Posts by Bebu

PC makers hopeful that Chromebook refresh cycles about to kick in

Not a fan of Chromebooks.

On the whole too little grunt (cpu), too little memory(ram) and inferior build quality.

ChromeOS is pretty irritating too but that might not be the case for some 50 years younger. :)

Some years ago I purchased a new Chromebook for a song (roughly what it was worth) but low battery life, rubbish keyboard, a lower peculiar screen resolution, slow response and inobvious interface choices put me off but I fiddled with it until I decided to reflash the firmware to run Linux (it was an intel celeron.) Even Linux wasn't fast. Installed Win10 out of sheer perversity - surpringly didn't run much slower than on other real laptops.

Last few years has sat gathering dust with some odd Linux distro installed.

Modern Chromebooks are apparently so locked down that they cannot be repurposed in this manner.

If you actually want education notebooks to have a decent lifespan the up the specs - faster cpu/gpu, reasonable ram, better build quality and repurposable. Upgradeable and reparable would be nice too.

Higher unit costs but might be cheaper in the long term.

One obvious option is to give the devices to the students so they literally own them and hopefully if decent hardware they might take better care of them. Unlock them at the end of their course.

I never really understood the need for devices of any type in the class room. Outside the classroom as a research tool and document preparation tool I can accept.

Molten lunar regolith heats up space colonization dreams

Not the full bottle on logistics either

"Hauling materials to the Moon would be both slow and expensive as the trip takes roughly three days."

If I were constructing a lunar structure I would be sending a continuous stream of supply vessels to and from lunar orbit from from earth orbit rather like the Berlin airlift or WW2 Liberty ships.

Getting materials from earth into terrestrial orbit would be the hard part I imagine.

From lunar orbit to the moon's surface would have challenge too although I like the Lunar Space Elevator

If soft lunar landings weren't required a bloody big gun in earth orbit could do the job or a very long linear motor. ;)

These chaps actually get given real money to "research*" any number number of peculiar ideas of various levels of daftness.

_{* presumably at their local Rubbity. Watson and Crick apparently had their light bulb moment in a similar venue.}

Re: In other news:

"Dealing with the zero gravity effects"

I suspect Connor MacRobbie unless he is a PR drone has been quoted out of context.

Otherwise one would have expected Armstrong and Aldrin to have propelled themselves back into space with their first bunny hop.

Doesn't matter where you are there is always gravity (curved space-time doesn't go away just because you're falling in it or maybe it does. ;)

Elon Musk ends OpenAI lawsuit without explaining why

The dog ate the contract.

"Musk's inability to produce a contract – meaning his claims of a breach were hard to prove."

I know contract law is notoriously convoluted and even verbal contracts can be worth slightly more than the paper they are written on, but seems somewhat negligent on Musk's part not to have a copy of the actual contract (if one ever existed.)

FWIW I would not blame his poor dog as it's more likely that the owner, in one of his special-K moments, scoffed it down.

In the wash-up I suspect Musk's lawyers finally convinced the great brain that whatever agreement he had with OpenAI constituted an unenforceable undertaking on both parties.

Microsoft's Recall should be celebrated as the savior of SMEs and scourge of CEOs

So...

So while engaged in a task at random time open excel and add two random numbers and convert the sum into a date, then proceed until another random time, then open word on the org's procedures manual or code of conduct and spell/grammar check a random page, then proceed...

Get the idea? Use your imagination - spell checking invoices probably good too.

With these diversions Recall's AI should be producing some LSD standard hallucinations.

Throwing clever clogs into the looms the AI revolution. :)

Musk wants to ban Apple at his companies for cosying up to OpenAI

Musk's knee jerked so hard

Knee?

It must stick in his craw that with his gazillions he cannot buy or bully the likes of Apple, MS, Google etc and that those corps have flourishing gardens of AI tulips whereas he only has the odd daffodil.

Musk could buy Nokia and produce his own X phone sans OpenAI etc - worked out well for MS. :)

Musk À Point.

