Posts by Uncle Ron

Everyone remembers their first time: ESA satellite dodges 'mega constellation'

Telecom Companies Rule

All the telecom companies on Earth are stutteringly terrified by Starlink and others of it's ilk. Direct-to-home high-speed internet service threatens their fat cushy gravy train. Government regulated high-speed internet service is unbelievably profitable. So who do you guess is behind the promotion of this non-story? You guessed it. The fact is that the ESA had to modify the orbits of it various satellites TWENTY EIGHT times last year. This is not news. It is also not news because the orbits of the Starlink constellation are much lower than the vast majority of scientific and observation satellites to reduce ping times and for this very reason to avoid such conflicts. Look elsewhere for a good Danger! story. This isn't one.

Amazon: Carbon emissions from our Australian bit barns aren't for public viewing

Relatively Speaking...

It has only been recently that the DC industry worldwide has exceeded the energy footprint of the entire airline industry same/same. Combined, they're something like 3% or 4%. IMHO, we're chasing waterfalls here. Let's really focus on the rivers and lakes where the REAL opportunities lay. Also, why should -any- usage be public information? Reveal it only in the case of law-breaking. Just my $0.02 worth.

That this AI can simulate universes in 30ms is not the scary part. It's that its creators don't know why it works so well

Nobody Knows...

Nobody knows how it reached over and grabbed my sandwich either. Plus, it made a phone call over to Skynet for some reason.

Cram this in your Pai hole! New York, Cali, eight other US states sue to stop T-Mobile-Sprint merger

America, Inc.

The people of the United States have lost their government over the last 2 or 3 decades to corporations. By bribing elected officials with unimaginable campaign money, and bribing appointed officials with promises of fat cushy jobs, corporations in America now rule America. Tax policy, trade policy, health-care policy and more are all being made by corporations. Laws being written by corporations. Regulation being done by corporations. Former corporate lobbyists running Federal agencies. Simply a glance at the Behemoth AT&T is absolute proof of this: AT&T now owns HBO. TBS. CNN. DC Entertainment. Warner Bros Pictures. New Line Cinema. DirecTV. DirecTV Now. Plus, the rest of AT&T. What possible public interest has been served by this obvious "Combination in Restraint of Trade?" I can remember jokes being made years ago about a merger of Exxon, Chipotle, and Verizon becoming now "One of America's 8 Great Companies." If Sprint (or T-Mobil for that matter) needs to go down in flames, so be it. But allowing them to set the rest of us on fire is completely out of the question. The purpose of the American government should not be to allow corporations to avoid failure by merging to avoid competition or to create monopoly or industry control. It needs to stop. And much of it needs to be reversed.

What's big, blue, and hands out pink slips? IBM on Thursday: Word spreads of job cuts

340,000 vs. 2,000

This is .005 of IBM's workforce. This is like a small business with 200 employees laying off one person. That doesn't make headlines, and certainly doesn't say -anything- about that small business. And some goofy commenter above made a crack about IBM's cloud. If I wanted to store my photos or back up my hard drive, or calculate when a baseball team should steal a base or how long a home run was, I'd use Amazon's or Microsoft's cloud. If I wanted to do complex and business critical data analytics in a secure and bulletproof environment, well, I wouldn't use those guys. Also, go to weather.com RIGHT NOW and see how long it takes to load. Hint: 'Bout as long as amazon.com. Bashing IBM seems to be fun for stupid people.

LTO-8 tape media patent lawsuit cripples supply as Sony and Fujifilm face off in court

Every Two Years...

The IT industry has been predicting the death of tape every two years for the last 50 years. But because tape offers characteristics that are not duplicated by any other storage media, it has survived. Some of these characteristics are: 1) Continues to be relatively cheap, 2) Movable from one (broken) machine to another (working) machine, 3) Easily movable offsite, 4) No RAID rebuild delay, which can be MUCH longer than recovery from tape, 5) Can easily and provably be made non re-writable, 6) Can be made archivally (30+ years) permanent . I like tape.

DXC: We axed 10k staff, shut nine data centres, closed 4.6m sq ft of office space... and sales tumbled, funnily enough

It Might Be Ending...

IMHO, the whole structure of capital formation in the West (Wall Street, investment banks, the bond market) is broken. It is causing self-immolation across the entire private sector. Capitalism is not dead, but it is killing itself.

