Posts by love not war 17 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Dec 2009
Exactly. That is the whole point of the hysteria. They are trying to create a monopoly by regulation.
You will notice also that their examples of other existential perils don't include climate change. Because using a huge datacentre to cheat on your class room history assignment, by getting ChatGPT to write it, is probably not helpful to emissions reductions.
The government is not posting health messages on Facebook for the government's convenience, but because (some/many) people use Facebook and the government wants as many people as possible to see the health messaging.
If Facebook persists, they will definitely receive some hostile regulation.
What do you think would happen if a cellphone provider refused to connect emergency calls, or refused to carry emergency broadcasts?
Because MS (and its executive suite) doesn't want to be prosecuted / fined as a party to a crime?
It is a little hypocritical, as they presumably hired the guy in the first place partly because he knows something incidental about Intel. On the other hand, it's not in their interest to be a blatantly criminal enterprise.
It's a hacker acting like an advanced persistent threat, and specifically acting consistently with how the the advanced persistent threats thought to be Russian intelligence agencies have acted in the past.
Sure, it is conceivable that another hacker is attempting to spoof the MO of Russian intelligence. But it is hard to see why they would, and would be very difficult to do so in a way that was convincing to, say, US intelligence.
Advanced persistent threat type-hackers are not really trying to hide who they are, because unlike a civilian hacker you cannot arrest them etc., they don't face consequences like that. Advanced persistent threats are only trying to hide what they are doing.
Agree with LarsG, there are many plausible Sgt. Duffer scenarios that explain this. As he says, fuelling error, or something like a legitimate, but wrong, command and control signal from the US controllers easily explain this.
It is even plausible that a real mission went awry, for example, maybe the drone was deliberately landed in an attempt to re-supply a special-forces unit, but was intercepted by Iranian ground-forces.
Lots of other "natural" explanations work too --- hit by lightning or buffeting from turbulence causing some sort of system disconnection, for example.
If it did crash, as long as it lands in relatively flat terrain a fairly unscathed body is not that surprising either. The drone will probably be designed to glide --- as this saves on fuel for high altitude, long-duration missions. And it is surely designed to be rugged enough to experience a hard-landing without disintegrating into thousands of pieces. It will be designed such that it can land on an improvised/poor run-way when being used by a unit in the field, for example.
On the other hand, it would be foolish to assume that the Iranians hadn't figured out some method of causing a malfunction. And it would be equally foolish to assume that a propaganda statement (from either side) actually contained any truthful information about what this exploit was.
Any government capable of enforcing taxation policy on its population is also capable of turning off the internet if they so choose.
Even a government that has lost control over the majority of the population still only only needs to conivince a small number of corporations to follow the government's instruction in order to turn off the internet. Corporations are not in the business of bravely standing up for principles.
Ultimately, any government in control of at least a fraction of its armed forces can always seize/destroy the critical pieces of hardware.
Sure, there might be technical work-arounds that a limited number of people will have the technical nous to exploit. But, only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population will have the technical skills and the right equipment available at the right time.
@StephenD " What does this mean? I'm pretty sure they haven't produced a power source with greater than 100% efficiency"
In refrigeration the COP is the amount of cooling you get (in kW) divided by the amount of energy required to run the refrigeration system (also in kW), which is usually the compressor and fans. COP is not an efficiency it is just a ratio of paid energy input to energy transferred.
In refrigeration you generally design the system so that you transfer a whole lot more heat from inside the refrigerated environment (to outside) than you put electrical energy in, thus the COP is typically bigger than 1.
In this case, because there is no compressor, they are claiming that the only paid energy input is the fan, thus because the fan energy is relatively small the COP is apparently large.
However, this means that the cabinet can't be refrigerated below the temperature of where they are condensing the refrigerant gas. Which is why in the example, they are sending the vapour off to a chilled water heat exchanger. The real cost is the cost of creating that chilled water. That is the COP which is relevant here; which is likely going to be on the order of 2-4.
So it is rubbish.
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