Posts by Elongated Muskrat

Starlink-branded hardware reportedly found amid wreckage of downed Russian drone

Re: What usage ?

Yeah, satellites are notoriously not real-time though, are they. Russia are reportedly using Chinese spy satellites, but satellites are typically in high orbits. (And Ukraine are being allowed to use images from European satellites).

With a satellite, if you want to have real-time surveillance, your options are pretty limited. Either you need to be in a geostationary orbit above your target, which means being in a high equatorial orbit, or you need to use fuel to remain above the target, which is both limited and expensive.

In reality, a satellite in an unpowered orbit (i.e. not pissing away valuable fuel that you have expended many times more fuel raising into orbit) passes over a target in a sun-synchronous orbit once a day. This also means that the pictures it takes are always taken at the same time of day, directly from above, with shadows at the same angle. This is clearly less useful than taking real-time pictures from a drone passing over a target, especially if you are trying to work out movements of troops and vehicles, which are almost certainly under cover a lot of the time. Spy satellites, on the other hand, are much more useful for pinpointing static targets, such as massive ammunition dumps, so that they can be made to make a loud noise and deprive your dear leader of three months' worth of ammunition.

Re: What usage ?

Inside "a missile" or inside a drone. Drones aren't just bombs, and the article itself pretty much spells out that this would have been used for real-time surveillance. Given that the Ukrainian forces have reportedly taken out several of Russia's very expensive surveillance aircraft, and knowing where your enemy is and what they are up to is kinda important in warfare, it doesn't take too much brain power to work out what it was being used for.

Probably slightly more brainpower than the average pro-Putin keyboard warrior, though.

BOFH: AI consultant rapidly transitioned to new role as automotive surface consultant

Re: ... almost there....

Indeed, "Solanum lycopersicum, tomato," as they say...

As IBM pushes for more automation, its AI simply not up to the job of replacing staff

I read it as "the firmware was no longer supported 4 years ago", not "the firmware is 4 years old". Probably more like 14 years old, not 4.

Re: So if we ask chatGPT....

He paid $44Bn for it, didn't he? Apparently it has lost 5.75% of it's "market cap" in the last 12 months, but as for its value? I think it has been estimated at far less than that.

Unions 2, Apple 0: Cupertino caves after fresh strike threat

Re: "We know Apple is capable of providing us with the pay and benefits we deserve"

There are two types of "shareholder", though. Yes, there are people investing their pension fund into a "portfolio". Most of these people don't honestly expect the workers in those organisations that are invested in by those funds to have terrible working conditions, while they squeeze every penny of profit out of them.

Then there are "private equity investors". The kind of very rich people who use a leveraged buyout to take over a company that is ticking along making an honest profit and paying its staff a reasonable wage, and then asset-strip the place, making everyone redundant, for the sake of a short-term profit.

The problem is that capitalism doesn't have any intrinsic set of ethics, and thus places value on the acquisition of profit over the wellbeing of humans. This is the very reason unions exist, and, historically, why unions have won workers basic rights, such as weekends, holidays, sick and maternity pay, minimum wages (although these are still way too "minimum" in most places), basic health and safety (the right not to be killed by your employer for profit), and so on. It's symptomatic of the push from private capital to reduce regulations (which are there for the protection of people from corporate abuse), that we now have increasing unionisation. We shouldn't need it. In an ideal world, employers would already have a concept of basic decency. It turns out that there are people out there without such a concept in their minds, and they're ready to exploit people for their own gain. Whodathunkit?

Elon's latest X-periment: Blocked users can still stalk your public tweets

Re: moron alert

"I don't know anything about this thing, and here's what I reckon it is," is both a remarkably ignorant, and also arrogant position to take.

I know plenty of people who still use Twitter (none of them call it X). There are still communities there that are separate from the toxic cesspit that is the whole, but they are being eroded. I acknowledge that I am missing out on some stuff by no longer having an account, but quite frankly, I'd had enough of Elmo's shit, and I decided that, on balance, I'd rather not be there.

Re: Meh

"Free speech for me, not for you".

Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?

