Posts by theOtherJT

US State Dept has no idea if its IT security actually works, say auditors

It's not just in government, and it's not just the US. I have never worked anywhere where we would have passed an audit that I carried out to the actual letter of any of the ISO or BSI or whatever other rules we might claim to be complying with. It's always "Do just enough to get it by letter of the law according to the overworked auditor who won't actually look too hard" never "Do the actual thing the intent of the law meant for us to do" because actually complying will always upset too many people who don't want their day made harder by having to actually follow procedures and be seen to follow them.

I like to imagine it actually works in say, nuclear, or aeronautics, because that lets me sleep better at night... but I wouldn't want to bet on it.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Probably not. But then neither will the Pi4 in my experience. It just doesn't have enough pull to be used to stream video at even 1080p, never mind 4k. The user experience is absolutely appalling. Even opening firefox can take upwards of 10 seconds at times, and youtube is basically unwatchable, with constant video-audio desync issues.

I've often wondered if there's something wrong with mine, because as far as I can tell it's totally unusable for video.

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Well, that's probably because we too are getting worse not better over time...

Start rummaging: Atari's new 2600+ console supports vintage cartridges

Since its just emulation...

...what exactly is the point? I get the appeal of running things on real hardware to relive the old days and all that, but this is effectively just retropi in a nice case - with all the compatibility and timing issues that implies.

Hold the Moon – NASA's buildings are crumbling amid 200-year upgrade cycles

Re: It is a tragedy...

Just so. But maybe part of the cause of that is that we don't value science the way we used to in our society as a whole? I'm too young to have seen the first moon landing, but I know several people who are only a decade older than me who did see it as children and it made a real mark on them. Science used to be inspiring. People wanted to be part of it when they grew up. Even in my lifetime I remember being stunned by the Deep Field Image when I was in high school, and it was pointed out to me by a rather proud teacher of physics that this right here was the sort of thing I could be part of when I graduated if I studied hard enough.

If science doesn't inspire people they stop paying attention to it, and that leads to all the shit you very correctly called out right there. I like to imagine if we actually spent money on doing a bunch of really cool shit and promoting that, then we'd get more kids graduating school with a genuine desire to go into scientific fields, and fewer intellectually bankrupt idiots who only care about celebrities and social media.

It is a tragedy...

...that we stopped caring enough, as a species, about pure science. NASA went to the fucking moon but today while we all talk up how cool that is, we don't seem prepared to pay to keep doing it, or fund science enough to do the next big thing.

Cage match: Zuck finally realizes Elon is full of twit

I just want to see...

...at least one of them get punched in the mouth. I don't even really care which.

Actually, come to think of it - the best possible outcome here is going to be something along the lines of "OH GOD HERE COMES LARRY ELLISON WITH A STEEL CHAIR!"

Never mind room temperature, LK-99 slammed as 'not a superconductor at all'

Which does raise the question...

...if this stuff definitely isn't superconducting or diamagnetic, then what was causing the fun floating thing happening in the original video? Was it a deliberate fake? Did the actually build something different by accident?

Sysadmins are being left out of AI implementation

Most people don’t even know what sysadmins do...

...but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn’t make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

Everyone always forgets about us :(

On the record: Apple bags patent for iDevice to play LPs

Re: Sooo....

We even have somewhat modular laptops these days. Like this here.

Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress

Re: Alien UFOs

...and then land next to some poor unsuspecting soul who no one is ever going to believe and then walk up and down in front of him making "beep beep" noises with a pair of silly antennae on their heads.

All rather childish really.

Musk's X tries to win advertisers back with discounts

Watching Musk run this into the ground...

...is literally the most entertainment that twitter has ever managed to provide me.

Want to live dangerously? Try running Windows XP in 2023

Re: My takeaway from this article...

I think we also need to add "Maybe our software designers are complete idiots" to that list.

I'll be the first to admit I'm no designer, and I'm barely even a developer, but about the most important part of a UI be it text or graphical is surely consistency. It should behave in predictable ways at all times. You can always argue that one design or another is better on it's merits but if you've got one program that's somehow managing to invoke multiple designs at the same time and they don't behave the same way not only is the user going to have a bad time but you kind of have to be using more code and thus making the thing run slower.

