entire network when a bit of track maintenance is needed.

There have been lots of designs for amazing vehicles running on tracks but the stumbling point so far has always been building the track when I see a solution for this I'll start taking it seriously, otherwise it's just another fantasy.