Hours before Congress backs robocall blocking law, guess what the FCC boss suddenly decides?

The People of the United States Have Lost Their Government

The government of the United States is now owned by corporations, industry groups, lobbying groups, and by extension, the far right wing of the Republican Party. The Supreme Court, and much of the Federal Court system, does not reflect the rule of law, or the will of the people. Partisan and corporate-favoring decisions are being handed down in both civil and criminal actions. Our people have lost our government. We are no longer a majority-rule country. We now have a corrupt government at nearly all levels from the top to the states, counties and cities.

The Executive Branch and it's cabal of moron advisors is aiding Russia against it's adversary China by engaging in a no-win economic war that will leave both the US and China weakened. It is not only the moron-in-chief Trump. He is a dolt who doesn't know or understand what he is doing. He's a psychopath. From Bolton to Pai to Kavanaugh to Miller--the whole lot of them--are sending the US straight to Hell. The US has lost it's government. It is now owned by ideological and partisan and corrupt and greedy morons. We are headed to economic war with China, and military war with Iran and Venezuela and maybe more.

'Software delivered to Boeing' now blamed for 737 Max warning fiasco

Re: 'Software delivered to Boeing'

Private companies are not required to put anything "out to bid." And if they do, they aren't required to take the lowest bid. Further, highly complicated and highly engineered systems (either HW or SW) are extremely difficult to "spec" in a bid.

It is very easy to spec a window air conditioner or a fork lift in a request for proposal, and easy to accept the lowest bid. Public sector agencies spend enormous energy fulfilling their mandates in this regard and the more complicated the product and/or service is, the more likely that they will get a camel when they open the bids. They very often fail to achieve the desired results.

There are multiple companies on earth that supply aircraft automation systems, flight management systems, auto pilots etc., and Boeing isn't one of them. So Boeing works very, very closely with their suppliers, contractors and partners. I believe it is absolutely true that one or more lower level Boeing engineers or teams should be shot for this failure, but Boeing senior management needs new processes to assure it never happens again.

Boeing needs a MUCH better communications team that better projects their recognition of these facts, and exactly what they are doing every day to solve the problem. They are not doing this now. However, neither Boeing, nor the MAX product deserves to die because of this failure, as tragic as it is.

Windows 10 May 2019 Update thwarted by obscure tech known as 'external storage'

Clever Mr. Bond, Very Clever. I expect you to DIE...

IMHO, MS wants you to ditch ALL external storage: USB drives, thumb drives, CD/DVD storage--ALL OF IT. They want you to use (and pay mucho dinero for) THEIR CLOUD. What better way to get you motivated than to issue an "update" that borks your system unless you detach all that good, inexpensive stuff, and then 'retach' it as a penance for attempting to be self-sufficient. Finally, when you are sick and tired of this time-consuming, attention-consuming routine, you just give up, and pay them. This latest debacle isn't embarrassing, it's their STRATEGY. Huh?

"Windows as a Service." Servicing the MS wallet since July, 2015.

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

More?

I may sound like an old coot here, but please tell me that there is more benefit to this huge effort than just a fuzzy picture of a bagel that appears to be getting too toasted on one side. I'm not a physicist or a mathematician or even a photographer, but I'd like to see bullet points as to what is being learned from whatever else this Mount Everest of data shows. Like, why do they keep referring to it as a "shadow" and not an actual view into the gaping maw of eternity itself. What's going on here?

Amazon consumer biz celebrates ridding itself of last Oracle database with tame staff party... and a Big Red piñata

Sale of the Century

Isn't it true that Amazon is "simply" removing Oracle products from it's own business? AWS customers will continue to use, and pay hundreds of millions for, Oracle instances in the Amazon cloud, yes?

Don't be too shocked, but it looks as though these politicians have actually got their act together on IoT security

Huh? Are you Kidding ?

Politicians don't know shit about IoT or even what it stands for, or much of anything else, IMO. It is the staffs or lobbyists that pump all this stuff into their voting habits. If there is MONEY in getting something fixed, partisan bickering goes out the window. Sure, they'll come together and do something because the 'industry' is funneling money into their greedy little campaign chests, of both parties. And maybe into other places as well. The politicians themselves probably don't even know about it. Just my $0.02 worth. Huh?

