Posts by Jaybus

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

Re: Go for it

Really? Because the US just allocated $1.5 billion for nuclear energy research, including $280 million for the Advanced Reactors Demonstration Program. ARDP is focusing on high temperature gas modular reactors and X-energy's TRISO-X fuel pellets. The fuel pellets are uranium, carbon, and oxygen fuel particles encapsulated in a carbon and ceramic-based coating that prevents the release of fission products. This tech would by no means provide bomb making material. Perhaps they just saw high temperature gas modular reactors as a better choice than thorium reactors. Granted, there is also a mobile version of this reactor that would be highly useful for military purposes, such as powering laser-based anti-missile, anti-aircraft, and weapon systems.

Who'd have thought the US senator who fist pumped Jan 6 insurrectionists would propose totally unworkable anti-Big Tech law?

Re: Disagree

...and none of those examples of voter suppression by individuals and groups has anything to do with a voter suppression law.

Australian police suggests app to record consent to sexual activity

Re: Is there a "magic word"?

If I'm gonna get my balls blown off for a word, my word is "poontang".

-- Full Metal Jacket (1987)

NASA sends nuclear tank 293 million miles to Mars, misses landing spot by just five metres. Now watch its video

Re: it's difficult to top the footage from Cassini-Huygens

Agreed. This is perhaps best ever in terms of video quality, certainly from Mars. But I am old and remember the Apollo 11 videos as the best ever.

Supermicro spy chips, the sequel: It really, really happened, and with bad BIOS and more, insists Bloomberg

Maybe, but #5 is a good guess too.

Drag Autonomy founder's 'fraudulent guns' and 'grasping claws' to the US for a criminal trial, thunders barrister

Re: OOoooooK

But doing a poor job of due diligence is not a crime. Falsifying financials for the purpose of fraudulently inflating revenues and stock price is a crime. Garbage in, garbage out. While HP leadership is/was incompetent for not being skeptical, their incompetence is not a crime and certainly does not excuse Lynch's criminal behavior. If someone leaves their keys in their car and it is stolen, we say they were foolish, but the thief is still a thief.

Re: OOoooooK

How did you conclude that HP skipped the due diligence? The HP board can hardly be held responsible for Autonomy's fraud and other crimes. Crimes are alleged to have been committed in both nations, btw.

It's not so hard to see how stockholders were harmed. If Autonomy falsified financials, then they fraudulently inflated their stock price. Any stockholders who bought shares at the inflated price were harmed, whatever their nationality. Perhaps if the Serious Fraud Office were even slightly interested in doing their job the US wouldn't be asking for extradition.

Vote machine biz Smartmatic sues Fox News and Trump chums for $2.7bn over bogus claims of rigged 2020 election

Quite a markup

Smartmatic USA Corp has annual revenue of $4.58 million. So the suit is for a little over 598 years worth of their revenues. Their sense of self-worth may just be more overinflated than Trumps. It's a fantastic voting machine...much better than any other...the best that has ever been or ever will be...

Nearly 70 years after America made einsteinium in its first full-scale thermo-nuke experiment, mystery element yields secrets of its chemistry

Re: “It was discovered by accident in the debris in the first hydrogen bomb”

Napalm was invented by Harvard organic chemist Julius Fieser in 1942. It was used in the US M2 flamethrower, the M-69 incendiary, and the E-46 cluster bomb (which consisted of 38 M-69s). It was used in the firebombing of more than 60 Japanese cities between March and August 1945.

Google, Apple sued for failing to give Telegram chat app the Parler put-down treatment

Re: @ecofeco @Overunder Am I bad for not...

"Should Mark Zuckerberg take down 'Jews for Jesus' from FB because he's Jewish and finds their site to be distasteful?"

And that is the problem in a nutshell. On the one hand, it is a private company. The 1st Amendment applies to FB and its users not being censored by government, not to FB users being censored by Zuckerberg. On the other hand, the 1st Amendment freedom of speech applies to everyone. In fact, the SCOTUS has repeatedly ruled that what is generally held to be hate speech (a term that is not legally defined in the US) is in fact protected speech under the 1st Amendment, the most recent case being Mataal v. Tam (2017) in a unanimous ruling. In other words, Congress cannot pass a law to prevent hate speech, as it would be unconstitutional, The Communications Decency Act of 1996 was an attempt to ban, or at least protect children from, pornography by making it illegal to publish "indecent" or "obscene" content that might potentially be seen or heard by children. The "indecent" provision, the part that could possibly be used to refer to hate speech, was ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS in Reno v. ACLU (1997).

