Posts by midgepad

Trump sends the US Navy back to the steam age

Re: Where's Lewis Page?

Which mission do you feel they need more aircraft for?

French tax authority admits data heist after crook touts 2M records

perfidy

They could reasonably say it is a problem for France, in the hands of the British.

Again.

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

stross is probably right

in remarking that that prefatory remark, a solution to the Thoats of Barsoom problem (call them horses) will cause trouble with people who ignore it's context - it is in a work of fiction, not outside it.

I suspect asides to the reader will increasingly be accused of being prompts to Eustace or whatever a future gadget is called.

Re: Frequency distribution heat map of names in the manuscript

...and was precipitated into the next chapter.

Re: "having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf"

Different book, that's the Concise OED. Useful in itself. Also holds doors open and works as a little podium for photography.

NASA boss balks at billion-dollar estimate for recycled Moon rover

you might think some generic assemblies

could be produced in modest quantities rather than single ad hocs.

Getting it down to Lego blocks and making transportation the main expense would seem desirable.

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Who will surveill the surveilleurs?

Re: Denial isn't refutation

Or indeed they deny, dispute, say.

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

Re: Ah, the tax man

Better to start taxation at 40% on any income over, say, £1000 and raise the minimum pay and benefits amounts so that 60% is a liveable income.

And put the costs of licencing and regulation largely and mostly through the Treasury, so the people who allegedly benefit from regulation exert control on what is spent on it.

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

I like text

More and more.

EU and UK officially blame Russian spies for cyberattack on Poland's power grid

SCREAMING FIST

underlies Neuromancer.

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

A variant of Godwin's Law may be that if Trump doesn't insert himself into a topic, somebody else will.

Another German state heads down the open source sovereignty road

The world turns.

Even the Secret Service won't use company-issued phones

can't have it both ways

People nowadays expect to have a phone/terminal wherever they go.

And when they come back they likely need it to get their transport or accomodation.

So they could use the company phone for personal stuff.

Or they could carry their personal phone, which is most of the security hole before they even use it.

If they have both, they'll get mixed up, that looks like a creditably low percentage of times.

Trump-shuttered climate change site back online in nonprofit hands

hurrah

Well done that team.

NHS Palantir claims face scrutiny after data suggests uneven results

the procedures are done by people...

In rooms.

The most effective surgeons I knew managed their own diaries, kept them on their outpatient desk, agreed and wrote down a date with the patient when a decision was made.

And then there is emergency work. Make enough slots for that, it runs smoothly.

There are clever things - but not _very_ clever - that can be done with computers to help that go smoother, faster. We did one of them with cumulative lab results, in 1975, on the mainframe. With the hard drive that was craned into the building. It hadn't spread everywhere by 1990.

NHS prescribes half a million Copilot licenses for its paperwork headache

oh

dear!

Listen up, England. The Health Secretary is going to be data controller for everyone's Single Patient Record

decades ago I wrote a rule for this

That each access to a patient's record must produce an entry in an account which is eventually conveyed to them.

Giving who accessed it, why they say they did, why they claim they are entitled to, what they looked at.

It seems rather a good idea.

HMRC and Companies House

Rather have for people letting a flat or owners management companies. Well, a few flats this year, one flat soon.

And none of the software, which AFAICS sends them one overcomplicated XML document, seems to run on Linux.

UK MPs slam digital ID rollout as a 'fiasco' after botched launch

What does this IF help me do

that I want to do and find difficult at present?

Countries where nobody

complains.

Really??

(Also at least one avoids centralisation for past reasons. Anywhere with Garage sniffing around would do well to pay attention.)

Mozilla warns UK: Breaking VPNs will not magically fix Britain's age-check mess

are these notional children committing an offence?

And will the Police be arresting them for it?

Utah tells porn sites to take the P out of VPNs, and it's their fault that they can't

but VPNs with a different purpose

seem to be out of scope here, although can their owners, providers, users, or targets actually apply that Utah law?

Surely it is far simpler for the Utahns, who after all control their government and thus only have legislation against things they don't want to do, to just make it illegal to access porn using a VPN?

Windows update prompt joins the Post Office queue

Re: Words to strike fear into the heart

My late favourite Aunt had a typewriter with those and other letters on it.

For reasons.

UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs

argument from incredility

Is this where the Post Office IT managers escaped to?

Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’

Re: First, decide your purpose

Flanks, trading, and reinforcement.

However, if reinforcement is unreliable then it falls back to trade, for noticeable amounts of food and stores.

distance

The Bering strait between the USA and Russia is 61 miles wide.

Attention data hoarders: Alexa loses its Plex appeal as voice feature gets canned

voice interface

Fine.

Interface to local equipment which depends on someone else's computer far away, less fine.