Thought you were done patching this week? Not if you're using an Intel-powered PC or server

Focus

Is all these guys ever do now is fix security "bugs?" Does anybody ever focus on software performance or broken stuff in new versions? I'm still trying to get Windows to fix Network Discovery in 10. Windows 10 1807 or 1809 or "Anniversary Edition" or some damn thing (I just now "upgraded" from 7) broke Network Discovery and I can't see the other 7 PC's in my home network. This is a real pain and MS has (so far as I can tell) done NOTHING to fix it. I have done ENDLESS googling and read ENDLESS dead ends. My home network is essentially useless if I can't easily share files with the other PC's in my network.

I wonder if there's something else going on here (with all this focus on "security...) Huh? Thoughts?

IBM hunkers down for no-deal Brexit, warns of disruption to supply chain, data transfers

Huh?

Isn't it fair to say that those who were "knowledgeably" in favor of leaving in the original referendum, and those who -still- support Brexit after so much more truth has come to light, are essentially evil, hateful, destructive morons?

Windows 10 1809 looks unlikely to overtake prior build before 19H1 lands

My Own Voyage of the Damned

I have 9 laptops and desktops in a little home network. Hobby stuff. Movie servers, backup servers, email, etc.--sandboxes. They are all Windows 7 and all humming along. Due to the impending 2020 abandonment/betrayal/departure of Win 7, I decided to bite the bullet and do an in-place upgrade to two machines. The two least valuable--from a content standpoint. It was not pretty. Lots of stuff didn't work. (I use VNC to pop around to all the machines from one place. Worked like a charm on Win 7 but with WIn 10, I got blank screens, freezes, and more. Days of research to fix that.) One of the machines repeatedly froze very early in the boot and only multiple power button restarts would bring it back. Looked at the critical errors in the logs and fixed something that didn't fixed anything. More research, and I'm still not sure if it's fixed and what fixed it. I use a screen recorder to record live stream sessions and it doesn't work with the laptop cover closed. (I know the settings are all correct...) More days of research and I finally bought VGA emulator dongles to fool the machines into thinking there was a 2nd display attached. The USB wireless dongle needed to be uninstalled and SW and drivers reinstalled to stop it from messing up. There's more. The point is, I now feel I could have done a clean install of almost ANY Linux distro, learned Linux, and solved all the problems in about the same time. I swear to god I don't know what a "civilian" does when they want to do this. Oh wait, yes, they just buy a new PC. I feel that Microsoft really really sucks. Oh and BTW, IMHO, there is NOTHING better about Windows 10. Nothing better. Some things were needlessly changed, and some things are absolutely worse.

Disk drives suck less than they did a couple of years ago. Which is nice

My Feeling:

I thought I wouldn't comment on this post, as the topic is really enterprise oriented and I'm just a home user with variously 12 or 15 drives installed in or connected to variously 6 or 7 PC's and notebooks in a home network. But I see other small-time users commenting below, so I felt I had to jump in.

Everything I have is always running 24/7.

Everything I have that came with a hard drive, I immediately replaced the drive with a higher capacity Seagate drive. Always. 1 or 2 TB 2 1/2 inchers in the notebooks, and 2 or 4 TB 3 1/2 inchers in the desktops. I guess I standardized on Seagate years ago because of the free DiskWizard cloning thing they provide. DiskWizard has been totally bulletproof for me for cloning. Never a hiccup.

I have never had an ounce or a blip or a jot or tittle of trouble with a Seagate drive--ever. My AFR has been zero. Even if I had one go tits-up and screech itself to death tomorrow, I would still be high on Seagate. (Maybe the next one, not so much...) It does, in fact, surprise me that these unbelievably complicated $100 products work so well.

The reason I felt compelled to make this hearty endorsement here (I don't work for Seagate, etc. etc.) is that it seems to me that bellyachers and bad-mouthers are often the main people that ever post anything. Some people love to boast that, in their huge profound experience, a wide-spread, huge volume, successful product like a Seagate drive is crap. An AFR in the 1% range, to me, for something like an HDD, either absolutely or relative to competitors, is totally fine with me. If the price is right, I'll keep buying, even as an enterprise user. IT'S THE ENTIRE REASON FOR A SOLID BACKUP REGIME. To call Seagate drives "crap" or "shit" (same thing) is fairly unintelligent. Huh ?