>> Could someone put Mr Musk in a faraday cage?

> without the holes

But with a magnetron!

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Begins to make sense...

I was puzzled why the out-of-government Australian LNP (our tory party) were pushing nuclear power when AU has only ever had one (research) reactor and a general community antipathy to atomic energy centred around waste storage, proliferation and safety history.

Fairly clear that serious money and powerful forces at play.

If AU can get to zero emissions without nuclear by relying on renewables, storage and emission reduction then it would provide an embarrassing counterexample to the claim that nuclear is unavoidable.

I am guessing by the time any of these reactors come on line their electricity is going to be woefully too expensive even at peak rates. If the massive accrued costs of these reactors were pushed into the consumer you might well have a retreat to off-grid or micro-grids so I am certain Uncle Sam (ie the US tax payer) predictably will be picking up the tab.

Apple built custom servers and OS for its AI cloud

Who knows?

《So in other words its probably just tweaked FreeBSD or MacOS,》

I was thinking a Darwin kernel stripped down to support just the restricted hardware of their "compute node" and their AI ASICs.

I would guess perhaps a basic hypervisor under that and/or secure containers under Darwin to run multiple instances although they seem to be treating the nodes like a hardware equivalent of a container.

Or perhaps its just a pile of PowerPC boxes. ;)

Legendary Glastonbury farm using bovine excreta power plant adds graphene boffinry

Re: "What nobody wants is to have/do/want less and be content"

"I have a book on life in Stratford in Shakespeare's time. It's based on analysis of wills, and it's really interesting in that the bequests of even highly commercially successful people indicate how little they owned but were apparently quite content."

Like William Shakespeare's will leaving his second best* bed to his wife. :)

I am convinced that until the post WW2 era the general population had surprisingly few material possessions and valued those they had as the cost replacing them would have been prohibitive.

Even growing up in the 1960s (albeit in a backwater) the difference between now and then is stark.

A particularly good example is clothing (and textiles generally) - if I were to compare my wardrobe with that of my father's (and indeed those of my grandfathers') the difference in the sheer number and variety of garments is quite remarkable.

Globalized "free trade" agreements and the required removal of tariffs on textiles etc meant with the higher cost of local manufacturing, production relocated to cheaper labour nations which resulted in much cheaper (if inferior) imported products which helped fuel material consumption. Post covid the prices of many such imports have largely risen much faster than incomes which I imagine is reducing material consumption and noticeably increasing reuse/recycling.

_{* Apparently this would have referred to their marital bed.}

Oracle Java police start knocking on Fortune 200's doors for first time

"buying a Java app from a third party supplier"

A lot of applications ship with a java run time even when they aren't primarily java apps.

Matlab has a copy of the java run time under its install tree but as we found out with the Log4j vulnerability it was rather old.

Flexnetls had a jre but was mostly a java app I think but the run time was also rather old.

I am fairly sure both these could be redirected to an openjdk install as I don't think they used any Oracle(Sun) proprietary java classes.

I guess if you were facing a visitation from Larry's toe cutters it might be a good idea to check all your installed applications for java contamination.

If I were purchasing software that included java components I would mandate a vendor guarantee of absolutely zero Oracle content and their indemnifying me against their getting that wrong. I guess I would likely end up with no java containing software... the downside of which is? ;)

Defiant Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial Recall – tho as an opt-in

Doesn't sound all that clever...

It takes a snapshot of whatever is on the user's screen every few seconds. These images are stored on-device and analyzed locally by an AI model, using OCR to extract text from the screen, to make past work searchable and more accessible.

I would have thought hooking the Windows text rendering routines would be more reliable than trying OCR whatever was on the screen. If you were using a Blackletter (Gothic) typeface the AI/OCR might get confused. ;) Not to say traditional Chinese glyphs could be a challenge.

In the days of yore stretched pig's bladder is said to have been used for windows and I imagine slightly more transparent than dealing with MS Windows but otherwise have much in common.