So actually, Zuckerberg has no liability for anything said on FB, and neither does he have any legal obligation to ban any sort of hate speech on FB. At the same time, Section 230 of the CDA protects him from liability for banning hate speech.

Ditto for Google and Apple. They don't have to ban hate speech, but they can choose to do so. However, if they choose to do so, then they must do so uniformly. They cannot discriminate because of race, religion, age, political views, etc. The banning of Parler has given them exposure that they didn't have before, in that CSW now has a case related to treating Telegram Messenger differently than the Parler app.

Judge denies Parler an injunction to force AWS to host the antisocial network for internet outcasts

Re: Free speech often is unpleasant and offensive

Certainly! But do we want Amazon to be "the authorities"? Neither Parler nor anyone working for them has been indicted.

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

Not really. A 1st Amendment argument would make them a publisher and remove their exemption under Section 230 of the CDA, which exempts service providers, not publishers. They will continue to use a Section 230 argument, even if it means they lose the case.

Re: Censorship by Private Companies

Not surprising at all. The First Amendment only prevents government (at any level) from censoring and doesn't effect private business.

This is going to be a very concerning case, nonetheless. It actually involves exemptions given to service providers by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. This is the basis of Amazon's defense. The problem is, the exemption specifically applies to providers of "interactive computer services" and Congress defined the term in subsection (f) to mean "any information service, system, or access software provider that provides or enables computer access by multiple users to a computer server, including specifically a service or system that provides access to the Internet and such systems operated or services offered by libraries or educational institutions."

So the question is, did AWS provide an interactive computer service to multiple users or did they provide an infrastructure service to a single user? If the former, then Section 230 effectively applies only to big tech cloud providers and a few like Facebook that operate their own server farms. Essentially, it strips Section 230 protections from, for example, El Reg-like sites that use cloud services and offer a comments section.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Re: ...and where exactly do you live in the US?

Hmm. Check ourworldindata.org stats. As of 7 Jan the top three in COVID-19 deaths per million are:

#1 UK 10.54

#2 DE 8.86

#3 US 8.35

The current 1.325 deaths per day in the UK is actually the highest in the world! So I certainly hope that the lockdown helps.

Trump's overhaul of Section 230 stalls, Biden may just throw the web legal shield on the bonfire anyway

Re: Sect. 230, Devin, Tucker C, Donald, the lame duck and Ijit Pai

"Presidential Medal of Freedom circa 2020 will like *never* be seen at auction as it will have a negative value."

Wrong.

“If you nail two things together that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it from you.” – George Carlin

Re: And...

Exactly. The liability shield is most definitely needed. It doesn't need to be excepted for certain companies, as Trump would have, or eliminated altogether as Biden has proposed. Note that Facebook is not responsible for what a user says, however that user is most definitely responsible and can be sued (or charged if it is a criminal act). Seems logical to me.

SolarWinds: Hey, only as many as 18,000 customers installed backdoored software linked to US govt hacks

Re: 36 days left

The Iran-backed attack on the US embassy in Baghdad on 31 Dec 2019 was also an act of war under international law. Your point?

And why is your list of usual suspects based on no actual evidence any more believable?

Re: 36 days left

No. It was a very limited retaliation for the attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad carried out by Iran-ibacked militia.

Up yours, Europe! Our 100% prime British broadband is cheaper than yours... but also slower and a bit of a rip-off

Re: Speed is not the whole story

Most of the broadband technologies will never make it to rural areas. The FCC still regards DSL as broadband in many areas where it exists for grandfathered customers but is not actually available. The only technology that might make a difference in rural areas is LEO satellite such as the Starlink service that is now in public beta in the Northern US and Canada. They are launching 120 satellites per month, even during COVID.

No providers actually still support DSL, or even copper POTS. Ancient, failing copper lines are too expensive to maintain. They only still have them because state and federal laws make it part of their licensing requirements (for 911 service, etc.). In fact, in most states they are petitioning the government to be allowed to abandon their copper, arguing that they can meet the state's requirements with LTE or 5G. So far, I don't think any states have believed them.

