* Posts by Peter2

2941 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Modern slavery

Conscription is a term used to cover people being called up for military service, typically for the duration of an existential war. Because if it was legal then a significant percentage of the population would emigrate rather than go to the frontlines of a war unless the law changes to make that not a option for the duration of a war. (unless daddy owns the building that your doctor works in, in which case you can get a phony medical records showing that your unfit to serve, or suffered from Asthma but that's just an argument for a much better anti corruption rules allowing the rich to opt out)

If your reclassifying that as slavery then the definition ends up so warped that it's meaningless.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Modern slavery

I guess the $40,000 equivalent in 1886 would have given you legally enforceable property rights over the slave, and there was an established way to advertise and sell your slave. Those things don't exist now, so that would depress the value.

The Americans were the last holdouts in the world with slavery with legally enforceable property rights, which ended at the end of their civil war. Other holdouts were simply based upon the premise that "might made right".

The last known slave market in the world was at Zanzibar. However by 1873 due to diplomatic efforts of the gunboat variety by the Royal Navy the slave market had been shut down, and a cathedral (Christ Church, Zanzibar) was built on the site of the slave market. (it's actually got a couple of the dungeons in it's basement to show the conditions slaves were kept in)

So actually, no. By 1886 the supply for slavery had been largely cut off and was quite thoroughly illegal pretty much everywhere, and gunboat diplomacy was brought to bear on ending the slave trade at source, which was the original justification for invading about a quarter of the planet. At the time, I suspect that the value of a slave was probably sky high because of relative scarcity of supply combined with the wrath of our Victorian predecessors fighting a moral crusade against the slave trade who took the view that if "might made right" then they possessed the maxim gun and truly heavy artillery.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Modern slavery

And then you've got forms of pressed labour which could include those press-ganged into the Royal Navy and elsewhere.

That would be conscription during wartime, which is not slavery.

AI to fix UK Civil Service's bureaucratic bungling, deputy PM bets

Peter2 Silver badge

The UK government will trial large language models to help ministers analyze and draft documents as part of a push to overhaul public services using AI.

Oh dear.

You know, this problem was briefly solved in 1940 by the memo below:-

To do our work, we all have to read a mass of papers. Nearly all of them are far too long. This wastes time, while energy has to be spent in looking for the essential points.

I ask my colleagues and their staff to see to it that their repots are shorter.

1) The aim should be reports which set out the main points in a series of short, crisp paragraphs.

2) If a report relies on detailed analysis of some complicated factors, or on statistics these should be set out in an Appendix.

3) Often the occasion is best met by submitting not a full-dress report, but an aide-memoire consisting of headings only which can be expanded orally if needed.

4) Let us have an end of such phrases as these:-

"It is also of importance to bear in mind the following considerations....." or, "consideration should be given to the possibility of carrying into effect....."

Most of these woolly phrases are mere padding, which can be left out altogether, or replaced by a single word. Let us not shrink from using the short expressive phrase, even if it is conversational.

Reports drawn up on the lines I propose may at first seem rough as compared with the flat surface of officalese jargon. But the saving in time will be great, while the discipline of setting out the real points concisely will prove an aid to clearer thinking.

Winston Spencer Churchill. 1940

Perhaps this memo could be reissued? Or promotion criteria changed so that promotion depends upon effective communication?

Mind you, George Orwell had a few things to say on that subject.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

Simply put, in any one of the three cases first cited by Orwell an AI is going to be equally as incapable of divining the meaning as anybody else reading the text. If you want to radically overhaul public services then the solution would appear be that authors of a communique of gibberish should be reassigned to a level more commensurate with their abilities.

ie; demote or fire people who do it.

This would surely significantly improve productivity in government considerably more than "AI" stands any chance of doing.

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

On the downside, the electromagnetic field from such a cable probably means someone has invented a torpedo / guided depth charge that can home on to it

I'd think that you'd do better with a MAD sensor or sidescan sonar to find an underwater cable than an EM field sensor; water is presumably going to block EM field propagation fairly efficiently given how much of it there is at sea.

Gelsinger splits Intel in two to advance foundry vision

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: A bold vision

As a counter point, this was somewhat inevitable and is in no way "RIP Intel".

At the moment, Intel's fabs have been one or two generations behind TSMC's for how long? five or six years? This has allowed AMD to keep putting the boot into Intel. Intel frankly likely would have likely lost half the market or more by now if they weren't still managing to lock AMD out of the market.