Re: Auto-Replace Shennanigans

The one I heard about was someone who was writing their biology-related PhD thesis, and some wag changed every instance of "organism" to "orgasm".

The even more evil programmer's equivalent is to randomly replace semicolons (';', Unicode character 003B) with the Greek question mark (';', Unicode character 037E).

Elon Musk's assassination 'joke' bombs, internet calls for his deportation

Hey down-voter(s), feel free to bash that thumbs-down to your heart's content, it won't change the facts.

Snopes article on Musk's degrees. Note that the one he claims as a physics degree (picture in the article, from court document filings), is both a BA, and does not specify the subject, as far as I can make out, because he didn't complete enough course credits to get the degree, and then "filled them in" later with credits from unrelated courses - i.e., it's actually a "general" degree.

His economics degree is a "BS", but then, that describes a lot of economic theory: BS.

I think he actually got a BA in Physics. As well known, all high-quality good physics degrees are arts degrees, and this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with rich people paying for qualifications.

Re: Deport him…

Maybe deport him to the UK, so he can be charged and stand trial for inciting the recent far-right riots (and attempting to incite civil war). He's at least as culpable as some of the utter fucking morons who have been jailed for their part in those, both in things he has posted directly, and in his total failure to moderate or restrict those who were calling directly for violence.

Echo Chambers in Action

"Well, one lesson I've learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn't mean it's going to be all that hilarious as a post on X"

Maybe, just maybe, it's because you've surrounded yourself with "yes men", after summarily firing anyone who doesn't immediately agree with everything you say?

It's far more likely that Musk's sycophants laugh at his "jokes" because they're sycophants, and not because the joke is funny.

Seriously, though, this is why billionaires are a huge danger to the rest of the human race. Their wealth separates them from reality so much, that they lose the normal feedback of human interaction, and start thinking and believing some very strange things. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but being billionaires, they also have the means to put their wacko ideas into action. I don't know what form Musk's eventual fall will take, but it won't be pretty to look at.

Win 11 refreshes delayed, say PC makers – and here's why

Re: Who are these users who want "AI"?

Ah yes, good point, I missed that particular subtle use of weasel words.

Re: Lovely Jubbly

I'd suggest replacing those monitors with modern ones, on the grounds that the electricity savings over the next year will pay for them (and you can get reasonable 4k ones that have about the same footprint).

I'm willing to bet those 12 year-old monitors get nice and warm after a day of use...

If you have something that would benefit from a locally-run LLM, you can accomplish it.

Again, what we are talking about here is that elusive use-case. Because, who actually has a use for it? Who has "something that would benefit from a locally-run LLM" that is actually useful, and not a toy or proof-of-concept?

Re: Meet me, Mr Dell

Conversely, I have met nobody who has said, "We're planning a refresh and want an AI-enabled PC."

I've also not heard anyone say, "We're planning a refresh, but we don't want an oversized marrow pushed up our rear ends." It's almost as if the thing they haven't mentioned doesn't figure at all on their list of things to worry about. Until it's too late, of course.

Who are these users who want "AI"?

Michael Dell said if a new PC that lands on a user's desk which doesn't have an AI feature, they're "going to really wonder what happened."

"Everybody's going to want that. Every piece of software that you're going to use is going to have an AI assistant. You're already starting to see this. And most of those AI cycles are going to run locally on the PC."

I think users are more likely to wonder what an "AI PC" actually is, and whether it provides any features that are actually useful, and worth paying for. Those who have invested heavily in the current hype bubble around LLMs and generative "AI" have yet to find a "killer app" for it. Humans are quite capable of generating superficially convincing bullshit without inventing machines to do it for them.

About that Windows Installer 'make me admin' security hole. Here's how it's exploited

Re: Cyber security industry

Imagine what would happen if MS had not existed. Someone else's OS would have become the de facto OS used by businesses. The same marketing and sales people would have taken over, and added ill thought-out "features" to that instead. Meanwhile, black-hats, not having Windows as the main target to focus on, would have gone round finding software flaws in whatever the mainstream OS that took its place would be. If you think Microsoft's offerings are unusual in the number of programming flaws that make it to production, I have news for you about the nature of software development. In some ways, MS development processes are quite well thought-out, so the chances are that what we'd have instead would be a lot less disciplined, and hence a lot worse.