Re: Speed is not the whole story

There are a few that do have caps in the US, AT&T and Xfinity (Comcast), but their cap is 1 TB and they also have unlimited plans that cost more. But most do not. I have Spectrum cable at 400 Mbps for $70 / month and it is unlimited.

The internet divide is very real here. In most (all?) cities 1 Gbps is available and 100 Mbps is the cheap level, usually around $50 and discounted to $30 or so if getting TV and landline with it. If you live in a rural area your options are severely limited, slow, and very expensive or even non-existent. The mean for the US is down around 70 Mbps due to the slow speeds in rural areas where only satellite service is available.

US Treasury, Dept of Commerce hacks linked to SolarWinds IT monitoring software supply-chain attack

Yes, but the infiltration may well have been old school, by getting a job there as a developer.

CentOS project changes focus, no more rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux – you'll have to flow with the Stream

Even though I too feared this would happen, I never made the change and held out hope. Turns out my fears were correct and all will be assimilated. Oh well. On to the replacement distro search, likely Ubuntu LTS.

A tale of two nations: See China blast off from the Moon as drone shows America's Arecibo telescope falling apart

Re: Amy Coney Barrett

Hmmm. I don't think Agudath Israel, one of the institutions bringing the case to court, did so in the name of Jesus.

Re: 5g?

Yes. It was how Puerto Rico spread COVID-19 to the world.

How the US attacked Huawei: Former CEO of DocuSign and Ariba turned diplomat Keith Krach tells his tale

Re: Which People ?

They can't just request it. It still requires a court order. Some historical data requires an administrative subpoena, but most require a court order. The only thing they can legally get without a court order or subpoena is a list of phone numbers that a phone has interacted with, as that was upheld by the Supreme Court. I can't imagine there is much cloud-based data that wouldn't require a court order. It is true that any data center in the US is subject to US law and so a court may issue a warrant to obtain any data stored there, regardless of its origin. But that is likely true most anywhere.

Biden projected to be the next US President, Microsoft joins rest of world in telling Trump: It looks like... you're fired

Re: Not if Republicans run the senate

I think the "Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters" is simply political rhetoric. It is mostly based on the ID laws and the misguided notion that some large portion of voters are unable to obtain an ID. FFS, the state IDs are offered at every BMV office. Many states offer free IDs for hardship cases. The average cost is $16, less than a case of beer. There are indeed 10s of millions of people who cannot obtain one, but it is because they are in the country illegally. Think of it this way, should the same people who are allowed to vote without an ID be allowed to withdraw cash from a bank account without an ID? Sorry, but these ID requirements are measures to safeguard the voting process, not "efforts to disenfranchise voters". Really? Are you suggesting that the majority of people who do not have the wherewithal to walk into the BMV and request an ID would vote for the Democratic candidates?

Missing Alan Turing memorabilia to be returned to Blighty from the US, 36 years after it went walkabout

Re: What would it be like if.....

In all fairness, the court would not have been privy to that information in the mid 1950's. His WWII contributions were classified and not declassified until the mid 1970's. Matter of fact, I learned of Turing's universal machines in a formal language theory course in 1980 and had no idea of his code breaking contributions at the time.

Re: There's a link right there

Well, there's evidence that she possessed it, not that she nicked it. Plus she will claim that she didn't know the items were stolen when she "obtained" them, meaning probably not really enough evidence to bring charges or to extradite. After 36 years, they are likely short on valid evidence. A settlement (through arbitration?) was probably the expedient choice.

You can't spell 'electronics' without 'elect': The time for online democracy has come

I agree with your assessment of electronic voting, but disagree with your assessment of US election issues. For one, I suppose it might be different some places, but my experience with in-person voting in 3 different states over the past few decades doesn't support that view. I'll address some of the points that you bring up.

I've never queued for even as long as 30 minutes, perhaps 10 minutes this year. Here, in Tennessee, we have early in-person voting for a full 2 weeks prior to and including election day, as well as solicited mail-in absentee voting. People in nursing homes vote.