However, this is slipping and AMD is still gaining market share. The ongoing failure to deliver the intel process map (We are at the end of a 5 year plan to deliver performance per watt leadership for Intel this year, and they haven't got it) has a painfully obvious solution; copy AMD and spin your fabs off as a separate business, buy capacity from TSMC and produce chippery on the same processes that AMD is using, removing the AMD structural advantage and basically making things a competition between design teams.

If Intel have fabs and AMD doesn't, it also allows the strategy of Intel buying up the TSMC capacity for high value processors to reduce the amount of processors AMD can fab by outbidding them and therefore further limiting their market share while then fabbing everything but the latest stuff on Intels less advanced fabs.

Now since this is an obvious contingency plan for Intels fabs not keeping to their schedule this tells you a lot more about how things are going internally and their managements opinion on how possible sorting their own fabs are rather than rosy press releases.

Web archive user's $14k BigQuery bill shock after running queries on 'free' dataset

Peter2 Silver badge

Remember, it's cheaper to outsource everything to the cloud!

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: FALSE

Yes. The Permission [from] Americans [required to] Launch system was offered to us by the Americans, but politely declined for some reason.

Even if it did work the way that they say it does (which is that the PM has to give a code to launch and weapons can't be fired without it) without any unwanted "easter egg" features then deploying that would incentivise nuking London to make it impossible for the UK to launch a nuclear response.

Whereas if you don't have the PAL system and the sub commander can fire his nukes should somebody turn his home and family into a radioactive crater, then the chances of getting a nuke with your name on it in response are probably somewhat higher than average no matter what the letter from the PM says, and this has it's own logic which does not encourage nuking the UK since the missiles are under the Atlantic somewhere.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: What the hell?

What you see is actually thick sound absorbing tiles, and apparently covering them with paint adversely affects their performance.

However yes, the entire submarine fleet does need replacing if we want a remotely credible deterrent, which Russia is making an excellent case for at the moment with their weekly threats of nuclear war for the last two years.

New submarines are in the works, new Mk 4A "holbrook" warheads are being produced, and frankly by the look of it we ought to consider manufacturing a new batch of Trident II's and then sequentially testing the existing ones to see how long they actually last for. Clearly (and unsurprisingly) after 45 years they have passed the "best before" date.

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Peter2 Silver badge

A 3.5" floppy has a roughly 3" circle of magnetic storage in it, which is an area of roughly 28 and a quarter square inches. If you stick a 1" square magnet on to the floppy then your potentially wiping 1/28th of the floppy, assuming complete and total data loss of the area covered by the magnet.

I'll let you figure it out for an 8" rather than a 3.5" floppy, but there was a good chance that there was nothing on the area covered by the magnet.

And from experience with a degausser deliberately trying to wipe things it requires several different angles to do it properly. You can wipe a floppy (or any other form of magnetic storage) with a magnet, but you do it in circles rather than leaving the magnet stationary.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Star wars?

The west has as policy that we will only use our nuclear weapons to respond to a first strike. The only country threatening a nuclear first strike at all is Russia, and it's been doing it on a weekly basis for the last two years.

My point is quite simply that we do not need to nuke the entire of Russia and so we do not need thousands of nukes. Many of the regions (Chechnya, Buryatia and all of the other minorities subjugated by Russia) hate Russians far more than anybody else, so there is frankly no point in including them in the glowing radioactive crater than will result if Russia carries through on one of their nuclear threats.

That pointing this out immediately attracted a vatnik with a panicked response rather suggests that losing control of their conquests and subjugated peoples who given half a chance will wipe out Russia rather more thoroughly than nuclear weapons would do is something that Russians fear rather more immediately than nukes. That's something that I don't think any of us had considered before; so thank you for making it clear.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Star wars?

Russia claims are ridiculous propaganda though.

They claim that basically every weapon that they had at the end of the cold war is deployed and operative and maintained, even including the ones that have been chopped up to turn them into fuel rods. I don't know what the actual figure is, but it's going to be a fraction of what they claim.

China keeps a few hundred nukes (assumed to be ~300-500) as a minimum deterrent, and France and the UK keep something like 200-300 each. The US has 1400 deployed nukes, but put it this way; would anybody ever say "oh, they can only drop 200 nukes on our cities, each of which are 10 times the power of what landed on Nagasaki; i'm fine with that"?

We has become increasingly obvious over the last couple of years is that we don't even need to nuke the entire of Russia; If Moscow and a few cities were to vanish then most of the subjugated parts of Russia would be celebrating and declaring independence.

Peter2 Silver badge

Exactly.

