Posts by Jellied Eel

Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs

Re: Nuclear barges

I very much doubt that a barge will be able to move or be moved more than 4 (nautical)MPH even if towed.

The conference is about the potential of civil nuclear power for propulsion. There's the small issue of lots of shipping burning oil, assorted decarbonisation and tax disincentives to stop the shipping industry burning oil. Which has lead to some FUN! things like some ships converting to run on ammonia instead. Which then presents a different set of environmental & safety challenges given ammonia is rather toxic. Plus producing and shipping that so vessels can refuel.

As I read this, the aim is to spread these power plants way beyond the russian artic shores.

Yep, so looking at some rules & regulations around their use. Then it'll be the economics, ie how much it'll cost to have a nuclear powered supertanker, bulker or container ship. Again I doubt there'd be much demand for power barges in the West, but it could be an option if the economics make sense.

Off-shore windmills that are suddenly on-shore are very unlikely to be upright and to any use for EVs.

They're not much use for EVs right now. They're also extremely vulnerable to the 'extreme' weather climate deniers keep predicting. Yet NPPs are much safer, cheaper and more reliable, and people lobby hard against them.

Re: Nuclear barges

How quick can you tow a floating nuclear power plant out of the unpredictable path of a hurricane/typhoon/cyclone?

Well, a floating nuclear Ford-class aircraft carrier can move at 35mph+. Russia's nuclear barges aren't that quick, but don't need to be given they're intended to deliver power in the north. Russia's also used nuclear submarines to provide shore power a couple of times, and has big nuclear powered ice breakers.

A tsunami could also create an interesting scenario where you end up with a new charge station for EVs many miles inland.

EV's will be able to power themselves from all the off-shore windmills that are suddenly on-shore. The windmills are also rather vulnerable to hurricanes and typhoons. There were also some interesting videos of Japanese war & other ships heading out to sea during the Tōhoku quake/tsunami where they had to steam uphill for a bit. Interesting to me because it showed what a large tsunami actually looked like, and the difference between Hollywood & reality, and the effects in deep vs shallow water. No photogenic wall of water, just a wave that keeps on coming.. fast.

But post-Fukushima, lessons learned from that were implemented to improve NPP safety, and were fairly simple changes like having generators well above the possible flood line.

People smarter than me must - of course - have thought about this and more...

Which is what the conference is all about. Then it'll be the economics. There's a whole bunch of SMR proposals err.. floating around with the prospect of compact & cheaper reactors. So whether those will make sense to install in ships or power barges. Russia obviously believes 'yes', but then Russia's geography is rather different. One of the power barges is being used to power a remote mining town ahead of shore-based SMR NPPs being constructed, and removes the need/cost of rolling coal/oil/gas. US and Europe don't really have the same needs, but floating NPPs could be a solution to powering our coastal towns & cities, and far more reliable than wind.

But the West is falling behind Russia & China in the SMR space, with Russia deploying these-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RITM-200

While our NIMBYs still tilt at windmills. Plus politics probably means Rosatom hasn't been invited to the conference to share their experience.

Meta latest to tell world its AI agent wandered out of test pen

How irregular

Because the old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" fails once it starts materially hitting your bottom line.

Better yet, some pampered executive bottoms hit concrete or stainless steel instead of their luxury Japanese toilets. After all, criminal acts were committed and the penalties include jail time. Plus for the US, felony convictions that have all sorts of interesting knock-on effects.

But also..

Irregular, the AI security firm that tested both companies' models,

Obviously didn't do a very good job in making sure the models under test were safely constrained to their sandbox. Then again, back in my younger days, I was running good'ol HP Openview and got it to SNMP-walk to see how well it'd generate a /8's worth of devices. In which I expected it to just discover our routers. Instead, it happily started crawling customer's networks. The routers we supplied and managed had ACLs to block inbound SNMP from the 'net, some customers.. did not. So stopped that test & notified the customers it'd discovered that they might want to update their routers.

SpaceX revenue rockets while AI spending burns billions

Not that we get to see accounting details that might show Starlink being subsidized through things being accounted for elsewhere and launches charged at cost rather than retail prices.

Or Tesla buying a lot of AI. Or SpacX buying a lot of Cybertrucks. But I think Starshield and Golden Dome contracts are the cash cows, but a simpler structure just with the space assets would make it more obvious that there's a lot of 'dark' money floating around from classified projects that people would prefer to stay off the books, or could be lost in the noise of all the other entities that make up SpacX.

If SpaceX does implode and is really of US strategic importance, then it’s obvious what to do, nationalise it, Act of Congress, take it into State control without compensation to shareholders; no the company you had shares in has gone bust, sorry, you have lost your money - it’s called Capitalism!

I doubt that would happen, because as you say, Capitalism! I think it would be far more likely to do the Ch.11 thing. Then do a reverse-Musk and unbundle SpacX, with the launch business & Starlink going to one of the usual suspects & large donors. But Starlink is probably the most lucrative bit, especially-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starshield

Which started with a $1.8bn contract with the NRO, and the cynic in me would suggest that Starshield, not Starlink accounts for the majority of the 'Starlink' revenues. So either way, the space tentacles would still heavily rely on US taxpayer funding.

Tomorrow/Thursday might get a bit interesting given the lock-up unlocks, and there'll be more shares in play.

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

Re: The colour out of space!

Cue lousy "what's bad wording and what's a technical keep?" algorithms.

I once had some fun as a bit of a technical author. Job was to write tests so the client could confirm that every function was working as expected or advertised. Click this button, this should happen. Then one function would let the user pick a colour for a symbol. So it had RGB sliders. So far, so good. Set sliders to 6,6,6 and err.. you should get <this> colour. Simple task, not so simple to write the expected results. So ended up referring to a section on monitor calibration, and then using their calibration hardware to confirm.

An interesting sojourn in my technical career, but wasn't something I fancied doing full time. Fortunately the Internet came along and saved me! Made me better appreciate the challenges technical authors face, and made me a bit more tolerant when reading manuals.

Re: "having a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary on the shelf"

Interesting how many writers in the past handed over serious hard·earned to own the OED — T H White was one. Useful if you have to change a lot of light bulbs I suppose.

I picked up a nice leather bound copy of the 2nd edition in an estate sale. It's 'only' 20 volumes, but as a kid, my parents got the good'ol Readers Digest that had a section 'It pays to enrich your word power'. The OED is that, but on a much larger scale, so I often get distracted looking up a word, and finding all sorts of other interesting ones. Plus realizing there's a scholarly debate about 'Americanisng' the semi-official big book of English. But other versions are available.

I also subscribe to their online dictionary, which is fine if I know the word I want, but less fun for finding new ones. Plus the search engines are replacing that, ie just go to Google and ask it 'Define Manglement' and see what it spits out. But that's also an example of machines displacing lexicographers. But shelf space is also a bit of a social issue, ie people not buying physical books.. Which is also something I'm a bit guilty of. I have over 500 books in my Kindle, and sometimes amuse myself figuring out how many linear feet of shelf space they'd need for the physical versions. Plus a lot have been long out of print, and often out of copyright. I like folklore, so Andrew Lang's collections are fun to read.

But I also agree with LLMs being a pox on civilisation, and also blatant copyright theft. There's far too much AI slop online, and it's getting worse. I've also been offered AI editing services, for a fee of course but much prefer to stick with humans. I've also seen services that claim to be able to convert books or stories into screenplays, but the rights around those get interesting. One I looked at briefly asserted rights to works, if they got put into development. But copyright is complicated and not entirely convinced an AI-converted screenplay could defend those rights. I also agree about not using AI for cover art. Sure, it's cheap and convenient, but I'd rather support real, living, breathing artists.

Moscow slaps Telegram founder on wanted list, Durov responds with one-finger salute

Re: Better Not Drink Any Tea, and He Should Stay Away From Windows...

Oh look, another whataboutism from kremls favorite poster

What about say, a woman that may or may not have been recruited via Telegram to deliver a package to a Moscow restaurant over the weekend? She didn't suffer quite the same fate as the Monaco terrorist, but guessing a spotter saw she was denied entry and detonated the bomb anyway.

Whatever it takes, for as long as it takes.. Even if that includes terrorism? Which is just a tad illegal in the UK.

Re: False Flag?

The have form for prepared stories that never went to plan. Early 90.s

Can’t remember if it was BBC or ITV that interrupted regular broadcast with a report on Russian military in Chechnya.

That was the Bbc. It's also sadly normal with propaganda masquerading as news. The Bbc is the UK state broadcaster, it's Charter and funding renewal season, so the Bbc plays nicely with the government. Fox is filling the same role in the US because Trump recruited a lot of people from there (Hegseth, from pundit to Secretary of War). Or Durov. France arrested him because they, and the EU really don't like encryption and are pushing very hard to impose a mass surveillance state. The EU's also censored pretty much every Russian news service because EU citizens can't be allowed to access unofficial misinformation. There's also suggestions that search engines should promote the MSM, because the public is increasingly turning away from the old guard. Russia's doing much the same and wants access to Russian Telegram users.

So there's a bit of a battle for our hearts and minds, which has been the case pretty much ever since countries created postal services and 'black rooms' where letters could be intercepted. Sometimes for good reason, because very bad people do very bad things via our communications networks, and LEAs need a way to prevent this. But it's a very fine line between privacy and security. Plus our education system really doesn't seem to be creating people who can tell the difference between objective truths and propaganda, or other deliberate misinformation.

Case in point this week where Zelensky was interviewed by Fox News. He claimed Russia had 700k dead and 1.6m casualties. But he also claimed that Ukraine had only lost 50k. The interviewer didn't question these claims, but should have had plenty of reasons to. So back in February, Zelensky claimed 55k KIA, so 5k have become undead in only a few months. But 50k is unbelievable given the intensity of the fighting, and the way Ukraine is running their busification program to recruit more troops. If they've only lost 50k, they don't need to, and if the 700k Russian figure is also true, well, they're winning. Right?

Unless Zelensky is just plucking numbers out of the air. In which case, there's a bit of a credibility problem. Or he's been told the 50k figure by his staff, and believed them. Also a credibility problem, but more dangerous because Ukraine's Commander-in-Chief would have been grossly misinformed and can't make effective decisions. Same thing may have happened with US v Iran. Trump's advisors may have told him Iran would be a pushover, and a quick spot of decapitation and the Iranian public would rise up, take charge and start building statues to Trump, their saviour. But that hasn't exactly gone to plan, and the US is now facing another forever war that further damages America's credibility. Whoever told Trump that Iran would be easy might want to be looking for alternative employment given Trump's thin skin and massive ego.