There are laws against preventing workers from going to vote. One cannot be fired for going to vote. Many (most?) states have early in-person voting for days or weeks, so there's no excuse for a worker not to vote. In most cases they can certainly vote even without missing work, but they can otherwise bring suit against the company for preventing them from voting.

ID requirements are not so stringent as you think. A state ID can be obtained for free, otherwise any state-issued ID or a passport can be used. Seriously? Other than illegal residents, who does not have some sort of ID? If by stringent you mean that it hampers illegal residents from voting, then I suppose you are right. But do you know of any nations that do permit foreign nationals to come in and vote?

As for the electoral college, how is it any worse than the selection of the President of the EC, which would be analogous to the US Congress selecting the US President. In fact, one faction at the Philadelphia convention advocated for just that. Another advocated for a popular vote. The popular vote was opposed by small states who feared being bullied by Philadelphia and Boston. So they ended up with a compromise. The President of the EC is not selected by popular vote for the same reason; the German and French candidates would have a distinct advantage.

Days before the US election, phishers net $2.3m from Wisconsin Republicans

Re: Democrats have won

Not my experience. I've voted in the US for decades in 3 different states and don't recall it ever taking more than 30 minutes or so. We have early voting and the polls are open for 2 weeks prior to election day. There are usually only long lines on election day. This year was a bit different. Mask was required, queue was marked off for social distancing, everyone had to pull a disposable glove out of a dispenser on their way through so that nobody had to actually touch the touchscreen, and even so it took only 10 minutes to early vote. The media seems to cherry pick data to "enhance" their stories, the more sensational the better. You may have noticed articles referring to the 91 million people who have already voted in the US election. Voter suppression?? Just ridiculous fearmongering.

Brit accused of spying on 772 people via webcam CCTV software tells court he'd end his life if extradited to US

Re: Team America: World Police

Perhaps she told the US authorities she would kill herself if forced to face trial in the UK.

Re: Team America: World Police

I do not even think he has been charged in the UK. Why not, ffs? The FBI claim that 52 of the women are UK citizens. So of course they are claiming the Laurie Love defense. If he were already in a UK prison, there wouldn't be an extradition hearing or a story.

Thought the FBI were the only ones able to unlock encrypted phones? Pretty much every US cop can get the job done

Re: Your big brother policemen...

Well, probably not much. Data pulled from the phone without a warrant wouldn't make it through discovery, but there's a huge problem. What is to stop them from looking first illegally, then if they find something crafting a warrant request with 20/20 hindsight to convince a judge to issue a warrant after the fact? How would the judge know they had done this? There is no log of the cracking. There is no audit.

Bitcoin value jumps as PayPal says it will accept cryptocurrencies... once it has the kinks worked out

It can be viewed much like gold or other precious metals. It is susceptible to volatile exchange rates driven by speculation, and this detracts from its use as a currency. This volatility means that it most certainly can result in a bubble, just as gold can.

Let’s check in with that 30,000-job $10bn Trump-Foxconn Wisconsin plant. Wow, way worse than we'd imagined

Re: Too funny.

Hmmm. Hillary keeps having media interviews and such raving against Trump. Maybe it is she who thinks she is still in the race?

Re: Political games is why

Do we have any evidence, as in actual rulings, that these judges are extremists and terrible human beings? Or should we rely on the false argument that Trump appointed them, so it must be true?

Re: Burn it down to the roots

You're saying that the Democrats have been blind-sided for more than 40 years now?

Former antivirus baron John McAfee collared, faces extradition to America on tax evasion, securities allegations

Re: is he still a US citizen ?

Not quite. A US citizen is taxed on their global income. However, there are exceptions and deductions. For example, there is a foreign tax credit. If a US citizen resides in Spain, then the tax paid to Spain is a credit, and the citizen only owes the difference (assuming the US tax rate is higher than the Spanish). Also, there is a deduction if one lives more than 330 days of the year outside of the US, then the first $100k is deducted from the income that is taxable. Basically, only the high earners will owe any US income tax when residing elsewhere.

Corporations dodge taxes in a different way. An individual cannot be two different individuals, but a corporation can. US corporations register a different corporation in a tax haven country and funnel considerable profits into that corp, a tax haven country being one that charges a low tax rate and allows the registration of an essentially non-existent corp, sometimes nothing more than a post box.