It's totally possible for textual UI's to get this wrong too (I'm looking at you megacli) but it's amazing just how wrong a lot of modern software seems to get it. Windows especially is guilty of this. You can still find things using the windows95 windowing theme hiding inside Windows 11 - which means the code for that theme is still there somewhere and probably a bunch of supporting code for that... and the code for the XP windowing engine... and the one for metro...

Each release they've added more and more ways to draw things on screen, but no one ever bothered to clean up the mess left by the old one or port all the applications forward. This is absolutely a design problem. No matter how clean and well written the underlying code is (and I'm sure it's not, but that's another issue) if you're invoking a dozen different design paradigms in a dozen different places you're not only wasting huge amounts of memory, but you're going to present the user with an experience that's just plain confusing.

My takeaway from this article...

...is that all modern operating systems have become absolute monsters of bloat and poor design. The more we look at older systems the more obvious it is that things actually were measurably, provably, unequivocally better in the past. Yes, they were also worse. We had to reboot all the time, yes. Drivers were a nightmare, yes. But the consistency of the UI and the speed of operation were just better then than they are now, and frankly that's unforgivable. It didn't have to be like this.

Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding

Re: Can you actually protect a letter of the alphabet?

This was my first thought. Surely that's going to be a trademark nightmare. Also: X is widely used for a bunch of other things. x.org for one.

Two new Linux desktops – one with deep roots – come to Debian

Re: Beautiful? Really?

I'm not sure it was beautiful even then. Let's compare NeXTstep with contemporary RiscOS

I get looks are subjective, but for me it's RiscOS all the way. It's a much cleaner design that doesn't scatter different UI elements all over the screen.

Beautiful? Really?

the original NeXTstep desktop is the most beautiful GUI ever invented

Really? I think it's hideous. But I'll give it this, it's also functional and I'd take that over "pretty but gets in my way" any day of the week.

Will Flatpak and Snap replace desktop Linux native apps?

Performance isn't free...

...and while the overhead might seem trivial when you're running a single instance on a single laptop, it doesn't scale nicely. I hate to even imagine how much memory and CPU power we're wasting running this sort of thing in datacentres that might be host to literally millions of instances of SnapPackagedSuperFutureApplication compared to running it natively.

And that's before you start worrying about the compound performance because SnapPackagedSuperFutureApplication is now running in a container because someone decided that would be cool - and of course that container is running in a VM because we don't do bare metal these days... all these layers of abstraction add up.

It's a cute technology for the desktop, but it's really not viable everywhere. The concern a lot of us have is the same as we had with systemd - yes, it benefits desktop users in a whole bunch of ways, but it comes with unintended side effects once it proliferates enough to become "the standard" and now it's sitting on my servers getting in the way.

Google veep calls out Microsoft's cloud software licensing 'tax'

Re: Would it not be cheaper for Google, AWS, Alibaba

Won't help. People are too deeply wedded to MS applications. You cannot convince office workers who have been using MS Office for 25 years now that there's an alternative. They won't hear it. They're not interested in the technical reasons why some alternative is just as good, or even better, they only want Office. It's been their entire career and they will refuse to change.

BMW adds games to the 5 series but still ain't the Ultimate Gaming Machine

Re: Oh my.

Well aren't you a lucky, arrogant, self-satisfied, little jackass.

Most of us live where we live because it's the best balance we can strike between where we want to be, where we need to be, and where we can afford. Given the option I too would love to live in a pretty little seaside paradise, but I have to stay within a realistic distance of my elderly family who need my support, my friends who can't afford to move to paradise, and my work which requires me to attend it occasionally and isn't located in paradise.

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

The ubuntu auto-installer for the server edition (and I'm given to believe it actually _does_ also work for the desktop edition, they just don't tell anyone) has, as of 22.04 at least, the best ease of use vs feature set I have ever encountered.

It's basically a big YAML file parsed by subiquity and a variation on cloud-init but it also copies itself into memory at install time and is re-read at several steps through the process, so you can use the "early-commands" and "late-commands" sections to modify it by just running bash code in the installer env and then injecting the output back into the file with sed or whatever. It's really slick, and I wish they'd lean more heavily on it in their documentation because it's actually capable of a ton of things they've not made at all clear.

I ended up using the afore-mentioned "early-commands" a few months back to stick some interactive user stuff into the installer that's not an option in their standard installer, and then automate all the rest of it that the users don't need to care about.