Fortunately I only do windows with 30% ethanol/70% water and a drop of detergent. ;)

There really is a ruthless competition between our IT megcorps to determine which is the genuine Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Fragile Agile development model is a symptom, not a source, of project failure

"Manifestos are manifestly dangerous."

Which is potentially a manifesto itself. ;)

"Changing the fig leaf can't change what lies beneath"

Presumably the orchestra and conductor*?

Most projects have received more than enough intimate attention from that particular conductor!

(Possibly the right tool for the job whatever that might be [which is often the core of the problem.])

_{* recalled from an episode of Home James! ITV 1987-90}

Seething CEO shoulder surfed techie after mistaken takedown of production server

License tied to host name?

I thought the classic flex lmgrd licenses tied to the hostid (normally one of the host's ethernet interface's MAC address) was pretty feeble (and easily subverted.)

I assume Emily's software used gethostname(3)/uname(3) etc to retrieve the host name rather than retrieving the host's IP address(es) and doing a reverse (IN PTR) lookup(s) for the (FQ) host name. Either way fairly easy to subvert just for the applications benefit. :)

DEC's lmf and hardware dongles were the only two that I declare no contest.

Always had (more than) enough licenses but trying to move/modify the licenses, typically when a motherboard or ethernet interface has been replaced, makes having teeth pulled seem pleasurable.

The main problem is that application developers know SFA™ about the licensing code which was normally purchased (licensed) as a secret sauce library that was added to the application code without further thought or understanding.

The license file generation application from the secret sauce package is given to support with even less understanding so that new licenses or renewals are mostly fine but anything else gets duck shoved back on to the developers who likely being a new crop have even less idea again.

The application's vendor usually being on another continent (arguably another planet in many instances) it is rather difficult to turf them out the window so the thwarted BOFH is compelled to exercise his or her powers of deviousness to keep critical applications running.

(Having an intimate knowledge of the toolchain, truss/strace and adb are very devious enabling. :)

Uber ex-CSO Joe Sullivan: We need security leaders running to work, not giving up

CXXX people?

Normally I would expect uniform substitution for the Xs so perhaps CXYZ or CHAG?

I gather the gist of this chap's offence was that he attempted to conceal the breach rather than any incompetence on his or his minion's part.

So I guess as a C-suite creature you can still be abysmally incompetent and fail miserably without the risk of prosecution as long as you are candid about your phenomenal shortcomings.

Boris Johnson the past master of the spectacular fuck up followed by the sheepish smirk is the perfect role model.

Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit

Pretty much a total erosion of ...

of trust, mutuality and good will.

I have to wonder how many of the remaining RTO victims, on getting up in the very early hours of the morning to begin their long commute to the dread office, are thinking "what novel what can I screw the bosses today?"

Not difficult, believe me - simply "accidentally" flipping a single bit in the wrong place can have at some point devastating consequences.

Even if the aggregate effect were to torpedo their employer's business its hardly likely to shorten an employee's expected term of employment based on the results of this survey.

UK tribunal greenlights $17.4B advertising monopoly case against Google

I finally had to ask...

why do the Vultures refer to Google as the Chocolate Factory?

I imagined it was a reference to Roald Dahl's Willy Wonka enterprise but with a o->a vowel mutation. :)

A quick search: Mountain View Chocolate Factory confirms the connection with Dahl's creation but refers back to the first recorded use to El Rego and later by Vulture Ted Dziuba.

Apparently Oompah Loompahs were stereotypical Wonkas and with mutation, Google employees....

Having once seen inside one of big G's Chocolaterie the whole shop seemed totally doolally.

Our vulture survived Computex – now he just needs to tell us the highs and lows

"if it's not on YouTube it's not real"

I would have thought the opposite: "if it's on YouTube it's not real "

Now even more the case with LLM deep fakes I would have thought.

《some people don't have the leisure to watch a 5 minutes video》

More of the dysfunctional illiterati don't have anywhere near a 5 minute attention span.

