Posts by Peter2

Whistleblower describes DOGE IT dept rampage at America's labor watchdog

Re: It may not be Russia.

English doesn't really have a wide selection of words for different types of coup.

Just use the French words. It's not as if "Coup" isn't lifted from "Coup d'état", after all.

Trump fires NSA boss, deputy

Re: What did they really expect?

The exploit is, if one person has enough popular support - doesn't have to be overwhelming, doesn't even have to be a majority, just highly motivated - then the people who are supposed to enforce the checks on their power won't dare to do it. That's what happened in all three of those cases. Makes no difference who those people are, or what specific form the checks take, the principle is the same.

It matters if the check on their power is not giving them the power in the first place.

Trump couldn't fire military officers in the UK because they answer to the King, not to the PM. Hence if he told the King "I want you to fire those officers because they aren't loyal to me" then he'd find that he'd be told "Yes, that's how it's supposed to work because they are sworn to the King, not the PM" and there would be nothing that he could do about it.

That's what an effective safeguard looks like, which is absent in the US system because they copied our government with the difference being that you elect a king. Which came about because most of the revolutionaries in the US knew how unstable democracies without a monarchy are, and wanted to solve the problem by having an elected king. Which obviously hasn't worked out the way that they wanted; it's been the source of the problem.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: What would a "reciprocal" tax on arms do?

Um.

Civilised countries do not encourage the population to wander around armed and enact John Wayne shootouts. That being the case, the only entity buying US arms is the government of the country for their military, and they aren't going to tax themselves because that's our politicians aren't as stupid as Trump. The response will instead be along the lines of "Does anybody else make something similar?" and "buy it from them then". You've got to take Trump at his word saying that maybe US allies won't be allies in the future and that maybe the US will sell us downgraded versions of weapons. Therefore we can't buy anything from the US that's higher technology than a bullet without worrying that it's got some form of kill switch in it, and therefore any reliance upon US stuff more advanced than a bullet is going to be run down in favour of making our own.

The lack of confidence is the US is far more damaging than Tarrifs, and Trump does more damage every time he opens his mouth.

* Redistribute the same total amount of tax over all US good exports minus energy, arms and high-end semiconductors. That would leave most remaining US exports taxed to such levels that they'd become totally unsellable.

This is what had already been done previously dealing with Trumps previous round of tariffs.

The EU made good on its threat to retaliate when retaliating to the US' introduction of 25% tariffs on aluminium and steel imports by imposing tariffs that could affect up to €26 billion worth of US products, but it also tried to tailor them to hit Trump in his heartland.

At the heart of EU’s retaliation measures are products from the American states that elected Donald Trump: soja bean from Louisiana - the state of the speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson - beef and poultry from Nebraska and Arkansas. EU tariffs on wood will also impact Georgia and Virginia.

“In our response we try to be smart,” said a senior EU official, adding: “That means we have a list of products that have high iconic value, high symbolical value, that do not cost us much.”

And it doesn't cost as much because as you put it, it means that they are taxed to such levels that they become totally unsellable; because if we can buy stuff from Argentina instead for 3% more and you put 10% tarrifs on the US produce then it becomes 7% more expensive, and the market just goes with the cheaper option. The cost to us is about 3%, the cost to America is 100% because they no longer have a market.

So kiss goodbye to red state exports to the EU. I'd also expect that tax dodging by US multinationals and any number of other issues is going to come under very, very intense scrutiny; the only reason it hasn't been tackled is the US objections and the public attitude towards upsetting the US government just shifted somewhat.

Well, yes?

Trump has in a world which is just starting a massive rearmament drive managed via shooting his mouth to put people off buying American weapons. Then he says perhaps he's reducing the size of the US army by 50%, and bang.

Boeing: down 2% YTD, despite the announcement of the F47 fighter. Possibly because Trump openly said that he'd sell a gimped version to allies as they might not be allies for long, which is the most stupid comment since Gerald Ratner.

Lockheed Martin down 6% YTD.

Meanwhile Europe declares that they are increasing the size of their armed forces and reducing dependencies on foreign weapons and throw a trillion into strategic parts of their arms industries. If you had money to put into an arms company then have a look at these share prices:-

BAE: Up 37% YTD

MBDA: Up 72% YTD

Thales: Up 77% YTD

Rheinmetal: Up 117% YTD

It's pretty obvious where you want to be putting money at the moment if you wanted to make money on an increasing share price and good dividends.

Re: don't pay attention to it

Only two out of three wives were imported from Europe to be fair.

Do you think that's why he hates Europe and immigrants so much?