I suspect we've ended up where we are out of the growing trend for "hiding anything that 90% of people don't want to see", which then devolves into "remove anything that 90% of people don't use" and things get taken out not because they're not useful, but because no one uses them because they don't know they're even there.

The Shakespearian question of our age: To cloud or not to cloud

Ain't that the truth...

Very large datasets coupled to highly pipelined compute are vital to AI/ML. They also generate monthly hosting bills you can see from Jupiter.

We ran the numbers a few years ago and came to the conclusion that it would be *five times* cheaper for us to buy a dozen 4U compute nodes and two petabytes of storage - because although the up front numbers were terrifying, the cost of running it in the cloud over the expected lifetime of the equipment would be insane, which we promptly did.

Fast forward to this year and we've grown a lot and need to massively expand our compute and storage, but we've run out of office to put it in. Now, me, I wanted to snaffle a couple of those meeting rooms we don't use any more since everyone's working remotely and have them re-fitted as machine rooms. Unfortunately CapEx has to be paid today, OpEx can be paid tomorrow, and comes out of someone else's budget, so off to the cloud we go...

...on a more serious note that's a genuine benefit of cloud vs on-prem. If you can't afford the couple of hundred grand it will take to purchase and install all that physical infrastructure based on your current operating profits, you can rent it until such times as you can afford it.

Which leads me to thinking about tomorrow. Our business has grown a lot since we made that initial assessment and we're looking at renting a new office that's literally 10x the size of the one we're currently in. It'll be a couple of years before that becomes a reality, what with all the site surveys and fit-out and everything else, so I'm inflating the numbers on the server room fit-out as hard as I can because it's only a matter of time before someone goes "Hey, this cloud compute bill is bonkers! We used to do all that ourselves, can we bring some of this back in house?"

What goes around, it comes around.

The quest to make Linux bulletproof

It's all about making it easier...

...for humans to manage the huge, sprawling complexity of modern apps

One can't help but wonder if it might actually make sense to go and look at said "modern" apps and determine why they got so huge, sprawling, and complex - because I'm almost certain that in 90% of cases what we're doing here is building complexity in order to manage complexity, rather than doing the smart thing and trying to take the initial complexity out.

I'm sure there are plenty of greyer heads than mine in this here comments section, but I've been doing this quite a while now and I'm far from convinced that most of what we do today is objectively better than what we were doing when I joined the industry twenty years ago. It's more just sort of... different... and probably involves a web browser for some reason no one seems to be able to adequately explain.

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

Re: This yor folt

Oh no, that's definitely from someone who speaks English as their first language. Anyone who was actively taught it would have made a better attempt at it.

Make Linux safer… or die trying

Re: Technology & Economics

4.) If you want to see the future of OSs, look at minimalist microkernels:

I wouldn't bet on it. That's the exact reasoning people gave back in the 90s when saying "Linux will never catch on" and yet here we are. We all should have learned by now that the future belongs to the most successful path not the technically most efficient / reliable / advanced one, and success is just as often determined by what is easy as what is good.

helloSystem 0.8: A friendly, all-graphical FreeBSD

Re: ...Meanwhile, the Linux world has a profusion of rival distros, desktops, and packaging formats

It's an eternal problem and much lamented - no less than here on the Reg - but I'm not sure there is a correct answer. Ask 10 different people what they want and you'll get 10 different answers. Most of what we have these days are variations on a theme. Each new Gnome is more "different" than better, and not even very different, just different enough to be mildly annoying. Some things improve, some get inexplicably worse.

We hit some sort of local minima where it's not bad enough for anyone to want to put in a lot of effort to change, but also not good enough for us all to have stopped complaining. I don't think there's really any way out of a hole like that except by force - and unlike with Windows or MacOS there's no driving company behind it to provide that force: "This is the new desktop. You don't get a say."

Linux people will continue to use sort of whatever suits them and there's nothing that stands out so far above the crowd to draw a mass migration by choice, just a bunch of "Well, I personally like A slightly better than B, so I'm gonna use that."

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

No surprizes here...

