Posts by niio

Almost there: James Webb Space Telescope frees its mirrors and prepares for insertion

So NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter because of a paperclip?

Nearly 140 nations – from US and UK to EU, China and India – back 15% minimum corporate tax rate

The deal involves 136 countries, the US recognizes 195 countries as sovereign nations. Any bets that some of the 59 non-signatories magically see corporate growth?

It took 'over 80 different developers' to review and fix 'mess' made by students who sneaked bad code into Linux

Banning UNM.EDU is not enough

The University needs to be sued for monetary damages sufficient to force the oversight board to change their policy, and to put every other institution on notice that the same awaits them for bad behavior.

Tightening up the review/commit process is a separate issue. This is why we can't have nice things.

Ransomware victim Colonial Pipeline paid $5m to get oil pumping again, restored from backups anyway – report

Isn't attacking infrastructure an act of war? Maybe special ops needs to go hunting.

We'd rather go down in Down Under, says Google: Search biz threatens to quit Australia if forced to pay for news

This is all bluster. Google just agreed to pay publishers in France, so they'll do it in Australia as well.

Trump's gone quiet, Parler nuked, Twitter protest never happened: There's an eerie calm – but at what cost?

Here are the two tweets that Twitter used to justify Trump's permanent ban. So violent!

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

You may not have noticed that the room full of 'journalists' hate Trump and the 'news' they get out is the most negative interpretation of whatever they hear. Sometimes it is stuff they didn't even hear.

Bad software crashed Boeings. Now it appears the company lacked a singular software supremo

Re: Pity they didn't think it that important earlier.

The specification must have been pure junk. The purpose of having two sensors is to increase reliability. If one fails you use the other, if you can tell which is correct, so you reduce failure rate by half.

The way this was implemented did the opposite. Since the software alternated between senors for sequential flights but only used one, they doubled the risk of failure since there were two parts to fail and both had to be working in order for two flights to complete successfully.

Even an idiot coder or specifier should have caught this.

Brexit Britain changes its mind, says non, nein, no to Europe's unified patent court – potentially sealing its fate

Re: For a contrasting view...

Mercantilism/Corporatism were damaging because they worked by restricting competition, usually by corrupting government to limit antitrust activity. It was this monopolistic aspect that led to abuse, whether by corporations or by government.

Capitalism depends on competition to limit power, and therefore abuse. It makes a virtue of profit seeking by allowing companies to compete in any market. If one pharma refuses to sell a cure expecting instead to sell a temporary remedy, there is nothing preventing another pharma from pursuing that profit by making its own cure.

Patents provide motivation, but their value expires. They are monopolies and there are abuses, like minor change renewals and patents on small changes made to publicly funded research. Laws and/or enforcement may need to change, but that doesn't mean the system needs to be dumped.

Capitalism and market economies have created unprecedentedly broad prosperity. This decade is the first time in history that there are more middle and upper income people in the world than lower and poverty level income. Market reforms in China alone have lifted 850m people out of poverty. It is a little too easy to say look at all these current problems while forgetting what life was like for people a hundred years ago.

You're not Boeing to believe this: Yet another show-stopping software bug found in ill-fated 737 Max airplanes

Re: Isn't THIS why we've got to teach 2nd-graders how to "code", rather than how to think?

Superficial is a pejorative, implying that coders with partial knowledge of a design could and somehow should comprehend it all. This is false now, and it was false in the 60's, and is false for any undertaking of any complexity. No one's brain is big enough.

The people responsible for understanding the design are software architects, who do no coding. In complex projects there are teams of architects, and only the senior of these see the design as a whole. They see high level function, so they may not even know all the details of the design let alone the underlying software. Getting coherence all the way from top to bottom is a serious challenge. There is no easy method; review and review.

The Max problem was not this complicated. Its primary flaw, twin AOA single points of failure, should have been obvious in isolation. Its secondary flaw, repetitive pitch down, was a little more subtle but hardly incomprehensible. Whoever designed the MCAS system was incompetent or intimidated, as was whoever approved the design and whoever coded it.