We did Nazi see this coming... Internet will welcome Earth's newest nation with, sigh, a brand new .SS TLD

NAZI is already Not See

Headline is wrong: It should read, "We did NAZI this coming."

Epyc move: Supermicro plunges into Cascade Lake’s Optanical waters

Revolution/Evolution

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

While Windows 7 wobbled, AI continued its relentless march at Microsoft

AI ?

"Microsoft has spent the last few years slapping the AI moniker on pretty much anything it could." What MS is doing is AI in the same sense that what my toaster does is AI.

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

Reason?

I'd like to get a good, comprehensive reason for doing this. Other than religious or moral outrage from people not gettin' any. That -cannot- be enough numbers to get attention from "the authorities." I mean really, where are the damage estimates? Who is really getting hurt? Isn't this just politicians caving (or campaigning) for a (maybe small) minority of voters who actually believe that smut hurts us more than, say, guns or drugs or banks? Aren't the real damaged parties strip clubs, prostitutes, and pimps? There are hundreds of thousands of cam-girls (and -boys) around the world who actually make a living dancing and playing around on cam sites. The only difference between puberty and 18 is 4 or 5 or 6 years. Any real children aren't that interested anyway. I'm guessing smut-on-the-web deters unwanted pregnancies, rapes, and psychological distress more than injury to minors. IMHO, this whole effort is stupid. Could the real parties behind this be ISPs and backbones who feel their pipes are being dragged down by these sites and don't feel they are being justly compensated?

The solid state of storage in 2018: Latencies, they are dwindling. On-premises, the kit is glistening...

Revolution/Evolution

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

Intel hands first Optane DIMM to Google, where it'll collect dust until a supporting CPU arrives

1) When it happens, and is fully supported, Storage Class Memory will be a Big Deal. (Relatively huge, nonvolatile, fast memory with a direct, fast pipe to the CPU--no SATA interrupt bottleneck bus.) 2) Pricing, as well as performance, will have to be somewhere between Main Memory DIMM and SSD/Flash Memory. 3) "Full Support" means both the Processor and the OS need to be aware, and to be fully realized, the application stack needs to exploit. This will not happen in the next two years, but over time, it will offer 10x to 100x or even more, performance boost. To me, Storage Class Memory architecture (HW, OS, and Application) is the next revolution in computing. So far, IMHO, Optane is an evolution, and nothing more than a nonvolatile DIMM. Huh?

HCL picks up Notes, spanks total of $1.8bn at Honest John's IBM software sale

Do the people at El Reg...

Do the people at El Reg actually not know that IBM has been paid back -many- times it's original investment in Notes? Whether you like the product or don't like it, it has generated huge revenue and profit for IBM. The headline that, "IBM received $1.X Billion but paid $3.X Billion is just silly--and irrelevant.

DXC: Everything is going to plan, too well in fact... we've chopped so many staff, our IT projects are now behind

What If ?

Suppose for a second that the "New Normal" in US Presidential behavior (bald-faced, pathological lying, exaggeration, con-artist-style hyping, bragging) that has clearly been accepted and applauded by his core followers, becomes a commonplace occurrence from corporate leaders. Wouldn't that be something? Have you seen it already?

Icahn't let you do this: Stock botherer fires off sueball to scupper Dell's 'coercive' deal

Please

Please someone give me one example of anything that Carl Icahn has ever been a value-add to anybody, anywhere ever. He has been nothing but a gadfly and loudmouth and ignoramus, and a destroyer of companies for decades. It is trite to say it, but he is the inspiration (I guess) for Gordon Gecko. He has made loads of money for himself and his inner worshipers, but has lost far more money for employees, communities and the long-term interests of our country. He pounces on companies in near-term trouble and sells off the pieces and puts them out of business. He is the human analogy to masturbation: Short-term gratification in exchange for eventual dissipation and irrelevance. (Maybe a lousy analogy--doesn't give enough credit to masturbation.) The only good news I will ever hear about Carl Ichan is that he has been deemed mentally incompetent, or that he is gone from among us.

30 spies dead after Iran cracked CIA comms network with, er, Google search – new claim

Of Course...

