Posts by Jonathan Richards 1 1452 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
> Getting SC cleared
Given the amount of transferable knowledge and skills to be had in this arena, I'd think that Developed Vetting (DV) might be the appropriate level of clearance [1]. I have no idea if autonomous AI weapons research/intelligence is TOP SECRET or not, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was.
[1] United Kingdom Security Vetting [gov.uk]
At its heart, this is a philosophical question. We like to think we're intelligent and exercising free will, and all, but get down to the neurological and biochemical level, and, well, were my punctuation decisions in this sentence driven by Ca/Na ion differentials across some greasy membranes, or were they intelligent?
My proposal for an agreed definition of AI: "It seems to do things that look to us as if it's thinking, but we have no idea why."
By this definition, Phalanx is not intelligent, any more than a bucket of water balanced over a door. Not even if you hook it up to an IFF database is it really thinking. If you know why it works the way it does, it ain't intelligent.
A truly intelligent autonomous weapon system might read the manifesto of the opposing forces, and decide to change sides.
Long ago, as but a callow youth, I worked a summer at a dairy/creamery which had a milk pasteurising plant. For a couple of weeks there were complaints of milk spoiling in the bottles (see, I told you it was long ago...) but it was impossible to take the time to break down the entire rig (pasteuriser, holding tanks, bottling machine, and all the pipes and valves that join them together) in order to work out where the nightly cleaning-in-place process was failing. The solution was, after cleaning was done, to use live steam to bring all that shiny stainless steel up to 100C to kill the bugs. The steam source was a heavy-duty hose (designed to deliver hot water, actually, by mixing steam and cold water at the taps on the wall). Muggins took the heavy-duty hose, and pushed the business end into the empty milk holding tank. Returning to the wall, I left the water off, and turned the steam full on. This was a Bad Move - the high-pressure steam couldn't drive the water out of the hose fast enough, subjecting the hose coupling to full pressure and blowing it apart. In the split second it took me to turn and run, I could see REAL steam: a perfectly transparent stream of it in the clouds of "steam" that enveloped the tank room. We had to shut down the steam generating plant, and wait half an hour until there was a cool enough breathable atmosphere in the tank room to get back in with a nice strong jubilee clip. I was lucky not to have been scalded, of course.
Sorry, no IT angle here, move along...
TFA quotes that pitch as saying "[Concorde] has every chance of securing a substantial part of the world market for supersonic airliners. This is a chance that will not return."
The first sentence was clearly borne out. There was no other supersonic airliner in the market, Tu-144 notwithstanding. The second sentence is a hostage to the future, of course, but the chance hasn't returned yet, 56 years after Amery said it.
Thanks for an interesting article. Having seen Alpha Foxtrot outside in all winds and weathers for so many years, it's good to know that it is now in from the cold!
Prompted by the remark re. quasars (discovered 1963), I pulled from my bookshelf a volume which I read a great deal when I was young, although it was published some twenty years before I was born. "The Wonder Encyclopaedia for Children" has an initial chapter on The Universe, which conveys the impression that the "spiral nebulae" that are observed with "the best telescopes" are clouds of gas from which a new star (singular) may be born. The caption to a photograph of Mars, with all the resolution of a charcoal pencil drawing, says 'Some astronomers think that Mars has inhabitants, and the lines which you can see are canals for irrigation'. Progress involves un-learning a lot of things!
> an anonymized email address for every domain name owner so people's real email addresses are not published online.
Isn't that just postmaster@example.com (SMTP) or webmaster@example.com (HTTP, HTTPS) ?
RFC 2142: MAILBOX NAMES FOR COMMON SERVICES, ROLES AND FUNCTIONS IETF, May 1997 (emphasis added)
... who requested a linky.
Try this: Lesbian Vampire Killers
What, you don't want any combination of lesbian, vampire and killers in your search history??
Exactly so. The survey results might be explained by ICT (Impulsive Click-Through) by users entering private browsing mode(s), or perhaps by participants never using such modes, and just guessing the answers.
I just checked what Chrome tells one when opening an Incognito window:
You’ve gone incognitoNow you can browse privately, and other people who use this device won’t see your activity. However, downloads and bookmarks will be saved. Learn more
Chrome won’t save the following information:
-Your browsing history
-Cookies and site data
-Information entered in forms
Your activity might still be visible to:
-Websites that you visit
-Your employer or school
-Your Internet service provider
So in this case at least, there's no good reason for the misunderstanding.
This happened in early March? And yet https://foipop.novascotia.ca still re-directs to a "System Unavailable" notice, even at Mon 23 Apr 10:38:23 UTC 2018.
I was about to exercise my leet skills with wget inside
$ for n in $(seq 100 199); ...; done
I hope that the prosecutors see sense, and charges are dropped/not laid.
> instead of being allowed to get a minimum wage job behind a shop counter , these days kids have to stay in school until they are 18
This is only true, and then only approximately, in England.
