Hmmm
Cryptocurrency is good for this….
Posts by Steve K
1439 posts • joined 4 Apr 2008
Bloke robbed of $800,000 in cryptocurrency by fake wallet app wants payback from Google
James Webb Space Telescope looks closer to home with Jupiter snaps
Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'
Not enough desks and parking spots, wobbly Wi-Fi: Welcome back to the office, Tesla staff
First steps into the world of thought leadership: What could go wrong?
Plot to defeat crypto meltdown: Solend votes to seize, liquidate whale account
Monday 20th June 2022 15:00 GMT 
Reinsurance spiral....?
This is getting to resemble the Lloyds (of London) reinsurance spiral crisis from the 1980s/1990s (for those of us old enough to remember that).
It turned out that a lot of insurance was (in the end) reinsured with many of the original insurance when all of the intermediate contracts were factored out.
One large adverse event/failure and the whole spiral unwinds catastrophically...
This led to greater regulation/oversight/disclosure for good reason, some of which was that relatively unsophisticated "Names" (private individuals) made loads of money in the good times, but when it all went wrong, they were on the hook for liquidity/claims etc. and many lost everything.
Everything old is new again.
Always read the comments: Beijing requires oversight of all reader-generated chat
No more fossil fuel or nukes? In the future we will generate power with magic dust
Friday 10th June 2022 11:12 GMT
Not that I was expecting to understand any of the maths, the macroscopic two-level Hamiltonian thingy looks impenetrable, but I was wondering if this is also caused by mathematical markup/ formatting getting screwed up OR if they have invented a whole load level of brainf@ck style notation:
$${{{{{\mathcal{H}}}}}}=\hslash \left({\begin{array}{lc}{\omega }_{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}[{N}_{{{{{\rm{B}}}}}}(t)]&-{{\Omega }}\\ -{{\Omega }}&{\omega }_{{{{{\rm{S}}}}}}\end{array}}\right),$$
Musk repeats threat to end $46.5bn Twitter deal – with lawyers, not just tweets
Wednesday 8th June 2022 09:39 GMT
Re: HPE
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000119312522152250/d283119dprem14a.htm#toc283119_20
P.49, second (full) paragraph
Mr. Musk also disclosed that his acquisition proposal was no longer subject to the completion of financing and business due diligence.
This doesn't mention skipping Accounting or Tax due diligence, but I don't think that is what is at question here.
We've never even built datacenters using robots here on Earth
Tech hiring freeze doesn't mean people won't leave
Elon Musk says Twitter buy 'cannot move forward' until spam stats spat settled
Meetings in the metaverse: Are your Mikes on?
Biotech firm: Graphcore IPUs faster for AI-based drug discovery than GPUs
Elon Musk's latest launch: An unsolicited Twitter takeover
Openness of Oracle licensing and audit tools questioned
Microsoft claims breakthrough in quantum computer system
Indian services giants target emerging technologies with PaaS plays
Apple seeks patent for 'innovation' resembling the ZX Spectrum, C64 and rPi 400
Skills shortage puts SAP projects on hold
IBM looked to reinvigorate its 'dated maternal workforce'
'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall
Sunday 13th February 2022 10:50 GMT
Greensleeves
In the UK at least, they should play “Greensleeves” (on a Glockenspiel) from the speakers as the safest tune.
People will (in the warmer seasons) either look round as they fancy an ice-cream, or in the colder seasons look round and wonder who is trying to sell ice-cream in the cold.
If they are going fast enough, people will still hear but can always quote Eric Morecambe and say “he’ll never sell any going at that speed!”
Raspberry Pis gain power to flash their own OSes with new network install function
12-year-old revives Unity desktop, develops software repo client, builds gaming environment for Ubuntu...
Second Trojan asteroid confirmed to be leading our planet around the Sun
New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle
He ain't heavy, he's my brother: Bloke gives away SpaceX ticket because he was over weight limit
BlackBerry offloads its 'legacy' patents – some of the stuff that made its phones hum
HPE has 'substantially succeeded' in its £3.3bn fraud trial against Autonomy's Mike Lynch – judge
Friday 28th January 2022 14:46 GMT
Re: Absolutely ourageous
Stock-takes are usually given to the junior trainees since it often involves being on a remote, cold
industrial site at an early hour at a weekend or public holiday, up a ladder or in a warehouse trying to find a serial number for a widget or dipping the level in a huge oil storage tank.
Then they take you for a cuppa while they pump whatever was in the tank into the next one so that's full too when you get to it....
Or when counting vehicles, they drive them round for you to tick off the reg numbers, and then drive them round the corner and back past you again after swapping the plates over...
Or Trainee:"what's your stock valuation policy? FIFO/LIFO/Weighted Average". FD "FOFO - F@ck off and find out""
Or (possibly my favourite), a car factory says that there are some cars with luminous paint destined for the Scandinavian market parked amongst all the others (hundreds). The trainee doing the stock-take is given a torch and a blanket to go and find them. After 30 minutes they happen to glance back at the main factory windows to see most of the workforce laughing at them....
But I digress (I was a Coopers & Lybrand audit trainee nearly 30 years ago....)
Friday 28th January 2022 14:37 GMT
Re: "The finding is a massive victory for HPE"
After all, Deloitte were deceived / allowed themselves to be deceived
Precisely - if there is systematic collusion at the senior management level to deceive the auditors deliberately then there is not much the auditors can do about it, unless they get lucky and pick up on inconsistencies and start digging deeper.
Additionally a substantive testing approach (aka ticking and bashing transactions back to invoices/assets etc.) vs. a controls-based approach (i.e. rely on internal controls by testing those internal controls) could give differing results in a case of deliberate collusion to mislead.
ISO.org outage hits day 3: Still in the dark as the important matter of bunk bed standards enters discussion
Silk could tie up all-but-unbreakable encryption, say South Korean boffins
Head of Big Tech Expertise? Believe it or not, it's a UK.gov vacancy for a Whitehall job
Former Oracle execs warn that Big Red's auditing process is also a 'sales enablement tool'
APNIC: Big Tech's use of carrier-grade NAT is holding back internet innovation
Tesla driver charged with vehicular manslaughter after deadly Autopilot crash
Autonomy's Mike Lynch gets yet another judgment date as US extradition wrangling continues
Ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, German court rules
More contractor pain: Parasol's sister firms, SJD Accountancy and Nixon Williams, confirm cyberattack
Alien life on Super-Earth can survive longer than us due to long-lasting protection from cosmic rays
Monday 17th January 2022 09:43 GMT
Black holes
Not a physicist either but:
A black hole "gobbles up light" only because light cannot travel fast enough along the spacetime infall to escape once inside the Event Horizon. It's a bit like trying to swim up a waterfall.
Light does not have mass, so that's not what is causing it (directly).
The sun will be losing so much mass (i.e. much more than the sunshine/coronal mass ejections we know and love presently....) at the Red Giant stage that Solar System planetary orbits will shift outwards due to this change in gravitational mass from the sun.
If the mass stayed the same then the density change wouldn't matter (unless we were then in the solar atmosphere in which case drag would send the smoking ember that was Earth spiralling in to the sun)!
