simple.
Any interference or destruction of national infrastructure should be a criminal offence with a mandatory prison sentence.
279 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jul 2015
I'm sure that this offensive/counter offensive battle will continue for quite a while with both sides using AI as the tool of choice.
There will no real winners here but I think that the material originators will be the ultimate losers.
Like CD and DVD anti-copying schemes that were defeated long ago, there are more people working on breaking the anti-copying schemes than devloping them.
If we all go electric, albeit at a slow pace, then the loss of fuel duty will have to be recovered from somewhere. If the price is added to the charging point bill then folks who recharge at home will be better off. My guess is road pricing will have to be introduced.
At the same time it would be sensible to remove VED (and lose the Swansea head count) and just roll it into one. Then, quite fairly, those that use the roads more will pay more.
However they do it, the Government of the day will not be popular.
Fujitsu rebranded our less then wonderful computing company ICL in 2002.
When I was in IBM I was approached to join ICL. Apart from the crap car offered and less than sparkling pay package, I was also informed that I might have to join a union. At that point I declined the offer.
I think Fujitsu was also blamed for a DWP problem over more than £1bn of state pensions not being paid.
Why does our Government still use them at all?
Clearly Biden and co did not think this through very well.
To the likes of us it was bleeding obvious what China would do and the consequences that the West would suffer.
And all of this to protect us against unproven spying from Huawei equipment.
I guess this is China 1, the rest of the world 0.
I read the paragraph: "Intel is working to accelerate its strategy while reducing costs through multiple initiatives, including some business and function-specific workforce reductions in areas across the company," and it doesn't say what the "strategy" that they are accelerating actually is. I guess the Xmas bonuses for the Directors will be little bigger.....
This extended test result is good news, particularly for the bean counters which must be dreading the first real flight.
We all remember the earlier Ariane "mishaps" so they are not our of the woods yet for sure.
As for costs then, surely, the low percentage of reusable components in Arianne 6 means that Space-X is still more competitive. And, as Arianne 6 is a long way from getting any sort of track record, the insurance will be very high against Space-X too.
I guess we should still wish them well.
What will happen next is quite obvious. Studios will create idealistic AI characters loosely based on existing actors but not close enough to fail a legal test.
Anyone who watched Titanic will already have experienced computer generated crowd scenes - and that was 1995-7 technology. Today it would be even better.
Then we will have AI-based agencies with AI actors for rent. At this point the real, and often overpaid, actors will be redundant. After all, AI actors will not be unionised, can work 24/7 without needing trailer homes, meal brakes, youth-regaining plastic surgery or expensive insurance.
Then writers will use AI to write scripts for AI actors.
It sounds like science fiction but it is possible right now. The real actors ought to wake up to the fact that their longevity is shorter than they hopes for.
The die is cast.
Cisco should spend less time trying to stop business re-selling heir kit and focus on making their equipment more resilient. This is not the first, and wont be the last, CVE we will see.
Like all of the big software vendors they don't stop to remove the bloat and just keep patching in knee-jerk mode. Microsoft, Adobe are you listening?
Where is the hydrogen going to come from? And how do we safely store large amounts of it?
A recent plan to use hydrogen for steel making came to nothing as a genuinely sustainable source of the hydrogen could not be found. A scheme to convert a fleet of Council vehicles was aborted for the same reason.
A recent lightning triggered explosion at a methane store in a sewage processing plant highlights the problems of storing inflammable gases.
Why don't they attach some boosters to it and fire it into either deep space or the sun? Surely that would cost less and would reduce the risk of debris falling into unplanned areas? If they put some cameras on it and took pictures of the sun collision that would surely provide some good science?
The knee jerk laws created by the US were always going to be flawed as they were written by angry people seeking vengeance but which do not understood technology.
The resulting loss of exports to China is not insignificant either.
A far better approach would have been to get smarter with the networking and intelligence gathering. Thus far, no one has provided concrete proof that any Huawei equipment has actually sent anything of value back to China. Any yet billions of pounds have been expended (aka land-fill wasted) worldwide on dumping and replacing Huawei equipment to "improve security" against a totally unknown and unvalidated threat. In fact the Chinese, although losing some exports, must have been having quite a laugh at us all.
This year, are all of our Christmas lights going to be validated against intelligence gathering devices in the power supplies? There are significantly more tree light sets the 4G/5G routers. If you were China which equipment would you bug?
If we have decided that this is an intelligence war then, surely, we must improve our defences? There are only so many fibre links to China and I am sure they are monitored continuously. Filtering traffic bound for China is a trivial task.
With modern AI we can easily see what is really going on at a much lower cost and with a lot less disruption. We could have spent a lot less of our precious money on better defences and used it to better effect on home grown technology ventures to beat the Chinese by creating better products.
With the EU and US spending billions of our taxes of trying to bolster the chip industry which, as we speak, is in decline again, we have to ask ourselves if the lunatics are still in the asylum?