"Because for the CIA the Cold War never ended..." The Cold War didn't end and will never end because there is no international law. The United Nations is impotent and almost irrelevant. It only exists because there is a non-zero chance--just barely--that when people talk, there is less chance of war. And miscalculation is just a tiny bit lessened. That's it. There has always been and will always be a Cold War between and among all nations--not just the "west" and the Ruskies. Countries will always act in their own interests, even to the extent that they cooperate. And always act to protect their god-almighty "sovereignty." So don't blame or insult the CIA because it spies on everybody--even our friends. Reprehensible, unjust, and immoral things are done by all nations against all other nations, because, well, they can. But you -can- blame and insult the CIA for being inept, lazy and overfed. And -very- self-protective. Even at the expense of our own interests. IMHO, we are definitely not getting our money's worth out of them. Nations are not accountable to each other, and the CIA is not accountable to anyone. Congress?? Hahahahaha. ROTFL.

Talk about Micron-aggression: US charges Chinese biz, staff over DRAM chip secrets theft

Culture

Feel free to flame me at will, but I have been to China on business multiple times and I can tell you that my experience is that Chinese culture simply does not recognize an outsider's intellectual property, as, well, property. Chinese culture looks upon anyone outside their culture as, well, not real people. It is not wrong to take whatever you can get your hands on from any outsider. They do this freely and openly (music, movies, books, designer labels, designs and processes, and more) and think nothing of it, in the streets and in offices and factories all over the country. It is not stealing when you are stealing from foreigners. Even among each other, there are concentric circles of honor and the farther one is (Chinese or otherwise) from their own center circle, the less honor there is between them.

A few years ago someone (who apparently didn't have any babies in his own circle) actually made baby formula with no protein but was filled with some (cheaper) substance that -tested- as protein to the food safety people. Hundreds or thousands of babies died from malnutrition.

The Chinese are not going to change thousands of years of cultural inheritance in only a few decades. The only way to get them to stop screwing us is to slap them as hard economically as we possibly can. Even if it means we suffer a bit too.

The farther you are from the Chinese border, the less your property means to them. We are the 'tribe over the hill' and we have no intellectual property or rights. None. That's my $0.02 worth.

McAfee says cloud security not as bad as we feared… it's much worse

Jumble

Either this article in general is full of confusing "averages" or the McAfee report was a totally fishy and confusing jumble of self-serving scare mongering not worth covering in El Reg. Which ?

Official: IBM to gobble Red Hat for $34bn – yes, the enterprise Linux biz

"can leverage red hat tech for free..."

Nothing is free. Not now, not ever. If IBM is true to form, transfer prices for support, services, subscription fees and all the rest between Red Hat and IBM will be at the same prices they were before this outrage. IBM doesn't fuck anybody more than it does internally. Between departments, divisions--with a healthy uplift going to the "procurement" department for it's "services."

The way IBM does "costing" and "pricing" is totally fucking outrageous. One internal uplift after another, plus an adder in case our forecast is wrong, and nothing ever succeeds. Once these internal processes infect the Red Hat operation (not to mention travel rules, no raises for years, no project money, no budgets for any departmental purposes, and consolidation of all advertising and promotion to Armonk, and Red Hat will be road kill--a stain on the highway.

Re: At least is isnt oracle or M$

Sorry, you're way off here: The KERNAL is from "Linus and chums." The HUGE rest of the OS is from a community of groups in the thousands around the world.

Re: At least is isnt oracle or M$

IBM was already "working on Linux." For decades. With multiple hundreds of full-time Linux developers--more than any other corporate contributor--around the world. And not just on including IBM-centric function into Linux, but on mainstream community projects. There have been lots of Linux people in IBM since the early-90's.

30 years ago, NASA put Challenger behind it and sent a Space Shuttle back out into the black

Re: A total failure for cheap launches

"And for the true cost of fixing the Hubble they could have launched another."

We do have "another." We have about 25 others. Trouble is, the others are all aimed DOWN. They are called "Keyhole" satellites. Owned by the CIA. Hubble was even built in the same factory as the Keyholes. With a total and complete firewall between personnel and spaces. If the people who build Keyholes were only allowed to consult with the Hubble people, Hubble would never have been blind in the first place. The Keyhole people saw it coming and couldn't say anything. We spend more money on defense than anything other than healthcare. My question is, "WTF are we defending?"

Re: Politics - NASA needs to go back to designing air-foils and that's it.

NASA still designs airfoils.