When you had multi (hundred?) mile long cables then you'd get formidable levels of energy picked up on a cable. But I worked somewhere which had anti EMP breakers fitted during the cold war; which was expected to protect the electronic equipment back then, which is considerably more prone to damage than modern stuff.

I'm not particularly convinced that a phone with a total possible antenna length measured in inches is going to pick up enough power to damage it.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Star wars?

I'd imagine in this case Putler is trying to play the same tactic back at the West.

Which is liable to backfire quite spectacularly, since if we do then we'll produce working examples which they have to counter themselves or plan for us using against them and they are already horribly behind of military technology and can't manage to produce enough modern equipment to equip their army with and are forced to refurbish 1960's cold war gear.

Additionally this is a bit of an eye opener:-

Russia GDP: $1.7 Trillion

China GDP: $17.7 Trillion

= $19.4 Trillion (excluding North Korea and Iran; which have a combined GDP best summed up by the words "rounding error")

Australia GDP: $1.5 Trillion

Canada GDP: $1.9 Trillion

UK GDP: $3.1 Trillion

EU GDP: $19.3 Trillion

US GDP: $23.3 Trillion

= $49.1 Trillion

5% of our combined GDP (which for the UK would mean increasing our military spending to ~80% of the education budget which is hardly unaffordable) comes out as $2.4 trillion, which is a total of 12.3% of their total GDP.

So yeah, if they want another arms race then it's fine with me. I'm not sure that they can afford that quite as easily. And the R&D arms race around ended up throwing out the IT industry as a byproduct; who knows what'd come out this time around? All the R&D and manufacturing (and a refusal to outsource to the enemy) also would do our economy a world of good, while it would account for a large percentage of China's GDP summarily vanishing.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Star wars?

And it appears they had no qualms about treaties, legalities or other philosophical limitations.

The US was quite happy to talk about their Strategic Defence Initiative 40 years ago. They never actually broke any treaties talking about it, or investigating it's feasibility.

Quite simply the US was spending 6.6% of GDP on it's military in 1985 while the Soviet Union was struggling to keep up with spending of 17.5% GDP. The Soviet Union had been signing arms limitation treaties not because they wanted peace, but because they couldn't afford to counter western weapons programs and so signed treaties saying that they wouldn't develop something they were scientifically incapable of developing, economically incapable of affording, and on a manufacturing level incapable of producing and deploying. Therefore signing a treaty promising that they wouldn't deploy something if we didn't was to their advantage, not to ours.

Notably, trying (and largely failing) to match the remainder of the military programs which Reagan went ahead with combined with the Russians proxy war in Afghanistan still bankrupted and brought down the Soviet Union.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

Next on the agenda: Be sure to check under your beds for reds.

Interestingly McCarthy was a Republican.

I wonder what he'd have thought about his party being controlled by somebody who it appears is being blackmailed by the Reds?

Peter2 Silver badge

On a more serious note than Russian "look how scary we are" propaganda efforts, as a thought exercise does EMP actually stand less chance of doing damage now?

The threats from EMP could be grouped into two parts. If we take the latter part of Electro Magnetic Pulse then it wiped magnetic storage via a huge magnetic pulse and messed up CRT's until the fuck of huge degaussing coil built in to the better sort of CRT's was used to fix it. CRT's at this point are dead and gone in any case (for which my back is grateful) and most devices have swapped out HDD's for SSD's now so the magnetic pulse part should be somewhat less dangerous to equipment?

The biggest threats from the Electro Pulse is a mass of radiated energy being picked up by copper wires which act as an antenna and then frying things connected to them through a voltage spike. However, most [data] cable of serious length is now fibre, so the copper runs are only the last mile stuff which is typically buried 2 meters underground which is not optimal for antennas to operate. Data infrastructure is therefore not likely to conduct serious power that way, and the power infrastructure is designed to filter out voltage spikes etc; national scale grid infrastructure has precious little subtlety to it.

I'm not sure that the antenna on a smartphone is going to pick up enough to get damaged, and as they spend most time unplugged then they aren't wired to anything to pick up anything that way.

So has the effect of EMP possibly been degraded to more along the lines of signal jamming on the electromagnetic spectrum rather than mass destruction and disruption to equipment? I'm not sure i'd want to find out, but I can't see that it's as much of a threat as it would have been at the end of the cold war; and even then they just added EMP filters to inbound lines in government buildings/hospitals etc with the expectation that equipment would survive and continue to work.