Having said all that, I have no particular love for MS, but blaming them for the existence of software flaws is going a bit too far. Windows is full of badly-written bloatware, yes, but I raise you SYSTEMD.

Re: Launching programs with elevated privileges after installation

It seems to be that the installer launches the browser as an elevated process, and that the browser then uses the Windows standard file dialog (in the same user context), which itself has a flaw which allows the user to run an arbitrary command through the address bar.

It's a bit unfair to single out Firefox in this instance, since it is doing exactly what it has been asked to do (open a web page in a specific user context) and then has allowed the user to do something else sensible (use the standard Windows dialog to get a file to open when the user asks to open a file).

There are two pretty obvious flaws here:

1) The installer (running as an admin user) uses that user context to open the browser, and not the user context of the user that started the installer (presumably before being asked for admin credentials). That's a flaw in the installer, or the installer tooling that allows this; essentially using its elevated credentials to fire off an arbitrary external process. On this note, I wonder what would happen if the user were to set any other arbitrary program as the system's default browser? Would that get launched with admin credentials?

2) The system file open dialog allows the user to do things other than just select a file. That's an example of unwanted "feature creep". In this case, it's allowing the user to launch an arbitrary third process (cmd.com). It also allows other things like directory creation, that are not strictly file-opening related.

Top EU court crushes Google appeal against $2.65B Shopping antitrust ruling

Don't forget it only seems to ever return results from a handful of large aggregating retailers (Amazon, Etsy, eBay, that sort of thing), and seems to completely exclude real small businesses where the products you are after originate. It's like, on a planet of 8 billion or so people, there are only five shops. Of course, that's exactly the world that tech bros want us to live in.

I think he actually needs to go back to school.

Apple owes billions in back taxes over Ireland state aid rule break

So what does the fungibility of money have to do with apple having to pay out the money that was in escrow? That's going to go from their books to those of the Irish treasury, they won't be getting it back. it's unlikely they'd see a tax write-off in the US, as those earnings that they didn't pay tax on weren't in the US to start with, and they wouldn't have had to pay taxes on any of it until they tried to "onshore" it back to the US. They are taxes owed by an EU subsidiary located outside of the US, specifically for tax reasons.

So, yes, money is fungible in the sense that one dollar bill is (nominally) worth the same as any other, but the unpaid taxes aren't fungible, as in they pay them in Ireland, but in no way get the same amount of money back. Again, you've either misunderstood the concept of fungibility, or woefully misapplied it.

Furthermore, the idea that they'd get the money back somehow, from the Irish government fails to understand the reasons why this all started: illegal state aid. If someone in the Irish government decided to now give the same kickback to Apple, it would still amount to illegal state aid, as there are laws in most places that prohibit the payment of public funds to private entities for favours gained. That sort of corruption would be noticed doubly so, due to the fact that there has been this long, drawn-out case with a final decision in the EU's highest court all about it. Your original post remains complete fantasist nonsense.

its decisions permit no admission of dissent

So... just like any top-level court then? Such as the Supreme Court in the US, a politically appointed court of a tiny number of judges, which appears to get stuffed with judges who share the political views of whoever is in power when a previous judge dies, and who get to sit on that court for the rest of their natural lives, no matter how senile? That paragon of justice? That court that can rule on constitutional matters (which the ECJ cannot), and which recently horrifically took away women's established reproductive rights in the US?

Yeah, I think I'd prefer to go with one that has representatives of all member nations, and who serve terms of six years, and require re-election beyond that, thanks.

From Wikipedia:

The Court of Justice consists of 27 Judges who are assisted by 11 Advocates-General. The Judges and Advocates-General are appointed by common accord of the governments of the member states and hold office for a renewable term of six years. The treaties require that they are chosen from legal experts whose independence is "beyond doubt" and who possess the qualifications required for appointment to the highest judicial offices in their respective countries or who are of recognised competence. In practice, each member state nominates a judge whose nomination is then ratified by all other member states.

