Posts by vtcodger

How many times do we have to tell you? A Tesla isn't a self-driving car, say investigators after Apple man's fatal crash

Re: But how about those batteries?

I'm inclined to agree, that the contribution of Lithium per se to battery fires is not all that big a deal. What **IS** an issue is that electric car batteries pretty much by definition contain a lot of energy in a small volume. If they didn't, they wouldn't be much use. The question is how one safely discharges a "fuel tank" that potentially contains several hundred million Joules. Especially when the control hardware and maybe even the external connections are possibly damaged. There's quite likely enough energy there to heat a house in a mild climate for months. In many cases, simply waiting for the battery to self-discharge may be the simplest and safest way to deal with it. (A fence and a few warning signs might be appropriate precautions).

Re: Frankly ...

"I haven't seen the very clear "off-lane"/"on-lane" as used in the entirety of Europe anywhere in the US

No offense, but I can't figure out what you're talking about. I wouldn't argue that all US traffic control markings are great, because many are less than superb. But I've driven in Germany a bit, and I don't recall that the road markings there were especially awesome. Could you perhaps clarify a bit?

Re: Company Policy: "Don't Do Illegal Stuff"

OK, I shouldn't use my cell phone while my vehicle is moving. I'm fine with that. (But what if it's providing driving instructions -- as many are able to do)?

But checking my fixed mount GPS, speedometer, dash panel gauges, and rear view mirrors or cameras are every bit as distracting, and I'm supposed to check most of those regularly. How do we reconcile that with simplistic notions about driver attention?

Re: Tesla never said it's driverless

The problem is that it does it’s autonomous driving so well that progressively drivers become complacent .

Exactly. If "Autopilot" (or whatever it's called) didn't work pretty reliably, drivers wouldn't use it. Just as they disable electronic "traction control systems" in other vehicles on really slippery roads after their vehicle visits the bushes a few times. The problem seems to be that "autopilot" (like ETC) mostly works. In the case of Autopilot that's probably exacerbated by the fact that at highway speeds, there just may not be enough time for even a fully alert driver to determine that the vehicle is about to to try to kill one and react to defeat its homicidal instincts.

I think that it is past time to for regulators to step in and develop RIGOROUS standards for ALL automated safety aids in automotive applications. If that delays the accumulation of untold wealth by autonomous vehicle mongers a bit, I suppose that's unfortunate. But it really does seem to be necessary.

Microsoft polishes Sphere, carts backups off to Azure – and mystery mobile claims to run Windows 10 and Android

Worse places in the world for a surprise hike

There are, we suppose, worse places in the world in which to enjoy a surprise hike.

For example, try Interstate 87 -- the main highway between New York City and Montreal. Cell phone reception on I87 in the Adirondack Park region has always been notoriously unreliable -- so much so that emergency phones are still maintained at two mile intervals along one lengthy, thinly populated, stretch North of Albany. Winter temperatures in that area regularly fall to 0 degrees Fahrenheit (-18C). Sometimes lower. Occasionally, much lower.

The Wristwatch of the Long Now: When your MTBF is two centuries

Re: Beware survival bias

I believe that some high end laptops still come with parallel "printer" ports. I think those might be fast enough to talk to 8 inch floppy drives ... with a bit of supporting hardware that you'd probably have to homebrew. Do you reckon that your 8 inch floppies will still read after 40 years or so? A few years ago, I tried to recover some software from 30 year old 5.25 and 3.5 inch disks. Some would read. Many wouldn't. Sic transit glorium datum. (apologies to anyone who remembers how to actually handle number and gender in Latin).

Re: such craftsmen could not possibly survive

What largely put the old watchmakers out of business was when Timex started stamping out zillions of inexpensive durable watches back around 1950. In most cases, when one broke -- which didn't happen all that often, it was cheaper to buy a new watch than fix the old one. They were pretty sturdy. I wouldn't be at all surprised that many of those 70 year old Timex watches are still running.

Re: Beware survival bias

"But I am trying to instil in him the idea that one should use durable goods until they no longer are fit for purpose."

