Posts by SP2000

Fear of Foxconn reportedly driving possible Nissan, Honda and Mitsubishi merger

Re: Not just Foxconn

Now the New Zealand is anywhere near a significant market but about 7 years ago my wife and I were driving around the South Island on holidays (not in am EV) and we pulled into a random middle-of-nowhere town on a Saturday and decided to have a walk around as there was a street market in progress. Due to the markets parking was at a premium and we eventually found a spot in a small, council owned carpark a few blocks away. Maybe 30 spots all up. Unlike every other parking area we’d checked this was just a gravelled area - not even bitumen - and lo and behold it had half a dozen charging bays. The moral of the story is that the council hadn’t just put a few bays in the Main Street, or even just their main car parks, they’d extended the rollout to the third tier parking areas too. Amazing!

Not just Foxconn

There’s also the fact that the long term Nissan and Renault partnership has failed to deliver benefits to Nissan, leaving them high and dry. Meanwhile the emergence and strong growth of Chinese EV manufacturers like BYD and Li Auto have taken significant market share and none of these three Japanese brands have kept up. Nissan failed to follow up on Leaf and they all missed the demand for hybrid vehicles. Nissan owns 24% of Mitsubishi (largest shareholder) which would be why they too are in the mix for a three way merger with Honda.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

Boebert gets away with it again

Representative Lauren Boebert (R-CO) breathed a sigh of relief after her question as to whether non-human DNA is being combined with human DNA was answered to the negative. Yet again her status as a walking, talking human / cave troll has remained unchallenged. She lives to troll another day.

Skyscraper-high sewage plume erupts in Moscow

My god, how many prawns….

….died to make the nasty curry that caused that?

Woman stuck upside down under rock for hours after trying to retrieve dropped phone

Thank you Laguna RFS and other responders

I live about 10kms from where this happened. TBH I don’t know the woman but I do want to shout out a thanks to the Laguna Rural Fire Service (RFS) and all the other responders who dealt with this (ahem) “bizarro” incident through to a successful outcome. I’m guessing most El Reg readers won’t know that the RFS is an entirely volunteer organisation made up of local community members whose primary responsibility is to deal with bushfires/wildfires, followed by generally being the first people to show up when traffic accidents and any other incident occurs in rural NSW. Good on ‘em.

Shame about those wildfires. We'll just let the fossil fuel giants off the hook, then?

Deny, delay, doom laden dark crofts

Let’s be honest. Many of the voices “chicken littling” that a phase out of fossil fuels will doom us all to a return to scraping a miserable living in candle lit, dark crofts are the same ones who denied the existence of anthropogenic climate change for decades, and threw out spurious “but the science isn’t settled” delay tactics. Now that the clock is close to midnight on us actually doing something to save our sorry arses they shout “too much, too quickly, too much disruption”. Yeah well, guess what? If you hadn’t spent several decades delaying action and feeding the fossil fuel beast we wouldn’t be facing such a high and steep cliff and worrying about how to get down quickly and safely. 1. Get on the YIMBY wagon for renewables large and small; 2. Stop whinging about the cost and instead actually learn how much direct and indirect financial support governments give to the fossil fuel industry (hint: as well as direct subsidies there’s a

Reason your tax dollars fund defence presence

In the Middle East and it ain’t because we just love watching camels from an F35 or the deck of a warship); and 3. Suck it up princess.

Banned US chipmaking equipment still ending up in China, says report

Dinner Dad Joke (Groan)

All those execs lining up to dine with Xi know which side their bread is buttered on.

It's perfectly legal for cars to harvest your texts, call logs

Re: I can see two cases here

I think the other thing about #1 is that if you dispose of a computer etc you can fairly trivially and irrevocably erase your data, or destroy or replace the drive. From the little documented of the technical detail as to where Honda et al are storage all this harvested data I’m confidently betting you can’t do the same if disposing or selling on your vehicle.

And furthermore, just why? Has there been some previously unknown backroom agreement with law enforcement that was the genesis of this sniffer-tech? Or with the insurance industry which wanted onboard data on phone usage in the event of a crash? Have the manufacturers got some plan for getting value out of the data? Because you just know it’s odds-on that this doesn’t exist and operate this way just on a whim.

Ask a builder to fix a server and out come the vastly inappropriate power tools

Is a hammer an appropriate or an inappropriate tool to ‘fix’ a Windows server? Asking for a friend…

Apple pushes first-ever 'rapid' patch – and rapidly screws up

This RSR also reintroduces the iOS 16x black wallpaper problem that was supposedly fixed. Turn the phone off and on and your custom wallpaper reappear but as soon as you open and minimise an app or two it’s back to black. “RSR is the new black”

US pressures Asian allies to join crusade against Chinese chipmakers

Re: Good to see the US is keeping the pressure on ....

China has already retaliated, but there’s more to the story than this one El Reg article tells. China, or shall I say “Chinese registered companies that May or may not be loosely coupled extensions of the government” have a track record of stealing the IP of major companies in the chip supply chain. For example the Chinese company Jinhua managed to get details of Micron’s IP regarding DRAM design and manufacturing, which they subsequently applied for their own patents over. Micron sued Jinhau for IP theft and patent breach. Jinhau countersued in the province of Fujian (where they’re HQ’d), and the Fujian court promptly found in Jinhau’s favour and imposed a punishment of barring Micron from selling 26 products into GRC. There’s other examples. Using trade and security controls to stop Japanese, Dutch, and US chip manufacturing equipment is an attempt to stop China capitalising on their already conducted espionage. Advanced chip design and manufacturing are strategic military advantages whether for the US/NATO alliance or GRC, or any other. There’s a big game being played here that goes beyond P&L for any of the individual companies involved.