Watching Biden's performances recently, we really ought to be worried as this is guy who just gave $6bn to Iran, did not attend the 9/11 Memorial, falsely claims he was at Ground Zero on 9/11/2001 and has his finger on the nuke button.
As Geena Davis said in the Fly "Be afraid, be very afraid."
Next year they will challenge AMD - really? They must be delusional as AMD is already working on next years Intel killer.
Intel are playing catch-up and investing billions to do it. For their sakes I do hope that their market predictions are accurate, as one wrong turn, and Intel could be in serious trouble.
Did we really think the export and import controls that Biden and the EU have implemented would have no consequences? How smart are we now?
And all this started because the thought that Chinese CCTV and 3/4G equipment was regularity "phoning home" with intelligence. Our EV cars plans are well and truly scuppered if we are not careful.
Yes, I get it - use AI to spot AI generated material. Sort of eating your own dog food.
But, as we are talking about AI, the answer is to use the AI detection tool to reveal the reasons why the analysis decided it was AI generated. Then feedback the problems and correct them.
This is almost certainly happening already along with "tools" to make AI generated text styles similar to the "creators" using yet more AI to create a writing style template to use.
The cat is out of the bag so there is no easy way back now.
Ever since that much-hated lady, now a dame, called Dawn Primololo announced IR35 is has been an example of misplaced legislation. It has never addressed the stated problem of employees quitting on a Friday and rejoining the next Monday as a contract supplier something they called "disguised employment".
And the problems keep coming....
Who benefits from fining a public organisation anyway?
Surely it is the strangest of ironies that we do a deal with Japan when one of their largest companies, Softbank, recently decided to list one of "our" companies, ARM, on the US NASDAQ?
After ARM and the Welsh company Newport Wafer Fab which has been bought by the Chinese, there is nothing left to offer.
And £1bn does not even get us a seat at the table of semiconductor manufacture.
With comments like "heavily adapted with complex customisations which are failing, and proving hard to fix." you can already see that this will be a support nightmare. You can see why SAP wants it's users on a standard platform.
The other comments like "Therefore, this comes with a single point of failure." and "process automation in SAP had been lost in Oracle" also do not bode well for future cost savings.
This really is a dogs breakfast where the winners have been SAP and Oracle and the losers the local rate payers.
This suspect equipment sits on networks that are under our management. And we, very possibly GCHQ, have the means to capture and monitor the traffic. Surely, any traffic with Chinese IP addresses could be detected and the payloads captured?
If we have the means to capture and decode dark web traffic to intercept drugs cartel intel, then we must be able to see if China really does receive our telecoms traffic. And, if they don't, then a vast amount of money is being wasted.
Clearly the "very deep investigation" was not deep enough. The failure of three out of the last eight flights of Vega and Vega-C must be both embarrassing and expensive.
You do have to wonder if the ESA project is trying to outcompete Space-X in order to get the paid-for launches for Europe.
With Virgin Galactic (ok one failure to-date) and Blue Origin playing in the same space then they need to get more successful launches under their belts soon else the business will go elsewhere. If they do fail then the whole project is doomed as the money will dry up.
With Microsoft's record I would hope that "automatic updates" is a feature than can be disabled else The Register's going to full of tails of woe. Get the strap-lines ready...
A few years back I had a lot of XP systems semi-bricked due to unstoppable updates requiring reboots. Never again I said and I have been Linux ever since.
When I load a seemingly small program that requires .NET runtime I never cease to be amazed at the size of the thing. And it seems to get bigger with each release.
Next, I predict will be retraction the so-called EU chip foundry project. The chip industry has just seen what a bad knee jerk reaction they made.
Those of us with grey beards will be tut tutting as we have seen it all before. Remember the 4K DRAM crisis to which the UK Government created the funds for Inmos. By the time the chips were ready the world had moved on to 16k chips.
Well, you have only got to look at the basic scenario which is a complicated and much modified system being "converted" into a SAP S/4 HANA system which has be plain vanilla.
Like other companies and councils already on this painful SAP route we are expecting to see lots of stories from Leeds with the headlines - delayed, over budget, review etc.
You would think that Meta, aka Facebook, would be more careful, bearing in mind their appointment of Former deputy prime minister and Yorkshire Liberal MP Nick Clegg as their president?
He gave many speeches on citizens' rights as an MP and Liberal Party leader.
As a liberal MP Clegg would abhor any abuse of citizen's personal data without their consent? Clearly, if you give someone a big enough pay-check they throw their moral values in the bin.
This all sounds like a good idea that they are selling us. Or is this a cunning way to re-use partially failed memory chips?
The non-binary idea is plausible but it could be the memory makers are sweetening their bottom line by using chips that, in a binary world, would have been consigned to the scrap bin.
Those of us old enough to remember EPROMS and static ram chips will know that this is not a new idea.