When even Microsoft can’t understand its own Outlook, big tech is stuck in a swamp of its own making

I disagree. Cassette tape data storage is alive and well and living in the retro computer scene, as it should be.

And with LTO9, with a capacity of ~18TB uncompressed and ~45TB compressed per tape for a tape cost of £40 it's still quite common to back up onsite systems as part of an offline storage for disaster recovery.

Intel's new CEO: Chip world veteran Lip-Bu Tan

6 Months after TSMC, and 6 months before TSMC goes into full scale production they cranked out... one test batch. Not really looking good, is it?

At the same time as Trump asked TSMC if they could buy Intel's fabbing operation, who have been talking to Broadcom, Nvidia and AMD about joining the venture as partners. From what we've heard Broadcom aren't interested, and i'd personally have rated them as being the more likely company out of the three to agree, given that it's in the direct interests of the other two for Intels fabbing business to be an inefficient disaster.

TSMC's 2nm is going into production this year. 1.4nm next year. 1.0nm in 2028, 0.7nm in 2032, and 0.3nm in 2034.

This is last months news.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/28/intel_delay_ohio/?td=readmore

Intel's Ohio plant which is supposed to churn out 1.8nm chips is going to start production in 2031. It's literally going to be 4 process nodes behind the state of the art by the time it opens; that's pointless and beyond disastrous.

Intels options for doing anything other than ditching their own fabs and buying from TSMC appear rather slim at this point.

The IT world moves fast, so why are admins slow to upgrade?

Re: Danger Will Robinson.

You could do. Which would be an additional cost for the cloud project relative to on prem hosting.

Eutelsat in talks with Euro leaders as they mull Starlink replacement in Ukraine

Re: Hmm

And the longer it goes on, the more of Russia's military gets killed or maimed. (there's nothing like a large number of crippled ex soldiers not properly supported by the state to raise public support for going to war again!)

The more factories get levelled in strategic bombing.

The more debt there is simply for Russia to exist, reducing Russia's ability to produce more war equipment.

The more equipment is destroyed worsening Russia's relative strategic position. (you know the Russian joke; Russia is in a proxy war with NATO. They've lost 21 generals, 800,000 soldiers killed or wounded, 10,000 tanks, 20,000 APC's. And what about NATO, they ask. Well, NATO hasn't shown up yet)

It doesn't really matter.

NATO has 3.5 million active service troops, ~1.3 million of which are American. 3.5 minus 1.3 is ~2.2 million in Europe. Russia's military is 1.1 million, fully mobilised to the maximum possible in Ukraine.

Do you think that Russia wants to start a war outnumbered 2:1 against better trained and equipped troops? Russians have those myths about Ukrainian super soldiers bred in biolabs because they consider that tale preferable to admitting to their troops NATO body armour works and stops Russian bullets. Their tanks are blown to bits by light shoulder launched weapons, and they threaten nuclear war about a few dozen older Leopards going to Ukraine. You'll see why if you see videos of the relative effectiveness of the equipment; a single outdated Leopard 2A4 singlehandedly annihilated an entire Russian battalion with absolute impunity and then drove off to refuel and rearm.

If the L2A4 does that; How likely do you think it is that Russia wants to engage in combat with a force armed with the A8 version which has a longer ranged gun, better armour and an active protection system to shoot down missiles? I'm going with "unlikely", personally.

Russia's supposedly huge and professional airforce hasn't done well in Ukraine against three dozen antique mig29's, and 2 dozen SU27's and now a dozen F16's. Probably because the last time most of it actually flew was in the years of the Soviet Union.

Europe has ~1800 combat aircraft, of which those F16's are the oldest stuff being retired because they are obsolete.

Don't get me wrong, it's worth arming ourselves to the teeth just to make anybody in Russia have a panic attack when glancing in our direction but they aren't that much of a threat to us collectively which is why they are desperately trying to split us up. Even so though they'd have to split European NATO in two just to reach numerical parity and they would literally never be able to rebuild just what they have lost in Ukraine; that took the entire Soviet Union something like 40 years to build. With a small percentage of the people and industry they just couldn't afford to do it.

Even if they could, then a tank built 50 years ago with known exploitable design flaws simply isn't fit for purpose on todays battlefield.

They are largely Intellian kit which would suggest [south] Korea.

Re: Hmm

Why would Russia give back what it has taken? We agree Putin is a bad guy etc, so why would he have a personality transplant and completely 180 degree change his personality just to make you happy?

Because Russia is having a recruitment crisis because everybody who wants to go to war has gone, and been killed and the people left have a sense of self preservation.