Re: False Flag?

Pt.2 as it got a bit long..

You really need to get over your best Russian propaganda talking points. Things are much more complex than you seem to allow. Ukraine's army is not "NATO trained", or it would operate much differently. US, UK and Canadian training in the years between 2014-2022 was mostly about training troops.

Et tu, Brute? You really need to try looking at things objectively, and asking if what you are repeatedly told by Ukraine, the EU and NATO in general is at all plausible. But that can be a bit of an uphill battle, eg-

https://euvsdisinfo.eu/report/merkel-admitted-that-the-minsk-agreements-were-a-ruse-to-rearm-ukrainian-armed-forces/

An official misinformation site, giving one interpretation.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/22/ffci-d22.html

According to former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Minsk agreement served to buy time to rearm Ukraine. “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time,” Merkel told the weekly Die Zeit. “It also used this time to become stronger, as you can see today.”

One site uses interpretations, the other uses quotes from Merkel to a German newspaper. Which do you think might be true? Of course 'buy time' and 'become stronger' could also be open to interpretation, but like you say, Ukraine used the time to send troops and officers off to get NATO-trained. Then there were all the weapons. Trump boasted that Biden sent blankets, whereas he during his first term sent missiles. But this also explains why peace won't be easy. The US instigated this conflict with Nuland and Pyatt happily talking about who was going to be Ukraine's new President and government, and how they'd fs'ck the EU. Which of course they've done, and as the late, unlamented Graham infamously said, without many (official) US casualties. But also why Russia isn't going to trust the US, EU or NATO as any kind of honest broker or neutral mediator. Russia isn't going to allow any Minsk-style 'ceasefire' and allow Ukraine breathing room to rebuild again.

...and that's 3 years after their big offensive failed, partly because they weren't able to coordinate large numbers of troops in single operations.

That's one way of looking at it. The other is lousy propaganda. The glorious Spring/Summer counter offensive that would have allowed selfies of triumphant NATO & EU leaders on Crimea's beaches was advertised further in advance than Doomsday. So gave Surovikin plenty of time to create layered defences and go 'Come at me bro!'. Which of course Ukraine did, and make it as far as Robotyne. Plus the disagreements between Zaluzhny, Sirsky and Zelensky. Zelensky wanted his PR victory, Zaluzhny urged caution and wanted more time to prepare, Sirksky was a yes-man and decided to split Ukraine's forces just for good measure. But also why Russia probably hasn't tried decapitation strikes. Why would they, when Zelensky is being so helpful? So Ukraine sacrificed an awful lot of blood and treasure on that failed offensive. Then for some bizarre reason decided to invade Russia. History shows that that is rarely a good idea, and Kursk wasted even more men and materiel for a very brief bit of positive PR. Then the reality set in.

Russia has the higher formation headquarters, and staff officers - but hasn't been able to come up with a tactical doctrine that would allow them to operate in large numbers without getting droned to buggery. So, rather like WWI, breaking through the front line just results in the line retreating a few hundred yards, and then reforming. After 2022, tactical and operational mobility only seems possible on bits of the front that are virtually undefended (like when Ukraine attacked into Kursk). This could be the new normal.

It's not the new normal, it's very much the old normal. Repeating the Charge of the Light Brigade and throwing yourself headlong into the Surovikin line isn't exactly smart. Neither was Kursk. It did briefly capture some potato fields, but at an enormous cost. It did draw some Russian forces away from other parts of the contact line, but only briefly. Plus understanding Russia's Constitution. It can't deploy conscripts or paramilitary formations outside Russia, unless war has ben declared. If Russia's invaded, well, then it can throw everything at it. Including inviting DPRK forces to come get blooded and experience.

And you haven't been keeping up with the reality on the ground at all. Russia has adapted. Their field officers have more autonomy, and this has always been kinda true, ie Soviet/Russian officers being expected to lead from the front. People get excited about senior officers being killed, but then Russia's staff officers are expected to lead from the field. And you don't seem to have noticed how Russia is using their DRG infiltrators to probe, develop and exploit weak spots, turning those into repeated cauldrons. Sirsky really helped Russia with those. Russia would leave an opening, because fully enveloped troops fight harder. They probably didn't expect Sirsky to keep filling the cauldrons with fresh meat, but then exploiting an opponent's mistakes is one of the basic lessons of warfare.

Re: False Flag?

The 3-day war meme, as far as I remember, comes from an article posted by one of the Russian papers - which got auto-published after 3 days and started with something like, "now the Kiev regime has fallen and the operation is over...' So the assumption was that it was a pre-written piece

Pre-written pieces, you say? Actual source here. Admittedly not the most reliable-

https://www.foxnews.com/us/gen-milley-says-kyiv-could-fall-within-72-hours-if-russia-decides-to-invade-ukraine-sources

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told lawmakers that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours if a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine takes place, multiple congressional sources tell Fox News.

Milley told lawmakers during closed-door briefings on Feb. 2 and 3 that a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine could result in the fall of Kyiv within 72-hours, and could come at a cost of 15,000 Ukrainian troop deaths and 4,000 Russian troop deaths.

Clear enough for you? Also a tad embarrassing for Milley, hence the desire to erase that memory and attribute the claim to Russia..

...given that the Russian infantry were under-strength, and the BTGs seem to have gone into combat all mounted in a lot of cases early in the war, and not dismounted and deployed when attacked. So it's possible they went in with lower numbers.

Yep. Not exactly what you'd expect from any 'full-scale military invasion'. More what you might expect, if they weren't really expecting to fight and there was a pause while the Istanbul peace talks progressed.

This still might not make them stupid, as the Ukraine number of 600k you give is after mobilisation - if this really was supposed to be a short operation, then they'd expect to face mostly the much smaller number of regulars. The only big city that fell at the start was Kherson, so the operation may have just been to fix-in-place the enemy while Kyiv was attacked from the raid on Hostomel airport. That and some small groups of troops in Kyiv kill the government, nobody fights for the "evil Nazi regime" - Russia imposes someone more friendly and leaves.

Ah, the retconning. So one of the first acts of the Kiev regime was Decree No. 303 on 17 March 2014, mobilising troops to deal with the civil war, which a surprising number of useful idiots believe didn't happen. Despite all the evidence, ie Donetsk International Airport didn't collapse on its own. The Odessa Trade Union building had video of people throwing petrol bombs and shooting that that building etc etc. Vice had some great videos documenting that, but most seems to have been memory holed now. But then as the situation deteriorated-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobilization_in_Ukraine

As part of the six waves of mobilization that took place in 2014–2015, 210 thousand people were called up for military service, every sixth of them was registered as a volunteer.

Whether they want to 'volunteer', or not. Then on 24 February 2022, Decree No. 64/2022 was introduced by Zelensky declaring a general mobilisation, martial law and making himself President for life. Well, he didn't exactly put that in the decree, it's just had that effect. His term expired years ago, and democracy is overrated anyway. But then you drift further into propaganda/conspiracy theories with Antonov Airport-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Antonov_Airport

In the time leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) obtained detailed information about Russian attack plans. CIA director William J. Burns travelled to Ukraine in January 2022, and informed the Ukrainian leadership that Russia intended to capture Antonov Airport for an airbridge, which would allow Russian forces to quickly move into Kyiv to "decapitate the government"

So Ukraine knew the Russians were (probably) coming, and could prepare. So the cunning plan was basically to repeat what the Soviets did with their Afghanistan invasion. Land troops at Kabul, seize it, reinforce it and call it good..

As a result, the airport only held a small garrison of 200–300 National Guard troops belonging to the 4th Rapid Reaction Brigade, as the remainder had been moved to the frontline in eastern Ukraine.

All eyes were supposed to have been on Russian troop buildups, not the Ukrainian mobilisations and buildups around the eastern frontline, where Ukraine was planning to re-occupy the Rhine.. I mean DPR, LPR and Donbas. But given Ukraine knew the invasion was imminent, it had time to prepare. Then the meme goes that helicopters could run the gauntlet of Ukraine's air defences and air force, land more troops at the airport. Then lightly armed and supplied paratroops could fight 10km through a densely populated city, across some bridges and then besiege Zelensky in his Presidential Palace.

Unlike Afghanistan, there's no evidence that Russia had assault troops loaded into multiple large transport aircraft, along with light vehicles to do a Kabul and seize and hold Kiev's government district. There may have been a plan to link up the road convoys pushing south into the city with the airport.. But those halted for some reason, right as the Istanbul peace talks were happening. Then Boris, then no peace, only fighting to the last Ukrainian.

So all the evidence points to a show of force that almost worked, not some bullshit 'unprovoked full-scale military invasion', because it very obviously wasn't. And Russia hasn't announced any general mobilisation, yet, but that would need an upgrade from an SMO, which nobody really wants.

Which apparently surprised the Ukrainians - most of who's forces were deployed around Donetsk and Luhansk - where the Russians didn't launch their major attack (as Ukraine expected) - which I guess is the other reason the Russians did it that way.

Again a show of force intended to draw Ukraine's forces away from Donetsk & Luhansk. Plus it'd be rather silly to try a frontal attack where Ukraine had massed their forces ready for their own invasion. Now of course it's different.

Re: False Flag?

No neo-orientalism here. I just happen to agree with Igor Girkin that the Russian army leadership are pisspoor at their jobs

Ah. That explains a lot. You believe the Girkin, the original 'little green man' who single handly (well, almost) captured Sloviansk? Then held it (well, a few buldings) until the UAF went WTF? and summarily evicted him. But a former oligarch's bodyguard who found a few dozen volunteers in Crimea, called them 'spetsnaz' and murdered people on his own initiative. Meanwhile, the actual Russian spetsnaz remained in Crimea, along with the marines and paras, wondering WTF Girkin was doing. He gave us quite a lot of propaganda value though.

They invaded on about 13 axes of advance, with less than 200,000 troops on a front of over 1,000km! That pretty much guaranteed a disaster!

That's just the Milley 3-day war meme, or the usual 'full scale military invasion' thing. So If you believe that, you believe that Russia seriously intended to capture and hold Kiev, a city of around 3m with a force of <50,000 vs Ukraine's 600k UAF, police and militias. Russians might be crazy, but they're not that crazy. But then there were the good'ol Institute for the Promotion of War maps showing big, red chunks of Ukraine that Russia captured in the first few days.

On the other hand, the tactical retreats from Kyiv, and later Kherson, were conducted brilliantly - retreating in the face of the enemy is bloody hard. Particularly in Kherson where the Ukrainians were on the offensive, and Russia had tens of thousands of men on the wrong side of a very wide river.