On odd occasions when I needed to know how to do something, I tried consulting (more like turd trawling) the tube, but the quantity of useless and often just plain wrong nonsense I had to wade through often finishing without a result... YouTube - more like U-bend as in lootube.

And yes, an A4 precis of the show's high- and low-lights would be nice.

California upgrade company aims militarized 'Tactical' Cybertruck at police forces

Re: Bwahaha. Please do!

《That's a new word for me: wankpanzer》

Me too!

Google translate gives the English as "roll tank" ? Curious or perhaps curious how the German mind works.

Wankerpanzer (half) translates as expected. (No not "Landbruiser.")

Wichser, Wichs, wichsen* are apparently the German vernacular equivalent.

So perhaps Wichspanzer or Wichswagon. :)

Anyway I learnt that Panzer also (originally) means body armour like chain mail.

_{* politely: to polish or to black (as in shoes or stoves I imagine.)}

Wi-Fi can watch your heart beating, Taiwan’s datacenter power outfit Delta finds

Surveillance?

Using the wifi's channel state to detect heart rate at 85% probably means a much higher rate of just detecting a heart beat or multiple heart beats ie the presence of one or more (human) life forms.

I am guessing the latest and greatest wifi uses some form of beam steering which could be subverted to scan, lidar or cat scan style, the environment. I would also guess these signals are also generated using (inverse) discrete fast fourier transforms which could also be subverted to produce all sorts of odd shaped pulses to probe the environment at higher resolution.

Tin foil hat time. ;)

Just realized it could be a right bugger if you had two hearts and went round thwarting the universe's evil intentioned.

Tetris Company celebrates classic game's 40th birthday

Re: Legend?

《> "The reason Tetris rows disappear? Legend has it it's due to the limited memory in the Electronika 60, which necessitated clearing the screen."

Admittedly it's been a while, but only the completed rows disappear, right? Did the Electronika 60 have a monitor with infinite height? It seems like that would have been the more obvious limiting factor.》

According the Electronika 60 wiki entry it had an address space (no separate D/I space) of 32K words (64Kb) but memory was (typically?) 4K words (8K bytes.) There was no on board video (so no memory mapped video) so presumably a serial (rs232) terminal was required. Given terminal capabilities varied massively (from minimal to ansii) you would need to store the current state of the display in ram which could run to 25×80 bytes (~2Kb) but better encodings would use fewer bytes but 8Kb less the OS/CCP/monitor still wouldn't leave a lot of memory to play with.

Actually Tetris or a simplified version is still a decent programming exercise today.

Some investors bet against Nvidia, expecting AI bubble to burst

"limited time in the sunlit uplands"

"Many fall down, and few return to the sunlit lands"* ;)

Based on recent history this particular tulip craze should have three to five years left in it.

I suspect any derivatives that might be used to short NVidia stock would be in a much shorter time frame although the interplay of the variety of derivatives can verge on the insanely complex so you might require a LLM or a quantum computer to work it all out. :)

_{* The Silver Chair C S Lewis}

Astroboffins order most advanced spectrograph ever to sniff out alien life

ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ETL)

I assume should read: ESO's Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) - I don't think even the French can get ETL out of that.

Total confused by a product label in French that claimed it was made in the EU but the weight was in oz. (not grams.)

Until the penny centime dropped that Etats-Unis was intended.

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

Great Caesar's ghost - a cheery editor!

I don't recall the comic book Perry White as being particularly grumpy but cheery definitely not.

Just imagining what an editor has to endure - from barely literate copy from writers who for the most part could be beneficially replaced by chatgpt, to manglement and C-suite crap from above - they should be extended honorary life membership to the worshipful guild of defenestrators.

OpenAI to buy electricity from CEO Sam Altman's nuclear fusion side hustle

Re: Sam Altman's next acquisition

A white cat.

Very good.

Must be mandatory as even Danger Mouse's adversary, the toad Baron Silas Greenback, had Nero.