I've not had cause to replace my regular daily driver machine in at least 5 years. It's fine. It does everything it did back then and there have been no real improvements in hardware that would warrant it. Screen is a perfectly acceptable 15" at 1080p affair, and my eyesight really isn't good enough for it to be worth getting a 4K one. Storage is a respectable 512G of NVME making it more than large enough and fast enough. I did put another 16G of ram in it last year to take it up to 32 - but that was only so I could play Cities Skylines on it with more mods loaded - it wasn't really necessary.

I'm not seeing anything compelling in new desktop or laptop offerings at the moment. GPUs continue to march on, but outside of gaming who cares, ML guys? Most people are not doing ML, and the ones that are are more likely to be interested in big server-grade stuff. We've really not had a compelling "Get a new machine this is so much better!" in years, and outside of gaming even the incremental improvements have been largely unnecessary for daily "browse the web" "watch netflix" "send emails" type tasks.

Tech CEO nixes AI lawyer stunt after being threatened with jail time

Shame...

...I was really ready for the "contempt of court" charge that they were 100% going to end up with.

WFH can get you 40% salary boost in UK and US tech jobs

Re: That doesn't make sense

Hi. Nice to meet you. It's Me. I would.

I mean, I already work from home so I don't have to, but if I had ever been offered it I'd have taken it. I was easily spending 3K a year on commuting which I now don't, so it would have been worth a 3K pay cut to WFH because not only would it make no financial difference to me once it all shook out, but I'd also be getting two hours a day of commuting time back. That's even more valuable to than the "dollar value".

Dear Stupid, I write with news I did not check the content of the [Name] field before sending this letter

Re: This would be the flip side...

I remember that one from a stint working with medics. There was a common one that showed up in the post-birth notes "FLK" because the delivery room staff just thought the Kid Looked Funny and should be checked over by a doctor just in case. The follow up was often "FLP NFA" after the doctor met the parents.

"Funny Looking Parent. No Further Action."

This would be the flip side...

...of the one where office admins see a bunch of "unused" fields in the database so decide they can keep notes in them. "I've been looking for somewhere to keep the reminder that this shithead always makes a fuss if we don't have the right kind of tea on hand whenever he comes in to give a lecture - hey look, this 'accessibility' field never has anything in it, I'll put it in there!"

Next thing you know the mailshot with this weeks events goes out and at the bottom there's a footer: "Students with accessibility issues, please note: Get twatface his stupid poncy tea."

Netflix changes CEO-sharing arrangement, teases paid password-sharing

Re: Netflix will die...

Valve would like to talk to you about the economics of being the primary provider and how that drives cost to consumer.

Re: Netflix will die...

...is a way to differentiate the platform and win/retain subscribers...

Which is exactly what I don't want them to do. I do not want to differentiate the platform. I don't care about the platform. It's exactly the same as my ISP or my operating system. It's at it's absolute best when I am basically unaware that it even exists. I want a pipe down which data flows, an shell in which programs run, and in this case a thing I can open on my TV and holy shit, there's a bunch of TV shows in there. "Netflix" adds no value other than to get the things from the creators to me. If it can't do that it is actually subtracting value.

If Netflix want to be a creator, well, fine I guess, but I don't care who produced a particular show any more than I care how it got delivered to me. I care about watching the god damned show, and streaming services need to stop collectively making that harder and start making it easier - which was the entire benefit of Netflix in the first place before all the other content creators started clawing back their own content and sticking it behind their own paywalls - presumably on the grounds of "We can do what Netflix does and cut out the middle man and keep all the profit!" That isn't going to work out for them because they've missed what it was that Netflix was doing right and what it is that people were really paying for.

The value Netflix had was as an aggregator. All the shows were there, so that's the place people went to get TV. Netflix was actually easier than bittorrent as a way to get stuff. It was faster, more reliable, and everyone gets to feel good about the fact that they're staying within the law. Once all the shows are not there people are not going to start paying for more subscriptions to fill the holes, they're going to stop paying for subscriptions at all and go back to the high seas - which is what we already see happening.

Re: I can’t imagine

Someone has to pay for it somewhere - and if it's not you, it's going to be advertising. Given the choice between paying subscription and watching adverts for me personally it'll be subscription every day of the week. I know some people are fine with adverts, but there's no way I could stand going back to a world where the movie I'm watching gets interrupted every 15 minutes so people can tell me to buy things.

Netflix will die...

