Posts by Jim Mitchell

Australia to phase out checks by 2030

Re: Banking apps

Here in the land of the check, the USA, passbook accounts have been passe for decades.

Reddit blackout planned over app-killing API prices

How important to Reddit traffic and ad views are these third party apps? I've never heard of them, but I am not an "app" user in general.

This ain't Boeing very well: Starliner's first crewed flight canceled yet again

Most everything is combustible in a pure oxygen atmosphere, but yeah, the materials used in the capsule did not help.

Twitter now worth just a third of what Musk paid for it

Re: Lesson on use of the sed command

I suspect that the other backers had motives other than making money off this investment. Backing Musk in this venture might get them access to more lucrative deals in the future, etc.

US bill to protect reproductive health data is dead. Here's why you should care anyway

Re: Be a man!

Since livers can grow back after donation, they should include those as well. And blood/plasma donation. Every life is precious!

Ford in reverse gear over AM radio removal after Congress threatens action

I'm confused, if Ford's EV implementation interferes with AM radio broadcasts or reception, this would seem to be an FCC issue.

VA's Cerner EHR platform fails to deliver medications to veterans

"At the five medical centers live on the new EHR today, veterans are receiving their prescriptions at the same rate they were prior to the facility converting from [the old system]," Sicilia said.

At the cost of quadrupling the pharmacy staff?

Tesla ran over worker rights, again, US labor judge finds

Am I missing something, or is there no actual penalty?

AMD probes reports of deep fried Ryzen 7000 chips

Re: Stupid "Optimized defaults" nonsense.

I think that these days the memory is directly attached to the processor chip, which is really more than just the processor. If you change the memory clocks or voltage, you are affecting the processor.

Substack copied Twitter so Twitter is copying Substack

Re: Talking of Substack...

Does he have a substack?

Inside FTX: Jokes about misplaced funds, diabolical IT, poor oversight, and worse

Re: This is when...

"Cave praesidem"? What guards? Are you referring to the regulators and oversight that FTX "management" worked to avoid? Or to FTX management themselves, who while guarding the hen house, ate as many hens as possible?

Either way, caveat emptor applies.

Cardboard drones running open source flight software take off in Ukraine and beyond

That movie won awards back in 1958, couldn't have looked that bad.

Poor Potemkin, a man known more for a political slander against him than for anything he actually did.

Vessels claiming to be Chinese warships are messing with passenger planes

Re: Peak China?

Um, China invaded Viet Nam in 1979.

Musk said Twitter would open source its algorithm – then fired the people who could

Gods and Kings are known for being cruel and capricious, adjectives that some have probably used to describe Elon Musk.

'Brittle' Twitter suffers bad case of the Mondays: Links, pics, vids fail

"I don't usually test, but when I do, it is in production"

Funnily enough, FDA forbids Elon Musk's Neuralink human experiments

Re: What does FDA stand for again?

Brains are food. Ask your neighborhood zombie.

FBI boss says COVID-19 'most likely' escaped from lab

Re: A couple of things

The US Department of Energy overseas American energy policy. In what way is it all qualified to issue findings on viruses?

The DOE doesn't actually oversee American energy policy, but it does run the "National Laboratories" that do research in a variety of areas, including biology.

Marketing company chases Twitter for $7,000 over 'swag gift box for Elon'

Re: $800 for a cheese board and cheese?

Um, that isn't how it works. Everybody knows you plant the whole cow in the ground and harvest the milk. That's why it is called a dairy farm.

FTX is back in Japan, where users can withdraw fiat and crypto

Re: "comprehensively regulated cryptocurrency sector"

Thumbs down because your reply doesn't seem to have anything to do with the topic at hand.

Yukon UFO could have cost unfortunate balloon fan $12

A "pico" balloon is basically littering. You aren't going to recover it. Littering some far off place for your personal pleasure makes you a jerk.

Craig Wright's crypto wallet claim against Bitcoin SV devs back before judges

Re: Puzzled

You might think that, but the blockchain is whatever enough computers think it is. In theory, if you control 51% of the miners, you can force the blockchain to whatever you want, including what this guy desires.

Used EV car batteries find new life storing solar power in California

Re: bit of a contradiction

I don't see how this keeps the batteries out of landfills. It just delays them either being trashed or recycled, but it eventually will happen.

Scammers steal $4 million in crypto during face-to-face meeting

Re: Who loves cryptocurrency?

Eh, some "small contractors" prefer non-electronic payments (cash, checks made out to "cash") because that method allows them to evade taxes.

Re: Whereas, in real life . . .

If the article is correct, the victim did not give anyone any money. They showed them the "bank account" page with the balance on it, which was somehow enough information to initiate a transfer out.

California toys with digital vehicle titles on private DMV blockchain

If they want to prevent "title washing" by moving a lemon/flood/salvage/etc vehicle out of state and then back, just keep a list of VINs that have ever been titled in California. Heck, I would hope they already have this.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

Re: My Feline Overlords

Introducing new felines into a cat system that has achieved stability is asking for trouble. Sometimes it results in a new point of stability that is advantageous to all, sometimes it results in kitty kaos where nobody ends up happy.

Intel, AMD just created a headache for datacenters

Re: Local heating

Apparently current data center waste heat is not hot enough to reuse for other heat purposes.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

Yes, these speech is among the "we are a family" stuff...

Domestic violence is a problem in many communities.

Wyoming's would-be ban on sale of electric vehicles veers off road

Re: This iis a public safety concern.