Indeed. I am still using hammers, saws, files, chisels, screwdrivers and other tools that my dad bought at estate sales in the 1920s and 1930s. Some are surely more than a century old. They work fine. I did retire the brace and bits a decade ago when we finally got battery powered drills that could be relied upon to finish an outdoor job without waiting hours for one or more battery recharges.

The modern obsession with constant "maintenance" seems to me largely a fad like the huge decorative fins that American cars sprouted in the 1950s. Why would anyone want to wake up every morning not knowing if the manufacturers have (yet again) broken their critical toolchain(s) overnight?

This too shall pass. At least one hopes it will.

Flat Earther and wannabe astronaut killed in homemade rocket

NASA

"he was killed by NASA ..."

If NASA were involved, it would be a multidecade project requiring hundreds of millions of dollars. They would still be working on the Request for Proposal. Hughes would likely die of old age before the project came to fruition.

If Hughes was the victim of foul play, it was probably a drug deal gone bad, or some good ol' boy who was convinced that Hughes' rocket had somehow caused his chickens to stop laying.

Xerox hopes wining and dining HP shareholders will convince them of takeover

Hey, it's a free meal

It's a free meal. And an opportunity to judge how qualified these financial geniuses are to conduct a really first class pump and dump operation on HP's stock.

Voatz of no confidence: MIT boffins eviscerate US election app, claim fiends could exploit flaws to derail democracy

Re: 27 times? In the world of DevOps and so-called "agile"?

27 updates? Why doesn't that make me feel more secure?

Re: I'm baffled

"If your mobile banking application is compromised, you will find out when you receive the next statement from your bank, the details of all transactions will be there for you to see. If you dispute any of them, there is a clear process to follow, which (in exception of cases of gross negligence) will result in any losses bing refunded."

On top of which, the money has to GO somewhere, and cobbling together a transaction chain that can't be traced to the miscreants is a non-trivial job. It's sort of like counterfeiting. Doable, but likely to be an inordinate amount of effort and quite risky as well.

Hacking a voting program is likely easier and less risky. And there's likely no meaningful audit trail.

Cache me if you can: HDD PC sales collapse in Europe as shoppers say yes siree to SSD

Re: And..

"But when it didn't work ..."

Which was, in my experience, maybe half of the time. On paper, plugging a proper resistor bank into the final device in the chain canceled signal reflections and made everything fly along. In practice, not always. Sometimes some combination of terminators on the "other" devices in the chain would make things work. Sometimes not. In which case, plan C was to rearrange the chain -- not always easy because of cable length and connector spacing. And sometimes THAT didn't work. Leaving Plan D -- swap out devices with different, functionally equivalent devices. Labor intensive? You bet.

I, for one, wasn't sorry to see SCSI in the rear-view mirror of technical progress.

Astroboffins agog after spotting the first repeating fast radio burst that pings every 16 days from another galaxy

Re: Carefull

And half the sites on the internet will include Javascript that autoexecutes a reading of the alien message by Kanye West over, and over, and over. There will be a Close button on the video. But, being Javascript, it will take between seven and thirteen minutes to work once activated.

Fortunately, The round trip latency for these radio bursts will be about six billion years, so we don't have to worry to much about folks calling in to the station and requesting their favorite Volgon poem.

Beware, Tesla might take away your car's autopilot if you buy its vehicles from third party dealerships – plus more news

Re: Always read the software license terms and conditions

No offense intended, but I downvoted you because the terms and conditions under which software is released are typically incomprehensible to anyone including lawyers. That's pretty clearly intentional. Read them? Sure, why not? But why waste your time? They amount to: "Here's a product. we take no responsibility for it and do not promise it to be good for any purpose under the sun -- no matter what our ads and salespersons might have led you to believe. Have a nice day."

Re: bits of your car not working...

Given the current record of "Autopilot", disabling it probably qualifies as a safety feature. But it'll be interesting to see how the law on this plays out. How does one distinguish between a feature that is disabled by the vendor because of greed and one that is disabled because it is hazardous to the driver, the public, or the environment? If the law comes down on the side of it was sold with X feature, the manufacturer must reimburse anyone it takes the feature away from, is the manufacturer then obligated not only to leave the feature alone but to keep it updated?