US Air Force's new cyber, IT skill recruitment plan: Bring back warrant officer ranks

Peter2 Silver badge

Most militaries have 3 main sets of people. Officers, NCO's and the privates. Broadly, Officers set strategy, NCO's implement the strategy and the Privates do what they are bloody well told.

A WO1 is the highest possible rank for Non Commissioned Officers within the British military. It's the non commissioned equivalent of a Major General, and those chaps were probably used to working at that level of officer and politician, dealing with much higher stakes than most people reading this will likely ever do, while managing people far more difficult or stressed than anybody reading this can have any conception of.

I'm in awe that anywhere you worked managed to get that calibre of applicant. If I get somebody as intelligent as my cat then I consider it to be an excellent day.

Drowning in code: The ever-growing problem of ever-growing codebases

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Remember 'The Last One'?

Might I suggest that you reflect upon the saying "Never ascribe to malice what may be attributed to incompetence"?

Expecting several hundred MP's to be separately investing in Indian consultancies and engaged in a conspiracy to destroy the jobs market is rather less probable than the alternate explanation that they have no idea what they are doing. I strongly doubt that any of the MP's understand Chapter 8 of the Income Tax (Earnings and Pensions) Act 2003 (aka IR35) or the amendments since then because it's hardly easy bedtime reading.

The only less credible suggestion would be that their replacements will in fact be any better.

Aircraft rivet hole issues cause delays to Boeing 737 Max deliveries

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Boeing should

While agreeing wholeheartedly with the sentiment the problem with it is that fatal flaws don't tend to occur on flight one. How many times had that door flown before flying off? How many times did a 737Max fly before the MCAS issue became obvious? Even the Comet did hundreds of flights before running into the metal fatigue problem.

Zen Internet warns customers of an impending IP address change

Peter2 Silver badge

Apparently, it also comes with a new FritzBox (which I won't be using) as they want to get rid on any analogue voice setups as well..

Analogue voice setups are being shut down next year, so they haven't really got much in the way of choice.

Software troubles delay F-35 fighter jet deliveries ... again

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Once Upon A Time At Hawker-Siddley...............

Presumably because England doesn't have any planes or ships?

Britain has both. And two squadrons of operational F35's, capable of flying off of both of our aircraft carriers.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

Peter2 Silver badge

Linux is a world where the OS can be on one disk (HDD or SDD), and the user space on another. Borkzilla has not only never understood that, it has actively refused to understand it. Otherwise it wouldn't be so difficult to move a user's data to another disk.

It's not difficult; you just don't know how to do it because your Linux power user and don't know how to use windows to any significant degree more than I understand how to do the equivalents in Linux.

On windows open the Microsoft Management Console, (start->run MMC works) open the local users and groups snap in, click on the user to modify, select the profile tab and then change "profile path" to the desired location.

And, um that's it. I've had user data on a separate drive since Win98.

WTF? Potty-mouthed intern's obscene error message mostly amused manager

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Errors that *should* never occur

Personally, seeing an error message that says "something went wrong" just annoys me. You might as well just close the application without bothering to display it. If a developer wants to output a message then personally i'd say it ought to look like this:-

An error has occurred. If this is the first time your seeing this, please restart the program.

If the problem reoccurs, to be able to fix it we need to reproduce the problem, so please report exactly what you were doing to your IT Department or the developers when the problem occurred, along with the following error code. <one unique code for every error output>

You'll then stand at least a fighting chance of getting useful information about the problem back from the end user and their support. "Something went wrong" or "if your reading this, your fucked" as an error message is simply an incitement to violence from both the user and their supporting IT department.

Infosys co-founder doubles down on call for 70-hour work weeks

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: quantity over quality not a great idea

70 hours might be OK if your work is undemanding (e.g. meetings), but not if the work is something that is very mentally challenging as 70 hour weeks will lead to lower quality of work and burn out over time.

The British experience during WW1 where the initial solution to a shortage of shells (sound familiar?) was to require 24 hour production, achieved by 2x 12 hour shifts and banning resignations from munitions manufacturers, led to a bit of a fatigue problem and the discovery that while the initial production was fantastic, people started making so many avoidable mistakes that production (passing QA tests) actually dropped compared to working sensible hours. This led to the formation of the Industrial Fatigue research board to figure out precisely what the best ratio of working hours for optimal productivity should be, which pointed out that having regular breaks during the day, canteens etc was as important as working hours.

The result was that working hours were somewhat shorter in WW2 and if sufficiently trained men couldn't be found then huge numbers of untrained woman were employed and trained to do only a single step of a job, with the actually trained people acting as line managers and trainers. Production increased to the point where German WW2 notes for officers fighting the UK who'd moved from the eastern front fighting the Russians warn of extremely heavy artillery bombardments of several thousand shells against any identified German positions even when the British forces advancing were on the other of single company sized (60 men) advances.

