Re: Attack the advertisers to get results
My strategy is much simpler - I use an ad blocker, so I don't see any ads.
446 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Jul 2020
No, it definitely does not have anything to do with the USA and its chums. Putin had publicly stated that he considered Ukraine to be an integral part of Russia and not an independent country, so he decided to enforce that view in way that would have brought tears of joy to Stalin's eyes.
If someone submitted wrong data and managed to take down the whole system?
From what has been said so far, I think it is more a case of the system not being able to parse input data submitted by one of airlines and activating what can only be described as an extreme fail-safe strategy (i.e. shut down all automated processing until the problem has been rectified). The question I would like to ask is: was that strategy actually appropriate, or could another strategy (for example, rejecting the dodgy data set and forcing the airline responsible to resubmit a corrected one) have been employed that is more appropriate given the impact that a complete system shutdown will have?
I don't think they've reconciled themselves to the private car being able to take people anywhere yet.
Most politicians are still trying to figure out an officially-mandated approval process for fire! Until that process is completed, the use of fire in any form is going to be banned.
Back in the late 90's I was work as a contractor for a SATCOM company, and I was tasked with travelling out to Japan to one of their suppliers to witness a Factory Acceptance Test on a system that was due to be delivered by the supplier. Everything went fine for the first morning and half of the first afternoon, then suddenly one of the critical test failed significantly. Much panic then occurred with the Japanese supplier's staff; in order to minimise the loss of face to them I took myself off to a safe (and discrete) corner of the factory floor and watched proceedings with considerable interest and a certain amount of amusement.
Come 17:00 and the end-of-day bell occurred. It had previously been explained to me that when this bell rad you had 30 minutes to vacate the site then the doors would be locked and not opened until 08:00 the next day, so I dutifully said my goodbyes to the Japanese supplier's test manager. The next day I was back on site just after 08:00 to find a very frazzled test manager (and equally frazzled team under him); apparently they found the problem at about 02:00 in the morning (a simple case of forgetting to purge a configuration left over from the previous test case) but had then had to camp out of any sofas they could find. Not a pleasant night for them! On they other hand I accrued a lot of brownie points for being understanding and giving them room to sort the problem out.
SpaceX already have a team of people whose sole job is to ensure that Musk is kept from doing any more damage to the company. I believe one of the ways they do that is o ensure that Musk is not allowed to talk to any of the real engineering staff (he is allowed to talk to some "engineers", but has not realised that they are shop dummies dressed up in corporate clothes with old plats of pizza near them).
ESA is independent of the EU, in fact it pre-dates it by a considerable margin. Brussels has tried a couple of times to take control of ESA (on the basis that it includes the word "European"), but has been firmly told to take a hike.
ESA funding rules are by and large simple to understand - the money a country gets out of an ESA programme is a function of how much money it puts into the programme. Hence the UK gets a lot out of some programmes, but is essentially blocked from bidding for contracts in other programmes (which it does not fund). Also all countries have to contribute something to ESA's general operational costs; I can't remember the formula for that.
As far as I recall, ESA are not supposed to directly award contracts to companies that are not based in one of its member states, particularly for contacts issued under the ARTES programme. Also, I am amazed that a the German government allowed a US company to win the contract when it is being largely funded by Germany - that bulk of that money should have gone to a German company (e.g. ADS GmBH) as prime contractor (they can then sub-contract, but that is a different matter). Seems like there is something else about this story that El Reg may have missed.
I used to work for a Swedish company, although in their UK offices. My laptop originally had a Swedish keyboard on it which made finding certain keys (my locale was UK English) an interesting exercise of memory. I ended up working with a standard QWERTY keyboard next to me for the times when my memory failed (I was not allowed to connect this to the laptop - they took security seriously). Took months to convince IT (based in Sweden of course) that a Swedish keyboard for an English speaker who writes all of his documents in English is generally A Bad Idea.
The James Webb wouldn't have been possible without the Hubble
I'm not so sure I would agree with that statement. The JWST operates in the near- and mid-infrared bands with a limited capability of seeing red and orange visual light (since red and orange frequencies are adjacent to infrared), while the HST primarily operates in visual bands; based on that I would argue that JWST is descended more from IRAS, ISO (which I actually worked on as a part of the ground system team) and Spitzer lines than HST.
While I cannot say from first-hand knowledge, I suspect that the bigger the sample you have, the more accurately the AI system can reproduce it. A few seconds of sampling is unlikely to be enough since most (if not all) of us have idiosyncrasies in our speech patterns that tend to only come out with certain words (in my case, traces of a Canadian accent from when I lived there as a child, even though I came back to Blighty 50-odd years ago).
Aircraft black boxes are capable of handling those sort of depths, and they have a sonar transponder that will generate a "ping" for about a month (on a full battery charge). Developing something like that to for a submersible is should be possible, and should be mandated for submersibles being used to carry tourists. It would also give an independent way of continuously tracking the position of the submersible relative to its mother-ship.