Built to last: Time to dispose of the disposable, unrepairable brick

"has a headphone jack"

Well yeah. But with a little wood putty, some fine grit sandpaper, and some cell phone colored paint, I'm confident that you can hide it so well that no one but an expert can tell that you are walking around with an unstylish cell phone.

Windows 7 will not go gentle into that good night: Ageing OS refuses to shut down

And contrary to "expert" advice ...

It was fashionable to pretend 25 years ago that Windows was a "real OS" that, like mainframes of the day, needed to be properly shut down if seriously bad things were not to happen to users PCs. However, many users didn't get the message and continued to turn the thing off with the power button. And even those who didn't had to contend with folks elsewhere in the building doing stuff that tripped their circuit breakers and with power failures caused by lightning or drunken drivers smacking utility poles or other slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. So Windows remained pretty much impervious to unscheduled power off. Unix handles it pretty well also BTW.

Google Chrome to block file downloads – from .exe to .txt – over HTTP by default this year. And we're OK with this

Re: Annoying tho

You could use a non-Chrome based browser -- at least this year and next and probably the year after that. However, there are fewer and fewer of those that actually work with today's (often needlessly) complex websites. I fear that in a few years we will be down to Chrome and Firefox. And a few years after that to just Chrome.

A few decades ago, the fad d'jour was Continuous Improvement (Kaizen 改善,). We now seem to be well into the era of Continuous Deterioration.

Uncle Sam tells F-35B allies they'll have to fly the things a lot more if they want to help out around South China Sea

Re: Harrier

The Chinese might throw in a few J-15s which the Russians claim are illegal knockoffs of their Su-33 carrier based fighter. Your pilots and maintenance folk can read the Chinese manuals, right?

Re: Harrier

Maybe the Chinese can sell you folks an aircraft carrier. If they can conjure up a hospital in ten days, slapping together a warship in six months or so should be no big problem. Or maybe HMAS Melbourne is still around stashed in some obscure inlet disguised as a shrimp farm. It had an excellent record for sinking destroyers. True, they were friendly destroyers, but that's more sinkings than most modern aircraft carriers can claim.

Hear, hear: The first to invent idiot-cancelling headphones gets my cash

99 Smart phones?

Weckert managed to get 99 cell phones running and accessing Google Maps AT THE SAME TIME from the same location. All before the batteries in the first one faded. The guy is clearly some sort of genius. Warped, but none the less a genius.

A statue is probably in order.

Time to patch your lightbulb? Researchers demonstrate Philips Hue exploit

Re: It's not just Smart bulbs that are at risk

You're talking about a light switch, right? I guess that's OK ... But ... But ... How does your vendor download critical security patches to it?

Iowa has already won the worst IT rollout award of 2020: Rap for crap caucus app chaps in vote zap flap

Re: Hahahahahahaha

The Donald is a self described "very stable genius". Of course he's an IT expert.

"that point is briefly addressed"

Yes. I read that. But there is a difference between obtuse/difficult/frustrating (which pretty much sums up much of the digital revolution if you ask me) and actually impossible without driving eight kilometers down the road from the polling place and climbing a hillside in order to get two bars on your cell phone. And yes, cell phone service used really to be that bad in many parts of rural America. ... It may still be which is why I asked.

Harder than it looks?

For a number of years, I did IT for a school in a rural area in Vermont. During that period, we got about half a dozen automated response surveys from various bureaucracies demanding that we provide data on various topics of great interest to society. The number of left handed students with overdue library books and such. Each provided a different tool for us to return our response. Not one of those tools worked without tinkering.

Not one.

Maybe this data collection thing is harder than it looks.

Re: Don't blame the users for the app failure

If I'm to believe the headlines on Google News, it WAS Nevada. They have (if I am to believe those headlines) rather hastily abandoned their Plan A (The primary app) and opted instead for their Plan B. Whatever that may be.