Which they'd bridged. It's almost as if they'd planned for this. It's almost as if they plan was a show of force to draw the UAF away from their planned operation to recapture the DPR, LPR and Crimea, which worked. So Kiev went 'Ok, Russia does have red lines, and currently they were our borders'. Red lines crossed, oh dear. So then came the Istanbul peace talks, a fairly reasonable settlement and prospects for peace after only a couple of weeks. But then Boris went to Kiev, promised Zelensky wads of cash if they fought Russia to the last Ukrainian, and the rest is history. Russia has retaken a lot of the territory it captured during their show of force, except this time, it looks like they're going to keep it.

But Russia is edging closer to the last two 'fortress cities' in the Donbas. They've captured New York, and they've almost captured.. Stinky. Then it'll be how much appetite for Ukraine Russia has, if it decides to partition it along the Dnipr, and if it decides to press on to Odessa, creating a land bridge to Transinistra and then offering the land back to Romania that they lost. Zelensky is being Zelensky and trying to convince the world that they're winning, and have the initiative, and also screaming for a ceasefire. Strange behaviour when you're winning, but Russia won't agree and allow Ukraine any breathing space to rearm and reconstitute.

...which showed that Ukraine's staff-work sucks, which makes sense given how ad hoc Ukraine's war effort is.

Not ad hoc at all. They had a lot of old-guard Soviet officers. Then from 2014 to 2022 were trained in the best NATO doctrine. Then TSHTF, and a succession of UAF commanders pointing out that the NATO combined arms doctrine wasn't really working, because Russia was cheating and not entirely following the old Soviet manuals. But there are rumors that Surovkin might be coming back to lead Russia's Southern offensive. Ukraine may have done something sensible by removing Sirsky and replacing him with Drapatyi. So an old Soviet-style commander who demanded the UAF hold territory at any cost, despite that cost being horrific. Those may have been Zelensky's orders though, but Drapaty is apparently more a believer in elastic defence, which Ukraine really needs, but it may be too little, too late given Ukraine is rapidly running out of manpower.

The only areas that I can think of that Russia are still around technological parity with NATO would be submarines and drone warfare (once they get over their reliance on Starlink).

You keep saying that as if you believe it's true. Why would Russia be reliant on Starlink when it's a US system and fundamentally insecure? But an area where Russia has exceeded NATO is with missiles and drones. And perhaps better propaganda, which in the West means expecting people to believe in unbelievable things, eg-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy8mk59l5jzo

The attack - which officials said had killed eight people - comes after Zelensky met US President Donald Trump in Washington DC this week to urge the US to grant Ukraine a licence to produce Patriot interceptor missiles.

Moar money! Moar Weapons! So far, so Zelensky. But if it bleeds, it ledes..

Their other children - Zakhar, Dominika, Viorika, Federica, and a grandson Artem - are also still missing after Russia launched more than 70 missiles and over 280 drones overnight.

Tragic, but also tragic that these deaths are ruthlessly exploited to push a narrative that Russia deliberately targets civilians. If that were true, then 8 deaths for 350 missiles and drones is remarkably low, especially when the US & Israel kill far more civilians with their strikes.

and I get the idea that Russia is still fielding mostly old EW kit, which is still good, but less effective than modern software defined radio based kit.

Yep, those orcs with shovels and recycled washing machines. But there's been videos from Russia showing how troops operate drones (they don't use Starlink) and how they do use Starlink, ie watching pron or YT. And do you really believe Russia can't make software-defined radios when they can make mobile phones, and it's a genie that's been out of the bottle for over 3 decades now. Plus if they can't make their own chips, they can just buy systems from China.

But reality will be on the ground in captured kit and ELINT. But Russia has been rapidly innovating, adapting and churning out new stuff..

They also started the war with lots of specialist capabilities like military engineering and mine warfare, which I suspect have taken a lot of damage, and will be hard to reconstitute afterwards.

Another way of looking at that is they have a lot of veterans and experience fighting the best that Ukraine and NATO can throw at them. Which has shown up in changes Russia has been making, eg embedding missile & drone units with infantry to shorten the kill chain. Or giving field officers more autonomy. Or embedding spetsnaz and other special forces with regular infantry to upskill those. Or shifting from attempts at mechanised assaults to their DRGs.. Small groups of infiltrators sneaking into Ukrainian positions, often one or two at a time to set up OPPs and collect intelligence ahead of assaults. They're not the Cold War Russia, or a NATO force that became complacent after only fighting insurgents for years.

Re: False Flag?

Losing access to Starlink hurt them a lot - from stuff I've read it's been suggested that a sudden stop on Telegram would also do major damage to their military comms - which they've never managed to get fully working in Ukraine.

citation needed Ukraine was generous in supplying Russia with Starlink, but it's importance may have been overrated, as would Telegram. Given neither are secure and could be assumed compromised, I very much doubt they'd be part of C3I. Especially as Starlink terminals happily transmit their locations, which is an obvious risk, if that data can be intercepted.

But there's also the typical neo-Orientalism and assumption that Russians are ignorant 'orcs'. Not a nation who's rapidly developed and fielded Starlink competitors and other EWAR systems, has arguably better radars than us.. And other operators are available. So China's got Qianfan and Guoawang as Starlink competitors, plus Russia's been busy with Rassvet and Sfera. And I think Rassvet had another launch last week. I don't think either Russia or China's constellations are complete yet, but they're getting there.

Plus following on from the outbreak of Ukraine's civil war, Russia has been launching classified stuff which may or may not include ELINT that's been used to detect and target Ukrainian mobile phone carriers. Or they might just be buying that data from commercial operators. But Russia told their troops not to take unauthorised devices onto the battlefield, because carrying easily detected radio beacons is obviously a bad idea. They've also got drones with variations on Stingray that are being used to detect and target Ukrainian mobiles.

So it's a dangerous assumption that Russia is technologically inferior. Ukraine will have captured Russian comms kit, so they, and their allies will have a good idea what they are actually using.

Re: Better Not Drink Any Tea, and He Should Stay Away From Windows...

Putin tends to get a bit edgy, when people flip him off.

Not just Putin-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Monaco_bombing#

But must be interesting being Durov. EU wants him to give them access to Telegram, or block all the things. Now Russia's turned anti-Telegram as well. Meanwhile, it isn't just Russia and Ukraine using and abusing useful idiots to do illegal things.

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Re: Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director

This is something that is designed and calculated to further hobble NOAA from the administrations climate-denying circle-jerk that begin by taking a chainsaw to the agency. This is how you destroy an agency, you kill off the institutional knowledge with indiscriminate firings and policies that lay waste to morale, and then you take its tools away so it is no longer self-reliant.

That's Democrat view of the world. Spend, Spend, Spend! It's other people's money, but if that runs out, just print some more! Or course the DNC is pretty much broke at the moment ,and the mid-terms are coming up.

Alternatively, You look at how many agencies there are, and how much duplication exists. Do both NASA and NOAA need to have supercomputers to run Earth climate models, or perhaps NASA should focus on space, and NOAA on terrestrial matters? Then there's the EPA and all the other climate-pork that was swirling around. Plus a perk of being the President is every new administration gets to set policy. So Obama decide NASA should be navel-gazing and duplicate NOAA's work, Biden decided he'd prefer chocolate ice cream and left spending decisions to his auto-pen. Which gave Americans the ironically named 'Inflation Reduction Act' and billions in Green pork.

But then along comes the Trump and a desire to trim the fat off a lot of government pork. If you've been suckling on that pork, this is obviously bad news. Might not be able to go on as many all-expenses paid jollies to the COP shindigs and all the other climate cons. Budgets get trimmed, agencies are expected to be a lot more focused and efficient.

What, the cloud contract expressly prevents running climate models, and the Cray is gone??

That would just prove the point and Peter Principle. Cloud contract. Why would any highly paid genius-level NOAA exec agree to that, when elements of climate modelling are core business for NOAA? And yes, the supplier will probably try to screw them on costs, but again. Contracts. If it's a 5 or 10yr deal, it's business 101 to have some price/cost certainty over the duration of the contract. If NOAA execs running what are essentially multi-billion dollar businesses don't understand this, then they shouldn't be in the job and should go work for the DNC instead.

Re: I suppose it has nothing to do with ...

Your own a site where people have more intelligence than your typical TikTok targets.

Err.. Is English your first language? Any idea why the Met Office would round up a temperature measurement to fake a record? Of course if you rely on getting your 'news' from a site barely above the level of TikTok, you wouldn't know this, the Bbc would just scream 'extreme weather!' and a new all-time (which is not very long in a climate sense) record. You wouldn't know the recorded reading was 37.7°C, not 38°C and because of the lousy choice of location, that should also be 37.7°C +/-5°C

I know this, because I don't rely on fake news and misinformation sites..

Trump (moron) hates NASA and NOAA climate data that appears to show climate change - change that he says is a hoax (moron).

I'll just leave this here-

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/30/met-office-say-class-5-lingwood-meets-international-standards/

Lingwood’s original reading was 37.7C, meaning that the Met Office cannot legitimately claim the temperature in the surrounding area was more than 32.7C.

They then inexplicably tell us they have decided to round it up to 38C.

Temperature records manufactured in someone's back garden heat trap. The other mistake you, and many other people make is a lot of what you think of as 'climate data' aren't empirical observations, but manufactured inside climate models. Which is why I keep mentioning RCP8.5 because that's the source of most of the 'extreme climate' nonscience and being officially implausible, as now been withdrawn. So stuff generated based on RCP8.5 emission scenarios should also be withdrawn.

Re: I suppose it has nothing to do with ...

But NOAA is Oceans and Atmosphere - nothing to do with weather.

Well it does run the US National Weather Service. But from the article-

...better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days.

It's rather hard to warn about things that aren't happening, and aren't predicted to happen. Well, some were predicted, but with the slow death of RCP8.5, those predictions are being falsified. Well, for science anyway. For climate 'science', the Chicken Littles are still screaming-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy5dw4plzvlo

How the UK's extreme heat is shifting the conversation about air-con.

By two of the Bbc's climate extremists, who aren't climate scientists, but are easily fooled by people pretending to be. But a lot of people get fooled-

Across the UK, solid brick homes like theirs quietly absorb heat the way they have for decades. Charged‑up walls radiate warmth back into rooms that never get the chance to cool...

...Climate change is serious, he wrote, but "will not lead to humanity's demise". Governments, he added, should be investing in cooling for the countries that need it.