Because Russia is rapidly running out of Soviet Union era military equipment to fight with.

Because the Russian economy is getting hit with strategic bombing nightly on a significant (and increasingly large) scale.

Because so many Russian refineries have been bombed out of action that Russia is having to either buy in fuel from abroad or prevent civilians from using it.

Because Russia is now deploying donkeys because they can't find vehicles (or fuel) for frontline logistics.

Because the Russian economy is collapsing.

Because Russian demographics increasingly look disastrous.

Because the Russian railways is now down 80% on carrying capacity because of boring shit like wheel bearings can't be replaced, and when they are replaced are replaced with inferior quality knockoffs with like 10% of the life; requiring 10x the amount of maintenance.

Because Russia can economically keep their war going for perhaps 18 months until everything in Russia collapses and Ukraine wins by default.

Pick a single reason or just look at the lot.

Still can't get to your Outlook mailbox? You aren't alone

Me too; i'm wondering if it's actually an attempt to push people running on prem servers to exchange online by making it unviable to run on prem.

Has anybody else found that they have problems problem emailing outlook.com or hotmail.com addresses this week?

They seemed to be returning NDR's with:-

550 5.7.1 Unfortunately, messages from [IP] weren't sent. Please contact your Internet service provider since part of their network is on our block list (S3150).

And that "part of the ISP's network" was seemingly a fairly large chunk of the UK address space, which is the most stupid thing that i've seen since an antispam blocklist which blocked ~40% of the total IPv4 pool.

Oh Brother. Printer giant denies dirty toner tricks as users cry foul

I have an opinion on Kyocera printers.

I have have looked after a fleet of a few dozen Kyocera FS2020's for ~15 years, quite a few of which racked up print counts literally in the millions; I think the highest got to ~2.5 million sheets. Fantastic printers, hugely rugged and the maintenance was a dream. They don't have any problems using compatible toners assuming that it's the right grade. Even if it's the wrong grade then it'll still print it in my experience, although this will have adverse effects on the drum cleaning blades and thus the drum service life if not adequately maintained. They'll also accept crap quality paper quite happily. (notably if somebody puts paper in at a 15 degree angle then it'll pull it in sideways, flatten it out and spit the sheet out of the top instead of jamming and crying for an engineer)

Kyocera has a "maintenance kit" which contains basically every moving part, all of which could be replaced on the 2020 with nothing more than opening a panel and replacing a unit, with the most difficult one being the fuser; which you had to poke two clips with a random key/screwdriver to detach the clips and remove it from the printer (a nice bit of userproofing; stopping the end user from accidentally damaging the fuser rollers)

The time taken to replace a dev unit, fuser or drum was less than the time taken to remove the part from the packaging materials. (They were very, very well packed against impact damage or contamination in transit)

On the basis of this rather positive experience and with the obvious age of the printers getting to the point of absurdity, combined with spare parts availability starting to become a problem (still available from Kyocera OEM, but they were obviously being made specially for us and then shipped from Asia...) I decided to pay that little bit more and upgrade to the Kyocera p3145, basically a straight upgrade to a more modern printer in the range.

All was well for a bit. The dev unit and drum are relatively painless to replace at about a hundred thousand sheets, but my god the fuser unit at about a quarter million sheets. You've got to basically totally disassemble the printer shell, then unscrew the fuser and pull it out and then disconnect some tiny delicate wires seemingly specifically designed to be easily damageable, thus writing off either the fuser unit or the entire printer and then reassemble the dammed thing again.

Suffice to say that the useful lifetime of these printers is effectively until the first fuser unit change. I'm going to be replacing the printers rather than repairing them at that point and after that experience it's not going to be with Kyocera kit.

But if your expecting to be printing less than a quarter million sheets over the printer lifetime then they are great.

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

Very little chance while Trump is doing what Musk is told to do by Putin.

If he stops, or Musk gets designated Vice President then the chances that bookies would refuse to give odds.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

Re: Heres

The problem is that those are really on the wrong side of Canada to export to Europe.

Even if Trump doesn't allow Russian gas directly, he'll certainly ignore Russia's shadow fleet where the gas isn't really coming from Russia, honest.

Re: Candada is to the USA as Ukraine is to Russia ?

Gigafactory Mexico (also known as Gigafactory 6) is a proposed manufacturing plant for Tesla, Inc. to be constructed...

So it's not been built yet then, and that'll be why President Musk doesn't care.