You can leave school on the last Friday in June if you’ll be 16 by the end of the summer holidays.You must then do one of the following until you’re 18:
- stay in full-time education, for example at a college
- start an apprenticeship or traineeship
- spend 20 hours or more a week working or volunteering, while in part-time education or training
See the source [gov.uk] for information about Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland.
And here I was, thinking that Vogons simply loved bureaucracy.
The morning broadcast is actually live, and so it often has the features that Verity describes, with lurches of logic and certain academics trying to hog the microphone. I listen to these on morning drives, and then often hear the evening repeat. The latter has had the benefit of attention from the editing suite, and often there are entire segments that have been shifted so that things make more sense, and fluffs have been taken out. I guess the polished versions are the ones that make it onto iPlayer and the podcast platforms.
The inscription on the statue was fictional, of course. Shelley said that he was reporting a traveller's tale: Ozymandias. How I wish I could write like that! And it was published just on two hundred years ago, I notice. In another two hundred years, Shelley's poetry will still be justly admired, and all today's Facebook posts will have long since disappeared.
> We will have people in your area next week... Can we do your driveway?
Translation: I have a mate who can "divert" a load of tarmac from a roadworks contract he's working on, and we can lay it for you for a bodge job that'll have weeds growing through it in 3 months, no problem.
> google kingdom litter fines
I didn't use GoogleTM, but searched with Ixquick. :) The url http://www.kingdom.co.uk/services/environmental-protection/ (deliberately not linkified) returns an error unless one allows http://www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js to run some JavaScript. I didn't do that, either.
I'm sure this sort of thing isn't what TBL had in mind when cooking up the WWW ...
OK, I detect the sarcasm, but
> So makes solar more viable for the rest of us
is a non sequitur.
Global warming does not mean more solar energy reaching any particular solar panel. The sun (we trust) will continue to shine next year just as it does today. There could be more clouds generated by warm seas, though, and the warm seas will fuel hurricanes that may rip the panels off roofs and solar farms, and the sea level will continue to rise, and so on. Global warming is not good. For anything. I reckon we can agree on that.
> So, when HP1 was published, she was from Scotland, no?
I think you underestimate the scale of parochialism that operates amongst the British. Clue: the scale is microscopic, and eternal. Someone born in Gloucestershire can never be said to "come from Scotland", indeed people in the same county will stoutly defend "coming from" individual towns and cities. This operates down to village level, and I can give you examples from within villages that you can, with a good arm, throw a stone clean across.
The words "You aren't from round 'ere, are ye?" is not generally a perfectly friendly greeting :)
> Genealogists have been at it for centuries...
Let's name names here [snerk]. Ancestry.com is full of user-generated "family trees" with egregious, ridiculous, totally fruitloop genealogies, which replicate themselves in exactly the way xkcd 'Citogenesis' illustrates. People who think they care about their genealogy, but clearly don't, find a marriage record for, say, Mary Smith and Robert Roberts, and think "Ooo, that must be my great-granny". In she goes, and the next time someone searches for Robert Roberts, Ancestry dishes this relationship up as a fact! And at the top of the search results! I rarely rely on user trees, don't consider undocumented relationships, and check the documents when they are cited. I'm clearly not having as much fun as some people...
[1] This is metaphorical brotherhood. I have no Syntaxes amongst the relations I have found so far.
> Uniqueness is important in identification.
I think you would be surprised at how unique gait is. I was looking for someone recently across many in-use sportsfields, and I eliminated many possible people at several hundred yards away, simply because they didn't move in the way the search subject did.
The El Reg headline makes a good point, though. This is interesting from a data classification point of view, but useless as an authentication method. Won't work e.g. in the back of a taxi where I can't do a bit of typical walking around...
> Starting from today, how many days would it take the Russian Army to reach the Channel and be prepared to cross?
It took the Wehrmacht 15 days from the beginning of the offensive against Belgium, France and the Netherlands until they had the BEF with its back to the sea at Dunkirk. [1] Of course, the Russians might have to cross Poland and Germany too, or maybe they'd take Ireland first with an amphibious landing? Granted, the reverse-D-Day operation would take much longer to mount, but not as much as you might think, if the situation got to that point.
In any event, one wouldn't have time to train conscript troops to the standard required for modern land warfare, and possibly not enough time to mobilise anything more than a short-notice regularly re-trained reserve. [2]
Operation Seelowe (Sealion), the German plan for invasion, was not mounted because the Germans couldn't achieve air supremacy over the English Channel. But it was touch and go...
[1] You've seen the opening credits for Dad's Army, right?
[2] As far as I know. I Am Not A Strategic Military Planner!
> equating speed with risk is primarily done because it is easy to enforce (and fine).
You didn't get any downvotes from me, but I'll just observe that the kinetic energy of you and the vehicle you're in goes up as the square of your speed (velocity, really).
