Posts by Flocke Kroes

It's on: Twitter vs Elon Musk trial to start October 17

Re: I don’t have a dog in this fight

The Twitter board changed tack when Musk made them a ridiculously good offer. Failing to accept would have been a breach of fiduciary duty to their shareholders.

Sorry, you are not going to get anything substantial on 'bot numbers. They are simply not relevant to the deal. At an enormous stretch, Musk's lawyers could start by trying to prove statements about 'bots in Twitter's SEC filings were malicious lies (really high bar). Those filings were scrutinised before publication by a team of Twitter lawyers to ensure there is evidence for every word and that nothing is provably misleading. Finding a gross misconduct in that document would only be the first hurdle in a marathon steeple chase.

When it comes to 'bot numbers, Musk's Lawyers' response to Twitter's complaint is full of "Mr Musk believes ...". If you translate that to English you get "We have no evidence to support ..." It is almost as if Musk's lawyers think there is a difference in credibility between a statement in a Twitter SEC filing and one of Musk's tweets.

Re: throwing the dice!

The usual nickname is the court of chicanery which may well be fair comment for person vs company. Company vs company is likely to be an objective application of contract law.

Re: Musk claims he wanted to close the deal quickly, but couldn't

A normal person would accept that they are at the bottom of a deep hole and stop digging. Elon would call in The Boring Company.

Musks co-conspirators and a bank have signed agreements. They are on the hook and presumably Musk could sick his lawyers on them if they do not pay up their share for a purchase. On the other hand, they may well get off without paying a cent if Musk accepts a settlement that does not include purchasing Twitter.

The reason Musk can be forced to make the purchase is the specific performance clause. [gigantic]If[/gigantic] Twitter had been mistaken about the 'bot numbers it would not matter as they are not a part of the purchase agreement and Musk waived due diligence.

Finally there are some words from Musk's lawyers that are very important here. I cannot find the exact quote, but it is pretty much standard boilerplate: Twitter is a home to invective and hyperbole. No reasonable person would consider Musk's Tweets as a reliable source of factual information.

The popularly believed method that Twitter uses to count bots comes from a Musk Tweet. Twitter's complaint deals with it in paragraphs 74 and 75. You should treat Musk's Tweets on bot numbers like "pedo guy" or "funding secured".

A couple of fun options are to appoint a special master who would have the legal authority to do whatever Musk could, like sell his Telsa shares. (Tesla is incorporated in Delaware.)

It is almost as if Tweeting about buying Twitter to deal with the 'bots, waiving due diligence and signing a specific performance clause are not actually genius business moves.

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: only the lifetime of the product

No, it is the lifetime of new updates in the required format.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

Why Intel killed its Optane memory business

Re: Longer endurance

I get there by over-specifying capacity. Optane is stuck in the usual new tech catch 22: at its current volume it cannot compete on price with too much flash. As it cannot compete with too much flash it is stuck at low volume.

Re: Sigh...

The high IOPS looks really good until you spot the Pi4's SDHC interface is limited to 50MB/s. Connect an SSD via USB3 and you will get 300MB/s - if you can keep the CPU cool. A Pi4 is plenty fast enough for emails and web browsing. For more demanding tasks you pay for that low price with memory and IO bandwidth constraints.

Battle of the retro Unix desktops: NsCDE versus CDE

Re: Opening a window on the windows

Some people do have a very different work flow: mostly I use keyboard shortcuts to switch between virtual desktops. Desktops are most often a full screen browser or four terminals. As all of these default to the right size and are automatically placed to not overlap I almost never move or resize windows.

I suspect most people only use a fraction of what their environment provides but there may well be plenty of strange people who do not use the most popular subset and would be upset if their favourite features went missing.

Re: RAM usage

For early '90s my monitor could do 1600x1200 but my computers could only do two colours at that resolution. I had to drop to 640x480 (and wait a few seconds for resynchronisation) to get 256 colours. It took years and several house moves with that 50kg monitor before I could use 1600x1200 with 2^24 colours. You must have had some top notch kit back then.

