Er....
Isn't the US only reducing tariffs to 30% for the 90 days? Or until the Felon-in-Chief has another temper tantrum?
715 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Dec 2007
“[T]he House Un-American Activities Committee under Senator Joseph McCarthy persecuted thousands of people”
McCarthy, a member of the US Senate, had no effect on the US House of Representatives, or vice versa. Starting in 1953, Tailgunner Joe chaired the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, through which he carried out the worst of his depredations. HUAC was its own, entirely independent can of worms.
Based on personal experience, those hours look very similar, if not identical, to what I’ve gotten used to over the last several years. I felt a bit of discrimination based on the apparent assumption that all Social Security clients and their support personnel are frighteningly early risers who are all tucked up in bed (without their phones) by 11:00 PM. Oddly enough, the Thrift Savings Plan, the 401(k)-like retirement investment mechanism for federal employees, has a website that’s available much later into the wee hours, including on weekends.
As the late Mr. Jobs famously explained to President Obama c. 2009, manufacturing the phones in the US would add ~ $1 to the price of the phones (say, $1.50 today). What makes manufacturing at such scale and with such rapid prototyping possible is the abundance of process engineers in China (educated to what would be called an Associate's degree level in the US), as well as the parts manufacturing infrastructure there. That difference in the result of state investment in the educational system, as well as demand by foreign manufacturers.
Sounds exactly like the standard “hedge fund” model in the US: buy a distressed business at a low-ish price, financed by debt which gets reassigned to the distressed asset, then strip the business of all its fungible assets, spin off the now hollowed-out business, less the real estate the shops/offices stand on, charge debt-ridden business rent on the property that had been theirs, and sell off the real estate at a nice profit when the shell of a business finally goes bust. They’re even doing it with hospitals.
If you read any of the NASA-tracking sites here in the US, it's not at all clear that Mr, Isaacman will ever lead the agency. Evidently, he has committed the mortal sin of starting several companies that offer diversity training, as well as other sins against the fascist, er, Republican core beliefs.
....that the managers of various federal agencies are being told to fill out spreadsheets listing the 10% of employees who are mission critical, the 40% who are, know, kinda OK, and the 50% who are for the immediate chop. This alone demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of what those agencies are about. The hopeless cases never make it past the one-year probationary period, and this who late decay into uselessness are remarkably few and far between in the agencies with which I've had to deal. I know right wingnut propaganda likes to portray all Executive branch employees as lazy do-nothings, but the truth is mostly the opposite.
Name two. Or better, “a lot.” Turning off unwanted A”I” “features” on iOS is a matter of three taps: Settings, Apple Intelligence & Siri, and toggling the Apple Intelligence setting to “off.” For what it’s worth, this Apple user didn’t have to worry about it because my phone is pre-iPhone 15. If there really are “a lot” of iPhone owners who want to be protected from A”I” intrusiveness, this old thing might command a good price.
In Apple’s case, at least, I suspect so few people turned on any AI features at all in iOS 18.1 and 18.2 that the corporate bosses are desperate the punters never will unless they’re forced to “experience” the new “functionality.”
Following through on another El Reg article today, I installed DeepSeek on my desktop and got totally reasonable answers to “What is air speed of an unencumbered swallow?” and “Latkes vs. Hamantaschen?” So what’s not to love? ;-)
For the record, those queries running locally emptied no reservoirs and caused no lights to flicker, nor even made the machine’s fans audible. No idea, of course, what they cost the mothership.
"Resolved: system issue impacting deposits, payments and transfers
"Valued customer,
"We wanted to provide you with an important update regarding the service disruption impacting Capital One, which resulted in delays in the processing of some electronic payments and transfers (ACH).
"This was due to a technical issue at a third-party service provider that delayed timely processing of some banking transactions and impacted your ability to bank online with us. Rest assured, it was not related to fraud or the work of bad actors attempting to access our system. Your Capital One Bank accounts remain secure.
"This issue is now resolved and impacted systems are restored. We sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact on your ability to access certain Capital One services. We also understand how frustrating this situation may have been, and we’re committed to making it right."
For what it's worth, this customer's account sent a scheduled ETF payment last Thursday, and received a scheduled direct deposit on Friday. Many other people, obviously, fared far worse.