BTW, congratulations on a well written story that seems to cover almost all the points one might be curious about. My one remaining question. Iowa is pretty rural. And it's also pretty bumpy -- low hills. Nothing one would call a mountain, but more than enough I should think to make cell phone reception iffy in some places. Is it even possible for their app to work as intended in the more remote (in Internet space) precincts?

The root cause

Their problem is probably that they didn't use blockchain. But the process does sound really Agile.

EU tells UK: Cut the BS, sign here, and you can have access to Galileo sat's secure service

Re: foot, shot.

Miles? Pounds? You folks planning on going back to Imperial units of measure?

Very little helps: Tesco flashes ancient Windows desktop on Scan-As-You-Shop device

Low Expectations

My God folks. Have we become so used to crummy software that we actually expect the stuff to fail? I recall about thirty years ago when we came across an old PC that had been pushed back in the corner of a lab. No keyboard or monitor, but it seemed to be running. So we borrowed a monitor and keyboard. Turns out the thing had apparently been used for monitoring some device or other and apparently hadn't been turned off when the monitoring was complete. Based on file dates, it's log files had run out of disk space years before, and it had nothing to monitor. But it was still gamely trying to record its results every few seconds. The OS? MSDOS-5. Why do we expect more "modern" products to perform worse?

AI snatches jobs from DJs and warehouse workers, plus OpenAI and PyTorch sittin' in a tree, AI, AI, AI for you and me

Re: WKRP in Cincinnati predicted this

Herb always told them that he was indispensable.

Gin and gone-ic: Rometty out as IBM CEO, cloud supremo Arvind Krishna takes over, Red Hat boss is president

Re: Misquoted...

If not, do you reckon Ms Rometty will be filing an age discrimination lawsuit?

US government grounds drone fleet (no, not the military ones with Hellfire missiles) over Chinese espionage fears

Re: Return of the Yellow Peril!

And really now. What great secrets would the Chinese gather from a hijacked Department of Interior drone and/or the data therefrom? It's no secret that the US, Russia and China all have sophisticated intelligence satellites that are far better suited than a drone to collecting photographic and RF spectrum information for sites of interest worldwide. And presumably the DOI would notice if their drones start making spontaneous, unplanned, trips to Area 51 or whatever?

Petition asking Microsoft to open-source Windows 7 sails past 7,777-signature goal

Re: Uh!

In the long run, you're probably right. The problem, if there is one, would be the transition period while the bad guys rip the code apart, exploit it -- maybe on multiple OS versions -- and the good guys frantically try to patch the holes that have appeared in their hull(s). Identifying problems, fixing them without introducing new problems, and distributing the fixes in a timely manner is a horrible problem. I did that for a few years, many decades ago when the universe was a much simpler place. It was ... stressful. I think nowadays -- given the great complexity of modern software and the huge attack surfaces -- things could potentially get REALLY ugly.

Uh!

I think open source is great. And I suspect the widespread belief that manufacturer support for software guarantees its security may be largely wishful thinking. But really, don't you folks think that open sourcing Windows 7 might lead to hackers worldwide picking over the code looking for, and exploiting, Windows 7 security flaws for fun and profit? And how many of those currently unidentified Windows 7 security flaws might still be present in Windows 10?

Open sourcing Windows 7 really might turn out to have unintended consequences.

Not that it's likely to happen anyway.

Star wreck: There's a 1 in 20 chance a NASA telescope and US military satellite will smash into each other today

Re: Cascading collisions?

Given the enormous closing velocity, I'm not sure what happens to the satellites if they collide. There's presumably some transfer of energy, and orbits are surely altered. But I have no idea whether the objects break up or simply go wobbling off in a new direction with some portions converted to vapor.

Maybe someone around here has some experience with the physics of REALLY high speed collisions between modestly macroscopic entities.

Re: Starlink

I've actually been involved in trying to get some sort of usable digital access to some rural users in Vermont, albeit not recently. Access is possible. Sort of. Despite the best efforts of the state utility regulators, access is not easy unless your facility is reasonably close to a telco office or you have cable access. And many cable providers (Yes Comcast, I'm talking about you) are completely and utterly incompetent. And God help you if your ISP is in the wrong part of the digital universe. And even where access is technically OK, it's often not cheap.