Re: So in summary

Not really a company invests money it doesn't have to build an imaginary supercomputer to do unspecified AI stuff using power from an imaginary reactor that's supposed to be built by a company that nobody believes can build it.

A level of virtualisation that even VMware haven't achieved. :)

I guess everyone is hoping a quantum vacuum fluctuation wanders long dragging one of these imaginary steps into reality thereby bootstrapping the whole sorry fiction.

Seems more like magical thinking which we should have abandoned after Newton's time. The Unseen University's wizards are far more practical than this circus and I am omitting High Energy Magic's Ponder Stibbens.

Meta algorithms push Black people more toward expensive universities, study finds

Re: It's just marketing ...

There's an anecdote about the person who walks into a shop and asks what the price on some item is. The shopkeeper's response, "How much money do you have?"

The late Albert Arkwright, the epitome of the shopkeeper, could gauge the contents of your purse or wallet within seconds, to the last happenny and have a sales strategy that would relieve you of that exact sum while offloading his old or expired stock.

Meta and fellow travellers don't even come close to his pecuniary CAT scan and targeted marketing. ;)

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

The Birds (Aristophanes)

Even for a gaga nation this is cloud cuckoo land material.

How about ketamine lad sods off for five years and if Tesla's position improves he gets nowt and if it goes belly up ... well he still gets zilch. If Tesla survives but has gone backwards he can have whatever he manages to extract.

The sad and sorry truth is he will probably get these billions.

HP CEO: Printed pages are down 20% since pandemic

Hybrid Work responsible?

A long bow being drawn here I think.

Most hybrid workplaces have a 2-3 days in the office (40-60%) but I imagine most of the pages that were printed pre COVID/WFH by now hybrid workers were annotated and taken into meetings. I imagine the number of these meetings hasn't changed much - just squeezed into the 2 or 3 days.

Possibly some of the meetings are video-conf. and the participants now have the documents that they would have printed now displayed on their large monitor(s.)

Perhaps meeting participants have, since 2018, acquired large tablets or A4 e-paper devices which now serve the same purpose as paper.

Larger and higher resolution displays also may reduce printing - I find I print less (problematic) code now with a monitor that can concurrently display a number of A4 pages. Hard to believe it wasn't too long ago that 80x25 was it. ;)

Most likely it's just the world justifiably telling HP go play with itself.

Re: Old HP

"In 2000 years time, when humanity has departed the planet" but I doubt "for a new home" unless it's called oblivion.

Microsoft shows venerable and vulnerable NTLM security protocol the door

Kerberos V ain't so young neither

Kerberos V was launched in 1993 apparently the same year as NTLM. Kerberos 4 dates from the '80s and Needham-Schroeder the late '70s.

So both NTLM and Kerberos V are now in their third decade. Perhaps time for something newer? (Although not designed by the MS cryptomavens. Please!)

Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment

The Vulture probably shouldn't have crossed the Pond.

The nonsense that is US politics makes one wonder whether el Reg. would have been wiser to have remained .co.uk. :)

UK politicians are just as much rubbish as the US ones but few in the UK take any of them and their ratbag ideas seriously - least of all the scoundrels themselves.

The UK voter is unlikely to bring up Corbin or Blair being as it were cold porridge but the Septics are pointlessly dredging up equally ancient history. Next up the failings of tricky Dickey, FDR and Andrew Jackson will be thrown into the miasmal phantasmagoria of US politics.

Recently when Dan Quayle came up in conversation (unsurprisingly about potatoes), I realised that for eight years he was one heartbeat from being President - "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy." Unfortunately none now are... and the heartbeats less certain. ;)

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

Ghastly loops

Edward's corvid client^§ only attached both ends of a single HDMI cable to two monitors, it's the truly gifted who manage a similar trick with two ports of a dumb switch* with a single patch lead. (* basically an ethernet bridge)

"My internet stopped working." - (So has everyone else's. ;)

Super glue or epoxy is a real temptation here. ;)

Enterprise switches can handle (limit) the traffic from these sabotaged switches but weren't always configured to do so or some possibly lacked the capability.