NASA: Mars rocks won't make it back to Earth until 2033

Heat shields are lighter than rockets

To come back from Mars, the up hill journey to an orbit that comes close to Earth requires a rocket. Once on the way, the returning vehicle is going downhill (closer to the sun), so picks up speed. Getting close to Earth (or the Moon) is a steep downhill journey so the vehicle picks up even more speed. Matching velocity with ISS or the Moon would require a really big rocket (that you would have to send to Mars with a much bigger rocket). Matching velocity with Earth requires a heat shield that is much lighter than the Moon/ISS rocket so it is far cheaper to send to Mars orbit.

It is possible to use a heat shield near Earth to slow down enough to enter orbit instead of landing. Next use a rocket to get to ISS or the Moon. That gets you a big saving because this rocket does not have to be sent from Earth to Mars and back. It only has to go from Earth to Earth orbit, match velocity with the return vehicle then go to the Moon or ISS. Then you need tiny rocket and a heat shield to go to Earth where all the equipment to study the samples is. Round about this point you should see the value in scrapping this plan and going straight to Earth's surface without taking a detour to the Moon or ISS (which will not be functional in 2033).

Charter told to pay $7.3b in damages after cable installer murders grandmother

Zero customer complaints

I can just imagine how the call centre software statistics collection gets used by busy staff required to meet targets: tick boxes for customer called, connection now working and complaint resolved then move on to next call.

Hints about SUSE's 'Adaptable Linux Platform' emerge

Re: Turtles all the way down

'telnet.netkit localhost 25' still works and I could read the email with 'cat ~/Maildir/new/*'. Sending to a remote system would probably require SMTP AUTH and I have never tried to do that by typing SMTP commands directly into telnet. Change 'user' to your user name and this will probably work:

HELO localhost

MAIL FROM:<sender@localhost>

RCPT TO:<user@localhost>

DATA

From: "Sender Name" <sender@localhost>

To: "User Name" <user@localhost>

Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2022 10:50:00 -0000

Subject: Telnet Email

Hello me

.

QUIT

Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds

Re: Expected more

From the article is sounded like they were adding support to an existing solution: run clock a little slower for a few hours around the time when a leap second is scheduled.

This has benefits and problems: it will work well with software that does not understand leap seconds. It will work badly with software that does understand leap seconds. It adds yet another possibility for confusion when computers using different time standards have to agree on the time.

Facebook are being reasonable here: identifying a problem. Pointing at one possible part of a solution. Not inflicting a solution on the world that only solves only their own problems. Trying to get the problem addressed in a forum where many stakeholders have a voice. Hopefully we will end up with one more time standard that suits many people instead of dozens of new ones.

Aviation body wants views on rocket plans of Virgin Orbit

Re: HEAT APOCALYPSE!

Virgin Galactic sold 700 rocket joyrides and has taken one customer to space. They continue to sell tickets but it has been over a year since their last flight and they might fly again next year. There are promises of regular flights eventually but very little supporting evidence.

Virgin Orbit is a completely different company that has put satellites in orbit twice but is too small to take a live human to orbit and back. This article is about Virgin Orbit.

Every time Virgin Orbit achieves something constructive a bunch of idiots invest in Virgin Galactic and Branson sells some more of his Galactic shares. He is now down to under 12%. Galactic has sold enough shares to buy two new carrier aircraft. My personal bet is that the bankrupt shell of Galactic will sell them for a pittance - to Virgin Orbit or Vox Space.

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

My confidence in browsers has already reached the point where I use separate user accounts on my computer to browse different sites and I clear cookies between visits. Pays off when shopping: I get introductory offer codes when I use a clean browser that are still valid when I log in to check out.

SpaceX crewed flight to ISS delayed by damaged rocket

Re: Plans for the future

A) Use the ISS as a base for assembling a replacement for continued research + pork without having to deal with one particular other country.

B) Use ISS for propaganda until the human spaceflight program dies from lack of funds getting through a kleptocracy to essential maintenance.

Don't dive head first into that crypto pool, FBI warns

Re: It *is* kind of amazing

The precise mechanism that allows someone to cash out of a ponzi scheme with a profit is that other people buy in with more money.

The precise mechanism that allows someone to cash out of bitcoin with a profit is that other people buy in with more money.

A manufacturing company can pay dividends to their share holders by selling goods at a higher value than the cost of the source materials and labour required for processing.

Yes, it really is kind of amazing how some people perceive a difference and other don't.

My smartphone has wiped my microSD card again: Is it a conspiracy?