. You see, in this case the money never actually made it to a US corp, so is not taxable by the US. However, to get the money back to the US corp amounts to the fake corp paying the real corp, and then it becomes taxable. This is known as "repatriating" the cash in the global business world.

'Robbery, economic plunder, victim of larcenous cronyism and a heist'

Re: Heads you win, tails I lose - perhaps landing on its edge is best then?

Do you really believe that the Chinese government, given access to all of the metadata gathered by TikTok, will choose to look only at inside leg measurements? What will they do with the rest of the data, sell it to GCHQ?

His idiot predecessor failed to act.

The Battle of Britain couldn't have been won without UK's homegrown tech innovations

Re: The war is over, the empire is gone

...you mean without having to fight SOME of them.

I can 'proceed without you', judge tells Julian Assange after courtroom outburst

Re: Blackmailed

You must be joking. Monsegur is taking the plea bargain, thus admitting his own guilt in the identity thefts. So you are of the opinion that the child is better off with the criminal father. Some might argue that the child would be better off if the criminal father were locked up, but you are entitled to your opinion.

Also, the FBI doesn't do the bargaining, the prosecution does.

Re: Blackmailed

And everyone has the right to legal representation, free legal representation if they haven't any money. A plea bargain must be reviewed and approved by a judge. So, no, I don't buy that so many defense attorneys fall for that on a daily basis.

Re: Blackmailed

"But if the Americans did do that, then plea bargains are legal in America and so information produced as a result of one wouldn't be inadmissible in evidence."

Yes. Plea bargains are legal in America. Keep in mind that plea bargains have to be reviewed and accepted by a judge. This is because it is actually a plea of guilty, the difference being that the judge is agreeing to the reduced sentencing proposed by the prosecutor in exchange for testimony. He cannot be compelled to testify against himself, but he can agree to do so. Does this make hist testimony less believable or more believable? That question is left up to the jurors.

Re: Blackmailed

And yet Manning's own defense claimed it to be a "gender identity disorder that may have affected Manning's judgement".

Be very afraid! British Army might scrap battle tanks for keyboard warriors – report

Re: Soldiers versus gunships

" Cyber weapons fall into this category, as less lethal ways of "blowing stuff up". "

I think you should add "Currently, " to the beginning of that sentence. Military leaders around the world would love to have robotic troops, and the industry will gladly produce them for the money. Very little reason to believe it won't happen as soon as technology permits.

Chinese State media uses new release of local Linux to troll Trump

Re: For whenever Source for the Goose is Sauce from the Gander

There are millions of Chinese Americans, so of course there are. Major newspapers in the US are World Journal, Sing Tao Jih Pao, Ming Pao, and The China Press. Also some politically slanted papers, International Daily News (pro-mainland), The Epoch Times (Falun Gong religious movement), and many more.

Linux kernel maintainers tear Paragon a new one after firm submits read-write NTFS driver in 27,000 lines of code

Re: Bit harsh

Well, there is already ntfs-3g, which is FUSE based. Why should they work on yet another? The problem with that is the huge performance hit, especially with lots of small writes, that is directly related to it using FUSE. A kernel driver for NTFS is not a ridiculous concept.

Oh, and btw, ntfs-3g has > 29k lines of code, so the existing FUSE-based FS is actually slightly larger than the proposed kernel driver. For comparison, ext4 has 29k and xfs has 65k. So wtf?

Bratty Uber throws tantrum, threatens to cut off California unless judge does what it says in driver labor rights row

Re: I am conflicted on this

Of course there are differences in legal obligation. For example, in the US an employer does not have to offer a retirement plan. But there is a caveat. If they DO offer a retirement plan, then they are legally obliged to offer it to all employees, not just those in the ivory tower. This is the same for the other things, health insurance, disability insurance, etc.

As a contractor, the driver is operating a business, independent from Uber. As you have pointed out, US law favors business. For example, tax deductions available to businesses are available to the drivers. I can certainly see why drivers would want to remain contractors. They make more money, or better to say they pay less taxes and so keep more of what they make. It's a fundamental difference in philosophy. The contractor is choosing to be self-reliant and manage his or her own money and affairs. The employee takes home less cash, offering up the remainder to the company and big brother with the expectation that they will manage it for his or her benefit.