Which says something about the sheer number of shells being produced on the British side.

Be honest. Would you pay off a ransomware crew?

Peter2 Silver badge

disc to disc to tape.

As in, backup the original files using a reputable backup program to a disc only accessible on the server running backups and not accessible to the sort of moron who runs ransomware. This grants immediate access to the files should they be required. (down to instant restore using programs like veeam) Then transfer those files to tape for offsite storage, just in case somebody burns the office down etc.

Also, set either a software restriction policy or applocker policy for normal users that prevents any executable program (eg, .exe, .bat, .etc) from running outside of %program files%, which will summarily prevent anybody from actually infecting your systems in the first place as it becomes impossible to actually run the things.

How governments become addicted to suppliers like Fujitsu

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change

Case in point: Rolls-Royce and the PV-12 aero engine. A pile o' shite when first plonked on the test bench, HMG nevertheless put all their faith in the company and dropped the competition

Did they?

Rolls-Royce continued development of their Kestral, Vulture and Griffon.

Napier produced their Saber engine all the way through the war. (despite early versions having problems; an engine failure killing Captain Martin, of Martin-Baker which led to Baker becoming obsessed with pilot safety and ultimately the Martin-Baker name being synonymous with "working ejection seat").

Bristol kicked out the Taurus, Hercules and Centaurus engines.

And this overlooks many other engines, including Whittle's jet engines.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: at the mercy of the big contractors

It's not public bodies that are dumping sewage into our rivers.

Not now they've been privatised, no. However they were however doing exactly this in most cases from the same facilities before they were privatised; during which it was seen as being perfectly acceptable at the time. Which is good; private companies are being held to a higher standard than the same facilities were under public ownership.

There were, undoubtedly, good reasons for wanting the privatising of some services,

If you look into it you'll discover that it was a requirement to obtain the 1976 IMF loan to bail out Britain's economy. Loss making entities which had bankrupted the government were privatised and allowed to sink or swim. Some swum, many more sank.

It certainly doesn't seem to have much good for the railways

The railways were entirely built from the 1840's as private for profit businesses with private finance, which were only taken into public ownership after they were all loss making after WW2 when everybody had switched to new transport options like buses and cars. Notably when it was semi privatised this was done so with a huge maintenance backlog that built up while in public ownership, because given a choice of money going to the NHS or maintaining track etc guess who lost out?

Council housing was far better maintained than many of the current "Housing Association" properties seem to be.

It was. However a huge reason for selling it off cheaply when they did was that a huge amount of council housing stock was prefabs designed to last for 25 years when built post WW2, and so by the 1980's significant amounts of housing stock was coming to end of design life and so likely to start needing expensive repair work or replacement in the near future, which was avoided by selling them off to the owners; this neatly avoiding any government liability for repairs or rebuilding. If you think about it you'll no doubt remember entire council housing estates being bulldozed from 1990-2010 and either rebuilt or the land sold for redevelopment? That's why.

Honestly, it makes sense for the government to own some things. However, the problem is that if a private business is sufficiently crap compared to it's competitors then it goes bankrupt, and the customers go to the competition. This ensures a basic performance floor for business which tends over time to trend upwards in average service performance and downwards in average cost due to competition.

If a government run monopoly is sufficiently crap then you just have to take the shit service and like it. When well run it's excellent, but it's not always. Personally i'd be quite happy with government running some things, but there needs to be some mechanism for ensuring a similar performance floor to private business, and one hasn't been found and implemented in ~500 years of government owned infrastructure so far (Portsmouth Royal Dockyard was founded 1496) beyond periodically closing things and then starting again from scratch.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Corruption

Yes and no.

If the post offices were meaningfully separate from the Royal Mail then the post offices could also act as collection and delivery hubs for parcel companies in competition with Royal Mail, which would make sense from the customers perspective. Want to send a parcel? Take it to the post office and pick who you want to send it with.

However, as the Post Offices are basically more or less exclusively providing Royal Mail services the separation is more on paper than it is in reality.

Former Post Office boss returns CBE to sender over computer system scandal

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

The NHS is (and always has been) just a billing structure which will pay an approved amount for particular treatments billed to it by providers.

Your GP for instance is an independent for profit private business who bills the NHS every time you see them. The general ignorance about this makes it quite difficult to actually manage the NHS, since people will scream "save our NHS1!111" and claim that they have thus prevented bits of the NHS from being privatised... which have in fact never been owned by UK PLC and have always been private businesses.

