* Posts by John Brown (no body)

25255 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010

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US Supreme Court allows 'ghost guns' to fall under federal purview

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

SO how many states that require gun registration, and have done for decades at least, are now actively confiscating those guns? Or at least trying too? One? A few? Many? Most? All? None?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"That's the first step to requiring gun registration. The next step is confiscation."

The first needn't, and for decades so far, has never led to the second. Why would you even link those two statements?

After all, many, many things bought and sold have serial numbers. Mainly to provide tracking for the manufacturer during warranty claims or supplying correct accessories etc.

New Zealand supermarket's recipe-generating AI takes toxic output to a new level

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Woah there !

"And did you? Well obviously not as you are still here to post!"

Sorry, I forgot to put the scare quote around that statement. Although in hindsight it kinda seems obvious considering the post I was replying to :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"It asks for food items, so it's logical (but not necessarily reasonable) to assume that it's given food items to work with. Can't blame the software for doing what it's supposed to do. Can't see many people thinking that bleach was a food item either (trump fans being a possible exception)."

No. because if it's an "AI" trained in cooking, recipes and ingredients, it should be responding based on that training, not taking ingredients it's never heard of in relation to it's training and just mixing them in some random way and telling you the result is "delicious" or "refreshing" because that is an outright lie. If had any AI at all in it, it would "know" what combinations work and what don't and not vary too far from those limits.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: instead allowing only a list of "popular items"

"Because there is no intelligence whatsoever in the "AI", otherwise it would know what it is doing, and in what context, and work out that the inputs were harmful itself."

Exactly. There are huge databases out on the internet with recipes for all sorts of things that are safe to eat, barring allergies and/or other medical conditions. It wouldn't be beyond the wit of the programmer to direct the "AI" to those sites for training and/or simply listing available recipes that use all or some of the ingredients that you give it. Or better yet, just crawl the 'net for recipe websites and grab, ask for or purchase everything you can find and build your own database that doesn't even need the "AI" component. It's little more than a fairly simple database lookup. I dabbled with something similar on a much smaller scale with a recipe book and database on an Amiga intending to push it out to PD libraries. Then I found there were a couple out there already so didn't bother getting much past the proof of concept stage.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Marmite

"《UK Vegemite is very different from the Aussie version (and dissed Marmite).》

That is curious not I would anything past the manufacturer(s.)"

Not really. Recipes are often tweaked to suit the local palate. I first really noticed it many, many years ago when I did a shop in Netto, who were famous for selling off failed export orders, end of line products etc. They had some Heinz Tomato Ketchup all labelled up in German, with nothing to indicate it might be a special version or anything, but was noticeably more spicy than the usual version made for the UK market. I went back and bought another half dozen bottles knowing it was a case of when it's gone, it's gone :-)

On the other hand, changing the local recipe is almost always due to costs, either to use cheaper ingredients, or because they off-shore the manufacture and the ingredient prices are different there or the process is a little different.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Woah there !

But my President told me to drink bleach to cure COVID and/or take massive doses of hydroxychloroquine!!!

Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Ground station as a service

Sorry guv, we're just,like, the "common carrier", not our problem what the user, like, does with the service once ,like, they paid for it. Innit.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

It doesn't appear to affect the many geosync commercial TV broadcasting sats up there. So either it's not a problem, or their orbits are designed not to get into that position in the first place.

Zoom's new London hub – where 'remote work' meets 'we need you back in the office'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Commute should be considered contracted hours...

They already see WfH as "perk" that saves you money and time and therefore an employment benefit :-/

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: commercial landlords

"They probably can't renegotiate the lease."

To a normal, right-thinking person, that should have no bearing on WfH/Hybrid/full-time-office working. The cost to the company will be the same until the lease comes up for renewal no matter whether staff are all there or mainly WfH. It's just that psychological need for willy waving by CEOs that keep them in their large and prestigious office buildings. Just look at how many are in the highest rent areas when a mile down the road would be half the cost.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Writings on the wall for these companies

"Another paper showed that companies that allow staff to choose, have over twice as much success with recruitment and retention. In addition to be more profitable.."