To be fair users are often blind sided by things that they cannot be expected to know or understand.

Notebook docking stations with network interfaces accessed from the notebook via USB or thunderbolt normally have an ethernet (Mac) address from the docking station. A user borrowing another dock or temporarily using another desk is then confused by their notebook having a different IP address or on a different network. DELL docks attached to DELL notebooks apparently configure the dock with the notebook's unique "mac" address (unlike many of their owners ultrathins aren't thick enough for a RJ45 socket and therefore lack ethernet hardware.)

The wifi mac address could also be assigned as this is/was allowed by the early RFCs. Originally Sun machines would assign the mac address stored in the nvram chip to each of its interfaces. Try telling that to a 20-something networking "expert." ;) "More things in heaven and earth, Horatio...."

^§ _{crows and ravens are normally a lot brighter than the average PC user.}

Study finds 268% higher failure rates for Agile software projects

Springdale Linux

I imagine some of those tagged as CentOS 7 are used for scientific computing. Fairly common for organisations that have some sort of RH subscription to run HPC cluster with CentOS with critical services running on RHEL hosts. Mostly saves expense.

The Springdale scientific software repos are often layered on top of the *EL7 hosts. Princeton was rebuilding its own distro but appears to have stopped at 8.8 and 9.2 around May 2023.

A question I would have is whether an organisation that has a RH subscription and therefore legitimate access to the RH sources is prevented from producing its own rebuild for internal use?

I am guessing deep within the licensing that you can but your rebuild would be audited as a chargeable RHEL install. A bit like Oracle and Java - Big Blue was up to these shenanigans long before Big Red was as twinkle...

I run AL8.10 on my own kit having upgraded from RHEL7 (dev subscription) and CentOS7 - no real dramas apart from the disk array's SAS HBA being blacklisted by RH mpt3sas kmod (AL now undeprecates this hardware.)

If Almalinux were to fold I wouldn't have too many problems or qualms moving to SuSE.

Interesting...

Reading the nearly 200 comments I am glad I avoided the software development side of the trade for the defenestration side. ;)

Agile is if you can get through the office door before being pitched out the accidentally open window. :)

Today I saw medical interpreters looking through their notes (minutes?) of the patient's examination etc. What surprised me was that those notes were in an A5 notebook with carbons. I assume the top copy goes in the patient's record.

I often wonder whether our use of IT blinds us to the actual effectiveness of the processes it replaced.

Whatever software development method(s) are actually being used in the real world the aggregate results are a pretty convincing statement they are all rather rubbish.

Re: Just maybe?

An ale for the reference Babbage's Difference Engine. ;)

With a government contract to build the Difference Engine 1 he started in 1823 and abandoned two decades later but finally

"In 1991, the London Science Museum built a complete and working specimen of Babbage's Difference Engine No.2"

Apparently they haven't managed to work out how to build his Analytical Engine as the specification is unclear on certain critical points.

_{The novel The Difference Engine (1990) was rather amusing when read it around then but now seems almost a parody of the 21st century.}

Can AI models trained on human speech help us understand dogs?

Pantalone award

《Essex to South Wales,》

Somehow don't think an Essex bitch would have too much trouble communicating the basics to a Cardiff dog. :)

I would have thought there were light years between language and mere vocalization.

From experience dogs can have quite a large recognition vocabulary of human speech and potentially understand very simple grammatical constructs of tense (now, later), number (other), prepositions (behind, under) and properties (hot, colours) but a very limited ability to communicate these.

Some birds like crows(raven in AU), magpies, parrot species are a rather clever lot (to the point of nuisance) and have a wide repertoire of sounds which I would imagine should make them a better target for this type of study.

We need an award like Ignobles for the most imbecilic or avaricious proposal using contempoarary AI

The Pantalone Awards

Tokyo takes on Tinder by developing its own dating app it hopes will arrest population decline

Fundamental problems

The marriage rates have been falling since the 1970s (and those that do marry do so later [late 20s.] )

On top of those factors birth rates have also been independently declining.