Re: Cyniclally

IIRC, France taxes storage devices to punish people who create their own content and to double charge those who purchase legitimate copies of copyright works. In theory the taxes are distributed among content creators so (in rainbow unicorn) France obtaining music from pirates does not harm the creators (who may well have harsh words for this theory). This type of copyright protection should be unnecessary in France.

Works for me

My first Raspberry Pi (ordered the day they were released) is still working fine with the same SD card (which is even older). It has no difficulty with log files and swap on the card. I used to have problems with defective SD cards, but I became more careful about where I purchased pre-Pi and have not had an SD card fail in a Pi or elsewhere since.

To be fair, I do not require my Pi's to thrash the swap partition and I repartition leaving a healthy chunk unassigned. Flash is made by Samsung, Toshiba and Micron. Do not buy from anyone else. Buy from as close to the manufacturer as you can. Buy from a distributor that specialises in electronics, preferably one you find on the list of authorised distributors you can find on the manufacturer's web site. Amazon (spit) have a common binning policy: cards sold by Samsung on Amazon were (years ago and perhaps still are) mixed into a bin with cards with the Samsung logo from other sources.

Tesla jettisons 75% of Bitcoin holdings, boosting cash balance by $936m

Re: Twitter fine?

$1B does not buy Musk out of his rock solid commitment to pay $44B for Twitter. The only way he can get off with $1B is if he can convince the US government to block the sale (and he has a shortage of friends there). He could get $1B from Twitter if they cancel the deal but that is even less likely than a big birthday bonus from Biden.

NASA stalls water-seeking VIPER lunar rover to 2024

Plenty of oxygen

Pick any moon rock at random and it will have plenty of oxygen bound to a light metal. The obvious shortages for humans are hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. Replacement fuel for your nuclear reactor is also in short supply.

Singapore distances itself from local crypto companies

Ponzi progress

Before each generation can cash out a new generation must be suckered into buying in. Crypto has reached the point where the only people dumb enough to invest are politicians. I fully expect the UK government to leap in by guarantying bail out future crypto crashes with tax payers' money.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Really that bad?

Getting backed by the UK government is not an indicator for potential profit. At least this is cheaper than OneWeb ... so far.

Bogus cryptocurrency apps steal millions in mere months

Re: "legitimate cryptocurrency investments"

Sorry for replying twice but it took me a while to find the link explaining how to reliably warn off a potential crypto victim.

Re: "legitimate cryptocurrency investments"

Wikipedia says Ponzi Scheme too, with citations.

Just because you failed doesn't mean you weren't right

Spelling error

s/missed/Mist/g

Copper shortage keeps green energy, tech ventures grounded

Re: Mode of failure

Xmas tree lights are wired in series. If any one of them fails to open circuit the entire chain goes dark. If one of them fails to short circuit each of the remaining bulbs shine a little brighter - and age a little more quickly.

If instead we wired Xmas lights in parallel a failure of one to open circuit just reduces the power draw and total brightness. A failure to short circuit has more interesting possibilities but hopefully just results in a blown fuse and darkness.

If you wanted to wire a large number of solar cells in parallel the obvious solution would be to use a layer of solar cells with one terminal connected to a sheet of steel full of holes. Connect the other terminal of each cell with fuse wire through a hole to a second sheet of steel.

IT departments often regret technology buying decisions

Re: cat

UUOC

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

Re: Who is going to buy wadges of crypto

It is more a matter of when than who. Half of when is when the bankruptcy court has decided who is owed money, and with what priority. The other half is when the price of crypto has fallen to slightly below its perceived value. The good news is by that time if perceived value is .1% of the current price you only need to find a bunch of fools worth $4.3M.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Re: The British Internet....

I thought the internet was supposed to be a television you cannot turn off, always shows government selected content, watches everything you and and sends it to the Ministry of Love.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

judge it by what it's doing today

Microsoft hires people to write software so they own the copyright and have the right to select whatever licenses they want to distribute that software.

I get to read those licenses and to decide for myself whether to rent their software. My dislike of their choice of license has not changed in over thirty years so I do not rent their software. The difference between back then and now is that it is easier to not pay Microsoft for software I do not want. Hate is definitely the wrong word for my feelings toward Microsoft. To me they are mostly irrelevant but they do provide some entertaining news.

Perhaps this article is asking me to trust Microsoft: sure, just as much as Google, Amazon and Oracle.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

Re: I'm saving my popcorn for the third act...