I wish the doom-ongers would make their minds up. First they tell us they want lotsa money to Insulate Britain. So

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/great-british-insulation-scheme-release-may-2026/summary-of-the-great-british-insulation-scheme-may-2026

The most common measure so far has been cavity wall insulation, accounting for 51,400 (37%) of the total 139,200 measures. This was followed by loft insulation which accounted for 39,500 measures (28%) and heating controls which accounted for 35,000 measures (25%)

The UK now has some better insulated homes. Rejoice! Except of course this creates problems during Summer. But such is politics.

Meanwhile, back in the US. Some of NOAA's excesses have been trimmed, and some aspects have been improved, ie their weather stations have been fixed following a citizen-lead inspection pointing out that many of those stations were improperly sited per WMO guidelines. The UK hasn't gotten to that point yet, despite most of the Met Office sites being junk. But NOAA still does science, eg an interesting paper I read some years ago about this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossby_wave

Rossby waves, also known as planetary waves, are a type of inertial wave naturally occurring in rotating fluids.

Which have a big impact on US weather (and OK, climate) what with the US having an ocean on either side and a couple of mountain ranges in the middle that perturb those waves and lead to things like America's Tornado Alley(s). Which is both FUN! and important. So Moore's Law means CFD can be done better at near-continental scale and tornados tend to be rather hazardous. Whether offloading this to Google will result in better or worse forecasting is anybodies guess. As will the financial impact.

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

Re: Only available for Single-Dwelling Structures

The point here is that there is some kind of performance criteria or contract stipulation for them to make fibre available for a certain number of premises... They have decided that the time required to figure out what is needed for an MDU degrades their time-per-dwelling performance statistics, so they are treating anyone living in an MDU as a second-class citizen just so their directors can get their bonuses.

Ofcom regulates and with government, has decided on a bunch of metrics because broadband for all! So then a bunch of stats that are open to manipulation, and like a lot of politics, it's easy to announce things. Funding them is a tad more challenging.

But directors bonuses are one of those MDU things. So property developer builds a bunch of 'luxury' apartments that include super fast fibre broadband! All for only £100 a month more, and as it's tacked onto apartment 'owners' rents.. I mean service charges, it can be a nice lil earner. Especially when their renters.. I mean owners can't opt out of that element of their charge. And even more so when the super fast broadband is actually just apartments wired back to a cheap switch in the basement and a single upstream connection. But it's luxury to have a shared, contended connection with some WiFi that everyone can share! And not at all a security risk for anyone WFH.

Which is all part of the joy of MDUs. Also my bit of that where it could be a major PITA when trying to get services into shared offices and the building owner/manager didn't want to lose their cash cow. And most of that isn't any technical thing, but very much a wayleave and sometimes Party Wall problem. Which is what Openreach's New Build team try to address because it's easier to cheaper to plonk an ODF in a basement ready to serve any renter/owner who might want service from an Openreach customer while the building work is being done than try and do it later.

Most of that can be done with desktop surveys, then site surveys, method statements, SoW etc, if the project progresses. Which if there are costs involved, developers might not want to pay. BT won't want to pay them either because an ODF doesn't generate any revenues to pay the costs.But planners have checklists of things developer would need to provide. Risers are good. But that includes wayleaves, and another FUN! aspect of telecomms is that some developers or land owners want to charge for those wayleaves, in which case BT would probably say 'No' because then it means a cost, and still no revenue. There are some potential work-arounds, like invoking Code Powers, but those are kind of a nuclear option and involve legal costs.

BT, via Zen, have upped the cost of that unwanted voice line to £29/month ex-VAT, with the G.Fast price on top at £40/month. We were paying for a voice service whilst BT-Openreach couldn't provide an alternative. We've been punished by BT-Openreach with punitive fees for voice (unwanted) owing to their flaky roll-out of full fibre.

Nope, Zen's decided to bundle a service that includes VoIP, whether you want it or not. Other ISPs will sell you a data-only service but probably also try to push you to bundle voice as well. Openreach doesn't do retail, only tightly regulated and defined offers that are then available to all SP's that want to use Openreach. Openreach's customers (including BT Retail, Business & Wholesale, Zen etc) will then create their own packages based on Openreach services.

Which understandably confuses people who aren't trade and use to the way regulated providers have to operate. Which also leads to some oddities, like the standard old Huawei FTTP NID having a battery and POTS port included linked to a separate VLAN, with the idea that that could be used by Openreach (or other telco) customers to provide a voice service with some degree of resilience. But even though this was a GoodThing(tm), most SPs prefer to do VoIP via their router, which generally doesn't have any battery. So power goes out, so does your VoIP service.

But that's regulation for you. So back in the early days and OTT operators flogging VoIP, people died because their phones stopped working, or they couldn't be located. Not good, when voice is a safety-of-life thing. So then regulators started regulating and mandating things like battery backup so dying gasps to emergency services could be made, and customer's located. So we, as industry developed services that could do this. But (I)SPs glued to routers decided that including enough battery to power a router was too expensive, and just printing a warning to their customers was much cheaper.

Maybe the way to get a survey is to let them go ahead to attempt an install and fail.

Challenge is if they already know the DP is cabled via the rear and presented at the front. So no avoiding corners until we start building homes with fibre-friendly rounded corners. Then just bypassing the standard sales processes and scripts. If fibre could be routed via a cellar or attic, that may avoid having to deal with a different DP. I think I'd go with the disabled customer and denial of service route. BT doesn't like bad publicity and it must have internal processes for this situation because rear-entries aren't that uncommon.

Openreach don't help themselves when they advertise FTTP as ideal for "Larger families and shared homes, Streaming 4K TV, Connecting 100+ devices, Flawless online gaming, Crystal clear video calls, Reliable home working, Digital phone lines", absolutely none of which is useful or of interest for my 80-year-old Mum-in-law

That isn't what Openreach does, this is-

https://www.openreach.com/building-developers-and-projects/fibre-for-developers

So they have a process for developers & new-builds. Then confuses the issue a bit by mentioning residents as well, who Openreach don't sell to.

I want to get a survey done suggesting the best way of overcoming problems. Openreach won't do that either, even if I offer to pay for a call-out.

I suspect that's the good'ol structural separation problem. You, as a mere mortal can't speak to Openreach, You talk to BT Retail or Business and they can mostly only talk to their order system. And a pox on modern business can be a refusal to add a notes field to signal that a job is a little more complex than the assumed standard install. BT Business has more options, so might be worth exploring that route. Their FTTP costs a bit more, but they can manage more complex installs with possible excess construction charges. The Retail offers assume a standard amount of hours & consumables for OSP/ISP (Outside/Inside Plant) & then you hit the 'computer says No' problem.

But standard installs assume a delivery to the existing PSTN master socket, and we, as mere mortals aren't supposed to touch that. So one option can be to order a move of the existing master socket to somewhere more convenient for both you, and BT.. Which can be a general gotcha given FTTP will run fibre to existing master socket, then needs space for a 9x10" wall unit that holds the NID & a battery, then it's Ethernet to the router that'll need to go <somewhere>. But the order notes should have a pre-installation checklist informing customers of that, but often ignored and installs aborted because there isn't a dedicated power socket 1.5m from the ODP, or space for the wall unit. Which was a common problem with business installs, despite telling customers what they needed to do, and because we'd get charged for an abandoned visit if they didn't listen..

But that's pretty much how I got my FTTP. Existing Master was on a wall in the lounge, and not the basement where I wanted it and had a UPS & comms/server rack where I wanted it. So ordered a move of the Master, then the FTTP order, and all was well.

I work from home because of a medical condition. I need a broadband service to work.

That's another option. You have a medical need for a working BT service, you are concerned about the great POTS switch-off, so you need fibre, and BT wouldn't be discriminating against the disabled now, would it? That might be enough pressure to get your order moved from being a standard order in the system to one where an actual human planner/job controller will look at it.

British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes

Re: So that's the platform

It's based off an Elbit drone design but goodness knows how much it varied from that.

Probably quite a lot given the speed which drones are evolving. But the French should be a bit more trustworthy. On which point, they snapped up Racal Research who I did some work with many moons ago, and think moved that from Reading to France. They were fun. We need a thing, and a week later, said thing arrived and did what we wanted.

But IMHO, there's the two aspects to droning. Have a basic airframe that's cheap, easy to manufacture, transport and assemble with an autopilot so it can loiter somewhere. Then hopefully a mission/payload bay that's easy to configure with whatever new technology comes along. Something that struck me about drone evolution is how quickly they've gone from 720p to 4k cameras. Or back in the day, thermal cameras used to be big, power hungry and sometimes needed cooling to cameras on small DJI-style quadcopters that provide good image quality, and negate a lot of camouflage.. Plus being compact & cheap enough that law enforcement can keep them in the back of a vehicle & catch criminals, without needing to summon a helicopter.

Re: So that's the platform

The drone is the simple bit even if last time MOD managed to cock up buying an off the shelf one from Elbit.

That would be the Elbit headquartered in Haifia, Israel? So both a supply-chain risk being in range of Iran, and a security risk?

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Re: 2 separate problems

Cheap alcohol in supermarkets has definitely been a factor, as you can buy a basic beer for well under 2 quid, whereas if you're lucky, in anything other than a Spoons beer will be 3-4 quid a pint absolute minimum and 5 pounds plus in city centres. Although if you're looking at nicer beer, the difference between the supermarket and a pub narrows more quickly.

I think there have been many factors. So price is obviously one, and technology another. Figured I'd do a quick check of Sainsbury's prices, but their website appears to be borked right now. It did show a promo of 2 for £23 on multi-packs of beer, but not the brands. But figuring 'pack' is a minimum of 4, then £2.83 a pint, ish, thanks to going metric, ish. And beer can be summoned with a click. I'm guessing the bogof deal is to offload surplus Sainsburys ordered for the recent over-hyped sporting thing. On which point, I guess the slow death of the pub has also lead to the slow death of 5-aside pub leagues.

But then we had the smoking ban. No longer could we enjoy a pint of duty and a tax stick. Nanny said 'No!'. Then Nanny said we must socially distance because of the Panicdemic. Then Nanny said 'let them eat wind, and sun!' and pubs energy costs rocketed. And there was the minimum wage. UK doesn't have the US tipping culture, despite some pub chains desperately trying to introduce that here. And then rates, and all the paperwork that goes with running a pub. Falling demand, fast rising overheads and regulatory burden and running a pub is an increasingly expensive proposition, even for brewery's sales outlets. Alas poor Brew Dog, your watering holes will be missed by some, but not by me.

Society does lose something when there aren't suitable melting points for the community and friends to gather together. It doesn't have to be a pub, but often that's one of the few suitable places, especially after 5pm.

