Posts by veti

Yolk's on you – eggs break less when they land sideways

Re: Small quibble...

The drop height was measured according to fig. 2(b) from the bottom of the shell to the impacted surface rather than from the egg's centre of mass.

The CoM to surface distance minus the distance from the CoM to the shell surface vertically below will determine the maximum velocity just before impact.

I must be missing something, because it seems to me that "The CoM to surface distance minus the distance from the CoM to the shell surface vertically below" is just a more verbose and less intuitive way of saying "from the bottom of the shell to the impacted surface".

You'll never guess which mobile browser is the worst for data collection

Re: Evil

I think what a lot of us missed for a long time was that "don't be evil" wasn't "culture". It was strategy. Larry and Sergei knew Google would grow faster and stronger if it could persuade people to trust it, and turning evil too soon would ruin everything. But once they finished their growth phase and were ready to move on to enshittification, it was no longer relevant.

Re: The biggest suprise

You can do that in any browser, but "disabling Javascript" is really an extreme measure nowadays, one that will severely restrict what sites you can visit and use.

It is nice to have sub-nuclear options.

Re: I use Brave

I still use Firefox on Android, with only one extension, and I don't see any tailored ads at all.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Re: How fat is Kim Jong Un?

It's not that hard, but it's reasonable money for a job with no heavy lifting. Why would you go to all the trouble of getting into that business (there are a few hoops to jump through), then jeopardise everything by playing silly buggers on the side? Bearing in mind that business will inevitably bring you into contact with criminals and people who think like criminals, who are inherently not the most friendly or trustworthy people to deal with.

Damn silly thing to do.

New Zealand kind-of moves to ban social media for under-16s, require age checks for new accounts

Two things.

One, ban recommendation algorithms. When I log on to a social media platform, I should be able to see "latest posts from accounts I follow" and "the results of any search I care to make", and that is all. No "hot posts", no "people who liked that also liked..." - nothing. This would remove a whole lot of social media's ills: limit the viral spread of misinformation, creeping extremism and rabbit holes. It would also severely limit the value social media companies can get by slurping their users' data, thus making them less anxious to do it.

Two, tax attention. If a user spends hours a day on the same platform, it's a good bet that the platform owners are deliberately trying to hold their attention. So make them pay, let's say $1 per user per hour over 2 hours in any 24 hour period. Exemptions available for, say, platforms that charge users more than $5 per month to access them (because, e.g., educational sites are a thing), but in general, incentivise platforms to encourage users to click away.

Trump's wind farm funding freeze is so much hot air, say states as they blow sueball to Washington

Re: SCOTUS

He only needed the votes once because he can't stand again anyway, so he really doesn't give a shit who wins the next election.

Re: Throroughly confused

The thinking couldn't be simpler. Wind power is popular with most environmentalists and lefties, therefore it must be stopped.

The fact that this means funnelling more money into coal, oil and gas industries is really just gravy. What's important is winding up the Libs.

Zuck ghosts metaverse as Meta chases AI goldrush

Re: "Losing" $6 Billion in Five Years

100,000 people at an average spend of $10k per month per person.

That's some serious partying.

Re: Whoops

There's a catch: to boycott the companies, you'd have to know who they were. You'd have to actually use Facebook or whatever to find out.

Siri? Will tariffs hurt Apple? Tim Cook says brace for a $900M whack, for starters

Re: I'll never understand the stock market

First, consider that most Tesla stock is likely already owned by dyed-in-the-wool Musk worshippers. Everyone else will have sold out years ago.

Second, consider that Musk still has the ear of the most corrupt president in history, so there's a significant chance he can bend policy to his own ends.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Re: Is Trump just not capable of grasping the concept of knowledge?

Who knew golf was so complicated?

Re: Make Aerospace Grotty Again

a) Debatable at best. b) Returning to the Moon was Trump's grand plan in the first place, Artemis is his baby already. c) Just plain false. d) Well yes, and? e) True, but...

A private space station would not be limited by anything. It would be controlled by some insanely rich dude. It might or might not have all the properties you seem eager to assign to it, but that would be largely irrelevant because we the people would have no way of using it anyway: it would be there to further the ambitions of the owner who was, most likely, trying to build his (I bet anything it's a he) empire in space. Could it be a refuelling station? Well, sure, but only for the owner. Cargo hub? - for cargo from where to where, exactly?

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

Re: It's a wise dwarf ...