I'm told that the situation is improving. But slowly.

Ships in the night

500 miles up. I'd have thought that a little atmospheric drag would have brought these birds down in the decades after they ran out of fuel.

I reckon that they did start off a bit further out. My guess (unsupported by research or actual math) is that this is just a chance encounter on their way to eventual atmospheric incineration in a few more decades.

Starlink

I'm not that big a fan of Elon Musk. On a truthiness scale he's too often not that much higher than Donald J Trump. But those 42000 Starlink satellites will purportedly provide affordable, high speed, digital service to the half of humanity that doesn't live in urban areas. Given the demonstrated inability of governments, and private companies to get even basic cell-phone service -- much less high speed internet -- to remote areas, maybe Starlink is worth the aggravation. ... If it works (It likely will) ... And if it's actually affordable.

If the words 'new', 'AI', 'for', 'the', 'physical', 'world', 'accelerate' and 'Facebook' scare you, click this headline

Re: GPS and Compass readings in a building?

"And the pizza would get cold"

And it'd probably be the pizza that your neighbor ordered. With --- yuck -- anchovies.

BTW, I'm kind of unimpressed with the "equivalent of 80 years human experience". Really, now, are octogenerians generally held in awe for their fantastic navigational skills?

Ooh, watch out Google. You've got competition. Verizon has a new 'privacy-focused' search engine

Re: Nope

OK, OK -- They maybe made a few mistakes back when they were kids. But they've changed their errant ways. You know that because they tell you so. Don't you folks believe in rehabilitation?

Chrome suddenly using Bing after installing Office 365 Pro Plus... Yeah, that might have been us, mumbles Microsoft

This should be entertaining

Let me see if I have this straight. Microsoft has just attacked the world's largest search engine by hijacking their search clients using a browser developed and maintained by said search engine's maker? And Microsoft's management thinks there will be no consequences.

Man-o-Man. I tried to tell them that legalizing marijuana might have some ... ahem .. interesting ... side effects. But did they listen?

Remember that Sonos speaker you bought a few years back that works perfectly? It's about to be screwed for... reasons

Maybe the business plan needs some tweaks

"Planned obsolescence"

You folks are absolutely certain that there is a plan behind this?

Fly me to the M(O₂)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

You'd prefer zillions of itty-bitty mutant spiders descending from space?

Re: Nuclear power on the moon

"Out of...erm...curiosity, how does Curiosity's nuclear power source work on Mars?"

Thermocouples. Thermocouples are heat engines also I think. At least they need a temperature difference to function. Curiosity apparently cools the cold surface by conduction/convection(?) to Mars very thin but quite cold atmosphere. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph240/belanger2/

"Make the hose out of diamond"

A bit brittle for your application I think. Probably spider web would be better. Since it's a demanding application, might need mutant spiders.

For some reason, I find the notion of mutant spiders bred for super strong web material acceptable as an engineering solution, but -- on another level -- a bit creepy.

Nuclear power on the moon

"Maybe a better option would be to use partially spent nuclear fuel, the energy density is still good enough to make it a viable source of energy."

Nuclear power seems a reasonable solution for power on the moon. But, there's one thing. Nuclear power plants here on Earth are really heat engines that run off the thermal energy difference between a working fluid heated in the reactor and some cooling entity -- typically a lake, river, or ocean. On the moon, you'd need a probably need a large radiating array to provide the cool side. And half the time you'd need to shade the array from direct sunlight. That's all probably doable. But likely kind of complex.

Maybe solar power and a BIG battery would be simpler.

I've heard rumors

That there are things called "plants" that will convert Carbon Dioxide and water -- both byproducts of human metabolism -- to Oxygen and a bit of waste material. Not only that, but the waste material is said to be edible (as long as it isn't something called "kale").

Further research is needed.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

But don't you feel safer knowing that your personal data is safely locked up in an undisclosed location where no one except a couple of million folks with appropriate security clearances can view it?

Is there anything else we freedom loving Americans can do for you today?