Yeah, a lot of our job vacancies are advertised as remote or hybrid possible. Depends on what the job actually is, of course :-)

eg Sales and Marketing can all work remotely much of the time but also find in-person collaboration is good so most go into the office at least once per week, usually on a "team" day, ie not all of marketing on the same day, but all of a team. The warehouse and workshop staff tend to all go in everyday though :-)

On the other hand, there's a client I visit regularly who has a beancounter with an intermittent hardware fault he seems quite happy to work around rather than turn up at the office and get a new laptop. I think the fault ticket has been open for nigh on 3 months now. He logged the ticket remotely and hasn't been seen since at least that long. His work is still getting done and he sends emails and joins meeting, but that could just be creative AI and video editing. Rolls of carpet and lime may or may not have been involved. Probably not. But he is a beancounter :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

If you are busy, set your status as appropriate, eg busy or do not disturb, whichever level suits. We also have team chats open so anyone with a question can check if a specific person is available or at least willing to be disturbed or ask in the general team chat. It took a little while, but the habit soon becomes automatic to set status as appropriate. Initial problems were people using too high a level of unavailable and not changing it when appropriate, eg Do Not Disturb to the extent that no one in team was ever available even when sitting twiddling their thumbs waiting for something such that people would ignore the busy status, whatever the level, As I say, it took time and co-operation, but eventually we reached a balanced consensus. No "Do Not Disturb" really means that. Busy means I may get back to you soon, but probably not immediately and available means yeah, I'm looking for an excuse to stop what I'm doing, someone save me from this grindstone. The team chat is less used now, but it's still common, for those "hey, anyone know how to..." and similar questions where it doesn't matter which of us respond.

Likewise, audio or video calls. In-office etiquette is to not have headphones on unless you are actually using them so that people who are actually using them in a meeting are not disturbed, ie there should be a real assumption that headphones on means "in a meeting", not just "please don't talk to me"

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Mine too. Worse, sometimes she starts a conversation with "me" in her head and "continues" it with me out loud part way through! That can be disconcerting :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: I think it is the perfect time to start a new company : Gloom

In the UK. Grot. Founded by Reginald Perrin :-)

Think International Space Station dust is obviously free of bad chemicals? Wrong

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Measuring the wrong thing

Isn't most household dust composed of human skin flakes? I wonder how many of those chemicals listed are part of the recipe for a human being?

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Is that why the well known germophobe Donald J Trump is so enamoured with gold?

Microsoft OneDrive a willing and eager 'ransomware double agent'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Relatively easy...

...and MS STILL hide file extensions by default on a fresh install and users still don't suspect something might be wrong when one file emailed to them DOES show an extension. Admittedly, having kittenpic.jpg.exe show up with an extension when they don't normally, but still an innocuous looking kittenpic.jpg is probably easy for most to overlook, whereas if ALL extensions were shown by default, I suspect many more might notice the unusual "double" extension of kittenpic.jpg.exe

NASA to test potential 400Mbps laser link for Mars

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Mushroom

Re: error correction

"Except NASA's poster says otherwise... Looks like 1 - 100Mbps from Mars distances."

Worth remembering that "Mars distances" vary between ~34 to 250 million miles depending on orbital locations of Earth and Mars. Not to mention that big ball of uncontrolled fusion that sometime occludes the line of sight, eg from mid-November this year until early 2024.

Have you ever suspected your colleague doesn't hope this email finds you well?*

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Guilty as charged

"of pressing Return between thoughts and thereby sending multiple Teams messages."

Yeah, that's bloody annoying and counter-intuitive. Enter should start a new line like in most text entry. CTRL-Enter as a shortcut for send would be far too sensible, of course.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Performance assessments

"Playing a game of boredroom bingo, were we?"

FTFY :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Happy

Re: Or the really annoying

"Why don't you replace the fucking word yourself?"

Maybe he's fecking Irish you daft fecker! :-)

Or just a fan of Father Ted.

Larry Ellison a major contributor to Blair Institute vaccine database plan

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Big Brother

Re: Larry and Tony don't understand computer systems

"Attempting to unify more than a few such systems is an impossible task at the moment. Anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or lying."

Users are already being "educated" that the workflow is defined by "The System", not by them or their organisation. And "The System", being either cloud based or with enforced "updates" will change your workflow when the Tech Gods say so. That allows for world wide uniformity even if there are a few stubborn hold outs claiming they have their own local sovereign laws.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Thanks for reminding me, I need to order some more likeables as thanks to this article I now have too few in stock having just used up most of them.