Tech support chap's boss got him out of jail so he could finish a job

if Alice meets Bob and

Charlie, then Alice meets Bob and Charlie.

Charlie might well be meeting, with Bob, Alice.

could you work ...

...without?

I suppose one can simply go outside, rather than meeting within.

And would you meet with within?

Globe.

I arrived at LAX from Brisbane, with a stopover with relatives by marriage, and the relevant wife, and was told that Brisbane LAX Heathrow wasn't approximately a great circle route, hence dropping in.

It's a long flight, at most I raised an eyebrow.

Now I wonder if he was a flat earther, then I just thought there must be recruiting standards.

BOFH: If the meatbags can't agree on aircon, AI will decide for them

Re: I just knew this was going to come up

What makes you think the air is at the set temperature?

Fewer than 3 in 10 register for HMRC's Making Tax Digital shake-up

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

The TV Reception licence fee is one of our very few hypothecated taxes.

I'm 8n favour of runn8ng a lot of fees through the Treasury, rather than charging the end-using individual, mostly for reduction of effort and cost, but less so for that one.

Re: MTD = Making tax difficult

So, part of the Tory strategy.

Iran war drives urgent need to counter underwater attack drones

both sides

Have nucular weapons.

How the Second Republic will work remains to be seen.

Half of VMware users plan to reduce usage by 2028

continuing use

Is a risk.

It might get smaller.

Unlikely.

Junior disobeyed orders and tried untested feature during a live robot demo

Re: The junior kept his job.

"waitresses on minimum wage are getting fired for calling a bloke in a skirt "sir" don't you?"

I don't know that.

If you do, where?

Most blokes in skirts I've seen were drunk Rugby players, and calling them Miss doesn't seem notably better.

BTW do you have a suggestion for a salutation to people whose gender is not obvious to you? Or perhaps gender always is "obvious" to you?

Re: the one thing it isn't

is constructive.

IANAL but he should be dismissed, at least from the team, and for a reason nobody seems to have picked up, and probably from the company.

That's dismissal.

Might be peremptory, decisive, immediate, measured after review, or whatever, but it is dismissal.

OTOH keeping him on, putting him in a less interesting important job - with less scope for fucking up anything significant - downsizing his desk; chairs; shoes - pointing st him and warning newcomers to beware - if he left saying that had made work life intolerable, that's constructive dismissal.

What hasn't been said?

Team leader: Lydia.

Errant subordinate: male.

He can't be trusted to work for anyone without a Y chromosome. That rules out most decent companies.

Re: military

Possibly not, where it matters.

Quite likely, where it doesn't matter, to find out.

If the training and manual says "don't do that, seems a good idea; doesn't work" then less likely even to check.

Payment biz pulls plug on open source charity after KYC spat

percentages and counts, and counters

The bank etc wont be using it's brightest stars on this and they'll perhaps want some proportion of customers checked and cleared rather than of funds.

Japan to allow ‘proactive cyber-defense’ from October 1st

SCREAMING FIST time

Perhaps.

While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

speed of response

A colleague once wanted to buy an X-ray department (having been asked to set up a health service) and rang a supplier in England to enquire. They indicated they could arrange to discuss requirements in a week or two.

He rang an American supplier, "my VP is on the way to the airport".

Enthusiasm can be overdone, but also underdone.

Nice place, I gather, never been there.

Jeff Bezos' rocket company Blue Origin applies to launch 51,000 datacenter satellites

put them in the Moon

Lots of mass for cooling.

And shielding.

Lots of Silicon there, if one builds a fab.

Vacuum available.

Latency between clusters whatever you build.

To Earth, well, a bit more.

No re-entry burnups.

No Kessler Syndrome.

Very large solar arrays, mirror fields etc stable.

warm to the touch, but

Our vacuum tubes, thermionic valves, were warm to the touch, ranging up to hot, but I don't think low power ones had anything inside quite that hot.

It's not a binary choice. Independent boffin builds a ternary CPU on an FPGA

Niven's Chirpsithtra

had a trinary counting system. IIRC that included computing hardware.

(Draco Tavern stories)

Re: On the gripping hand, it's interesting and different and fun.

The book is worth reading. SF, First Contact.

Britain's satellite-watching gap to be plugged with £17.5M eyeball in Cyprus

Re: Why

Physics.

Re: Why

Physics

West Sussex's Oracle rollout pushed back again as costs balloon 15 times

regarding paying the workers

as non-core disappoints me.

(Providing work and currency to people who on average working the area is very core for a local administration, apart from the more obvious aspect.)

I could even argue that Personnel is necessary to look after the personnel who do everything else.

Nanny state discovers Linux, demands it check kids' IDs before booting

my camera has an OS

As do many other gadgets.