* Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

3184 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009

Filipino police free hundreds of slaves toiling in romance scam operation

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Headmaster

Electrocution

Officials were reportedly tipped off by a Vietnamese worker who arrived at the center in January. He arrived after being promised a job as a chef.
If they were talking to him, and receiving responses, I can guarantee they weren't electrocution marks!

Third time is almost the charm for SpaceX's Starship

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Re: Capabilities.

Yep, if there was no intention to reuse it, it would be able to put 1,000 metric tons into orbit.
The estimated expendable payload to LEO is 250-300t

Intel's $699 Core i9-14900KS turbos to 6.2GHz – assuming you can keep it cool

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Re: Looks like a lot of hassle for mostly minor benefits

There's a lot of second hand Xeon systems on ebay though.
I'm not sure how it is worldwide but ebay around my parts (.au) has been running a lot of discount codes on refurbished electronics lately.

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Re: time travel

"Athlon XP 2600+" it was. In hindsight, it was probably a sensible change, considering performance is about more than raw clock speed, even if it was purely marketing driven at the time. In the case of many of them, the 2600+ included, there were even multiple versions with different core clock speeds, depending on other factors such as FSB speed, cache sizes etc.

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Re: time travel

Hey now, Intel has finally reached the clock speeds it promised in 2004.

If we plug this in without telling anyone, nobody will know we caused the outage

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WTF?

Re: The sure fire 10p investment...

What in hades possessed you to write and then post that comment?

Some Intel Core chips keep crashing, game devs complain

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Re: Golem.de looked closer than ElReg...

1500 W of resistive heating is 1500 W of resistive heating no matter what it comes from.

(apologies if I've missed a joke)

Australia passes Right To Disconnect law, including (for now) jail time for bosses who email after-hours

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Okay I can see you're a bit confused. This is an article about Australian politics. We don't have to choose between Biden and Trump.

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Facepalm

Okay, I'll bite, Biden is infinitely preferable to Trump, but that bar is absolute zero.

Why on earth do you think we have to choose between emulating those two?

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The coalition has a snowflake's chance in hell of winning the next election if they make repealing this their platform, it's so breathtakingly out of touch.

Labor will barely have to lift a finger, much like the John Howard billboards in 2007.

CERN seeks €20B to build a bigger, faster, particle accelerator

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Priorities

"When the world is faced with threats from the climate emergency, would it not be wiser to channel these research funds into the endeavours to create a manageable future?"
Let's build one less nuclear submarine and have both, eh?

Apple redecorates its iPhone prison to appease Europe

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Contempt and posturing

Apple reserves its contempt for democracies such as the EU because it's a waste of time attempting to influence policy in China.

We put salt in our tea so you don't have to

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WTF?

"if you don't like how tea tastes, no one's forcing you to drink it"

She believes she's improved the flavour, I don't see what the problem is. Whether or not she has, I can almost guarantee everyone telling her she's wrong hasn't performed any sort of systematic blind testing on the issue.

As a totally neutral observer to this whole kerfuffle I have to say I'm enjoying every minute of it. The wailing! The gnashing of teeth! The clutching of pearls! An American ignoring convention and the English being elitist about the whole thing are both very much on-brand.

I needed a popcorn icon for this post but I can't remember if there ever was one.

Tesla Cybertruck gets cyberstuck during off-roading expedition

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Re: Sports Futility Vehicle

Is this a car manufacturer we're talking about or Bethesda Softworks?!

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Trollface

Land Rover owners rejoicing

Cybertruck owners replacing them as the butt of Landcruiser jokes

OpenAI: 'Impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials'

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Re: Sounds like...

It's an interesting subject to explore and I should say I'm wholly unqualified to contribute more than base speculation but LLMs being transformational would be something quite special, wouldn't it?

An author did recently write a piece about how the LLM way of doing things is very similar to the way that authors in general, particularly successful ones do things, but as you say, it's the transformational nature of the human mind that is the key. You can learn how good novels are written by reading them, but the way a human mind works is very complicated and can an LLM do anything more than merely ape what it's learned?

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Re: Sounds like...

Indeed if "OpenAI has said it would be "impossible" to build top-tier neural networks that meet today's needs without using people's copyrighted work." is the best they can do, it's time to pack it up.

X's 2024 plans include peer-to-peer payments in app push

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On form I don't think that'll stop Musk from trying

How the Xbox Series X fridge chilled our holiday spirits

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Shonky

The Xbox fridge won a Shonky Award in Australia.

The Xbox Mini Fridge is essentially e-waste straight out of the box

A ship carrying 800 tonnes of Li-Ion batteries caught fire. What could possibly go wrong?

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Re: Carbon Dioxide?

Lithium-Ion batteries have very little lithium in them; it's the electrolyte that burns.

Doom turns 30, so its creators celebrate seminal first-person shooter’s contribution to IT careers

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Re: "Doom 1993 from the Microsoft Store"

Get it from wherever you can find it cheapest and then throw the WADs into GZDoom.