Three levels of function should have flagged it for the failure it was to become, which means the rot was structural. If it was intimidation, Boeing needs new management. If it was incompetence, Boeing needs a whole new workforce.

Whether or not new engines are a Type change, the problem is that the FAA trusted Boeing to self verify the quality of the change. Boeing took a short cut that literally blew up. They could do the same thing with all the additional requirements for a Type change and the product would be no better off. The extra work unrelated to the engines may pull resources off the more critical things that actually changed.

I don't think the objective should be to punish Boeing; the stock market, it's customers and all the people who fly are already doing this. The objective should be to fix the problem, defined both as the software flaws that exist and also as Boeing's penchant for cheating. The FAA is now crawling through every line of code for this very reason, and is not going to allow Boeing much self verification going forward. If the review takes another year, so be it.

PSA: You are now in the timeline where Facebook and pals are torn a new one by, er, Borat star Sacha Baron Cohen

The media giants of Hitler's day did the same thing with their old tech. Hitler was Time Magazine's Person of the Year, the NYT published an opinion piece Hitler wrote.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

Single payer health would equate to single grower food, and that would be Stalinism. The Farm Bill is just corruption.

So fifty industries with crony ties to Democrats get exemption from the law, but the companies upsetting to unions don't. Corruption much?

A Register reader turns the computer room into a socialist paradise

"Socialist paradise" is an oxymoron.

If your broadband bill is too high consider moving to Idaho, they get the internet for free

$50/mo for gigabit connections is about twice as much as it would cost if corrupt politicians in DC hadn't given away the networks and ruined the franchise system in place for cable TV. Running internet wires to houses is a natural monopoly just like running power or water lines. We don't expect to have two water utilities "compete", since most people only really have one decent choice and sometimes not even that. We should go back to allowing localities to award a franchise for internet service in their jurisdiction, then have everybody use the same network just like power or water.

Local govt wouldn't need to fork over money to build the network. Then TV, phone, home security, etc could all compete on equal footing. Unregulated monopolies are abusive, which is why everybody hates Comcast.

The plane, it's 'splained, falls mainly without the brain: We chat to boffins who've found a way to disrupt landings using off-the-shelf radio kit

The difficulty for the disruptor is to be able to do it long enough to cause more than a temporary disruption. Plans exist to deal with this kind of attack. The signal's power is easy to find with the right equipment, which the authorities have, and it would take only a couple of missed approaches to start the hunt. Then off to prison for the offenders.

'Lightweight' UPS-style flywheels to power naval laser zappers

You must be figuring California electricity. A KWh in many states is less than a dime.

3.2mj is 888wh in 180kg, or about 5wh per kg. Supercapacitors are capable of this energy density, are smaller and have no moving parts so they should be more reliable and safe. They are already tested and commercially available. Does someone have a kinetic fetish?

Calm your conspiracy theories, latest glimpse reveals Planet Nine may just be a pipe dream

99% of scientists blame solar system warming

Swiss sausage sizzler 4.0 hits 200 bangers per hour

Of course the wheel is vertical so you have to skewer der wieners. The same thing horizontally couldn't possibly work.

Waymo van prang, self-driving cars still suck, AI research jobs, and more

The "idiot" that pulled out in front of the Honda that hit the Waymo van was actually entering the intersection on a green and had the right of way. The Honda which "had to swerve" was running a red light.

So human driver: 1) runs red light, 2) swerves to avoid a car in its rightful place, 3) jumps the median, 4) crosses two lanes of oncoming traffic so that it could 5) crash into a self driving vehicle.

Human "Director of Consumer Watchdog"?! calls for national moratorium on self driving cars!!!

I built a self driving vehicle fifteen years ago for DARPA and I thought the tech might never be really ready, but the more I see of how badly humans drive the more I think the sooner the better. Humans kill 30,000 people on our roads every year. How could self drivers (other than Uber's) be worse?

Clickbait headline

The headline juxtaposes "Waymo crash" and "Self driving cars suck", but doesn't say that humans suck harder. The article doesn't know who is a fault but the video clearly shows the human driven car jump the median and cross two opposing lanes of traffic to hit the Waymo van. The humans that suck in this case weren't just driving the car.