Re: Neither Canada or Mexico was doing enough to stop drugs

That's probably actually what he's complaining about actually, since illegal drugs going across the border amount to like 0.2% of US supply according to the US DEA and the insulin smuggling at the international cost price must be costing US company megabucks considering they charge like 15x the actual worldwide retail price to their captive American market.

One wonders if we actually ought to be offering those Americans asylum. The simple fact of the matter is that if they don't get insulin they die, and their government is deliberately pricing cheap medicines available in quantity everywhere else in the world which are absolutely required for life at a level which one could argue approaches the requirements of reducing them to servitude. The situation does comprise multiple violations of the universal declaration of human rights.

There is a big difference between mining and refining though, and then delivering finished products.

All of which the US will be discovering shortly.

Microsoft unveils finalized EU Data Boundary as European doubt over US grows

Re: > Europe should be...

Europe would have to overturn its tax system first, because it punishes working men and productive business.

Have we been listening to Microsoft, Amazon etc scream about how incredibly and deeply unfair it is that they have to pay tax in the countries where they generate wealth by any chance?

US Dept of Housing screens sabotaged to show deepfake of Trump sucking Elon's toes

Re: During this time

the WLB also pointed out that if he ended martial law, there would probably be mass desertion.

If before every engagement in WW2 the US army troops were told "you can desert if you want with no consequences, now let's fix bayonets and charge those machine guns", or "you can desert if you want with no consequences, now please take this Sherman with the gun that won't penetrate the Tiger up against that column of Tiger tanks" then what do you suppose the outcome of the war would have been?

It's exactly why Russia has a recruitment crisis for the Russian Armed Farces at the moment; Russians know that joining their army means that like 70% of them will be dead within a month in exchange for a foot square chunk of Ukraine and the gory of the motherland. Not really worth dying for unless your already 80 and likely to drop dead in a few months and want the recruitment and killed in action bonuses for your family, hence that's about the only people in Russia signing up.

A combined EU-Russia economic bloc would be a far greater threat to the US.

Alas comrade, Russia has zero chance of conquering the EU to add our wealth to yours. If you were thinking more along the lines of some form of peaceful trading status such as you had before stating that you intended to invade Europe in the first few days of the Ukraine invasion then firstly you've fucked any possibility of that, and secondly Russia has a GDP a third smaller than the UK, which is a rather less objectionable partner for France and Germany.

Secondly, there is the 'externalities' issue. Musk just fires people on the lower end of the bell-curve in his companies. However in a country, this doesn't work. There isn't an outside void into which to cast people. Ultimately the country picks up the pieces or people starve (see the moral point above).

Musk is a dedicated believer of the Eugenics movement, which has always had this problem. What do you do with the the Untermensch?

We'll see what his solution is over the next few years.

SpaceX has an explanation for the Falcon 9 bits that hit Poland

The company said there were no toxic materials in the debris that fell over Poland last week, but advised anyone coming across bits of the second stage to leave it alone and contact authorities. It said it "is working closely with the government of Poland on recovery and cleanup efforts."

If there are no toxic materials in the debris then why does there need to be a cleanup effort? Let's look at the definition of "cleanup".

Cleanup; noun.

The act or process of removing a dirty or dangerous substance, esp. when it has been left in the environment as a result of an accident:

HP deliberately adds 15 minutes waiting time for telephone support calls

Re: Confirms my decision...

Any network grade laser printing a ream a year will last a couple of centuries before hitting the servicing point.

The old HP ones are simply the most notorious for it since people picked up used ones 30 years ago which are still ticking along.

Trump can't quickly or easily kill the CHIPS Act, but he can fire the workers funded by it

Re: The Trump administration’s plans for the future are not clear.

It's also worth noting this sentence in the article:-

The layoffs are also expected to gut the US AI Safety Institute, which was responsible for evaluating the security of emerging AI models.

To which one could reasonably append "such as Tesla's full self driving and Elon Musks startup" if they were feeling sufficiently cynical.

Kelsey Hightower on dodging AI and the need for a glossary of IT terms

Re: Hang on a minute...

what is really unfortunate is the more impenetrable the language you use the more competent you appear to be because the harder you are to understand.

That's merely an assumption that people who use lots of unfamiliar terminology are experts with a higher degree of understanding, which is typically what those sort of people want you to think.

The reality is that they don't have a f***ing clue and are covering that behind a pile of acronyms.

Albert Einstein held a number of opinions which i've come to share. Firstly that his laws of physics should be understandable by a barmaid, and secondly that if you can't explain something to a five year old then you don't actually understand it yourself. Both points apply to other fields; anybody disagreeing significantly should have to justify by what authority they are setting themselves up above Einstein.