So, yeah, about as fairly an appointed court as sensible people could come up with. It's amazing, though, what sort of picture you can paint by cherry-picking specific information and deliberately omitting the bigger picture.

Your axe must now be pretty sharp after all that grinding you obvious have to do.

Re: European Colonization

Yes, very WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant).

It's also worth remembering that the "founding fathers" who were "fleeing religious persecution" like to omit the bit where it was them doing the persecuting, and that's why they had to flee. This also explains the irrationally high level of religiosity in the US, when religious belief is on the decline in most other democratic nations.

Re: European Colonization

It's almost like it's their full-time job to maintain a presence on these forums or something. How odd...

Well, yes and no. There was an awful lot of disinformation about what those regulations actually are. For instance the one about bananas, which the europhobes like to spew a different version of each time. Was it that we can't have bendy bananas any more, or straight ones? I can't remember. The actual underlying regulation there, is a boring bit about the standardisation of labelling, so that everyone agrees on what "class A" produce is, and the example given being that an excessively curved banana, which would be an indication of sub-standard produce, would have to be labelled as "class B" instead. Its hardly jack-booted-thugs-coming-for-you-at-dawn level stuff.

It seems some people just don't like to have standards, agreed by everyone, or that they don't like the fact that, once decided and agreed upon, they might be expected to uphold them along with everyone else. It all stems from some xenophobic idea that British people are somehow superior and know better than "Johnny Foreigner", and some paranoid ideation about how there must be a secret cabal "in Brussels" trying to tell them what time to go to bed. All quite pathetic, really, but a lot of otherwise sensible people fell for this sort of rhetoric.

Re: European Colonization

I'm pretty sure both the Roman and Greek empires extended well outside of Europe. Rome conquered large parts of North Africa, Including Egypt, and Greek interests at one point covered large parts of what is modern Turkey, and their influence went right up into the Balkans. Hint: the Cyrillic writing system used in Russia was brought there by Saint Cyril, who was a Greek.

Anyway, the idea that the notion of slavery was somehow invented in Europe is laughable. The industrialised slave trade, maybe, but then I think those in the US might have a touch of culpability there, especially in continuing it after others had given it up as a bad idea (to employ understatement, before someone goes off on one telling me it was more than just a bad idea). There is evidence for slavery in prehistory pretty much everywhere, including the Americas prior to European colonisation, and pretty much all of Asia, and it's very telling of a US-centric mindset that human history started with the creation of the US.

Re: European Colonization

To be fair they have consistently used the same user id for some years and not hidden behind AC.

We've absolutely no way of knowing how many of their posts have been posted anonymously. I post some things AC myself, if I decide they reveal too much about my real-life identity (I have no desire to be doxxed by some incel in a basement), or revel details of who I work for and where I work.

We also have no idea how many accounts they have. I suspect at least one of them has a second account used for up-voting their own posts, and down-voting dissenters, as those votes always seem to come in pairs.

As for the consistency of user IDs, I changed my handle a few years back; my posting history goes back to 2008, which is about the same amount of time one of these accounts has been active, but you'll only see my posts from the last time I changed it. I'm not sure why El Reg does this, but I'm assuming it's to protect people's identities, if one of their previous handles was actually their real name.

Re: European Colonization

I did check to see which two you've picked up on. Yup, think you've nailed which are the two main RWNJ troll accounts.

Since money is fungible

[Obligatory quote]

"You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means"

Did you read the story? It's in escrow, which means it already has been, but not yet released.

Re: WTF is "Tax Justice"?

Show me on the doll where the tax man touched you.

Mr "Basic" here doesn't realise that the EU is bigger than the US, in terms of population. (...and rights, and living standards, etc. etc.)

To be fair, if they stopped selling Apple products in the EU, I think the overwhelming response there would be, "meh", and the overwhelming response from traders, to the plummeting stock price on the NASDAQ would be "AAAAAAARGH!"