Politics

So long as the Right is in charge of American politics, there will be no space program. There will be huge profits for space contractors, but no space program. Some commercial companies have and will grow tired of the fits and starts and camels-designed-by-committee that come out of the ignorant, incompetent, corrupt political process, and these commercial companies have and will do great things. But, IMHO, NASA is a dead duck. NASA needs to go back to designing air-foils and that's it. When I was 60, my joints started to ache and my attention span went back to when I was 8. RIP NASA.

I find your lack of faith disturbing, IBM: Big Blue fires photon torpedo at Pentagon JEDI cloud contract

Baloney

Amazon builds nice virtual machines to store your photos and spin up a virtual instance of your payroll system. Microsoft doesn't even know how to do that. Google doesn't know much about any of this, and none of those three have any credible experience. There are only two companies in the world that know anything about the unprecedented complexities of a bullet-proof, high-function, diverse, planet-wide DOD cloud system. And one of them is light on references and breadth of skill. You IBM haters should re-consider. They have the best security people outside the NSA--and NSA isn't sharing--and more high-value data assets under their control than everybody else combined. Whether you like them or not, IBM is the only choice for this contract. I had an old boss who's philosophy was, "Whoever writes the bid, wins the business." IBM doesn't grease palms, but if it doesn't win this critical contract, whoever is writing it is greasing DOD palms in 7 figures.

Send up a satellite to zap space junk if you want Earth's orbit to be clean, say boffins

Re: Consider:

Two ships RARELY hit each other at sea--even in shipping lanes. They hit each other in harbors and other "choke points." Earth orbits are not "choke points." They are more like "at sea." Plus, the surface of the ocean is one-dimensional, while earth orbit is absolutely not.

Re: Consider:

Solar panels don't exactly look like shot-gun target practice, but they do look pretty messy. Almost ENTIRELY caused by rocks and dust coming in from someplace OTHER than up from Earth.

Consider:

I haven't done these calculations so what I'm about to post is pure speculation. (I'd like to see the real numbers:) If the entire "surface area" of all the orbital planes of all the "debris" (and even all the "non-debris") that is currently in orbit around the Earth, including Ed White's glove and a tool or two that got lost, was reduced to the two-dimensional surface area of Earth itself, the average distance between two pieces of debris (even paint chips) would be 170 miles (or something.) In other words, hitting one of these pieces of junk -on purpose- would be well-nigh impossible. Hitting one by accident would be something like an act of God. And remember, simply because everything is going 17,000 mph doesn't mean that the collision velocity is anything like that. The collision velocity might be miles-per-hour, not thousands of miles per hour.

The artists' images of a cluttered earth-orbit with stuff bouncing off other stuff is just nonsense, the area out there being just so huge. Plus, now, by international law, every item placed into near Earth (up to geo-sync) orbit, must have an end-of-life plan that assures either destruction or "no-factor" removal. Accidents and failures of self-removal mechanisms won't cause an urgent problem for, maybe, centuries. My sense is that there is something else to this. Like a military something else. Huh?

The ink's not dry on California'a new net neutrality law and the US govt is already suing

Hypocrisy

Totally separate from the merits of this case (whether or not NN is a good idea,) the hypocrisy of the Right in the US is breathtaking. When it suits the interests of their overlords (big corporations and the rich) they espouse the values of "state's rights," and state and local control of as much government as possible. The hidden agenda here is that state and local governments are much easier to manipulate (ie, "bribe,") they border on incompetence in many important matters, and are much less transparent and accountable to constituents. But whenever a legitimate "state's rights" issue goes against the interests of the Right, they are immediately in there to fight against it. In fact, the Right universally campaigns on telling voters that they will "get Washington off your back," and "Washington is the enemy," and "Washington wants to get in your pocket." The Right in America has become a pawn of the above mentioned corporate and wealthy interests, and totally and completely devoid of any other ideology. Total hypocrites.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Re: Skype

LINE is great. IMHO, better than Skype. But it's banned in countries that refuse to allow LINE's encryption. It's banned where gov't spies want to read and see everything. It's banned in Russia.

Optional

It appears that unless someone complains, you are safe. Am I reading this correctly? If my girlfriend and I exchange selfies (assuming she doesn't complain to M$) there is no problem, correct?