Not sure there's as much social benefit as there used to be given the way society has shifted. I'm rarely in a pub now, but when I am, it's depressing to see groups of friends all glued to their phones. The pub I used to go to to work on my bridge hustling skills closed, so now a bunch of us just meet up at our homes to drink, snack and play cards. Society has moved on, perhaps not for the better and Burnham's proposals are too little, too late. The damage has already been done. Taxing companies like Amazon, who've also helped destroy the high street might get some cash, but probably not much given the loopholes the e-commerce giants exploit are international, not domestic.

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

How much would a war with Russia or China cost, because we have demonstrated ourselves to be too chicken to avoid messing with? 1938 is asking.

Pretty much everything. Russia would be a bit easier because of the border with the EU, but the EU's cupboards are rather bare after donating a lot of kit and supplies to Ukraine. China? Well, NATO would have to pretty much sit that one out because it's rather far from the EU. Or there's Iran. People probably told Trump they'd be a pushover. Quick decapitation, the Iranians would rise up using the weapons supplied and it'd be another regime change. Yet that didn't happen, and millions turned out for the Ayatollah's funeral. So far, Iran's cost the US a lot of their missile reserves, and drained air defence stockpiles as Iran struck back against US interests in the region. And the US doesn't seem to know what to do next, other than threats, posturing and more bombing. If Iran attacks a ship, Trump announced he'll hit a bridge or power station. Nice of Trump to pre-announce war crimes.

Ukraine was meant to extend and collapse Russia, with a side of driving a massive wedge between the EU & Russia because the EU had already overtaken US GDP, and closer ties would have further challenged US hegemony. As Ass.Sec Nuland famously said when she & Pyatt were selecting who'd run Ukraine, 'Fsck the EU!', and she did. The EU sanctioned itself and cut itself off from one of its biggest trading partners, and is now much, much weaker. Picking a fight with China would just accelerate the collapse given our dependency on China's manufacturing.

And of course both China and Russia can hit back and strike EU and US capitals. MAD kinda working to prevent mad men (and women) doing something really stupid. Except MAD's also failing because it's showing the world that to prevent regime changes, having your own nuclear weapons might be the only deterrent against the forces of 'international rules-based order' and their bombing campaigns.

Besides, Ukraine is at the moment hardly losing and we wasted much, much, more in Afghanistan, throwing good money after bad. Every Russian tank going up in smoke is one less to deal with in Lithuania or Poland, making future European NATO defense expenditures less demanding.

Many problems with that. Firstly Ukraine lost pretty much the moment Russia crossed the border in 2022 and demonstrated that it really did have red lines. Ukraine is now 20% smaller, and shrinking by the day. Around 50% of Ukraine's population has either fled or been killed. One of the most disgusting things that's happened recently is the EU announcing it will no longer accept Ukrainian refugees, and might start sending 'draft dodgers' back to be used as cannon fodder. So a combination of an economic & demographic bomb was dropped on Ukraine by Johnson et al when we persuaded Ukraine to fight to the last Ukrainian rather than signing the Istanbul agreement. Ukraine's lost most of their industrial heartlands, mineral resource, and an ever increasing amount of their agricultural production. And this is what winning looks like-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj637zd1k1ko

At least 15 people have been killed in Russian attacks on Ukraine, including 10 dead in ballistic missile strikes on an exhibition near Kyiv showcasing drone technology...

...This is at least the third time since Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 that an exhibition of this kind has been hit.

There has been widespread outrage that a public event of this kind was being held at all and had, apparently, been widely advertised.

Missiles > drones, and why did Ukraine do this, especially after Russian missiles previously gatecrashed two previous DronExpos? And as for tanks, although Russia is still busily producing far more new tanks and IFVs than the rest of Europe can manage.. They're not being seen on the battlefield very much. Drones make those rather vulnerable, but raises the question what Russia is planning to do with all the new tanks its been producing? Maybe those will be used once Russia's broken through Ukraine's 'fortress belt' and drive the UAF back to west of the Dnipr, or maybe it'll carry on attriting Ukraine's busified conscripts in a slow, brutal grind.

But EU defence is very much more demanding. Rutte's demanding 5% of GDP so he can help do for the EU economy what he did for the Dutch. But the Russians are coming! The Russians are coming! Please give generously, our shareholders need you!. Except apparently Ukraine is winning. Schrödinger's Russia is simultaneously the second strongest army in Ukraine, and poised to capture Paris. How can both claims be true? Or perhaps it's what our 'leaders' want. Ukraine certainly does, with 'Russian' drones mysteriously ending up in places like Poland. So keep provoking & escalating, then maybe Russia will retaliate, then we can invoke Article 5 and start bombing Moscow.

Except then Russia goes nuclear, and many of us die.

FWIW, I don't think Crimea is worth insisting on getting back either, if I were Ukrainian I'd use it as sweetener to get back to 2022 borders. That's partially due to direct military cost of trying to get it back. But the bigger question is what do you do with the people living there when you get it back? Many pro-Ukrainians probably left the area and Ukraine would be left pacifying a restive civilian population which had pretty big Russian roots before 2014 already.

Crimea was one of the prizes though. Quick lick of paint and the Black Sea Fleet becomes a new NATO base. Exploiting that might have meant cancelling the Montreux Convention, but most of the original signatories are now EU members, and Turkiye can be leaned on. But Kiev has already decided what to do with the Crimeans. They're traitors and collaborators and will be dealt with accordingly. The Banderites have plenty of form for this, but that's one of the reasons Ukraine's civil war started, then escalated. But over 1m Ukrainians fled the civil war to Russia, some of whom have since returned, volunteered for the DPR & LPR forces and are fighting for their homeland.

Which is something the MSM reporting glosses over. This is still very much a civil war. The big question is how much of the previously pro-Russian Ukraine will end up assimilated into the Russian Federation. Voting patterns pre-SMO shows that could be pretty much everything east of the Dnipr, which would also be a natural partition. Plus Odesssa to create a land bridge to Transinistra and a lot of Odessans are pro-Russia. Then Ukraine moves the capital back to Lviv, and hopes Poland, Hungary and Romania don't absorb the rump state. Russia almost certainly wouldn't want western Ukraine because that's Banderite central.

One useful thing we ought to be doing is trying to give Mr Putin a climb-down position whereby he can get out of the war in return for something, possibly including a safe retirement for him personally. The problem at the moment is that the situation is rapidly heading towards economic collapse in Russia and "Let's all try kill Mr Putin".

Well, we may have tried to kill Putin already. That phone call with Trump. Stay by your phone, we'll call you back.. and then a drone strike. If true, gets a lil harder to negotiate after that. But the problem with you, and others like you is the fixation on Putin. So ok, we kill him, or force a coup in Russia. You may find this hard to believe, but Putin is actually quite moderate, and has been urging restraint when other Russian politicians have been calling for the gloves to come off, and to finish Ukraine.

So we manage to remove Putin. Then imagine the surprise when he's replaced by a hardliner who thinks that Ukraine would look a lot better after a few tactical nukes had been used. Especially if those hardliners know we had a hand in removing Putin. They may not really care, and just want the top job but it'd sell a bit of a tactical glassing to the Russian people, Or the Russian Federation may implode into civil war and a bunch of warlords with strategic and tactical nuclear weapons.

But we got Putin, so.. Yey? Winning wars is generally a whole lot easier than winning the peace..

Which Russia has been doing since Putin has been in charge.

Hmm. Let me think for a moment, and not put my thoughts into chronological order. So-

Yugoslavia. Not there any more, except on old maps and atlases. The proto-Russia that got broken up and asset stripped.

Libya. Gaddafi was mad, bad and a threat to western civilisation. So a quick spot of regime change and bombing and now it's a great place to buy slaves and weapons.

Syria. Assad was mad, bad and a threat to western civilisation. So another regime change, a lot of bombing and the curious sight of an AQ terrorist in the White House not full of bullet holes. A suit and a beard trim rehabilitates I guess.

Iraq. Saddam, so mad & bad that we bombed the snot out of Iraq twice. Not exactly peaceful and democratic now, because..

Iran. The Ayatollah was mad, bad and so we bombed him. And his family for good measure. The hoped for revolution wasn't terrorised, so Iran is being bombed some more until it does what it's told and we can grab the oil. Oh, Libya, Iraq and Syria also had oil..

Venezuela. That was only bombed a little bit, but we did kidnap their President. International rules based order & all that. Oh, also oil.

If you discount oil, then assets means recovering stolen toilets and washing machines from Ukraine right?

Why discount oil? Kallas tried that. Thou shall not pay more than $44 because the EU says so! And if you do, your tankers will be hijacked, or perhaps sunk. But Russia has lots of oil & gas, and now thanks to the US, the price is back up to over $100, making both US and Russia's oil exports more profitable. Slight snag, it also makes Europe's oil & gas all the more expensive, driving inflation and deindustrialisation. Plus winter is coming, and it's usually the time of year to build up stocks ready for the winter heating season. Also a bit of a problem for the US given they've been busy draining their SPR to try and reduce the inflation they've created in the Gulf and elsewhere.

But Ukraine's seized a few golden toilets from their corrupt officials. A lot from Zelensky's Kvartal cronies. Washing machines? Well, von der Leyen told us those we all being recycled and turned into missiles. Or there's all the other stuff that Russia has in copious quantities. Fertiliser, food, titanium, iron, manganese, 'rare' earths, uranium and more. It's so unfair that Russia is so rich in resources that we want and should rightfully belong to our oligarchs and political donors, not Russia.

Russia has spent enough money on weapons to spend more than four years invading and attacking Ukraine if we don't count Crimea and 14 if we do

Funny thing is Russia's spending around $200bn a year. Pete Hegseth was getting grilled yesterday because he wants a $1.5tn defence budget. The EU's GDP is around $20tn and apparently we're supposed to spend 5% of that on defence contractors because the Russians are coming! Oh, and we've given around $400bn to Ukraine, but don't ask for receipts. War is quite the racket, isn't it?

But Russia has been content to grind down Ukraine, and by proxy, the EU and US. How long they can sustain this for is anybody's guess, but there are signs that Russia may be running out of patience. Rubio met Lavrov yesterday for all of 30 minutes. Speculation is Rubio asked Lavrov for Russia to stop helping Iran, and Lavrov's response was probably along the lines of 'sure, once you stop helping Ukraine'. Oh, and Putin talked about expanded buffer zones, so seizing more of Ukraine. And there are rumors that Surovikin (aka General Armageddon) will be brought back to lead Russia's Army Group South to take Zaporizhzhia and then probably Odessa.