Infosys launches 'sonic identity' – an aural logo to 'reinforce brand purpose'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Missed the ship?

If you had read the original story, you'd know that the Golgafrinchan Arkship B crashed on Earth, thus destroying the computer program the Earth was built to run and the survivors outcompeted and extictionised the local inhabitants resulting in us being the descendants of said Golgafrinchans.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
FAIL

Re: Please wait while we place your life on hold...

Yeah, I was skipping through to find the short catchy few notes that was their "identity" before I realised it was the full, entire and hugely overlong thing! I was expecting something like, as mentioned, the Intel Inside thing or the Dolby sound ident.

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Sounds like that's about it, then

...AKA CD-LAD, the teenage mix DJ?

(No idea if he really exists, but I bet there was at least few going by that name at some stage, probably in the 2000')

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "a very highly resistive poor quality material"

My concern is the fickleness of the stock market in the first place. Why invest in some random superconductor company that is totally unrelated to this research paper when said company may never get access to the technology even if it does exist? A major breakthrough such as this purported to be is as likely to wipe out many "superconductor companies" as be a sign they will suddenly thrive and become valuable.

CLI-beautifying ANSI escape sequences can also make your log files a security threat

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Old-timer here!

"But I am aware of the problems. I remember looking at one VT220 compatible terminal that allowed you to re-progamme the characters sent by the function keys, and even trigger them remotely, and another hack was to re-program the terminal ident sequence and then trigger that!"

That was possible in MSDOS too with ANSI.SYS loaded by CONFIG.SYS.

Re-programmed keys to do something else was just part of the "cool things you can do" with it. No idea if it's still there in cmd.com etc with Windows, but you could map a string to a key too so in theory TYPEing a log file with user submitted data in it could remap a key press to a dangerous command string with an embedded ENTER at the end.

X tries to win back advertisers with brand safety promises

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Not false advertising

"provided the salary is high enough"

In those sorts of positions, and especially in tech companies, the lions share of the salary is often stock options. Hopefully, she negotiated more cash and fewer stock options for her salary.

Researchers discover algorithm to create shapes that roll down pre-determined paths

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Joke

Re: Associated material

If you want to see it in action visit any fairground and have a go on the sideshows. Most of them manage to "gimmick" things so they roll or fly in anything but the direction you expect :-)

Apple, Samsung, and Intel to invest in Arm IPO, and emerge with some control: report

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

scrip?

Is this a synonym for shares, or does it have some special meaning here?

We need to be first on the Moon, uh, again, says NASA

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Yes, and you probably don't want to either attack or defend with missiles that are at the very least a few days away after you press "The Button" and which, if actually stationed there, could be seen launching with a few days of warning.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

"Also last time I checked, every US astronaut+family has received free medical care for life."

Ah,. so THAT'S how it's done. Now we just need to qualify the other 99.99999999% of the population and find some way to get them all into space for a few minutes each. Paging Mr Branson, Paging Mr Branson, call for you at the green courtesy phone in the main concourse of Spaceport America :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Time to re-release...

"NASA has already addressed that. They are planning "the first woman, the first person of color, and the first Canadian[0]".

Tokenism is the new black. Get used to it, it'll be here until it runs it's course. Probably another eight or ten years or so."

Likewise ESA and disabled astronauts. While I may laud their ambitions, I don't think this is quite the "everyday experience" where we ought to be making adaptions for special cases just yet. We're barely past the early WW1 fighter plane level in terms of space travel at the moment.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Well if anyone can do it, NASA can.

"Excellent isolation possibilities are great for bio labs working on dangerous viruses."

Ah yes, the perennial favourite of SF :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just one question

"We never claimed that the sun never set on our Empire, either ... "

Mainly because if you had, it would not be true :-) That statement was meant literally at the time, it wasn't just jingoistic bravado, there was always some part of the British Empire in daylight. And no, I'm not defending "empire", just stating the facts :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just one question

"Developing assault rifles which can fire in an airless, weightless environment isn't that hard to do."