In many cases it's not worth even trying to have sensible discussions about issues.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: How many fraud and theft cases in the 80s?

What Post Office courts are these?

Citations please, because there is no such thing as a post office court, and never has been. These offences would have been before a Magistrates court like most court cases in the UK.

Crown court jury trials are reserved for serious offences.

Another airline finds loose bolts in Boeing 737-9 during post-blowout fleet inspections

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Shameful

You missed one; if you have poor quality engines and have two engines then losing one means that your probably going to lose the aircraft with everybody onboard.

If you have poor quality engines and have four of them and lose one then your probably still going to be able to land it. So while it's an economically crap design, from a Russian perspective it's probably preferable.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Oops!

And there may also be another problem brewing if Russia bans nuclear fuel exports to the US, especially as there's a growing recognition that nuclear is needed to meet energy needs, clean or otherwise. US also has uranium, but would need to re-open those mines and processing & enrichment facilities.

That's not a problem for several reasons.

Firstly, Russia supplies 5% of the worlds [unenriched] Uranium. Kazakhstan supplies something like 43% of [unenriched] uranium and their diplomatic slaps in the face to Putin suggest that they aren't really onboard with him.

Secondly, for the pittance that we actually require the supplies from Australia and Canada are sufficient. Unless we ramp up nuclear plans significantly, but given the building time there would be plenty of time to get on with producing the enrichment. Urenco (headquarted in the UK with facilities in Europe and the US) already supplies just shy of a third of the nuclear fuel used in the world. Britain maintains strategic stockpiles of Uranium, Plutonium and any other waste product from a reactor that might conceivably have future value as fuel, or for the UK's nuclear weapons programme on the basis that storing it is cheap, but mining it takes ages and is expensive.

Ergo if Russia did shut themselves out of the market then it's not going to do any more than cause them more economic problems with industries losing customers.

Doom is 30, and so is Windows NT. How far we haven't come

Peter2 Silver badge

Although the PC industry is in deep denial about it, as it was in 2021, just as it was a decade before that, computers aren't getting that much faster any more.

I think we need to separate out this sentence slightly.

The hardware continues to get ever faster. You can happily buy 16 core processors for desktops running 32 threads. You can buy a 96 core processor running 192 threads with all of them running at circa 5GHz.

However, there is fuck all point because all of the software is so badly written that it will use precisely one thread running on one processor.

The net result is that despite the hardware performance being literally thousands of times better than it was in the 1980's, the software runs slower.

It takes longer to cold boot a modern PC than a 1980's original. It takes longer when the OS is loaded to open a word processor. It takes longer for that word processor to open and display a file.

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

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

Look up the costs of enough storage to cover a 2 week drop to practically zero from wind (which looking at the graph on gridwatch is a literally monthly occurrence, for instance from the 24th of november to the 7th of december) for say 5 GW.

The math is not particularly difficult. Figure out the known cost of a kilowatt hours worth of storage from UPS systems and multiply by a thousand to get to a megawatt and then multiply that by a thousand to get to a gigawatt. Multiply by 5 to get to 5GW, and then multiply by the number of hours needed for the storage requirement, which I would suggest would need to be circa two weeks. What is the end result as to cost, excluding the cost of land, staffing and maintenance? Then look up the figures for building hydro storage and adjust for inflation since we last did it, and check the runtimes. Multiply to the storage requirement. What is the end result as to cost, and what area of the country would you have to flood?

Even if you arbitrarily divide the cost several times (because wishful thinking) then if you have a logical mind then it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that grid scale storage is economically impossible because building it would be several orders of magnitude more expensive than building nuclear, which doesn't have a problem with needing to be recharged. (since storage just stores, and nuclear actually generates)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: When will Big Oil face the heat?

When I was at school some years ago, we were taught that all oil reserves would have been completely depleted by something like 2020.

And they were; at least the ones that had been discovered and judged economical by the standards of when they were originally discovered. Of course, as time marches on then there is new exploration and as prices rise then previously uneconomic reserves become economically viable to exploit. My guess is that there will still be reasonably plentiful fuel supplies at the end of this century, and we'll still be using them because the green types will have continued to oversell utopian but ultimately unworkable solutions forcing a continued reliance upon fossil fuels by default.

Wind turbines for instance simply end up as a load reduction and PR method for continued use of gas turbines.