But we'll have a bunch of new weapons by 2030, or perhaps later, if those projects slip. I doubt Ukraine will be able to hold out for that long.

As usual, so much projectionism from pro Russia handles.

As usual, so much projection and wishful thinking from a nafo-bot. Who are often very child-like in their naivety, optimism bias, and not realising that actions have consequences.. Just cast your mind back to 2022 when Ursula & Co announced their 'schlock and awe' sanctions that would bring the EU.. I mean Russia to its knees.. Yet we're on the 22nd or 23rd round of sanctions now, and Russia isn't kneeling. Which our 'leaders' should have known. Russia seems done with our attempts at diplomacy, which is too bad for Ukraine.

I think it's disingenuous to say 'determined to go to war'. That particular comment would be..

.. High pressure sales tactics from Blackrock?

https://www.politico.eu/article/we-must-be-ready-to-fight-germany-army-chief-christian-freuding-warns-of-rising-russia-threat/

BERLIN — Germany must prepare for a Russian attack by 2029 or even earlier, the head of the German army told POLITICO.

"We have to be prepared ... We must be ready to fight," Lt. Gen. Christian Freuding, Germany’s army chief, said at the ILA aerospace show in Berlin.

He said that there is broad allied consensus that Russia could attack NATO territory before the end of the decade.

It could attack NATO territory tomorrow and start destroying weapons manufacturing sites, or logistics and intelligence locations that are helping Ukraine. It won't though, because then WW3. But there's a bt of a spat going on in Iran at the moment because there was a consensus that Iran could attack the US or Israel. So our 'leaders' doctrine of pre-emptive self-defence that gets used to justify regime changes, kidnapping, assassinations, or just bombing the snot out of any country that dares disagree with us. Plus comments from 'leaders' like Kallas who call for the break-up of the Russian Federation so we can asset strip it.

Or after decades of defence cuts, it's time we started spending again and Russia is the convenient reason to divert money from social spending to anti-social weapons development. But a lot of money to be made, if you've got investments in the right defence companies.

...wherever the money comes from, shouldn't it be spent on drones now?

I don't think so. Drones get all the hype, but aircraft are still very useful. But depends on the drone, so the loyal wingman is a bit of both fighter and drone. But if you look at Ukraine, fighters (or multi-role aircraft) are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Drones are kind of a sniper replacement with the small drones carrying anything from a few grams to a few kilos and good against individual targets or vehicles. But Russia's using aircraft to drop a lot of FAB-500/1500/3000 dumb bombs, or those bombs fitted with glide kits. Drone can fly into a window and hit a soldier, FAB-1500 just drops the building.

So then a counter to that, and Ukraine recently shot down an Su-35. But that took apparently 3x F-16's and a Patriot in what Gen.Caine described as a 'SAMbush'. But a lot of assets to hit a single aircraft, and Russia usually has fighter escorts for their bomb trucks, risking the F-16s. And there's a rumour the Patriot battery might have been hit once that unmasked. But an engagement where Tempest + wingmen could help, ie using their radars, electronic warfare and weapon systems to gain air superiority and prevent Russia or another opponent from bombing.

Or the way Ukraine is using their F-16s to shoot down drones and missiles. 4x Tempest each with say, 2 wingmen should mean they can hit quite a few, especially if they can intercept hypersonic missiles. Which could be rather important given our 'leaders' seeming determination to go to war with Russia around 2030. But then it would be whether Tempest can shoot down RS-28 Sarmats or nuclear tipped Oreshniks heading for London, or other European capitals.

But I think it's one of those min-max things. Tempest is probably overkill for our usual NATO seal-clubbing operations, where our opponents don't have much of an air force, or air defences. So then it'd be capacity to put warheads on foreheads in a ground attack role. Wingmen then act as payload extenders & the pilot can stay stealthy and hopefully safe. But we're seeing how a peer- or near-peer level conflict goes, and although drones are playing a big role in that, they can only do so much.

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

Re: Mind that big gaping hole in the middle

It's not just the missiles, the interceptor also needs (probably multiple) radar units..

.. and unless they're passive, runs the risk of the radars being detected by decoys and electronic warfare drones mixed in with a swam, and then the interception battery being destroyed.

Re: Mind that big gaping hole in the middle

The nifty little UA antidrone drones don’t defend their launchers they defend passage corridors, so they need more range.

They need all the physics, range, speed, endurance, payload. The more corridor they're expected to patrol, the harder that becomes. Both sides have been using loitering drones that park up to conserve battery and wait for targets. If they're flying, they drain the batteries. Bigger the drone, faster the drain.

I’m curious what UA will cook up in the ABM space.

Probably very little given much UA tech is actually Western tech, and Russia has been actively hunting actual & potential drone and missile assembly facilities. And with Ukraine being out of interceptors, that situation is getting worse.

Think about it: a ballistic missile needs to be big enough to fly 500-1000+ km with a heavy payload. That’s not small or cheap. Meanwhile an interceptor missile defending a high value location could theoretically fly up 2km, hit an insufficiently-evasive IRBM and do its job by destroying its explosives and fuses. Shorter range => could be a lot smaller and cheaper.

Ballistic missiles don't have to be that large or have that long a range, ie they just have to outrange the defenders ability to strike launchers on the ground. So systems like 300mm Tornado-S have a range of 1-200km and fly faster than this gun can engage. So do the Geran-4 jet variants. Quadcopter-style drones can't really fly fast enough to intercept those either. Then it's a gamble that IRBMs could be destroyed by small missiles given they're essentially armored by their fragmenting casings, and fuzing might be top & tail. Might hit a fuze in the nose, probably won't penetrate through to the tail. They might damage guidance systems, but if it's a ballistic missile, it'll follow a ballistic path and land somewhere near the intended target anyway.

It's a rather wicked problem.

So I think best use of systems like this is protecting forward bases or convoy escorts, so rather like Russia's Pantsir or own version of this system with aim-assist on trucks to deal with Ukraine's small drones. Or just use it as an anti-infantry system to automagically defend sectors against DRG infiltrators. Shades of Skynet, but lots of money to be made.

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

Re: Artemis schedule is political nonsense

So you mean that 2 years before an actual moon mission the status is that there is no idea if the rocket is able to lift off from the platform and they are focusing on detecting the failure modes prior to launch to collect some data?

Usually the data collection phase is 5-10+ years before the actual product materialises..

They're partially there. So 4/33 engines failed causing an automatic abort and scrub. So that bit worked, ie data collected detected the lack of ignition, which was presumably due to a lack of fuel, otherwise they'd have lit.. Except maybe there was something wrong with the fuel flow, so might have meant too much or too little thrust from those 4 engines and a UED. So then figuring out what exactly went wrong (other than being flight 13) and fixing it.

Hopefully.

But the abort meant defuelling everything, de-stacking and hauling bits back to be inspected, replaced and trying again. But AFAIK for the Moon mission, there needs to be a pretty rapid launch schedule of fuel tanker rockets, transferring that and then fueling the Starship that'll head to the Moon.. Where failure may not be an option, or an option that can be addressed by having some spare Starships ready to replace any scrubbed launches. Also makes me wonder about complexity and redundancy, so managing 33 engines is more complicated than say, 4, although theoretically more redundancy.

Re: SpaceX stock

Thanks for posting the link. The article is interesting and certainly plausible. You're getting a lot of downvotes. I'm not entirely sure why. I wonder if the downvoters actually read the linked material.

I doubt they read or understood it, but I have a fan club that'll just downvote anything I post, including one who proudly wrote a script to automate the process.

My own opinion is that if SpaceX were just a launch and satellite communications company it would likely have a bright future.

I'm not so sure. It has a lot of competition across the board from launchers to competing satcomm services. I'm also curious just how much of a market there is for big birds, ie customers for Starship, assuming that makes it to orbit. From what I know, a lot of that used to be things like TV satellites, but TV is increasingly moving to streaming via broadband/terrestrial links. I'm also very dubious about AI datacentres in spaaaace given the technical challenges like cooling, comms, radiation shielding, life expectancy and just how much compute can be crammed into a Starship payload bay.

When I was at Uni, I did some work on things like silicon-on-sapphire components that were designed for harsh environments like space. But AI processors like Nvidia's aren't designed for that environment, plus far, far higher component density. So great, launch an AI DC, then watch the performance steadily degrade due to ray-fade. Alternatively, just build a DC somewhere like Iceland and get cheaper cooling and electricity from their geothermal. Much easier to do maintenance and Iceland is a beautiful country with people that love to party hard.

So it has shades of the 'build it and they will come' optimism that lead to the .Com bubble and burst. Then again, we live in interesting times with competition bringing launch costs down, meaning costs come down for science projects. Not sure how many of those would need a Starship payload, but there's a lot of ride-sharing to bring research costs down.

There looks to me like there is a real chance that the company won't be around the full 25 year span of the bonds. Bondholders often do not fair all that well in bankruptcy settlements. I suspect that I'm not the only one who has doubts because the 25 year 6.65 % bonds are trading at a roughly 10% discount.

Yep. But something that I learned during the .Com implosion... Bondholders usually fair better given they're usually senior secured creditors. So the usual Ch.11 thing was often pre-packaged with bondholders pulling the trigger due to covenant breaches. Then bond debt gets converted to new equity and existing shareholders get wiped out because they're not secured creditors. Then financial rules typically put conditions on things like banks and pension funds around the credit rating of securities. So business starts heading into trouble, credit rating on bonds & securities drop, triggering a sell-off, drop in value and a bit of a doom-loop where bonds being downgraded to junk accelerates the bankruptcy. Which then can present an opportunity, so I've bought junk bonds at 30-40c on the dollar, which then convert to equity in the NewCo that should emerge from Ch11, which are then promptly bought by another company that's been waiting in the wings.. Which can make some decent money, assuming the company manages to emerge from Ch.11 and doesn't just slip into Ch.7

But the whole AI thing reminds me very much of the whole .Com bubble. Disruptive tech, market not entirely sure how to value/price it, fuelled by debt, optimism and sharp marketing. Plus an all too familiar amount of vendor financing and what look very much like swap deals. After WorldCom & Global Crossing giving the world Sarbanes-Oxley, accounting should be cleaner, but.. accounting. It just doesn't smell right to me.

So some of the SpacX IPO money went towards debt repayment, then the new bond issue helps refinance and more working capital, but still an incredibly capital intensive business combination with any change in AI sentiment creating large risks. Which is why I think that analysis report is interesting because of the bond comments. There's a lot of AI plays relying on cheap money, and that money might be drying up and the potential for SpacX being forced into becoming an AI company could be rather risky. Then if there's an AI-Apocalypse and implosion, it could lead to SpacX Ch.11 and SpacX being broken up. Then Musk ending up 'just' a billionaire again instead of a trillionaire.