Chaingun sniping on a UHD monitor is hilarious.

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Doom's "bob" is weapon only; the player's viewpoint remains fixed relative to the ground. However, the weapon bob is extreme and combined with the comically fast running speed in Doom, could be the cause.

Musk takes SEC 'Twitter sitter' consent decree appeal to US Supreme Court

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Re: Same old story

The most unfortunate part of that whole Mars pipe dream is that he doesn't want to go personally

China gamifies censorship and surveillance with national internet law quiz

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Re: Question 7, which of the following is true?

I think you've been reading the North Korean edition

17% of Spotify employees face the music in latest cost-cutting shuffle

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I think it's probably fair to say that Sky produces a lot more content as a proportion of what it delivers than Spotify does?

Bitcoin's thirst for water is just as troubling as its energy appetite

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WTF?

Re: Don't care

Haha what

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

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The problem with this prediction is that there are a lot of lunatics who sincerely believe it

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

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Re: more ads means more users ????????

That is bizarre. Why does a retailer believe it needs to run ads on its own website?

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

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FAIL

Re: Tesla should deal

I have no idea what you're on about but this is one labour union taking industrial action out of solidarity with another labour union.

Lenovo's USB-C Power Banks pack more heat than expected

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Re: 20,000 mAh

I assumed it's because they're miniatures and it's cute.

I'm reminded me of Neil DeGrasse Tyson's tale about serving on a jury in a drug possession trial and arguing with the judge over the use of milligrams rather than grams to describe the alleged amounts, being prejudicial to the defendant because it makes the amounts sound gigantic.

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Sure, but they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts either, they're managing their liability. At least an iPhone that doesn't work when you Hold It Wrong™ won't burn your house down...

SpaceX celebrates Starship launch as a success – even with the explosion

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Re: I can't help but feel....

Elon Musk owns 42% of SpaceX and holds 79% of the voting rights. So for better or worse, SpaceX does what he tells it to. The only recourse any other investors have is to sell.

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Re: Self destruct

The "leniency" in the programming of the Flight Termination System (FTS) is dictated by the launch licence, and while Elon Musk doesn't respect many things, he does respect those.

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Corrective action

In the process, the heavy-lift rocket even destroyed a chunk of its own launch pad. That mess earned SpaceX 63 corrective actions from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) – all of which the space cadets seemingly took on the chin.
As I understand it, SpaceX proposed those 63 corrective actions.

Vote now on who should take the lead in Musk: The Movie

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Re: Only one choice, really

I don't know about that... Steve's in his 70s and unlike Space Karen, Zuck has actually been training.

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Re: Whoever wrote this article

Hmm, they must have their heads screwed on the right way around in that part of SF

48-nation bloc to crack down on using crypto assets to avoid tax

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FAIL

Four years!

Why not just ban it all right now?

US Air Force wants to see some atomic motors for future spacecraft

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Headmaster

Atomic Motors?

Based on the headline alone you might think this is a rocket motor when it's just a power generator, so that's a bit misleading

Microsoft hits Alt+F4 on internal ChatGPT access over security jitters, irony ensues

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Trollface

Re: Maybe this is the issue about ALT+F4 and AI

Some yobs will say ',don't use extensions at all', and to that I say: should we bring back Lynx
We could bring back Opera 12?

The number of extensions I need to use in modern browsers just to replicate what Opera 12 did natively is still a bit ridiculous.

Major telco outage leaves millions of Australians disconnected

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Re: I Feel for the small shops...

Square went down here a couple of months back. A restaurant had me pay for my lunch by direct deposit.

It was only when I got home that I noticed I'd still paid them for the Square transaction fee...

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Re: I Feel for the small shops...

We were already enthusiastic adopters of contactless payments pre-pandemic, but that was basically the final nail in cash's coffin.

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Re: Who, Me?

Even 000 wasn't working from Optus landlines according to some reports which is... yeah.

What staggers me is the sheer amount of critical public infrastructure that apparently doesn't have a fallback mode and simply fails when it loses comms.

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Who, Me?

I cannot wait for the Who, Me? episode about this one.

GPS leading your phone astray? We can just fix that in code, startup claims

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Why is GPS accuracy on mobile phones such a problem?

The GPS head unit I use on my bike yields far more accurate results (to within low single digit metres and quite repeatable) than the output of <social network masquerading as a fitness tracking app> (which is low double digit metres at best).

Why is this? Are the GPS receivers in phones that bad, or is it simply the app being terrible?

Privacy advocate challenges YouTube's ad blocking detection scripts under EU law

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Then again, supermarkets have struggled with this ever since introducing 'loyalty cards' for customer profiling.
One of Australia's big two supermarket chains recently began gating some (but not all) of its regular yellow ticket specials behind a loyalty card. I can't articulate why very well, but it feels completely bizarre to me. I suppose I'll be using the other one of the big two more regularly?

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Re: For now...

I use RSS for all of the channels I "follow". You don't only watch what you directly follow, surely?