Technical terminology in other fields is used between peers to reduce the number of words required for communicating concepts. For instance nautical architects might discuss metacentric height, but would have no real difficulty with having the conversation using non technical words or explaining in a non technical way by mentioning that's basically the height above the point of balance and therefore how much a ship would roll. They might need 5 times more words, but it wouldn't stop them communicating the concepts. They also wouldn't use technical jargon when communicating with people who should not reasonably be expected to understand it.

In IT there is an unfortunate and increasingly developing tendency to use words to conceal any meaning a sentence contains with the mistaken assumption that this makes the person look intelligent, rather than utterly ignorant and to be fair that does need combating.

Re: Hang on a minute...

He's calling for that in order to call out and reduce the proliferation of undefined terminology aka buzzwords found when playing bullshit bingo.

It's not actually a bad idea. A common marketing tactic is to introduce a large amount of meaningless bullshit terminology and then exclaim <gasp>, but as a professional don't you know what web9.7 blockchain linked AI means in this context?!

The idea of course being for a non technical manager to keep quiet instead of correctly calling them out on a meaningless word salad. Having a standard glossary would deter people from inventing new words to try and prevent understanding of their products. That last sentence also explains why it won't happen without need for further elaboration.

Ignorance really is bliss when you’re drowning in information

Is it possible (and reasonable) to not care? To replace the fear of missing out with the joy of missing out? Can we learn to discriminate between what's immediate, important and relevant - and everything else?

I find all of this a bit odd, simply because when smartphones came out I applied the same sceptical methodology to them that gets applied to every other snake oil salesman who wanders in trying to sell me things that I can't possibly live without, despite having lived without my entire life. My conclusion was then (and remains now) that I will either be at home, in which case I can access the internet via a laptop which is more efficient for any purpose that I wish to use it for, or at work (same comment), driving from one to the other (in which case I can't legally use it) or out with friends of family, in which case then I needed to be with those people and not on a tech device. The result of this was that I remained with a featurephone all the way through the entire fad, and am now bemusedly watching people who have addicted themselves to smartphones try and figure out if it's possible to live without a so called smartphone.

Yes, it is possible (and perfectly reasonable!) not to care about things. Your opinion is frankly worthless most of the time anyway because the level of information you have upon most subjects is so minimal (although skewed by the Dunning-Kruger effect aka illusive superiority in the eyes of the subject) that the opinion of most of the general population is quite frankly rarely worth reading.

To replace the fear of missing out with the joy of missing out?

Fear of missing out on what? What some drunk and drug addled fool with a smartphone thinks? What topics actually interest you? Pay attention to those, do not pay attention to the ones that are not of interest to you. It's a pretty simple concept. If you are sufficiently advanced interest in a particular subject and if your opinion is worth listening to and you can converse on a subject in person without filling people with a desire to knock your teeth down your throat then you can join membership groups which will unlock the ability to actually meet decision makers in person at events and you can talk to them and actually have some real impact on their thinking, which is liable to have rather more effect on the world than a comment on twatter.

Can we learn to discriminate between what's immediate, important and relevant - and everything else?

What's immediate and important that you can effect is relevant. Little else is.

Quite why people obsess about current events that they have no actual control or influence over I have no idea. If you pick a small subset of interests then you can interact with them in a meaningful way. Being interested in everything is being interested in nothing, because the reality is that "nothing" is your level of knowledge and understanding on basically every one of those topics; you've just read a synopsis that somebody else prepared which means that you are parroting their opinions.

US datacenters in for shock as Canada mulls cutting the juice over Trump tariffs

The US DEA says that the supply of Fentanyl from Canada to the US is fuck all.

https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-008-20%20Fentanyl%20Flow%20in%20the%20United%20States_0.pdf

It also shows that the precursors are made in the US, then shipped to Mexico and then smuggled back across the border and finished into drugs. Blocking the export of the precursors from the US to Mexico would be rather more sensible than demanding Mexico block their export to the US; that just looks like an attempt at deflection from the US failure to prevent the exports in the first place.

ASML makes hay while Sun shines, but Trump could rain on its parade

Re: When exactly has Russia or China tried to invade the Netherlands?

Do you think he'll stand by NATO when Russia goes after the Baltics without demanding something unreasonable in return?

Nope, not at all.

But given that Putin has lost basically lost like 800,000 maimed and killed from his army in Ukraine and basically all of that armies equipment to the Ukrainians who have been given modern infantry weapons and 1960's - 1990's vintage military heavy equipment that was lying around unused, with training consisting of a 2 week crash course and the manual and wishes of good luck, i'm pretty sure he's not going to want to face several dozen times the amount of equipment that is generations more advanced, and in the hands of people who'd spent their careers training to fight WW3.