Re: SpaceX stock

But I'm reliably informed it isn't a rocket company. It's future $Tn profits will come from its magic bean farm

Therein lies the problem. The rocket company burns cash. The 'AI' business also burns cash. The AI sector in general is burning colossal amounts of cash, and requires regular injections of other people's money. The SpacX IPO raised some cash, but not as much as it'll need to finance all their forward looking statements. So SpacX could try flogging more shares, but that dilutes the available shares already being traded, and those shares have already fallen below IPO price. Which is often an indication that once the initial hype has faded, the market finds it's own price and the demand isn't there.

But there's another fun casino game on offer-

https://www.investing.com/analysis/spacex-falls-below-its-ipo-price-but-credit-is-sending-the-real-warning-200684008

That is where the SpaceX bond matters.

A 7.5% yield on a newly issued, high-profile security suggests the market is no longer treating every piece of AI-adjacent debt as a scarce asset. Investors are beginning to distinguish between growth potential and financing risk. The story may still be compelling, but the cheque now comes with a higher interest rate.

With SpacX perhaps being a bit of a canary, and higher yields being demanded across the AI sector, pushing up borrowing and financing costs.. Especially when many AI plays aren't actually making any money, and probably why they're busily hiking their token costs.

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

The £45 saved will almost certainly be swallowed up by price rises on the supply side in the next few months, especially if Trump continues his middle east adventure. It's a very small sum when you compare it to the price of fuel. I doubt you can fill up the tank of a small car for that amount.

On the plus side, The King in the North has already said he'll start exploiting the North Sea oil & gas again. Kinda handy when there's a bit of an oil crisis on the go. Snag is lack of refinery capacity. But Millibrain's no longer Energy Minister and will instead be collecting more air miles. Burnham does seem to realise that UK energy costs are a problem for both cost of living and the economy in general though.

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

It doesn't vanish, but it does throw off models using that data.

It throws off many things. So short & medium range forecasts rely on, well, reliable inputs. The very long range models, less so, except when it comes to hindcasting and reanalysis. Which gets to be another issue when temperature measurements are 'adjusted' based on model outputs. It also throws off proxy records. So take the wooden thermometers as used in the infamous Hockey Stick. Take a core sample from a convenient tree. Isolate the wood from each tree ring and measure the wood density (MxD) for each growth ring in the sample. Compare that to the instrumental record to calibrate, then run that back to create a hockey stick.

If the temperature records are wrong, then obviously the calibration is wrong, and thus so is the entire proxy record, other than perhaps the general shape of the hockey stick. You might be able to claim that 1742 was cooler than 1942, but claims of an exact temperature to the precision possible by a PRT is a very big stretch. It also makes a huge assumption that tree growth is dominated by temperature, and can't account for differences in say, rainfall, nutrient availability, sunlight etc. It also makes huge assumptions with calibration, eg tree core samples from the Yamal Peninsula played a big part in MBH Hockey Sticks, but there's no long-term instrumental temperature record from that region, so those trees get calibrated against instrumental records from 1,000km+ away.

But see also-

https://climateaudit.org/2024/04/18/twisted-tree-heartrot-hill-revisited/

PAGES2K, including its 2019 version, reverted to the TTHH data version already obsolete in Mann et al 1998 – the data ending in 1975, not 1992. The figure below compares the TTHH version in PAGES2K (2019) – on -right – to the TTHH versions discussed above. The PAGES2K version uses the same measurement data (ending in 1975) as the MBH98 version. The PAGES2K chronology is very similar to the MBH98 version in the period of overlap (1550-1975) but is not exactly the same. Notice that the PAGES2K version (like MBH98) avoids the post-1975 data with the severe “decline”.

There's a limited number of tree samples, so they tend to get recycled, which introduces errors into supposedly 'independent' reconstructions. But Climate Audit and proxies also demonstrate some Internet science issues. CA uses Imugr for hosting, and Imugr's decided to block users in the UK, so the graphs can't be viewed. But could also allow dynamic science. So temperature records get 'adjusted', new values could be read, calibration adjusted, proxy model re-run and results updated and automatically re-published.

Which is also the WMO / Met Office station siting and classification thing. A Class 1 site data should be reliable. Coningsby isn't a Class 1 site, but still gave an accurate temperature reading when the jets took off. But obviously nothing to do with the weather, or climate, hence the WMO stating that 'junk' sites should not be used for climatology, ie model or proxy reconstructions. And yet they are. And I guess they could be used, providing the uncertainty range is factored into the reconstruction. Which they sometimes are, ie the wide uncertainty ranges shown in some reconstructions. So wide ranges in graphs like this-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:T_comp_61-90.pdf

Reflecting the wide uncertainty in the past, and no uncertainty in the recent past because of a false assumption that those temperatures are reliable. They're not. Which then gets back to the story and people making false assumptions based on deliberate misinformation, and using that to justify chemical weapon attacks on buildings. Those activists/terrorists are being badly mislead, and often deliberately.

ps.. also see-

https://climateaudit.org/2024/06/02/tracing-the-esper-confidence-intervals/

As discussed in previous article, Esper et al (2024) link, the newest hockey stick diagram, asserted that 2023 was the “warmest summer” in millennia by an updated version of “Mike’s Nature trick” – by comparing 2023 instrumental temperature to purported confidence intervals of temperature estimates from “ancient tree rings” for the past two millennia. In today’s article, I will report on detective work on Esper’s calculations, showing that the article is not merely a trick, but a joke.

Which shows how false confidence can be created.

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

The Daily Sceptic analysis of the temperature has been totally debunked.

On that day 46 weather stations exceeded the record.

What record? And who provided the debunkiing? I kinda know the answer already, but also how the Met Office gets away with 'white lies'. So Coningsby is what it was, and caused by aircraft. It still recorded what it recorded, it's just it bears no relevance on weather or climate. But records aren't what you think they are. So if you've got 46 individual weather stations, having 1 setting a record due to jet exhaust lets you move the average higher and distort 'the record'. Not that a UK average is at all meaningful. Then it's the WMO station classification system and why that classification matters for anything climate related. So Coningsby isn't a Class 1 site, and doesn't need to be given temperatures on the flight line are what matters. But if you take 1x Coningsby and 'confirm it' with 45x Class-5 stations, with an uncertainty range of +/- 5C, then they could 'validate' Coningsby because their temperatures would have been in the range of possibilities.

Take those contaminated records out of the data, and 'global warming' kinda vanishes..

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

Says the person who- purely coincidentally- constantly regurgitates Putin regime talking points or selects perspectives that push in a direction consistent with their propaganda.

Objection, relevance. What exactly does Putin have to do with this? Also coincidences do actually exist. LIA or Ice Age ends, temperatures and CO2 levels rise. Temperatures rise first, but that's just the way the carbon cycle works. But when effect precedes cause, that's not how science usually works. So back to the story in hand-

Extinction Rebellion spokesperson Martijn Dekker justified the attack by saying datacenters and the AI they power are exacerbating the climate crisis, as well as playing a role in the killing of Palestinians by Israel.

And I'm sure Dekker can point to the good'ol 'peer reviewed literature' explaining how an unbuilt DC is exacerbating the climate crisis. Or why he thinks there's any crisis, because this isn't showing up in the temperature record. But then Dekker isn't a climate scientist, he's this chap or person-

Political Anthropologist | University of Amsterdam | Scholar of Contentious Politics | Rebel | Feminist | Amateur Musician | Nail Polish Lover

Presumably organic, free-range nail polish, not any product of the evil petrochemical or mining industries. Oh, wait-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_polish#Ingredients

So why isn't he campaigning against nail polish given it's full of chemicals, and arguably unnecessary? But being an 'amateur musician' might explain his love of bandwagons. He doesn't seem to have much in the way of a publication record though, possibly because he's been too busy with extracurricular activities like throwing acid bombs at buildings. So seems like another middle class poseur suckling on the public teat.

So, maybe you know what you're talking about

Yep. Kinda why I explain my position and try to cite evidence. Or, given your strange fixation with Russia. There's a bit of an environmental crisis developing in the Black Sea (and Persian Gulf) at the moment with Ukraine busy sinking tankers. Normally whenever there's a tanker incident, the 'environmentalists' are up in arms. They're strangely silent about this one, wonder why?

Oh, hai Jellied, fancy seeing you here!

As if by magic, a wild troll appears. Anonymously, of course..

As El Reg's resident and most ardent supporter of Putin's Russia, I suspect you *would* be an expert in their favoured tactics of whataboutery

At this point, I could ask 'what about Putin?', unless you've got some evidence that Russia bankrolls Extinction Rebellion I guess.

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

As a brief break from the whataboutism, the reader may find it instructive to check the the temperature records for the UK.

Cool! No, wait, that's a wiki link. And-

England 40.3 °C (104.5 °F) 19 July 2022 Coningsby, Lincolnshire

That would be RAF Coningsby, where-

https://dailysceptic.org/2022/11/27/fresh-doubts-emerge-about-40-3c-u-k-temperature-record-next-to-airfield-runway/

Doubts are rising about the recent U.K. record high temperature, measured by the runway at RAF Coningsby on the afternoon of July 19th. Over six minutes, the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C to 40.3°C at 15.12 (3.12pm), and was 0.6°C lower just a minute later. In just two minutes from 15.10 the rise was 0.6°C.

So very much man-made, and caused by 3 Typhoons taking off at that time. But those pesky PRTs again, and although the Met Office 'confirmed' the reading, they never could explain any weather phenomenon such a large and rapid temperature excursion. But given Coningsby's thermometer is right next to the flight line, jet exhaust is a far more plausible explanation, especially if the aircraft were taking off on afterburner (aka reheat).

It never ceases to amaze me how easily useful idiots are fooled by junk science..

Oh hey, it's the "'lefties' are foreign-funded and/or on it for the money" card popular with right-wingers trying to turn round and deflect from the obvious fact most of your figureheads are grifters.

Ah, err.. so.. you're not turning this around and deflecting because some on the right might also be grifters. Whataboutery at it's finest.

But this was a bunch of Dutch lefties committing terrorism under the banner of an 'Extinction Rebellion' franchise. So this lot-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_Rebellion

Government must create, and be led by the decisions of, a citizens' assembly on climate and ecological justice.