Dwarfs don't have any truck with this "neutral pronoun" nonsense, they're all "he/him" regardless of personal biology or other properties.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Re: "You want answers?" "I want the truth!" "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!"

The more I read about the current generation of AIs, the more impressed I am with how well they can imitate human reasoning.

If a young up-and-coming analyst on the make allowed himself to be studied in the kind of depth being applied here, do you think the observations would be significantly different? I don't.

Re: So can we make it president?

That would depend on what goals it was set. If you asked it to strengthen the American economy and rebuild its middle class, then no, it wouldn't do those things. On the other hand, if you ask it to remove as many obstacles as possible to the richest Americans remaining in power in America, then it might.

So who do you think would be setting the goals, and what would they want?

Linux in Excel? Sure, why not ruin both

Re: NeXT STep

Great idea, then you can transfer the whole thing to run on itself and you'll never have to look at it again. Which is the goal I'm sure we're all working for here.

X marks the drop for European users

It wasn't asked "What has Elon Musk done lately?", it was asked "why are Europeans leaving X?".

Infosec pros tell Trump to quit bullying Chris Krebs – it's undermining security

Re: Erm

The 2020 election is "questionable" in the sense that you can ask questions of anything. It has been quite exhaustively questioned for several years now by some of the most highly motivated people you'll find anywhere, and none of this "questioning" has turned up anything that anyone remotely impartial considers grounds for suspicion.

I also like to mention at this point that Trump was the president at the time of the 2020 election. When Obama was president, and when Biden was president, Trump won, and those elections were apparently free and fair... but when Trump himself was president, i.e. head of the executive branch of the government, it was by his own account rigged and rotten. What does that say about him as president?

Also note that Trump himself appointed Krebs as a trustworthy figure. For Trump to attack him now as the opposite is essentially an admission that he, Trump, is a terrible judge of character and has absolutely zero reliable expertise, either his own or hired from elsewhere, in any relevant sphere.

As for Trump "trying to stop the invasion in Ukraine" (interesting choice of words there, most people would have said "invasion of Ukraine"), he's "trying to stop" it the same way he "stopped" the war in Afghanistan: by surrendering. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to have dawned on him that since it's not the US army that's actually fighting this war, he doesn't get to give that order.

"Weaponisation of the state vs Trump" - neither Biden nor Obama attempted any such thing. Biden let the law take its course in prosecuting violent criminals. Obama let federal agencies make their own operational decisions, with the result that the FBI director torpedoed Clinton's campaign. Trump is the one who is politicising and abusing those powers.

DARPA to 'radically' rev up mathematics research. Yes, with AI

Re: Maths

This is an AI generated comment, and I claim my $5.

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Trump is in an unusually safe and cushioned position, he can simply retire to Mar-a-Lardass and no successor would try to stop him from whoring away what's left of his life. Contrast with Putin, who if he announced his retirement today would be dead by the end of the week.

It's part of the democratic bargain.

Signalgate lessons learned: If creating a culture of security is the goal, America is screwed

" the Atlantic's editor-in-chief"...

Dear El Reg editors: the Atlantic is an ocean. It doesn't have an editor, in chief or otherwise, and it doesn't publish anything.

You're thinking of The Atlantic, a periodical I used to enjoy before they paywalled themselves into, as far as I'm concerned, oblivion.

Microsoft mystery folder fix might need a fix of its own

Re: Quality control - yes we’ve heard of it

No matter how long you extend the lifetime, people will still moan about having their hardware deprecated. Remember WinXP?

Windows 11 has been available for four years now. Anyone who bought a new computer since then, if it's still running W10, they have only themselves to thank (or blame) for that. US accounting standards say that the expected lifespan of a working computer is five years, so I would say MS really should support Win 10 at least a bit longer, but "5 to 10 years" is unreasonable.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

Re: Looks like China Learned the Lessons of the Opium Wars

In the same way as we're currently "elbow deep" in the Arab Spring, sure. Those events were years apart. Turns out the 19th century went on for quite a while.

The United Kingdom, it's often forgotten, was formed by a Scottish takeover of England and Wales, not vice versa. Scots merchants were at the heart of the imperial project all the way. Names like Campbell and Macdonald and Mackenzie keep coming up again and again in imperial history.