Even an idiot knows that he can't possibly win. He's outnumbered in ships, aircraft, tanks, IFV's, APC's and even pain old grunts. And all of our equipment is massively better than his.

Re: When exactly has Russia or China tried to invade the Netherlands?

The Netherlands is part of the EU & NATO.

Anybody invading one EU country is courtesy of the mutual defence pact at war with the lot, and the same comments apply to NATO. Additionally, Britain got involved in both world wars due to Germany invading the only deep water ports in Europe that can conveniently be used to invade the UK; if somebody invaded them again then we'd be looking to keep them out of unfriendly hands.

If somebody nukes the netherlands then given nuclear weapons will be flying and landing within 100km of the borders of two nuclear powers (That's Britain & France for Americans; both are nuclear powers) then they are liable to end up with one or the other side tossing nukes back. Which the Russians know; they aren't stupid. They just talk shit because their social media arm is the most successful part of their army. They detected that americans scare easily and bow to their threats and hence the event of the drunken nuclear threat of the day for the last couple of years.

They won't carry through with their threats; Russians know that they would be the epicenter of a large glowing radiactive crater if their fired nukes first. Even China has told Russians to lay off the drink and threats or else they'll stop propping the Russian economy up because they don't like being associated with crazy people.

Why does the UK keep getting beaten up by IT suppliers?

It found "pay constraints mean that government departments are unable to fully compete with the private sector in hard-to-recruit roles."

It's a bit hard to recruit a competent developer, support person etc on £23k a year, yes. It's also a bit difficult to retain people on this salary, which explains the problem without much in the way of elaboration.

UK council selling the farm (and the fire station) to fund ballooning Oracle project

Re: Oracle

If you deliver a multi quadrillion Oracle project then you've led an expensive, complex and successful project and can get jobs elseware trying to fix their problems too on a large salary.

If you pull the plug and implement a working off the shelf solution in a week then the taxpayers will be furious that quadrillions have been wasted, and Oracle will also be furious and blame you for wrecking the project.

Tired techie botched preventative maintenance he soon learned wasn't needed

Re: Ah, hardware replacement...

This is so true it's painful.

What happens when someone subpoenas Cloudflare to unmask a blogger? This...

Re: Not a free speech case

The deeper legal bit though is that London is a favourite place for libel jurisdiction shopping. It's very hard to defend against libel actions in the UK.

No, it isn't.

If I say "Your an uninformed fool" upon this subject and that caused "serious harm" to your reputation and you tried to sue me for defamation in Great Britain then I could defend that on the basis of "truth" by it being factually correct, or upon the basis of it being my "honest opinion", and you'd have to prove that neither is the case, at your expense. You'd struggle on both counts, since that is basically my opinion, and it is demonstrably factually correct.

If I thought that there was any danger of my defences being eliminated then at the point that somebody actually wrote me a letter before action (a legally required step before litigation) then I can simply make an "Offer to make amends" which is to say I could retract the comment and make an apology for making said comment (with similar publicity to the original comment) and it would basically then become legally impossible to succeed in suing me.

The only way that you can end up in trouble is if you have written something defamatory and you can't prove that the defamatory statement is true (the person being presumed innocent of what you are accusing them of until you prove that it is true) and you can't prove the statement is true (because it isn't) and you then decide to refuse to accept that your talking bollocks and apologise and fight it in court, despite this being absurd. At which point most of the penalty will be a financial one; the court will make you pay for the other peoples solicitors/barristers for wasting everybodies time, as well as charging you for the courts time that you wasted.

DEF CON's hacker-in-chief faces fortune in medical bills after paralyzing neck injury

NICE decides what drugs can and should be used for what, and sets acceptable prices for the drugs the NHS uses. If you remove it then your going to have to set something up with an identical remit. It's an unfortunate fact that we can't afford to pay a million quid a dose of new drugs that claim to (but are not proven to) work wonders and somebody has to decide what gets used and negotiate costs with the manufacturers.

The problem is that the trusts exist to make the admin burden possible to deal with. You could move all of the responsibilities of the local trusts and their staff to the national level but costs will just go up when all the staff end up working in London, and it's rather questionable that this is going to improve anything.

The NHS isn't actually massively overcharged for things. It costs like £3 for buying branded paracetamol from a pharmacy through their supply chain and about 40p for an unbranded knockoff from Aldi. The unbranded knockoff has packs under half the size; so the price ought to be doubled to compare like for like. 80p for a knockoff vs £3 for a brand is comparable prices to what you see in most shops.