...and all the other streaming services will die with it if they can't get their shit together and realize that content is the beginning and end of their business. That's it. That's what they do. They provide access to video content. If they can't do that, they are done.

But no, here we are with the god-damned cable TV bullshit all over again. They're all so busy fucking each other over to secure "exclusive" content for their platform that each provider becomes less and less attractive to customers. I DO NOT CARE who I buy my streaming content from. I never cared. Nobody cares. We want to pay a flat fee, per month, to get access to the things we want to watch. That's it. It's that simple. Not 2 fees. Not 6. Not "If you buy this bundle you get these other bundles for free!". Fuck. All. That. Noise.

That shit is exactly why video piracy went through the roof when peer to peer services started offering what the cable and satellite companies couldn't - one-click convenience where I get to watch whatever the hell I want without having to worry if it's managed to pass some stupid backroom wrangling test between the lawyers of big companies I don't give a fuck about.

They need to sign some sort of platform sharing agreement like all the record labels did a decade ago before they're forced out of business entirely.

Time to study the classics: Vintage tech is the future of enterprise IT

If Microsoft calls anything over a decade "ancient"...

...then I'm pretty sure that anything less than a decade old probably hasn't really had all the knots pulled out of it yet and almost certainly contains as yet undiscovered weird failure modes.

There's nothing convinces me that something is good so much as that it's over a decade old and still in use.

It's been around the block a few times. We've found and fixed most of the properly stupid faults in it. We've given that thing a proper workout and it's not been found wanting. Old tech makes me feel a damn sight more confident that it's fit for purpose than anything that's still new and shiny.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

Re: The car industry is increasingly turning into the fashion industry...

Not sure about that. They made expensive glossy things that they were never going to build, but they made really awesome looking expensive glossy things.

This is increasingly getting into the "It's not a bin-liner with used teabags stapled to it, it's art you just wouldn't understand!" levels of pretentious bullshit. I don't mind impractical halo stuff. I mind deliberately fucking hideous impractical halo stuff.

The car industry is increasingly turning into the fashion industry...

...where they do self-congratulatory circle jerk trade shows where the "designers" compete to produce the most laughable, hideous, and impractical things imaginable while the general public wonders what the fuck that poor model is doing with a bunch of coloured clingfilm and feathers glued to her, and at what point they're going to show us something they might theoretically actually put on sale?

Japan lacks the expertise for renewed nuclear power after Fukushima

Re: "an intermediary power source until the wider adoption of renewables like wind and solar"

Working fusion would increase the "accessible" energy reserves of the world per capita

Still thinking too small. You're looking at "The world". We need to be thinking about the whole solar system, because that's what's going to be at stake in the next couple of hundred years and it will require planning at those sorts of timescales if we're not going to end up going extinct on this little blue ball.

Fusion isn't even going to be enough once we go properly interstellar.

Re: "an intermediary power source until the wider adoption of renewables like wind and solar"

.Well, until the next thing. Fission is only an intermediate step to fusion. I don't know what comes after fusion because I don't think we have even got a theoretical framework for that, so any guesses I might make would be pure science fiction, but there's always a "next" even if we can't imagine it yet.

This above all is my objection to the push for "renewable" power. Not that it's bad in and of itself, it clearly isn't, but that its just so unambitious. There's a mindset that most people who are most vocally for it seem to have that doesn't see that there has to be something that comes after. Wind power won't be taking us to the stars.

Who'd have thought...

...that making reactionary policy decisions based on populist fearmongering could have long term negative consequences?

Vanilla OS 22.10: An Arch and Fedora-compatible Ubuntu

But why Ubuntu not Debian?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like they've diverged so much from what Ubuntu offers here that it would make more sense for them to upstream Debian?

Computing's big question for 2023: How many more questions can we endure?

Re: A depressing list

I have to assume the answer is very simple: It doesn't make them any more money.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

Re: Hydrogen is an energy storage medium...

Under those sorts of circumstances I'd assume the best thing to do is stick with petrol. Even diesel will start to freeze when it's that cold. This is one of the many reasons I think we need to be more pragmatic about transport. Not everyone everywhere can use an EV. "Three hundred mile range!" sounds reasonable, until you live somewhere where it's a 301 mile trip to the next place you can charge.