Apple are unlikely to relocate their EU headquarters and all their staff to another EU country offering more favourable tax terms, unless it's really in their benefit to do so, and the costs of doing so would be huge, especially since I'm sure Irish employment law is much fairer to employees than US "at will" employment law, so there would be massive severance and relocation pay costs.

Bitcoin: +450% in the last 5 years (you can literally just google "bitcoin price" and see the chart for yourself).

I wouldn't advocate "investing" in that, either.

WHO-backed meta-study finds no evidence that cellphone radiation causes brain cancer

Re: The car and the steak....

I'm all for buying less, more expensive, meat from a local butcher, which is produced locally. Bear in mind, as well, that that supermarket meat is pumped full of brine, which becomes fairly apparent when you try to cook it, and it ends up going for a swim in the pan, so in terms of grams of protein per pound, it probably isn't even cheaper.

Re: The car and the steak....

I'd just point out that air quality regulations have meant that, over the last 40 years or so, pollution from car exhaust had decreased, especially from tetraethyl lead. What I'd like to see is whether there is any correlation between the generations that breathed in the most of this compound in car exhausts (baby boomers and early gen-X), and general mental degradation, tendency to uncritically accept untested pseudoscience, and other effects that could be put down to toxic heavy metal inhalation.

Obviously, there is lung damage from both particulate inhalation, and from oxides of nitrogen, and these are still generally much higher in populated places than they could be, but certainly in countries with decent air quality regulations, things are getting better, or staying the same, and not getting worse. I'm not sure the same can be said for China, India, or the US.

Re: Sloppy

On what basis was that conclusion made?

There's this little thing called the corpus of scientific knowledge. Physics, in particular, being closer to pure maths than other "hard" sciences such as chemistry or biology, allows people to be much more definitive in answers to questions such as "how does electromagnetic radiation interact with matter", "how much energy is in a photon of a known wavelength", and "how much of that energy is then imparted into matter it interacts with, and what would be its effect". In general, the boil-down of that is, that a tiny amount of energy imparted into biological tissues to cause an immeasurably small heating effect has no observable effects on health. You're actually many orders of magnitude more likely to end up with aluminium poisoning from your tin-foil helmet, especially if you sit there licking it.

Re: was there ever an actual physical reason

I'd suggest doing some further reading on how photosynthesis works, specifically how the chromophore in chlorophyll manages to essentially capture, store, and "add together" photons to raise the energy level enough to do what it does. It's a fairly complex molecule, and it evolved that way because it is the most efficient way for directionless evolution to provide something that does that job. There's no way an analogue would evolve by chance in organisms that don't have chlorophyll (the evolutionary path of plants and animals diverged a few billion years ago) purely in order to capture, amplify, and then waste the energy from RF photons.

Sure, you could engineer something that does that, but the thing about evolution is that it tends to discard traits that have no functional use over a relatively short number of generations, and traits that could only be harmful, with no benefit, even quicker. Biosynthesis of any bio-molecule has a cost in both energy and materials (chlorophyll has a magnesium atom in it, which necessitates a source of that element in a plant's growth medium), and even if you bio-engineered such a trait into an organism, if it wasn't necessary for survival, and didn't convey some advantage, random mutations would remove it in a few generations, conveying a survival advantage to those offspring that didn't conserve it. That's called natural selection.

Which all goes to show that new Scientist has really gone down the pan since it was acquired by DMG.

Re: Dr WHO

Meanwhile, my wife's beloved uncle died in hospital, gasping for breath, due to selfish cunts who cried, "I'm alright Jack".

Re: Dr WHO

I'm trying to work out which kind of idiot you are; the type that sees conspiracies theories everywhere with international bodies, or the type that cries "woke" at the casting in popular TV dramas.

Either way, your flex is not the flex you think it is.

Elon Musk’s Starlink won't block Elon Musk’s X in Brazil, as required by court order

For some strange reason, I'm more inclined to trust what international observers have to say, rather than some RWNJ with skin in the game. Funny that.