This is more a case that Aldi's prices are excellent; this is not exactly an issue like the US with insulin and given that the costs in question are counted in the millions against total spending in the hundreds of billions would tend to show that it's pretty well managed already.

Coder wrote a bug so bad security guards wanted a word when he arrived at work

The companies have to pay in advance for gas roughly quarterly, which they then sell to the customers on a monthly basis.

They clearly do not have the money to afford to buy the gas upfront, cannot get sufficient credit and so are deliberately overbilling customers to obtain the money to continue trading. This is basically the definition of trading whilst insolvent, which is a crime.

However nothing will be done because the law only applies to us plebs and not to our lords and masters.

Cost of Gelsinger's ambition proves too much for Intel

Remember Ferranti?

Didn't they buy an American defence company (International Signal and Control) to expand, and then discover that it was a front/slush fund for illegal arms sales on behalf of the US government that was basically worthless? It made the Autonomy scandal look quite mild.

Google offered millions to ally itself with trade body fighting Microsoft

It's just as well Microsoft has impeccably clean hands, and didn't do the same thing to Linux when Microsoft was severely worried by *nix competing with Windows by funding the SCO lawsuit back when.

Oh, wait...

Musk agrees with fan that worries over orbital Starlink traffic a 'silly narrative'

20x the number orbiting in a 500km orbit is a bit different to 20x the number in a geostaionary orbit at 36,000km because it's 72x closer.

He can't not understand that so he's deliberately trying to avoid ending up coming under any regulation.

Academic papers yanked after authors found to have used unlicensed software

Re: The connection is copyright

I receive copies of a highly ranked quarterly journal for one of my personal interests, and the most recent edition there was an article by an employee of the US government. The article noted that the journal didn't own the copyright as that wasn't allowed by the US government etc so i'm fairly sure that particular part is not so much an issue as might be assumed.

The main problem with the free to view journals is actually a somewhat circular one; the reputable ones are reputable because they have all of the experts doing peer review and thus only print high quality stuff. The free ones don't have the experts and print everything, with no filtering via expert peer review, and so your work would appear alongside an argument with the academic rigour of claiming that the world is really actually flat, which encourages crazies who end up being filtered out of the reputable journals and discourages non crazy people from submitting reputable articles to them.

All bark, no bite? Musk's DOGE unlikely to have any real power

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

I've worked for government agencies, I've worked for fortune 500 companies. They are just as screwed up as the government. Doubt that, see Boeing.

My personal opinion is that companies have a base level of incompetence which can be reached before their competition drives them out of business, which provides a corrective mechanism to ensure a base level of functioning.

The only method that government has of ridding itself of particularly useless departments is to spin them off as an independent company providing a service, outsource the work to them for X years and then at the end of that period switch to a competitor, which is why government does that.

If they want to stop that then another mechanism needs to be created to sort problems out.

Re: There IS NO MORE CONGRESS

While agreeing in principle the problem is that when you get beyond a certain point making the laws understandable by a normally intelligent person gets rather difficult.

For instance, there is a legal requirement that structures be made so that they don't fall down. That is expressed by specifying requirements for the specification of building materials; for instance specific grades of concrete and steel, their supports etc. That will make about as much sense to a layman as the standards required for secure cryptography.

If you don't have them, then at the extreme you'd have buildings that fall down, cryptography that doesn't work, dangerous drinking water, poisons in food etc. Yet if you do have the rules then the laws quickly get way too complex to be understood by a layman.

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: damn shame

From your own link in the first paragraph:-

Rolls-Royce is the world's second-largest maker of aircraft engines[3] (after CFM International)[4] and has major businesses in the marine propulsion and energy sectors.

And yes as per the second paragraph, the 4th largest commercial aircraft engine manufacturer if you exclude military aircraft jet engines. (although why you'd decide to not count the most powerful and difficult to make engines i'm not sure...)

Re: damn shame

You've highlighted the salient point there though "the worlds first commercial railways".

They were produced by investors deciding to throw money into railways, because they could make a profit doing so. The government bought the railways after WW2 from willing sellers who were looking at the growth of motorways and busses and the number of railway tickets going down faster than the Titanic. They'd have been bankrupt if the taxpayer hadn't have very generously bought them for much more than they were worth, along with basically every other industry.

If there was any real money to be made today then private industry would have provided it to make a profit. That this does not happen indicates that there is no money in it because the prospectus for infrastructure is only good for conning a politician into spending our tax money on it, and it doesn't survive any contact with a commercial due diligence exercise aimed at not wasting money.