At most only two acts.

Musk has bugger all on his side and Twitter have among other things - Musk's self damning Tweets. Delaware Chancery court will wrap this up in about a year. Musk will appeal. In the very unlikely event that is granted, Musk only gets that one do-over - and that will be after a year of Musk posting more evidence against himself on Twitter. A normal person in a hole this deep would have stopped digging already. Musk founded The Boring Company.

Re: Wonder how many Tesla owners...

already happening.

Many people who were going to buy Teslas are either looking elsewhere or deciding to wait an extra year or two to see what else becomes available. At the other extreme, Teslas cannot be modified to roll coal.

With any luck, Musk's demand to buy Twitter at $54.20 will cost him his Tesla shares and Tesla will be better off without him.

SpaceX Starship booster in flames after unexpected ignition

Re: N1...

N1 was massively different in just about every possible way starting with money. Because of lack of budget the only way to test an N1 rocket was to try to launch it. SpaceX test each part and sub-assembly at each possible point in production until it they get it right so often that the chance of a test of failing becomes really small.

What went wrong was very clear. The first step in starting a Raptor engine is to blast high pressure gaseous oxygen into the oxygen turbine and high pressure gaseous methane into the methane turbine until the pumps spin up fast enough to pressurise the liquid oxygen and methane. For the outer ring of twenty engines the high pressure gasses are supplied by the launch table as these engines do not have to relight during flight. Someone thought it would be a good idea to test this on several (all?) engines at once without deliberately igniting the propellants as soon as possible. After they had time to build up into a really big cloud the propellants found an ignition source.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

I am not expecting such a protracted sequence of delays. Once it was clear that The SCO Group had nothing, Darl focused on delays. Every year he delayed was a year he could convert Novell's license fees into income. (SCO was supposed to collect Novell's fees, pay 100% to Novell and get 5% commission back.) When it became blatantly obvious that continuing wiht the litigation would be trading while insolvent, Darl filed for bankruptcy. The result was not quite what he wanted: a trustee was assigned to spend Novell's license fees on the favoured law and accountancy firms.

Twitter want their money now. Just the idea of Musk having to pay out so much money is a threat to Tesla's share value. Musk wants to cut his losses quickly. Neither side has an incentive to delay.

The current battle is Musk vs reality. Musk needs Tesla stock at a high value while he settles his debts so he needs to convince the world that at worst he is only on the hook for a piddling $1B. He will be trolling like crazy to divert attention away from the $44B specific performance clause.

Melania

I have never played Elden Ring so I looked up Melania. Apparently she can be killed safely because her AI does not recognise a big canon aimed a little off centre is dangerous.

Musk ran X.com. Peter Thiel ran Cofinity. The two merged into Paypal which was run by Musk until he was fired. Thiel took over then Paypal was bought by eBay. Musk owned a large portion of Paypal until the sale to eBay and as far as I know, he has not owned a significant portion of Paypal since. You are welcome to have any opinion of Musk, Thiel and Paypal that you want but please do not associate Musk with the huge rise in the value of Paypal that massively boosted his wealth.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

Re: Huh?

At a guess, if I put your work in github without your permission and you are unhappy about how it gets used Microsoft can try to recover their loses (if any) from me.

Re: profiting off your code

What is the licence? There are "not for commercial use" licenses but they are incompatible with some of the popular FOSS licences. For example, you would not be able to link your code to GPL libraries. Also, check the github terms of service. By using github you may have promised to bake them a birthday cake as well as given commercial use.

Tone deaf article

AFAIK, Microsoft are not doing anything wrong by renting out copilot, even though it is trained on source with different authors and licences.

The problem comes from anyone using code generated by copilot. There is the minor risk of getting sued for billions for something as trivial as rangeCheck. There is the more major problem of the copyright holder's intent. Some code is written by universities founded by government grants. They often select a BSD/MIT like license so they can track where their code is used and use it as evidence that last years grant did something productive and they should get more next year. People often select GPL so that improvements cannot be hidden in binaries and must instead be returned to the community.

I respect the intent of Microsoft's licenses: pay up (inclusive?)or fuck off. They should respect other people's licenses by getting copilot to generate accurate attribution and licensing requirements.

Robots have not rights at all and certainly do not have the right to ignore copyright law. If there is a problem with the law it is that it may not be possible to hold Microsoft to account for actions taken by their badly programmed robot.