If I were in your boots, which it appears are in the US, firmly in the Donald Trump cess-pool, I'd be far more concerned about your own candidates consistent efforts to undermine and nullify a free and fair election in your own country, even under a crooked "collegiate" electoral system that places an over-representative bias on votes in "swing states" rather than using the actual popular vote for it (under which Trump would never have won any elections at all). It's almost as if the far right are willing to turn a blind eye to vote rigging when it works in their favour, but are very keen to seek it even when there is no evidence of its existence, when they lose legitimately.

Now, having said that, onto the most important part of this reply:

Kindly fuck off. We sadly have no way of blocking forum trolls from our feeds here, otherwise, I'd be sure that I couldn't see your drivel. Even Jeel has made comments here that I agree with (and found myself up-voting), but yours are pure ignorant bullshittery.

Re: Tantrum boy

Agreed; this was actually some of the best television made in the last few decades, despite being presented by Clarkson (but not because of him). He has alternated over time between being mildly amusing and absolutely loathsome, and I think one of the main issues with him is many people's inability to determine what is tongue-in-cheek, and what is serious. Sadly, it seems he is included in that group himself, and has started to drink ever more of his own Kool-Aid in recent years.

People who have publicly said that if they are re-elected, then people will "never have to vote again". Because that sounds nothing whatsoever like a dictatorship, right?

It's worth remembering, too, that a far-left (communist) dictatorship, and a far right (fascist) dictatorship are functionally indistinguishable; you get a small group at the helm living in luxury, and everyone else gets shat upon. My advice would be to strongly avoid electing either; ones formed by force or via a coup are harder to prevent, but luckily that coup attempt in the US failed.

Since you clearly don't know what communism is, here is a handy link to the Wikipedia article on Communist States. Note how it includes a handy map of which countries have at any point had a Communist government. Note also how this doesn't include any country in the Americas other than Cuba.

For reference, Brazil is an elected democracy, and in case you had forgotten, the previous incumbent was a far-right dickhead, like Trump. The people decided, in a fair and internationally observed election, that they wanted a left-of-centre government instead, and re-elected the previous incumbent, "Lula".

Re: Musk isn't alone

I'm not referring to the ground stations used for backhaul here (which would obviously get switched off right away), but the individual receivers used by the customers. To make an analogy, it's the difference between the hulking great 5G tower at the end of the street, and your mobile phone that connects to it, except with satellite internet, the "phone" bit talks to the nearest satellite, which in turn talks to the base station, which could be hundreds of miles away, and not at the end of your road.

There's probably some capacity for the satellites to "mesh network", so deactivating the ground stations would mean a longer ping and transmission back down to Earth in another country, but I'm sure that would have knock-on effects with both latency and bandwidth, especially given the size of Brazil.

Re: Tantrum boy

Top Gear, years ago, did a feature on an old Toyota pick-up, trying various ways to destroy it. I think they managed it in the end, but one of the memorable attempts was to park it in on a slipway in the Severn Estuary at low tide (an area with one of the highest tidal ranges in the world), allowing the tide to come in and go back out again and covering it in estuarine mud. The engine still started after that. I can't imagine what would happen to a "Cybertruck" under those conditions, but I'd put money on it not being driveable.

Also, there was the thing where the Cybertruck couldn't be imported into Israel, because it claims to be bulletproof, thus requiring a special import licence, but also doesn't meet the standards for that import licence, because it's not actually really bulletproof.

Re: Tantrum boy

I'd say it would make a pretty terrible crash barrier, since one of the principle design features of such would be to deform and absorb the energy of an impact, without bursting into an inextinguishable lithium fire.

Key aspects of Palantir's Federated Data Platform lack legal basis, lawyers tell NHS England

Re: "NHS England declined to comment"

Don't confuse the NHS with "NHS England", the QUANGO set up by the previous Tory government to funnel money out of the NHS into private hands.

Re: Is opt-out even legal?

I mean, even if we didn't all know that Peter Thiel is an absolute RWNJ who routinely spouts far-right talking points, the fact that they named the company Palantir tells us all we need to know about exactly how evil they are. What next, is he going to forge us all some nice gold rings in order to "keep an eye on us"?