British business is actually pretty good at building things; Rolls Royce for instance is the second largest builder of jet engines in the world. The British government is not good at building things, because they can't go bust when they fuck things up and so lack the corrective mechanism for punishing severe incompetence that exists within the business world.

Datacenter developer says power issues holding up new builds

Re: Hang on a minute lads, I've got a great idea

Probably because they want power 24/7 and don't want to wait until Sizewell C is finished.

That and as so far as people in London are concerned the area outside the M25 is filled with cannibalistic savages who aren't qualified to exist, and so they need to hire staff in London. (despite most of their own staff living outside the M25 because they can't afford the cost of living in London and so commute in...) And because their staff work in London therefore the new site needs to go in London.

Ex-Intel board members make an ill-conceived case for spinning off Foundry

Re: Sell it to Musk

He bought twitter because it allows him to remain in the public eye and continue to keep tesla's share price pumped up in a huge $500+ billion bubble, at which point the $40billion purchase cost was a good deal for him and his investors.

He's unlikely to see similar value in Intels flailing foundry business.

I'm not actually sure that it's all that ill conceived; the writing has been on the wall for a long time.

This is a comment of mine from 2023 where it was really obvious that Intel had issues with executing their roadmap.

https://forums.theregister.com/forum/1/2023/02/01/intel_pay_cuts/#c_4611849

Intel has been used to having a process advantage since forever. They've lost it, and can't retain it. By the time "Intel 3" which is supposed to counter TSMC's 3nm process is available in any quantity then TSMC is going to be rolling out their 2nm process. And Intel 3 is going to be equivalent to TSMC's 3nm; not 3nmE which will have then been in volume production for a year and a half at that point.

TSMC has a track record of making conservative guesses on their roadmap and delivering early for their customers; Intel has a track record of over promising and delivering late.

Here's a prediction; Intel will end up buying capacity from TSMC within the next and getting them to fab chip designs and will offload their older internal fabs. Logically that will eliminate the problem of using a previous generation fabbing technology and allow competing on an even playing field. However it'll introduce Intel to a new problem; that of having to compete on design merits; something which Intel has struggled to do against AMD since the AMD 386 turned out the same performance as the Intel 486 chip at a fraction of the price.

It's really obvious what the solution is to competing with a competitor who has an advantage from buying/hiring capacity from TSMC instead of using your own fabs; you do the same. Buy/hire capacity from TSMC and nullify AMD's current structural performance advantage over you by making stuff on the same equipment.

However as soon as you accept this then you also have to accept that actually, you don't need to spend literally tens of billions on running your own fabs. From there you switch to a different model where the chips are developed in one department and then put out for construction in the fabbing department, which also handles external work. Intel have already done this publicly IIRC.

You also have a research group which designs Intel chippery on TSMC, (of course purely for research purposes with no intended actual large scale production) which happens to turn out a processor which courtesy of superior TSMC fabbing technology is better performing than Intels offerings from their own fabs with lower production costs and no capex required on fabs. I'd be willing to bet good money that this research group exists, probably described much this way.

And once you've done that thinking then the logical next steps are obvious, you then build that chip on scale. It will sell very nicely without needing to spend literally tens of billions on upgrading fabs.

That leaves two options:-

A) Continue to throw tens of billions into developing your own fabs, which are worse than the ones that you can use for a small per product fee. Make no profit and risk the continued existence of Intel.

B) Don't, and make tens of billions profit.

Anybody competent is going to go with "B" at some point, after accepting that "A" isn't working.

That commits you to disposing of the Intel foundries, probably without worrying that they are likely to sink after being split off of the profitable part of the company, because if they don't separate then the non profitable fabs are eventually going to take the potentially profitable parts of Intel down with them.

If I were running Intel, i'd make the decision to pull the trigger based on the current roadmap. Intel 20A was scrapped last month, which leaves the last part of that roadmap being Intel 18A which is due out in Q3 of 2025. If that fails to compete with TSMC then intels fabs get a mercy killing and they switch to TSMC.

TSMC has a track record of making conservative guesses on their roadmap and delivering early for their customers; Intel has a track record of over promising and delivering late. Therefore by historical indications Intel 18A is likely to fail, although it will almost certainly have intels best and brightest working on it knowing that they don't have a job if they fail which ought to focus minds somewhat. On the other hand, a lack of future planning for fabs beyond Intel 18A would tend to suggest that the only possible future path for Intel is switching to TSMC in something like 2026 or 2027 even if Intel 18A worked perfectly...