For the UK, the new nuclear plant (Hinkley point C) will generate 3.2GW worth of power. Building 3 new plants to this design would mean that we only burn gas for power when the wind output is pathetic, which is about half the time. Building ten of them would mean that we'd instantly never burn any gas for power again until the last decade of this century and would be in a good position to start phasing out gas heating and gas cooking.

Getty's image-scraping sueball against Stability AI will go to trial in the UK

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Having trouble getting my head around what exactly is at issue here

No, it wouldn't. Your free to look at the images in getty images without paying for them, with the intention that you pick one that you wish to use. Your free under existing copyright law to look at an image (or block of text such as yours) and then criticise it without reproducing it.

Your simply not allowed to put the entire contents of getty images in a library and then programming something using it as the basis for training data without paying for using the images. If you paid for the images, then legally they'd probably be fine. The fact that they want to use the images without paying for them is the problem.

Microsoft confirms Smart App issue renaming everyone's printers to HP

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Many years ago....

It's still conducted. Rigorous testing is performed to ensure that bugs are included in every release.

AWS exec: 'Our understanding of open source has started to change'

Peter2 Silver badge

“Our understanding of open source has started to change, and realising that, we have to measure and assess risk every time we take a dependency. How do we ensure that this open source project continues to be developed?

Pay the developers to keep doing it? And in money, not "exposure".

If your making millions if not billions off of Free Open Source Software then you can afford to spend a tiny fraction of that on making sure that it's adequately supported and maintained.

And on that topic, this article literally talks about Amazon complaining that Amazon Linux was originally CENTOS, and then they had to change it because CENTOS was discontinued by Red Hat.

CENTOS was basically an older version of Red Hat, so my reading of it is that there was a decision to fuck over Red Hat Enterprise Linux by not paying for their software and yet still benefiting from the development. If Red hat realised that, it's no wonder that CENTOS was axed. Amazon could have chosen to pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and i'm sure that Red Hat would have been delighted to have them as customers and they wouldn't have had to change practically anything.

That they didn't I think speaks volumes.

Experienced Copilot help is hard to find, warns Microsoft MVP

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Seen it before...

You probably joined the party at version 30, after which other poor fuckers had ironed out all of the noticeable bugs.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

Peter2 Silver badge

As a serious question, Why?

According to most things written about the subject Labour had first planned those bits of anti union legislation in the late 1960's. They looked at them again when they were being fucked over by the unions in the Winter of Discontent.

Once in power, the Conservatives, who under Thatcher's leadership had begun criticising the unions as too powerful, passed legislation, similar to that proposed in a Labour white paper a decade earlier, that banned many practices, such as secondary picketing, that had magnified the effects of the strikes.

So the proposals were actually reasonably sensible Labour proposals in the first place, except that Labour couldn't pass them because of union influence on their party.

Peter2 Silver badge

There is nothing good about unions having too much power; that was proven when they destroyed British industry post war by refusing to accept modernisation to use new technology that was labour saving. While this protected their members in the short term by keeping jobs in the long term it resulted in the near total destruction of British industry when exposed to competition when we joined the EEC/EU.

However there is also nothing good about total tossers having too much power; they hoard all of the wealth and power at the top by not paying either the workers, or the tax bills.

What is required is a fair balance, and the balance at the moment in the UK/US is clearly tilted too favourably towards business.

No more staff budget for UK civil service, but worry not – here's an incubator for AI

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Ooh ... so could we have an AI in the cabinet ?

The whole thing is a massive waste of time and money, and it's clearly a whitewash.

May I refer you to a quote from a great political documentary?

“No Minister, I beg you,” replies Sir Humphrey. “A basic rule of government is never look into anything you don’t have to, and never set up an inquiry unless you know in advance what its findings will be.

The findings will be that the civil service is 100000% the bestest system in the world, let down by somebody who has departed the scene and can't mount a political defence. And lessons have been learned etc etc etc.

Royal Navy flies first mega Mojave drone from aircraft carrier

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Interesting...

Defence companies don't get paid directly for R&D work and so their R&D costs are recouped via higher costs on things that do get ordered.

Typically this then results in the unit cost being higher than expected, which results in cutting the number of units to save money, which results in the unit cost going up.

Personally I think it'd be more honest to just account for and pay the R&D work directly given that in most cases our own government is the sole customer. (Unless you want to sell our military technology to the Russians/Chinese, who'd probably be delighted at buying a single copy to reverse engineer...)

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

Peter2 Silver badge

I agree completely with your first paragraph, and disagree totally with the second.

China is not a valuable market. China is scattered with the bones of dead companies that thought this.