The Irish, it's true, were more removed. But in all countries, the really important distinction was between ruling classes versus proletariat. It was always the latter who did the really graphic suffering. At the same time as the Irish peasants were starving, English mill workers and miners were labouring 14 hours a day from the age of 11, with no chance of an education. And peasants were only slightly better off; only a generation earlier, the countryside had been depleted by enclosures, which had forced countless people into the cities to find work by, yes, starving them out of their homes.

Re: Stupid

If he's so stupid, how did he win?

Twice?

He certainly espouses policies that seem stupid, but only because you aren't thinking about the same objectives as he is. He wants to enrich himself and ingratiate himself with other rich people, and if he has to sacrifice the entire US and the rest of its population to do that, he won't hesitate for a moment.

I'm not saying he's playing 5D chess. He's not even playing 2D checkers. He's playing king of the hill.

Re: Is 'blink' a euphemism for pump & dump?

Except Trump isn't stupid. He's proved that time and again.

It's just malice. And greed, obviously.

US to slap up to 3,521% tariffs on SE Asian solar imports – especially you, Cambodia

Re: Please dump cheap green tech in the UK.

Incorrect. Germany, Belgium and Ireland all have higher energy bills than the UK.

But if you've got a suitable south-facing roof, go for it. I just spent $15k on an installation like that, now it's saving me about $5 per day, will be significantly more come summer.

CVE fallout: The splintering of the standard vulnerability tracking system has begun

Re: China

We still don't know whether thorium reactors work, in China or anywhere else, because nobody who doesn't work for the Chinese government is allowed to see them. Sure we get the occasional triumphal announcement, but whether there's any actual there there, I don't know and nor do you.

Re: China

Can you name one product the USA has made, essentially EVER, that wasn't stolen from someone else's work, design or idea?

That's how technology works. People take what's already around and figure out ways to improve it and new things to do with it. It's what we used to call "progress". Every, and I mean every technology developed in the USA was built on top of knowledge it (by modern standards) "stole" from previous developments in other countries.

Re: Move MITRE & CVE to Europe

Why in the world would we want it to be close to the US? Move it to frickin' Afghanistan, then it might have a shot at real independence...

IBM orders US sales to locate near customers or offices

Re: So all those employees in India will be moving to the US?

I'm sure they can't wait to be thrown into holding cells and/or shipped to a maximum security prison in El Salvador for the crime of Not Being American Born.

What to do once your Surface Hub v1 becomes an 84-inch, $22K paperweight

Re: Could it be used

Home cinema, then. I'm willing to bet not many of these things will actually turn up in landfill.

It's fun making Studio Ghibli-style images with ChatGPT – but intellectual property is no laughing matter

Re: Cunning move...

Miyazaki personally is worth an estimated US$50 million. Ghibli itself would probably add a whole lot more resources to that pot. He's not exactly defenceless, if he wants to lawyer up he absolutely can.

Anora? The Substance? Heretic? The Assessment? The Brutalist? Kraven the Hunter? A Real Pain? Conclave? The Friend?

I'm just browsing down the list on IMDB of movies released last year, all those titles are in the first 20. None of them are part of any preexisting franchise. People have been saying this "there's nothing but sequels and remakes" for at least 30 years to my personal knowledge. It's never been true, and it's not now.

Europe's cloud customers eyeing exit from US hyperscalers

Re: Some of us have been saying this for years

"Common sense" is not even remotely close to what you think it is.

There's some amazingly selective memory going on among commentards here. Sure, we all remember when companies kept their data in-house, it was always available to anyone from anywhere, there were no leaks or data losses, servers never went down, sysadmins were always completely conscientious, industrious and respectful, they never made unreasonable requests or mistook a tech fad for a business need, costs were minimised...

From management's point of view, it's always been "someone else's computer". It's just that the relationship with that someone else is different now. More formal, better documented, more severable. Previously if you weren't happy with your server support, that was a personnel issue and you'd have to tread carefully and likely get HR involved. Now it's a contract issue, that's much easier to manage. For managers who've been dealing with wannabe BOFHs for the past 30 years, you can see how that would appeal.

Krebs throws himself on the grenade, resigns from SentinelOne after Trump revokes clearances

Re: Next week :

Oh good, we can add "falsifying government records" to Musk's rap sheet. That's good for up to 20 years in Club Fed.

Microsoft: Why not let our Copilot fly your computer?

Finally

... Microsoft boxen can work without any human input at all.