Finding something to brace yourself against might be a little more difficult. That big Russian gun did fire, true, but they were so concerned at the effect it would have on the Salyut that they only test fired it 2 or 3 times when it was unmanned and about to be de-orbited as end of life And FWIW, it wasn't an "anti aircraft cannon" which would be very large, it was a 23mm cannon from an aircraft, relatively small. The follow up Salyut was planned to have guided missiles instead, so I guess they saw the recoil from the gun and decided as a defensive measure, it might not be too good if it broke the space station when firing it but I think in the end that idea simply never flew.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Just one question

"Really? That abundance of caution why starship blew up?"

He said "in the development phase", which is where Starship is right now. Just as with many of the early Flacon flights, they expected it to blow up and even said so before it launched. They did appear to screw up quite badly with the destruct mechanism though.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

"The priority at the moment is getting Starship to orbit, so that shows up far more."

And since Machdiamond asked, yeah, getting Starship working is quite important to one of the missions, ie the orbital fuel depot. Without that reaching orbit, the cry-fuel transfer and the lander becomes a little less important. So, they are actually visibly working on at least one of the stated objectives. And if Musk ever wants to meet his stated aim of getting to Mars, that fuel tanker/depot is vital to that mission too.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: So reading between the lines ...

"Starship an object designed to look like male genitalia"

Er, wot? You mean like every other rocket ever built? And if anything, Bezos attempt looks more like a cock than Musks does, so Jeffy wins that willy waving contest hands down.

Boeing abandons plans for crewed Starliner flight in 2023

John Brown (no body) Silver badge
Flame

Re: total losses on the project to $1.4 billion.

Why yes, yes they are. Very good for aerodynamics :-)

Would you go to space in an Apple spaceship? based on their usual level of engineering, probably yes. But they are shite for repairs and maintenance :-)

I wonder what would happen if they built rockets too? Would the Apple Core Stage be reusable or would they expect you to buy a new one each time you used"broke" one :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: Rather them than me

I was thinking along similar lines re the tape that can't be accessed to be removed. If a new/extra coating is good enough for the inaccessible tape, then why isn't that good enough for the entire job instead of taking the time to replace the accessible tape?

It all sounds rather like a budge job with a side helping of porkies to me.

UK voter data within reach of miscreants who hacked Electoral Commission

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How was this made possible?

"Chair of the Electoral Commission"

Yeah, not the best person to be interviewed on the subject of IT security. I doubt that was on his CV when he was appointed. Maybe if they had got their director of IT to interview instead, we might have got more sensible answers. But that's not how it works. Pick someone "important" who can waffle a lot and later claim they didn't really understand the technology when they gave "potentially misleading" answers when responding to the eventual Parliamentary Inquiry which will be so far down the road, most will have forgoteen, few will care and plenty of time has passed to "bury the bodies".

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: How was this made possible?

Ah, the Trump Security Method. Good'o :-)

Cops cuff pregnant woman for carjacking after facial recog gets it wrong, again

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

There does seem to be a slight implication that the car was carjacked by a couple of people and that the "unknown woman" who handed the phone in may have been the one involved in the carjacking simply because she was now associated with the phone and a woman. At least that's the only thing I can think of since the victim was asked to try to identfy her as otherwise how could he possibly know what she looked like?

None of that is made fully clear by the article but the two associations I mentioned above do strongly imply the arrested man was not working alone. The cops were still looking for a second person and made multiple mistakes based on weak evidence bolstered by the facial recognition from the CCTV. And CCTV is notoriously poor quality with badly sited cameras giving odd angles in the recordings.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

Re: "Facial Recognition" is no worse than any other kind.

"The problem here is that what the police do is "lock people up". That's the police job."

I thought their job was "To Serve And Protect"?

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

And then there's the savings in the generation of the 'leccy in the first place. What might the wind turbine or solar panel efficiency be if we have access to "room temp" superconductors? not to mention hydro and/or traditional generators? But as so many have said, it's all pie in the sky at the moment. A bit like those conversations you may have with friends about what you'd do if you won the lottery jackpot :-)

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"Try the above formula and you will GET SOMEWHERE!"

Well, go on then. Come back and let us know when you make your first $billion and we'll all eat humble pie.

John Brown (no body) Silver badge

"The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the 'Star Spangled Banner', but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.”

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

So, even Douglas Adams misinterpreted the final dolphin speech then? They were the Galactic Council representatives :-)

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