One reason claimed for the decline from the 1970s has been the status of women (generally) and married women (particularly) in a fossilized traditional japanese society. From the 1960s in the rest of the industrialized world they saw women making great advances in almost all areas of life and being presented with vast new opportunities while they were left behind. No wonder as one they said "fuck this" (well actually not.)

The declining birth rate among those that have tied the knot is as much the consequence of the extremely high cost of raising and educating a child as the general decline in the standard of living for those in the current child bearing cohort.

A simple app isn't going to solve these deeply embedded problems but might help single women to have confidence in the veracity and bona fides of the men using the app.

These are not problems restricted to Japan - South Korea is in an even worse situation - as almost every developed nation has been facing a declining birth rate and graying population. Australia is a young nation of immigrants yet its birth rate is little higher than Japan's. Only by maintaining fairly high levels of immigration has the australian population grown.

I can see some of the massive changes required but I can also see that until everyone born before 1970 has kept their appointment with their maker such changes are unlikely to ever fly.

Munter hitch?

《Only beautiful people need apply. Will there be another app for all the munters, both male and female? You could call it "Munternet" after a similarly titled adult sex services site.》

I hadn't encountered this particular use of munter. Munters is a global aircon enterprise (whose logo is interesting in this context.)

Instead of munternet I suggest munter hitch, which is a knot which I guess is not pretty but rather versatile and useful (a life lesson there), is a more direct reference to matrimony.

Scots english has a much nicer use of the word (neglecting a slight double entendre):

munter, n. A small biscuit with a raised rim which is often filled with jam like a tart before eating.

India's IT minister defeated in bid for lower house seat

Chandrasekhar limit?

The boundary of excessive political hubris when exceeded a political supernova/blackhole results.

In that part of the globe I would have thought it wise to treat your political adversaries with respect, or at least civility, as they might one day be your judges.

'Building AI co-workers going to be largest opportunity of tech in our lifetime'

And the world needs...

more lawyers?

Two AU legal academics have recently published a critique of the use of expert evidence in AU courts. They appear not to be too impressed by all the legal chaps involved reserving a particular lack of praise for the defending counsels' apparent inability to effectively cross examine expert witnesses or to critically examine their testimony.

I cannot imagine a coco unsel service added to mix could ever improve this.

Its been a fair while since most companies have actually been selling software (licenses.) Its invariably a subscription for the software or service. Cannot see anything new here.

Chinese car brands hit accelerator on road tests for level three autonomous driving tech

Dismal calculus?

1,425,213,791 + FSD L3 -> 1,425,213,79¹0

Even a particularly exceptional homicidal marque of vehicle is unlikely to make much of dent in 1.4_billion but, unless their OAPs are bit fleeter of foot when crossing the road than ours, these vehicles might reduce the median age of the PRC's graying demographics.

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

"technology that users flat out do not want!"

Probably explains why I am being bombarded with "opportunities" to reserve "my" AI PC by preordering some skimpy Appleish (in price and appearance) notebook. As if?

Even I were given one of these the first thing I would do would be to "upgrade" the poor thing by removing its unpleasant AI+Windows infestation.

I imagine the hardware would be pretty decent and with an honest OS would run like the clappers.

Command senior chief busted for secretly setting up Wi-Fi on US Navy combat ship

Radio silence?

I suspect it wouldn't matter what sort of transmitter if its being operated outside the knowledge and control of the vessel's command.

A wifi's AP beacon and general traffic would likely subvert any attempt for the craft to operate covertly.

If like AU recruitment into the forces is a real challenge the military are in an invidious position - discharging a serving member for a serious breach of discipline becomes an extremely unattractive option.

Retention is also a major challenge - skills and training acquired in the services are often highly sought after in civilian life.

Graveyards a favorite haunt for solar farms in Valencia

RIP (Requiem in Power)

Requiesat in potestate?