US cities react in fury to FCC's $2bn break for 5G telcos: We'll be picking up the tab, say officials

Money, Money, Money

I would like to understand how corporate and private money is paid to public officials/candidates in the UK and EU. In the US, we have something called the "Citizens United" decision, which basically allows corporations and rich people to pay unlimited amounts of money to public officials and candidates ostensibly for the furtherance of their political careers. Much of it is unreported, "dark" money. IMHO, it is essentially legalized bribery. The money is not intended to be used for the official's or candidate's personal use, but seeing as elected officials are essentially -always- re-running for office, this unlimited money can end up being used to feed and water politicians 24/7. The telecom industry in the US is the largest transmitter of money to politicians. Bigger even than the health-care industry and the defense industry. Comcast alone spends more money "lobbying" the US Federal government than anyone except Lockheed-Martin. IMHO, this institutionally organized bribery has corrupted the entire US Federal government. How doe this work in your country?

Russian volcanoes fingered for Earth's largest mass extinction

Re: The Ends of the World

I have one candidate to "send somewhere else."

Skype Classic headed for the chopping block on September 1

LINE?

I have begun to use LINE more than Skype. Any reason -not- to use LINE? It seems to have all the functionality, except it is "banned" in -some- countries. I think because state operators want to spy on it and LINE won't let them. Anybody have some insights here?

Freshly baked storage: Take a pinch of Intel Skylake silicon, some flash powder, sprinkle into IBM's FlashSystem

Re: Power?

IMHO, POWER chips would be more expensive and not add value to I/O operations. POWER chips are real computer chips, not just high density switches.

Off with e's head: E-cig explosion causes first vaping death

Re: Souk an e-cig

"...how long before we discover that vaping is as bad (or worse) as cigarettes..."

We will "discover" this shortly after we discover that the earth is, in fact, actually flat.

In the 10 or so years that vaping has been "a thing," considering the multiple millions of people who have switched from tobacco to vapor, there have been, at least, (and this is my own estimation using only common sense) several hundred thousand people, per year, in the US alone, who have NOT died from tobacco related illness.

We all know that PG and VG vapor, even including nicotine, is NOT a carcinogen. We know this from many, many credible sources, including the US CDC. We know that vaping is a THOUSAND times less toxic than smoking tobacco. We also know, again from many credible sources, that tobacco smoke contains, literally, dozens of toxic substances.

The anti-vapors, to me, are in the same category as the anti-vaxxers. Ignorant, ill-informed, self-righteous morons--except that the anti-vapors have a huge, powerful, greedy, hateful, self-interested group behind them: The Tobacco Industry. Every time an infant swallows a vapor pen, or a battery explodes, they will see to it that it makes national and world-wide headline news.

Don't be fooled by this. The health-care cost for treating all the health-related issues surrounding tobacco comes RIGHT OUT OF ---YOUR--- POCKET.

Pointless US Congress net neutrality vote will take place tomorrow!

Obvious

So long as campaign money (bribery) is the mother's milk of American politics, and so long as money is considered "speech," and campaign "speech" (money) is unlimited, making the "speech" coming from some locations (corporations, wealthy people, and lobbyists) of much greater volume than from ordinary people, the American people will never be heard from again.

No Falcon Way: NASA to stick with SLS, SpaceX more like space ex

Welfare

The "space" part of NASA is welfare program for smart people. It conceives, engineers, and manufactures horses designed by committee. Each horse is too big, too complicated, too expensive, and too late. It is also a huge employment program to fund House and Senate re-election campaigns. The NASA Moon program jump started nearly every aspect the technology and systems integration and systems management that make our lives better today. Yes, nearly all of it. But the jump start is over. We don't need it any more. Let the government fund the work of 2 or 3 enterprises, let them compete, and save us a huge pile of money to spend on health-care and education. We need the SLS and Orion like we need another real-estate developer in the White House.

Big Blue levels up server sextet with POWER9 for IBM i, AIX, HANA, Linux

Right...

LOL. You're right. IBM does have a crappy website. My muffler shop has a better one. It is the result of layer upon layer of bureaucratic "checkers," with high-school kids doing the coding--I take that back, high-school kids would do a better job. I don't know who is doing theirs...

The IBM site has numerous links that go nowhere, the worst search engine in all of the Earth (and probably beyond,) and it is DULL DULL DULL. I don't think it is too much to say it is useless.