I remember driving across Queensland Australia about 25 years ago and passing a sign that said "Next fuel: 400km." Which just isn't the sort of thing you're used to seeing if you live in Europe. You just can't take EV's into an environment like that. You can't take most normal cars into an environment like, that but people do live there and that's something that governments around the world need to take into account.

I don't know where the most remote part of the Scottish highlands is, but I don't think I'd feel comfortable going out there without an extra jerry can full of petrol in the back, and that's nothing like as remote as bits of really big countries like Canada, Australia, etc.

Hydrogen is an energy storage medium...

...not a "green" fuel source.

It has to come from somewhere. It's not like wind or solar power where it's just sort of there already and we need only build a machine to capture it. We have to make hydrogen - or at least refine it - normally by putting a ton of electricity into water. In that respect it's more like having to refine petrol out of crude oil, or extract and purify uranium from uranium ore. The electricity to do that has to come from somewhere.

Theoretically hydrogen might be a good way to store energy in a moving vehicle - presumably via fuel cells to generate electricity, rather than by feeding it into a combustion engine, because as a combustion fuel source it has... issues - but however we use it, first we have to create it.

It would seem that any time it's suggested by politicians that hydrogen is going to be this big part of the "green future" they neglect to mention that there's this whole much bigger part of the green future that needs to happen first to make it viable.

Amazon, Games Workshop announce Warhammer 40k film deal

This makes me nervous...

...because I really only see two choices here.

Either they make this true to the source material, grimdark and all, and then it doesn't make any money because almost nothing hard R rated ever does, and there's just no way you can do anything 40K without that. Not enough people "get" what it's all about, the general audiences don't like it, it doesn't make any money and it gets immediately cancelled.

Alternatively they make it PG13 enough for it to make money, and it ends up being a terrible pale imitation of what it ought to be - a dark and horrific future where everything has gone terribly, terribly wrong and human life is debased, desperate, and disposable - in which case the fans won't like it, it devolves into a massive internet argument about toxic fandom, and then gets immediately cancelled.

Not sure there's actually a way for them to win this one.

I really hope I'm wrong.

San Francisco terminates explosive killer cop bots

Re: Article 5

"We're talking April, May, June, July and August fool!"

Programming error created billion-dollar mistake that made the coder ... a hero?

Re: Worst code I ever saw...

And then you encounter syntactically valid perl...

Once upon a site migration...

...I was tasked with getting about 10,000 pages of website from our old CMS to our new one. Having spent several months poking around in the piles of spaghetti code that tied together a few hundred modules that had been attached to the old site in order to get it to do the dozens of intranet things that it didn't really have any business doing, I came to the conclusion that the fastest way to get everything moved would be to get each page owner - and helpfully the pages had the owners name stamped on them - to simply copy-paste the pages in question into the new site and do some much needed update on the copy as they went along.

I was told in no uncertain terms that there was no way everyone had time for that, and we had to automate it. I said something along the lines of "OK, but I'm giving this a 50% chance of working at best, and given the number of interactions we might not find out exactly how bits of it are broken until it's too late to do anything about it.

It was decided by the website committee* that we would go ahead with the automated migration, and so one fateful morning I pressed the enter button on an utterly terrifying bash script calling various bits of perl, php, and in one instance piping an SQLdump through awk. It was not pretty.

It took about an hour to realize that it was taking much longer than it ought to and clearly something somewhere had gone wrong and we were going to have to revert to backup even if it did finally complete, and I informed the website committee of this. Again, the committee decided* that it would be better to wait for it to finish and then spend a couple of days cleaning up the errors on the new site than going back and doing it all again. I pointed out that this was a very bad idea since I didn't really understand how it was that it had broken in the first place because the code I'd written couldn't possibly cover every weird edge case that I suspected, but couldn't prove, existed.

Three weeks later everyone agreed that we needed to go back to the backup and start over.

*That is, no one is prepared to take actual responsibility for the decision, and the only person who clearly opposed it** was mysteriously omitted from the minutes.

**Me.

US could save billions in health costs if it changed wind energy strategy

Saved by whom?

According to the study, models that swapped out known-curtailed power plants for ideal curtailment made that number jump considerably, leading to $8.4 billion in health benefits across the US

But healthcare in the USA is a private industry, as is power generation. What incentive does one company have to interfere in the profitability of another? And why would the government, who's election campaigns are financed by both, have any interest in doing anything that might upset either of them?