If the Chinese like your product they will copy it. If they can't copy it then they will require that it be built locally and then they will just steal it. As the courts in China are not independent and are controlled by the government then the law there is what's convenient for the government and even if the competition is making an unlicensed copy of your product including the original IP markings and trademarks if it suits China then their courts will ignore the evidence and rule against you. If you don't believe this, then look at the court case the EU has before the WTO at the moment.

China is already a competitor.

To pay or not to pay for AI's creative 'borrowing' – that is the question

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Two questions for the price of one

I'm not saying that LLM training is legal, and I'm not saying that it's illegal. I'm saying that it's not at all clear or obvious which way it goes, existing legislation does not really cover this, and if you attempt to shoehorn this case into current copyright law, I could see very good arguments for it to go either way.

Because of this, I think that the current crop of "AI" is standing on very shaky legal ground, until some high court manages to shoehorn this one way or the other, or lawmakers take action. The idea that someone somewhere wins a case and suddenly the entire industry is illegal is not so far-fetched.

Law is read by exactingly what the legislation actually says, then if that's not sufficiently clear by what the laws stated intention to do is (which is in the preface) and then what the people who wrote the text intended it to do.

If we accept that the existing wording is ambiguous then the simple argument on the part of the authors is almost certainly going to point to the preface of the first copyright act.

Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing, reprinting, and publishing, or causing to be printed, reprinted, and published Books, and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books; May it please Your Majesty, that [the copyright act] may be enacted...

Simply, it cannot be reasonably argued that copying the artwork and style of existing authors and artists to create derivative works without payment to the original authors will work to anything but the very great detriment and possible ruin of those authors and artists. Copyright exists as per the explanatory preface for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books.

By law, an "AI" has already been found to not not possess it's own "legal personality" which means that as so far as the law is concerned it is seen as a machine like a printing press or a photocopier which is controlled by an owner.

This makes the current situation very exactly what the copyright act exists to prevent as per the original preface; and while i'm sure that there will be a great number of novel arguments as to why copyright should be effectively abolished in favour of the people copying it I can't see how the law will actually be able to permit that. In the US then you'd simply drag the argument out until the less funded side gives up and you win by default, but that sort of strategy is simply not done in the UK because our judges really don't like that sort of abuse of process in their courts and tend to robustly retaliate.

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean AI's not after you

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: And netflix

Investment has gone from investment to betting.

yes and no.

Warren Buffet for instance amassed a huge fortune by seeing things that he thought were undervalued and then putting his money into them until he thought they were overvalued relative to something else, at which point he'd sell shares off and buy something else.

He's playing an entirely different game to the people who are gambling on whatever being "the next big thing" because everybody is talking about it, despite the underlying fundamentals not actually making any sense whatsoever.

Peter2 Silver badge

To be fair Tesla isn't just a car company. They are also in the energy business with solar roofs, Powerwalls, and Megapacks, plus charging infrastructure as well. Whether it should be worth that much is debatable, but comparing Tesla to Ford isn't quite apples to apples.

No, not quite.

Ford Revenue: $158 billion.

Tesla Revenue: $81 billion

Ok, let's value the car side of Tesla as being worth $40 billion (ie; more than Ford), despite producing a small fraction of the number of cars. Then let's value the energy business with the solar roof as being worth $40 billion which is just absurd, then the powerwall separately as being worth $40 billion which is equally absurd and then then the megapacks as being the same amount which again is absurd. That's $160 billion. Then let's add another $70 billion for the value of Musks hot air, and it's still overvalued by over $500 billion; that's over half a trillion.

Objectively, Tesla's valuation is in the same league as the South Sea Bubble, Tulipmania, the dot com bubble, and FTX.

Fujitsu-backed FDK claims nickel zinc batteries ready for use in UPSes

Peter2 Silver badge

They said it would be ideal for stationary applications, which implies that when it moves things slosh around and it develops problems.

Or perhaps i've just been trained to be a distrustful paranoiac by snakeoil salesmen.

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Is it just me

Yes, it's just you.

NASA did self correct. Since the 1960's, how many NASA rockets have blown up on the pad? Go and look it up.

While the occasional failure is the price of success, after a certain point you should have a design that is reasonably safe and has a good probability of getting off the launch pad before blowing up, and here is a compilation of videos of Space X blowing the launch pad up with "Starship".

This latest version is SN25; the 25th version. At what point would you say it's reasonable for a regulator to start saying "uh, what are you doing?" when tossing huge quantities of explosive and toxic materials across the area?