Ah, right. I mean left. Call me old fashioned, but I thought the usual democratic way to do this was to stand for election, get elected, and do the democratic thing to drive change. Not use terroism and political violence. But XR is a foreign entity, largely created by this Marxist-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Hallam_(activist)

Who previously failed at sheep farming, and found his politics are a tad unpopular when he created a political party 'Burning Pink', which launched with a shoplifting stunt. It did try contesting a few elections, but came last in every one, lost their deposits and eventually folded. XR also tried the democratic thing-

In May 2019, Roger Hallam and eight others stood as candidates in the European Parliament elections in the London and the South West England constituencies as Climate Emergency Independents. Between them, they won 7,416 out of the 3,917,854 total votes cast in the two constituencies.

So, err, 0.18% of the vote. Thus demonstrating democracy is a tad harder than convincing useful idiots to commit terrorism. They're very keen on 'citizen assemblies' though, which democracies pretty much are already. Citizen runs for office, gets elected, assembles in Parliament. XR-style Parliaments differ in the Politburo kinda way where XR chooses the candidates and dictates policy. And then there's funding, so a hedge fund billionaire, and if you add 'Just Stop Oil' into the mix, a chappie very invested in 'renewables'.

Such is the way 'grass roots' campaigns spring up to serve their donors interests..

Re: The World is on FIRE!! (on the inside)

As for being ON FIRE on the outside, not so much. As a percentage of the surface anyway. If I turn on a gas hob, I don't normally say "My house is on fire". And that's probably an exaggeration.

Isn't that kind of scaremongering?

Yep. It's just the way extremism can lead to terrorism. So-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5ywdl9ne3yo

Extreme and long-lasting heat draws more moisture out of soils and plants – this dry vegetation acts as fuel for fires.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/ckg4gqlye02o

Comparisons are being made with the historic hot summer of 1976. Whilst that year still holds the record for the longest heatwave, this year has seen higher extreme temperatures, and more "very hot days".

Or an explanation of the extremists claims here-

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/16/met-office-state-of-climate-report-just-more-gaslighting/#more-92252

Last summer was not even as hot as 1976’s in terms of daytime temperatures. So far this year, there is no evidence that the heatwaves have been any more intense than in 1976 – back then, the hottest day on CET peaked at 33.1C, compared to 32.8C this summer. This summer so far, there have been eight days on CET over 30C, compared to nine in 1976 by this date.

So extremists at the Met Office whip up hysteria, which is then amplified by extremists at the Bbc, which then filters down to left-wing extremist terrorists who attempt sabotage, thinking the world is on fire and they're going to save it. Except they're just poor, deluded fools who've been lead astray by activists using sensationalism to make extreme claims that can't be supported by science. So no 'extreme temperatures' and as for the Met Office-

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/07/12/met-office-class-1-sites/

Only 19 of the Met Office's weather stations are Class 1 locations, per WMO siting guidelines.. And if you look at the comments, many of those supposed Class 1 sites aren't, so have an accuracy of +/-2C or worse. But there's been a very high pressure system to beat the UK's 1976 heatwave, which extremists are pushing hard.. And glossing over minor details. Like the weather stations now are different to the ones in 1976 and use more sensitive PRTs. Or this is just weather, not climate, and caused by the jets stream, not CO2.

But such is politics. It's easy to use misinformation to create hysteria and get ignorant people working their thumbs, or throwing acid bombs and committing terrorism.

AWS sustainability claims don't hold water, lawsuit alleges

Re: But why water?

Cooling a data centre using conventional cooling e.g. closed water circuit and a forced draft air heat exchanger would require a huge set of heat exchangers and a massive amount of electrical power to turn the fans. There would be a massive hot air plume and it would also be extremely noisy.

Ah, noise. Or the lack thereof. So when the AC in my DC failed, it suddenly went very quiet.. Then the beeping started. I also think that noise, plus noise from lots of shooting also lead to my tinnitus. The joys of a misspent youth.

I guess for datacentres, regulators could force closed-circuit cooling. So reduce water consumption, but also increase noise, and neighbours already complain about the constant noise from large DCs. Which I think is solvable by regulation and planning. So there's no real need for AI DCs to be close to the Internet because they're not really latency sensitive. So then may be able to get more creative with cooling and have AI DC campuses with ponds and other water features that serve cooling needs, and reduce noise. So maybe add things like fountains or waterfalls to aid cooling.

But currently no real incentive to do this. DCs are also much like retail and work on revenue per square meter, so cover as much of the land as possible with a bit-barn, and make energy, water and noise someone else's problem. Land further away from London is cheaper though.

Re: Interesting point

So why do datacenters lose water ?

Because they can, currently, and I'm guessing cost. My first datacentre had big AC units lining the halls that worked much like super-sized PC coolers. So sucked in the hot air through raidiators, then the hot water used evaporative cooling to chill it and blow cold air out the bottom. But the units also had condensers to recapture the evaporated water, give or take some used to maintain the humidity level. We also had an IBM (3090?) that was directly water cooled, with hot components attached to chilled water pipes, much like a PC. Got exciting one day when there was a fault to the AC power and the temperature in the halls rose rather rapidly and much beeping as the kit started doing emergency shutdowns. The DEC8800 cluster stayed up longest as they were air cooled.

But I also remember the AC engineer regularly dosing the AC units water and taking samples. There's been an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease in NYC at the moment-

https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/health/health-topics/legionnaires-disease.page

In NYC, building owners are required to register cooling towers. This allows the Health Department to quickly investigate when we are notified of clusters of Legionnaires' disease cases. Building owners also need to routinely test the water in the cooling tower for the presence of Legionella and do routine checks of their system as required by NYC cooling tower regulations. They also need to routinely test the water for the presence of Legionella.

Which presumably hasn't been done, hence the outbreak. But presumably also a risk for datacentre evaporative coolers that don't use condensers. Bean counters presumably crunched the numbers and decided getting deals on cheap water were better than condensing, but potential liability from spreading Legionnaires might change that equation. Regulations and costs of disposing of waste water also play a part, so cheaper to just waste water through evaporation and socialise any costs. And-

Ex-staffer accuses Amazon's Virginia datacenters of quietly guzzling H20...

H2O, surely?

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

Re: The head of information security at TfL had their account hacked

This was obviously someone with very high level access - you would think that TfL would make sure that a simple impersonation during a phone call would not allow a very low level help-desk employee to reset their password.

It could highlight a few problems. Head of IS is VIP, so a well socially engineered call to a mere helldesk minion could pressure said minion into compliance. Don't you know who I am? It's urgent that you do this now etc. So what TfL's procedures were to prevent that kind of pressure. Then what roles the Head of IS had. Might be the head and big boss, but generally wouldn't need any device level or supervisory access to kit. He has minions to do the hands-on stuff. But can be a common vulnerability. Just because you're the boss, it doesn't mean you need super-user privs..

Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices

Well, if you were to use Home Assistant in your smart home, you can use a zigbee switch to turn on a z-wave light, and at the right time of year

Philips has at least answered the question "How many software engineers does it take to change a lightbulb?". Sort of, because the light bulbs are ok, they just bricked the hardware. Vendor lockin keeping home owners in the dark.

But it's something I've been pondering while slowly working on my 'smart' home. That's mostly been around HVAC, and being able to automagically shunt heat and power around. Which is mostly something that can & is done with simple PLAs or FPGAs. But then suppliers make that more complicated by deciding we need a PC to 'manage' those, or a server in the 'cloud'. So then every other Tuesday, we lose the ability to turn on the heating, AC or lights because MS is down. Or the Internet. Or your mobile network. Or you lose your 'smart' phone. Yey, progress. Or there are commercial BMS with DIN-rail modules and a SOC, with a display panel and once configured, it should just work.. Plus some fun, like living in our cars, sort of given there's a ton of CAN bus modules that have been developed primarily for vehicles, but can also be used for building & industrial automation.

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

Re: network doom

we used to use it for out of hours network testing while having some fun as well, if the network coped and survived all was good :)

Been there, done that, got the headshots. Favourite experience was detecting a player was trying to flood ping us. Cheats seldom prosper, especially when they're on a 56kbps dial-up connection, and we were bored netengs doing a spot of inter-company rivalry. We had pretty much all the UK's Internet capacity that wasn't BT at our fingertips, and BFRs with.. like all the bandwidth to flood ping them into oblivion. Poor lil user didn't realise they were trying to ping real Caco-Demons..

EU and UK officially blame Russian spies for cyberattack on Poland's power grid

Re: A gentlemen would at least wait until the war starts

What makes you think it hasn't?

Quite.

UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said: "These sanctions strike at the core of the cybercriminal networks propping up the Russian state's aggression, and the UK and EU are sending a clear message that Russia cannot hide behind its use of these proxy groups.

Russia is being attacked by UK and EU supplied weapons who are hiding behind Ukraine as a proxy. So it's hardly surprising that Russia (or Russians) might be retaliating against those who're supporting Ukraine. It's also surprising to me that SNMP was used as the vector given that's been (or should have been) a well-known risk since the very early days of the Internet, despite efforts to create more secure versions. I also suspect that users who don't take security very seriously might not even be aware they have IoThings in their network running SNMP with defaults, because it's still commonly used for device management.

As for cameras-

https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/03/middleeast/us-israel-plot-kill-iran-khamenei-latam-intl

Tel Aviv — The traffic cameras on the streets of Tehran provided a real-time view of the targets.

Hacked years ago, the cameras allowed Israel to map the city in detail, establish patterns of movement, and build an intricate, complex picture of what was happening inside an enemy capital, according to an Israeli official.

Also a long established, and should have been well-known risk given the number of times cameras have been exploited by everyone from skiddies to states. Plus another important factor-

The sheer quantity of information required powerful computers to process, sort, and analyze the data to draw out what Israel wanted: targets.

Given Iran's control over the Internet, surveillance and censorship, Iran should probably have spotted massive amounts of data being exfiltrated. Hey, where's all our bandwidth gone? Which is also something companies should do, ie traffic analysis to detect anomalies that might just be someone downloading gigabytes of data that they shouldn't. That should be basic network management stuff, so sudden spike in usage, check the news sites to see if something's happened. But if companies have outsourced their IT security, nobody might be watching or notice. Which is also a bit back to SNMP given that's an easy way to monitor traffic on interfaces and generate alerts.. But if that's been outsourced, SNMP might have to be permitted on external interfaces, and companies have to rely on their outsourcer to have secured that properly.

But one of the many reasons I'm not a fan of outsourcing critical functions, or blindly trusting the 'cloud'. You have to feed the 'cloud', and then place a lot of trust in the 'cloud' provider to secure that data.