That's "unfortunate countries where American [there's another kind?] baseball isn't played."
The fortunate ones include Japan, Australia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Mexico, Cuba, Panama, Venezuela, and the Dominican Republic. Probably leaving off some I've forgotten. Oh, wait, there are 82 altogether: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/what-countries-play-baseball .
Things may have changed in the last six years (when I retired after 31 years of working on SOHO, from instrument proposal, software development, and science operation design before launch through science operations and management), but we never got one cent from NOAA despite their using SOHO data for forecasting. There was a brief time, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012, when it actually looked like NOAA might share some very modest costs for a backup data processing facility for the SOHO data they use, but that evaporated once it hit a certain level of management at NOAA.
Don't know about other systems, but Apple's Face ID is implemented by scanning that can distinguish between a three-dimensional face and a photograph, and the vectors extracted from that scanning are embedded in a devices "secure enclave," which I believe has been demonstrated in proof-of-concept to be vulnerable by boffins if they have physical access to the device (and can somehow evade security procedures to log in), but for ordinary humans, including crooks, pretty secure.
"[E]xpensive high-end" Well, I guess you get what you pay for, in security as well as anything else.
Imagine all those user-generated bots, er, AI constructs, replacing our actual faces with their perfect ones in every Teams meeting. While the people whose time would have been wasted "participating" in such a meeting can, you know, do productive work. Or hang out around the water cooler and discuss.... stuff.
And the fossil fuel extraction industry will love it: re-open more coal and hydrocarbon-fired electric generating plants do Micro$oft and others can open more GW-gobbling AI GPU-farms. Feed that loop. Kill that planet.
….make life so much easier than the cramped, heavily shielded enclosures PDP’s had in their first lives. The thought of inserting and especially removing cards without donating copious amounts of blood is almost incomprehensible to this veteran.
Come across “one?” Try PDP-11/20 (operating an instrument at a mountaintop observatory), multiple -11/34s, commanding, receiving data from, and analyzing those data from instruments on a spacecraft, an -11/40 used by another project, that borrowed me for some grunt work, and a schizophrenic -11/70 that ran IAS during the day and Unix at night. Probably others this geezer can’t recall right now.
And Apple knows that.
There’s something odd about this report. Apple has known for years — since well before the introduction of the first Apple Silicon machines in late 2020 — that Mac users keep their machines well over three years. It’s one of the reasons they started offering AppleCare+ service plans not just for three years but indefinitely (defined as, “until we no longer stock parts except where required by law” [e.g. France]), on a monthly billing basis. Think that “service” income isn’t making up for at least some of the supposedly missed (and famously large) margin on hardware sales? Think again.
"[I]mportant information which would otherwise have been very useful to them" — when was the last time you got that in any ad, anywhere?
Disclaimer: I am so adblockered-up on all my devices that the only time I ever see ads is when I briefly lift the protective force field to view specific _content_ (as opposed to ads) before swiftly turning the shields back on, that I haven't viewed many ads coming from the Intertubes. Please let me kn ow if I'm missing anything "important" or "very useful." Ta.
....at the vast majority of US drivers who have never seen a roundabout, traffic circle, or rotary (as they're called in Massachusetts, where I grew up), but I dar any UK driver to try driving (keeping to the right, mind) a Boston-area rotary with unsweaty clothes and dry pants. While state law humorously insists that vehicles entering the rotary have the right of way [*], the actual practice is even simpler than the UK hierarchy outlined by FIA, above: simply assume the vehicle you are driving in a Range Rover with heavily tinted windows and once you muscle your way into the rotary, _you_ always have right of way. Put another way, whoever gets there first has the right of way. Miraculously (or maybe not so, since human beings tend to get used to almost anything), there are very few accidents in those rotaries.
During a sojourn in France some decades ago, I learned that the driver entering from the right (pretty much anywhere, including rond-points) always has the right of way.... unless the intersection is signed otherwise — which is why nearly every rond-point through which I had to navigate every day was festooned with "Vous n'avez pas la priorité" signs confronting anyone trying to enter the rond-point. Not that it made much difference in the drivers' behavior.