FCC shifts its $8bn pot of gold, sparks fears of corporate money grab

Overcharge

So the FCC has a $9bn fund which pays all intended recipients with $1.5bn a year. Maybe they should quit collecting the money for six years.

Oh dear... Netizens think 'private' browsing really means totally private

An article that says everyone is thinking wrong but never states what is correct?

PCs were more and less expensive in Q1 as shipments stalled

"slower replacement cycles"

This.

My desktop gets the heavy use. It is a 16gb 4770i7 with a couple of SSDs and nvidia driving a 55in 4k hdtv. It is 2.5yrs old, nearly silent until I start up the engineering simulations, as good as anything I'd consider buying and does everything I need. The PC boots faster than the TV.

Uber self-driving car death riddle: Was LIDAR blind spot to blame?

Re: Jaywalking

I'm not saying right or wrong that a pedestrian has to yield outside a protected zone, but it is Arizona law.

Re: Jaywalking

"crossing the road" but not in a protected area like a crosswalk and must yield to vehicular traffic.

You are obviously unfamiliar with the Velodyne unit used by Uber. Here is a somewhat dated link that will still help you visualize what that unit should have seen. Note that shadows appear behind large objects and very close to the vehicle, but that coverage is 360deg from a couple of meters to beyond the area depicted. The concentric rings are from the Velodyne.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXlqv_k4P8Q

Should have seen the pedestrian

The lidar in question should easily have seen a person walking a bicycle in the middle of the road. There was some failure that wasn't caused by the lidar manufacturer's "not enough lidars" excuse. Maybe a dog right next to the car might be obscured by a fender, but not a five foot tall person walking a five foot long bicycle on a flat road sixty feet away.

There is also confusion about sensors being turned off. There are two sets of sensors: Uber's self drive sensors which are being tested and Volvo's proximity and braking sensors which are not. You can't test Uber's system if the Volvo system constantly interferes, so the Volvo system is shut off. The supplier of a Volvo system component is just pointing this out, so that their product does not get tarnished by Uber's mistakes.

Uber breaks self-driving car record: First robo-ride to kill a pedestrian

Re: bike or not

The confusion was due to the fact the pedestrian was walking a bicycle, which was laden with shopping bags. I don't know if it is the case here, but this is one way homeless people move their stuff around.

Re: @Yet Another Anonymous coward

Not true, though they often behave that way.

"Vehicles must yield the right of way to pedestrians at plainly marked crosswalks and at intersections where stop signs or flashing red signals are in place. Pedestrians must yield the right-of-way to vehicles when crossing outside of a marked crosswalk or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection." ncsl.org

FBI's Clinton email comedown confirms it could have killed the story in a canter

So 30k emails from the original server can only be released in sets of thousands spread over nearly a year so State can review them (we still don't have them all) but the FBI finds 650k emails innocent in a couple of weeks? Right...

So just what is the third Great Invention of all time?

Axe ag and sci, here are the four best inventions of all time

I disagree with agriculture and the scientific method, so I'm not even close to accepting your third place candidates. Here are the four best inventions in history, and they are inventions not just concepts:

The first great invention was paper, providing the means to preserve knowledge through means other than storytelling.

The second great invention was the printing press, providing the means to broadly disseminate knowledge throughout society.

The third great invention was the telegraph, providing the means to communicate knowledge rapidly across distance.

The fourth great invention was the integrated circuit, providing the basis for all the automated processing of information we now enjoy.

What do you think?

Would YOU make 400 people homeless for an extra $16m? Decision time in Silicon Valley

Need More Housing

200 apartments sounds like a better use of land than 100 mobile homes. Housing is expensive because the anti development crowd artificially restricts supply. Every city should be required to have as many housing units as they have jobs. No city in Silicon Valley does and neither does San Francisco. If they did there wouldn't be cities trying to spend half a million dollars to keep dirt under what is really just a large trailer.

Take the $55m and help the community.