If you have E joules of k.e. at thirty m.p.h., you'll have 1.77E joules at forty.
Since higher energy collisions do damage proportional to the energy involved, a small increase in speed can result in much more damage, so that does lead to increased risk.
@Brian
What makes you sure they made copies? For that to be true, the archive would have had to have been photographically copied in an age before digitization. If you're going to copy paper documents, you have to put them on a photocopier, or microfilm them. If such a copy archive existed, I'd expect reports to have mentioned it. Sadly, it seems on the face of it that much important information has gone up in smoke. See icon ->
Alister most usefully posted,
> ... at least one of the following applies: (a) the data subject has given consent
whois can continue if every registrant gives permission. I know I did whenever I registered a domain in the past. It does mean that my contact details are available to the public, but then, so are my websites. I'm a damn publisher, so why should I think that I need some sort of anonymity?
Now, if someone takes my personal information from whois, and abuses it then that someone is the villain, not the domain registry system.
@DougS
> might increase the chances of a confession given after they've been notified of their right to an attorney
Being questioned without legal adviceOnce you’ve asked for legal advice, the police can’t question you until you’ve got it - with some exceptions.
The police can make you wait for legal advice in serious cases, but only if a senior officer agrees.
The longest you can be made to wait before getting legal advice is 36 hours after arriving at the police station (or 48 hours for suspected terrorism).
Source: Being arrested: your rights [www.gov.uk]
So it would seem the best way to avoid being bounced into a confession under the influence of cortisol and adrenaline would be to ask for legal advice immediately after being cautioned. False confessions are a real thing.
> they should be able to revive your brain if it’s iced immediately after your death and safely stored as far from the Haagen Dazs as possible.
Yabbut, why would they? Just suppose that ol' Walt is in a revivable condition when the technology becomes available to revive him. What's the incentive to get the geezer out and pop him in the hugely expensive human popsicle defroster? You'll just end up with an old, terminally ill Walt Disney that will immediately require yet more hugely expensive medical treatment to become an old, moderately healthy Walt Disney. If Walt believed that his heirs and assigns are going to thaw him out in the future, he just didn't think it through. Oh, and if it becomes necessary to fit disembodied brains into spaceships and asteroid mining gear, then some still-warm individuals are going to find themselves involuntarily drafted. That'll be so much easier than defrosting somebody who's been dead for ages.
Beyond the risk of being caught oily-handed, I'd have thought one would need to spread the weight of a Mini (kerb weight somewhere north of 600 kg) across more than four floor tiles, especially if one is thinking of removing a tile or three and then of getting underneath. Hands up who has seen a collapsed raised floor?
> A small, very small, petrol engine can provide a lot of power to charge batteries
I think you mean *energy*. Power is the rate of energy use. Further, an electric car that gets its electricity from burning petrol to turn a generator is a petrol-powered car, innit? Every joule of energy used in moving the car has come from burning the petrol. A plug-in hybrid answers that criticism, of course.
> order all affected vehicles off the road
Nah, they'll disable it over the air: small print will call for a park_at_nearest_safe_location+switch_off() routine. They won't be willing to take the risk that the owner/driver has not kept patching up to date.
Will Plod be able to stop a driver-less car [1] and interrogate its software build ID? Enquiring minds wish to know.
[1] How?
That's a great image, but swords are not cast iron. They're forged from metal bars heated, beaten and folded many times, producing a strong and flexible blade - there are any number of YouTube videos illustrating the process. I don't doubt that ironworking would have been indistinguishable from magic to bronze age peoples. See Clarke, Sir Arthur.
Which says:
Copyright in open source? WTF? Most open source licences allow re-use of code, provided modifications are released under the same licence as the original. ... But it is possible for segments of code to be subject to copyright, too.
But, of course, ALL the open source code in the Linux kernel is copyright. If there were no copyright, then there would be no way of enforcing the GPL under which it is released.
I never thought I'd say this, but - bring back SCO. At least back then there was a more general understanding (among those of us who should understand these things), of how GNU Public Licensing worked.
For aeons, I've been using a bookmark for El Reg which explicitly had http:// prefixed. That meant that all the pages I visited here were also unsecured. I just changed the bookmark to be https://, and now wherever I go on theregister.co.uk, I get the little green Padlock of Reassurance. Simples, but I never bothered until this morning!
from TFA:
> In theory, the more miles autonomous cars clock up, the more data they will have to learn by, and the safer they will be.
I want to know if there will be a record of the autonomous driving sensor feeds, and what will happen to them. I think the answer to the first part is almost certain to be "yes", since otherwise there will be nothing to help with crash investigations.
If the answer to the second part is "they're streamed or uploaded to Google | Tesla | Uber | Dept for Transport | ... " to assist with autonomous car development, then I'm much less happy.
FWIW, I can't see myself ever driving (or giving control to) an autonomous vehicle, and I don't look forward to sharing the road with them.
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