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

Re: specific info on that contract

There are ways that Musk can get away with only paying $1B, like the government stopping the sale. There are ways that Musk could get out of the deal and get $1B from Twitter, but that would require Twitter's board of directors to ask their lawyers "what is the most stupid thing we could do right now", then follow the instructions.

The board of directors are reasonably smart, they hired skilled lawyers and Musk signed a contract against the advice of his lawyers. All the Twitter board have to do to get a really big payday is jump through the required hoops - which is what they are doing even when it is not clear that a cheap hoop is actually required.

I think part of the reason for the $1B section is to appeal to Musk's Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Re: specific info on that contract

Yes many people do know different. Section 9.9 of the agreement as filed with the SEC is a specific performance clause. On Musk's side, performance means paying $44B for Twitter. Unless Musk lawyers can prove Twitter did not hold up their end (see section 7), Twitter can legally compel completion of the purchase at the agreed price. Musk's lawyers have a monumental task as Musk waived due diligence.

Re: specific info on that contract

We have Twitter's SEC filing.

I agree the board will not sell out for less than $44B but they might accept a settlement for less with Musk getting nothing but egg on his face.

More than that, Twitter share holders are happy to be bought out at well above market value. They would also be happy with a judgement or settlement well above legal fees and court costs. They were probably thinking something along the line of "the fool signed!" but did not say it out loud because they have enough sense to let their lawyers do the talking.

Musk has signed a contract with a specific performance clause and his only way out of paying $44B is to prove Twitter breached their side of the contract. Part of the contract is that Musk can ask anything, including questions that Twitter cannot answer. It will be up to a judge to decide if Twitter's responses were adequate. The bot numbers are going to be a difficult point for Musk as his publicly announced reasons for buying Twitter included doing something about the large number of bots. Most likely, a settlement will be agreed before a verdict is reached with Musk paying something between 1 and 44 billion.

Musk is already in breach of the non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses so it will not be a clean fight. If he has taken advantage of Twitter's lowered share price to quietly buy shares via proxy again he will be in even deeper shit.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Skimmed it. It is large with plentiful legal jargon and IANAL.

Section 9.9 covers specific performance. So far Twitter appear to have jumped through the required hoops to apply for it. Musk's drivel about 5% bots does not come close to a way out and if he had anything better he would be shouting it from the roof tops. It will go before a judge and there will likely be a settlement before the judge reaches a decision. It will take years but Musk will not wriggle out of this for a paltry $1B.

Re: BBC reporting Musk's bid is ended.

That is shitty reporting from the BBC. I thought you had been cherry picking the quotes so I read the article. They are only quoting Musk. That specific 5% is Musk deliberately misquoting Twitter. The actual quote from Twitter's filings is "less than 5% of its first-quarter monetizable daily active users were made of bots."

Twitter sells adverts based on the number of monetizable daily active users. It arrives at this number by filtering out a large number of bots some of which provide interesting tweets, but none of which use the user interface or see adverts. Twitter says that the number of users that it claims see adverts is includes less than 5% bots.

Any journalist capable of minimal fact checking would have spotted Musk's malicious misquote. The judge in Delaware is going to find out really fast too. I used to expect better from the BBC.

Re: Next shareholder meeting should be interesting

The board and share holders were clearly aware they were selling a pig in a poke. The board exploited Musk's haste to get a specific performance clause to up the payout beyond $1B and a due diligence waiver to hog tie Musk's defence in the inevitable litigation. If I were a share holder I would be impressed by how well the board had maximised the value of my shares. As a cherry on top, the board got Musk to sign a clause about not trash talking Twitter on Twitter. It was obvious that once Musk spotted he was penned in his immediate response would be to squeal. Twitter's lawyers will argue that any reduction in share value is a result of Musk's tweets.

Somehow Musk's lawyers were able to get him to stay off Twitter for 9 days. He has come back with a photo of him meeting with Pope Francis. The only way this could get stranger would be to announce a coal rolling option for Teslas.

Re: Surprisingly honest wording from Twitter

A batch of workers left when this deal was signed. A batch more will go if Musk takes charge. Twitter have reduced the number of staff they employ for hiring new staff. Musk has already worked out that even if his original plans for Twitter had made any sense he would have difficulty getting them implemented.