A observed graveyards, funerals etc are really for the living so perhaps a few of the kwh could be diverted to aircon these necropolitan condominiums. ;)

In this part of the globe the real estate occupied by the departed is often found in extremely prime locations in our major cities and I imagine our deveopers would jump at any pretext to evict the dead given, historically, the living haven't fared any better. (The dead wouldn't have a ghost of chance. :)

US standards agency reports back on just how good age verification software is

Re: Stop trying to "protect children"

_{i.e. from porn, which for some reason they try to pretend minors never had access to before the internet and that any enforcement measures could actually stop minors from viewing it. "Adults only" should only ever be a content warning to push away viewers who don't want to see it.}

I was thinking more of a task based age verification scheme. eg on Porntube the verification page could display a tasteful picture requiring the browser to accurately label the (intimate) anatomical parts shown. :)

I suspect there are logical or linguistic tasks that would challenge an under 14 yo male (or 12 yo female) but between 18 yo and those ages I think its nigh impossible. Hypothetical moral or ethical questions posed to limit access to social media accounts would exclude those media enterprises' owners let alone most of their subscribers (of any age.)

Australia is going through this now and the idea of foreign internet sites capturing images etc for age verification leaves a lot of people cold. Not surprising after the theft of so much private data from AU organisation in the last year or so.

I can vaguely see that trusted third party age attestation might work.

You roll up to Porntube and the verification page requires you to create an identity which then generates a token encoding your identity, the domain, age requirements etc needing attestation, date/time etc. eg ([e-mail], porntube.su, >=18, 20240604)

You then take this token to verify-age.gov.au site which on your authenticating has your (gov.au) authoritative dob and can verify porntube token age requirement, add its domain of authority, date/time, expiry etc and sign it.

This signed token can then be presented to porntube and verified to allow access now and in future until the attestation's expiry.

This should have a modicum of privacy but the verify-age.gov.au site would be able to log your more prurient browsing interests and potentially identify you from subpoenaed porntube logs. :)

The obvious weakness is the access token could be copied and (unwisely) passed around.

Russia takes gold for disinformation as Olympics approach

Re: At least Russia is finally putting their efforts into something good for once

_{They're incredibly profitable for the IOC - and a nightmare for everybody else, particularly the residents of whatever city is bamboozled into hosting the mess. Billions are spent on stadiums that immediately turn into blight until they're finally torn down. The host city and country lose huge amounts of money, cities are frequently bankrupted. Local businesses are shut down because they're not the giant multinational sponsors.}

Something for Brisbane to look forward to. :)

The rustic yokel banana benders outside that city were opposed from the start which only goes to show...

I thought Taco Bell was purely a US thing but DDG tells me there are 14 in Queensland alone.

Unfortunately the name reminds me of the nasty PNG clostridial disease pigbel.

Twitch ditches Safety Advisory Council, relaunches with vetted 'ambassadors'

Twitch... more like shudder

"Twitch" wasn't on my radar until this article - I would have assumed it was a birdwatching (twitcher) site not a tiktok clone.

With every passing day I have more and more sympathy for Victor Meldrew "I don't believe it!!"

verso la fine del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per nella terra oscura,

ché la diritta via era smarrita.

Google finally addresses those bizarre AI search results

"[Reid] denied AI Overviews actually recommended smoking while pregnant, leaving dogs in cars, or jumping off bridges to cure depression,"

Apart from MRDA these suggestions have a logical, if raving bonkers, basis. Smoking does reduce fetal weight (I believe), so a smaller watermelon at term. Leaving dogs in a car make more logical sense than leaving them unrestrained (outside the car.) Jumping off a bridge I am confident you would perk up before hitting the ground or water (not that anyone could say differently.)

Stark raving bonkers.

The common element missing here is a human or moral element not to mention a skerrick of common sense. They are missing from enough humans I am surprised that anyone expects these to be present in a mere artefact.

Re: "limiting its reliance on info written by everyday users"

think of ouroboros

Snake eating tail. Her more under than over - head inserted into caudal oriface.