It is no environment to ride a bicycle in, but Wyoming is not floating bills that ban bicycles.

Re: 52nd in population - they just want attention

All states get two senators because the Constitution would not have been ratified by the existing states otherwise. If you were creating a legislature today, would Wyoming have two Senators? No, and it wouldn't even be a state.

Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu

Re: Precautions, for your convenience

The best way to reduce attack surface is to "fix" the computer so that it can't even be turned on.

Surely you can't be serious: Airbus close to landing fully automated passenger jets

Re: This system will work perfectly...

If you have lost the engines, the cameras and the pilots, then the plane is doomed with out without this new system. It is a silly question.

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

The exact same kind of tyres? Tread wear varies widely across tires.

NASA may tap SpaceX to rescue ISS 'nauts in Soyuz leak

I've seen Gravity, all they need is George Clooney, or his ghost.

Twitter dismantles its Trust and Safety Council moments before meeting

Tesla and SpaceX supposedly have staff just to keep Musk from interfering with the company's operations. Twitter doesn't have that to protect itself from its Chief Twit.

OK, we know iPhones are expensive but... $11 a month for Twitter Blue on iOS?

Re: I'm still bemused by the whole idea of making the blue badge a profit centre

"Is there really that many people willing to pony up $96[**] per year, for the privilege of having a blue badge by their name, an edit button and a slight boost to their visibility ranking? Especially since if Twitter does actually manage to get that many people to sign up to the blue badge, that'll effectively render the boost mechanism utterly meaningless..."

For those that use Twitter for business purposes, to reach an audience, etc, then paying to increase your relative tweet visibility makes sense. You pay for visibility in most mediums. A "regular" user who uses Twitter within their own sub group and doesn't want to expand that has no real reason to pay. The question is how many people are in which group.

How do you solve the problem that is Twitter?

"So in theory, moderation should be pretty simple. Is this comment legal? Yes/No."

Great theory, but it doesn't work in practice. What is legal? Where is legal? When is legal? A post legal in one jurisdiction might not be in another, whether a post is legal can change over time, and maybe a post cannot be actually determined to be legal until a court has ruled on it, years after the fact. So "legal" is not a useful determining factor in practice.

Twitter requires money to work, and that comes from advertisers. Much of the moderation effort is to keep the cash sources happy. Some is to keep the users happy so they stick around to see the ads. The rest is to keep the courts and governments happy so Twitter stays open, and in some cases, the execs out of jail.

And the Hunter Biden laptop story is so crazy, it is hard to believe. It was also from the New York Post, not the most reliable of outlets. Twitter deciding to reduce the story's presence on the site is relatable and presumably totally legal in the US. The government telling Twitter to remove it, or alternatively, forcing them to carry it, would be a 1st Amendment issue, but that apparently didn't happen.

FTX's crypto villain Sam Bankman-Fried admits 'I made a lot of mistakes'

Re: the scale of things

The most surprising fact is how little this is covered in main media.

Maybe not your main stream media, but the New York Times has had at least 10 stories on FTX since Nov 22.

But your are correct about the difference in how blue collar and white collar crimes are treated.

Musk: Twitter will have 1 billion monthly users inside 18 months

Re: Quick poll

"Musk took it upon himself to personally call CEOs to chastise them, one industry figure told the FT" is from https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/elon-musk-personally-called-ceos-of-companies-that-stopped-advertising-on-twitter-to-complain-report-says/ar-AA14BPiU?li=BBnb7Kz citing a Financial Times article I don't want to pay to read.

Journalists cite lots of sources who don't want to be named. You also apparently don't want to be named, are you publishing dubious claims in an attempt to shape the narrative?

Koch-funded group sues US state agency for installing 'spyware' on 1m Android devices

This violates Android device owners' federal privacy and unreasonable search protections as well as the state's computer crime laws, according to the lawsuit

Conveniently, the US Supreme Court has ruled that privacy isn't a federal right in the US Constitution.

Elon Musk issues ultimatum to Twitter staff: Go hardcore or go home

Re: Waste El-Reg Space

Brassy and coppery are both shades of blonde, right? Irony isn't, so I'm confused.

Parody Elon Musk Twitter accounts will be suspended immediately, says Elon Musk

Re: Free Speech!

Cat though? No sane cat would want to be involved.

The problem here is that lots of cats are crazy. (As a cat owner I can say this)

Elon Musk jettisons Twitter leadership, says takeover was 'to try to help humanity'

Re: The taste of schadenfreude

When we stop talking freely that is when we stop learning...

Much of what happens on social media is not talking freely, it is just .... lying. You only thing you can learn from lies is to not trust the liar.

India's – and Infosys's – favorite son-in-law Rishi Sunak is next UK PM

Re: Talking points

I believe that America has been founded on the premise that other cultures are welcome,

I think this shows a lack of knowledge of US history.

Is your datacenter safe from the next X-class solar flare?

I would not put the "Geostorms" as "Probability: unpredictable". They have happened in the past and will definitely happen in the future.

20 years on, physicists are still figuring out anomaly in proton experiment

Re: It's a facinating field

Bumps in strings are due to knot theory.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

Re: Prime Minister

This is the internet, you can't let facts get in the way of the narrative!

Water pipes hold flood of untapped electricity potential

Re: The elephant in the water pipe?

Power generation that only works during and after a flood doesn't seem like a good investment. Your potential power consumers have either fled or are underwater themselves.

Removing an obsolete AMD fix makes Linux kernel 6 quicker

Re: There's an obsolute compatibility patch running on my PC

Does Windows have this issue?