It occurs to me that if it can operate any interface, it can play games. I would really like to know what it will do when left to its own devices for an extended period. What exactly happens when AI gets bored?

Windows Recovery Environment update fails successfully, says Microsoft

Came here looking for the comment that this is hardly new. Updates display error messages about as often as not, in my experience. But it's not as if you can do anything about them anyway. Just push on through, and see what the system looks like at the end.

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

Re: US companies did this to us

Not surprised. The car industry has some amazing political clout, out of all proportion to its actual size or economic importance.

Re: Which hole is this?

Congress could impeach any president at any time, utterly regardless of what they have or haven't done. It's Congress's decision, no-one else's. There are a number of reasons why they don't do it, but many of them eventually boil down to "no matter how low the president's approval goes, it'll never be worse than Congress's". Which means they'd probably lose everything if they tried it.

As to why they want to give him more power - many of them have long since worked out that power is a burden. If you have power, you have to make decisions, and that means making enemies. Many of them are quite happy for the executive to do that for them. We see the same dynamic in Europe with powers handed to the Commission and Council, but never to the European Parliament.

Err... 16:59 UTC would be 12:59 ET. Not sure where you got your calculation from.

EU lands 25% counter tariff punch on US, Trump pauses broad import levy hike – China excepted

"Planned" may be not quite the right word, but GP makes a good point. Republicans are supposed to favour free markets and minimal government intervention in trade. Trump is intervening like there's no tomorrow, which is why the markets are crapping themselves.

Also why those few Republicans left who have any principles at all are trying to calm him down. But most of them, it appears, never really believed in (or possibly just never understood) free market economic theory, so they're content to abandon it when it no longer supports the goal of getting them into power.

I have to hand it to Trump...

He's really achieved something here.

He's hit the USA with its biggest peacetime tax hike in history. Single-handedly. Thus hitting an end run around the cowardice of Congress (which is supposed to set taxes high enough to meet its needs, but has been shirking that duty for as long as I've been alive).

And the party of "small government" and "low taxation" is cheering him to the echo. Presumably because tariffs are a strongly regressive form of taxation.

And nobody is talking about it in these terms. He's completely deflected the debate onto trivia like the stock market crashing. So the tax hike is very likely to remain. If he'd merely imposed 10% on all imports and called it a day, he wouldn't have got away with nearly so much.

Don't listen to what he says. Watch what he does. He's utterly, completely corrupt, but not stupid.

Partially true. But there's a difference between declaring that an agreement made long ago has served its purpose and is no longer relevant and we should update or scrap it, let's talk, and declaring that the agreement you yourself negotiated and congratulated yourself for was a terrible deal and now you're going to unilaterally abandon it, fuck you.

Basically, anyone who makes any kind of agreement with Trump is an idiot who deserves what they get. The rest of the world should simply ostracize America for the next three and a half years. Forget this "tariff" bullshit, just stop trade entirely, close the borders, and let them sort out their own domestic problems.

Nvidia paid $1M for Mar-a-Lago meal, US later scrapped AI chip export crackdown

The Democrats certainly not only dropped the ball, but then passed it back and repeatedly slammed it into their own net... They have some serious shit-gathering to do, no doubt about that.

But that doesn't make it "entirely" their fault. There was nothing to stop the Republicans from choosing a decent candidate to stand against them, and there's nothing now stopping them from trying to apply some discipline to the executive. Just their own spinelessness.

Musk's DOGE muzzled on X over tape storage baloney

Genius. Do you work for DOGE already? If not, they're totally looking for you.

Re: Minor correction

You are reckoning without 100% tariffs...

Re: leader of the free world

Oh, great idea. Give Thumper the excuse to declare yet another state of emergency and, if he feels like it, martial law in sanctuary cities.

You know he'd do it. And good luck reining him in at the midterms then. Someone who controls the movement of people has absolutely enormous power to manipulate an election.

Signalgate solved? Report claims journalist’s phone number accidentally saved under name of Trump official

That is some seriously pathetic bug fixing by Google. That's the sort of fixes they'd get if they told me to "make sure it passes these tests, no we're not going to run any other tests nor check what you've done". Somehow I expect more professionalism from them.

UK convicts five romance fraudsters who stole millions from duped singles

Re: String them up

My go-to treatment in such cases involves rope, tent pegs and an anthill, but the general idea is similar. I'm pretty sure it would last longer than the barbed-wire thing. Mention it to your in-law.