Posts by Palpy

Congress to FCC: Where’s the damn report on mobile companies selling location data?

Re: Senate committee power to arrest --

Theoretically the Senate committee could have a sergeant-at-arms arrest someone who was defying a Congressional subpoena. This is seldom invoked -- the last time was in 1927. Pai is not, to my knowledge, defying a subpoena, he's just corrupt as hell.

But anyway, Republicans control the Senate, so no such action will take place if the target is an appointee of President Trump. Most of the Republicans in the Senate are in Trump's dirty pocket anyway -- they don't call Senator McConnell "Moscow Mitch" because he's upholding the US Constitution or serving the American public, exactly.

The Feds are building an America-wide face surveillance system – and we're going to court to prove it, says ACLU

Re: screen names...

"Palpy" has got to be one of the worst three or four screen aliases I've ever used. It's an unfortunate amalgamation based on a name -- begins with the "Pa" from "Paul" and goes crazy after that.

You know when you first decide to post a comment to a new site, and ... oh hells, quick, have to think of a screen alias. One that does not contain any synonym for "buttocks", which is always my first impulse.

As far as Emperor Palpatine, he would actually be a descendant of mine, many many generations in the future, right? Or is there a closed time-like curve operating, such that the Star Wars franchise is actually a million years in the past? I get so confused. And where the hell is my jetpack?

640 million -- more than the US population --

-- just means they're scraping Facebook for multiple images. Easy-peasy. Plus they've got all you Brits in there as well, so stop smirking. ;)

Was there not a story just the other day on the US border patrol looking to use facial recog software? And is not FR a fact of life (Wired article) at some US airports?

Total Proactive Enforcement™ will be served when the Agencies know your travel pattern (cell-phone tracking), your Internet searches (thanks to Google) and history, your record of purchases (Amazon et al), your face, and... you add to the list yourselves, friends. Total Proactive Enforcement™ will not only know before you break a rule, it will know if you support the Glorious Leader of the Moment and where to find you at any time. So you can be properly punished and re-educated.

Cyber-security super-brain Rudy Giuliani forgets password, bricks iPhone, begs Apple Store staff for help

Rudy's mind has left the building.

Really. He's popped out of gear at the top of the Hill and is free-wheeling toward an uncontrolled wipeout. In security as in government, there are professionals, there are those who can learn to be professionals, and there are untrainable idiots. We know where Rudy is in that regard.

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Thank Deities that this kind of discussion --

-- will soon be moot. AI will run our cars, because a computer is better able to evaluate things like vehicle braking distance on wet roads with a lorry (that's for you Brits) right up your rear bumper and an auto in front of you simultaneously braking for a turn as it drifts into your lane. I mean, driving is really a set of simple and easily computed algorithms, isn't it?

It is until you start to analyze it. Then, however, we quickly arrive at discussions of possibilities, probabilities, driving psychology, edge cases, confounding factors, and so on. Just as in the above comments.

To add another regional traffic whinge: Where I live it's common at busy intersections for drivers wanting to turn left across the oncoming lane to pull out and essentially park in the intersection until the lights go red, stopping traffic. Then they turn. Sometimes two or three cars will be stopped in the middle of a particularly wide and busy intersection. And since the oncoming traffic in the lane the drivers wish to turn across is also pushing the red, the green signal for cross-traffic may be lit for 20 or 30 seconds before other drivers have a clear intersection and can proceed. I doubt that it's legal to block an intersection in this way, but "everybody does it".

Pack your pyjamas, Zuck: US bill threatens execs with prison for data failures

Ron Wyden gives me cognitive whiplash.

Recently a pundit opined that the US has, essentially, legalized corruption in government: since money is free speech and corporations are people, a corporation bribing a congressman is just a constituent engaging in free speech with his representative. I am pretty well on the way to internalizing the idea that I live in a corrupt oligarchy, like Russia, albeit with an as yet less-developed authoritarian / totalitarian tilt.

And then comes Ron Wyden. A politician attempting to something which would put teeth into corporate accountability, actually trying to do something that would piss off corporate moneybags no end. The opposite of a corrupt politician. The opposite of an enabler of oligarchy.

His measure is a bit of tilting at windmills, of course, especially as long as conservatives hold a majority in the Senate. Some would say such a proposal is nothing more than a cynical publicity stunt. But given Wyden's record on similar matters, I don't think it is. He does not mean it cynically at all. The measure will fail, but it will remain as a cri de couer: "This is what we should have done". Unfortunately, it is a cry issued in a wilderness of duplicity, partisanship, and corruption.

What's the scoop with Mars InSight's mired mole? It's digging again, thanks to trowel trickery

"The mole is not out of the woods yet."

For some reason this strikes my funnybone. Cleese, Idle, and a pantomime horse surveying a patch of oaks with oversized binoculars: "The mole is not out of the woods yet." Followed by an explosion. Peter Sellers as the Inspector: "Ze mewl ees not owut of ze woods yecht." Straight: "You said 'mewl""... Sellers, wistfully: "... Yes, I did."

Robots digging holes on Mars, photographing Pluto, shooting asteroids at close range, sniffing comet gas. What an age we live in.

Help! I bought a domain and ended up with a stranger's PayPal! And I can't give it back

Re: "...they take my personal data and privacy very seriously."

Oh, I'm sure they do.

Awhile ago I began getting emails from PayPal saying my account was going to be deleted because I hadn't used in donkey's.

"Good", thinks I, if I could have figured out how to delete the damned thing two years ago I would have done it myself. (I couldn't be arsed to work much at it -- the credit card connected to it was expired anyway.)

Now it's gone, and I don't worry / I'm sitting on top of the world.

Hubble grabs first snap of interstellar comet... or at least that's what we hope this smudge is

Re: Diameter versus radius

1 AU = the approximate distance from Earth to Sun, or, from Sun to Earth. In other words, the radius of Earth's obit. Wait, too early for an obit on Earth -- I must have meant orbit.

The interstellar comet's perihelion is, as mentioned, 2.006 AU. Twice the radius of Earth's orbit. Or, in flat spacetime, nearly exactly the diameter of Earth's orbit. As stated by Pen-y-gors.

Picky, picky, I am, but mean to cast no aspersions on commentards various.

But certainly if They wish to warn us they'll take out the Moon first? That would get our attention. I would guess Earth would gain a lovely ring of dust and pebbles but most likely no human eyeballs would get to see it because enough rocks would be de-orbited in the chaos that a fiery rain of meteors would turn Earth's sky into a broiler oven.

Welcome to the World Of Tomorrow, where fridges suffer certificate errors. Just like everything else

I do NOT understand.

Why are the IOT people missing the obvious?

If fridges are to be smart and automated, the obvious application is to add robotic sex. Yes, attached to the fridge. Many a teenager has appeared, to his or her parents, to be standing in the kitchen, fridge open, humping the door.

Business opportunity!

The idIOT designers have already added nozzles and pumps for dispensing fluids, and orifices and handles in abundance. I suppose the audio-visual enhancements would implement porn-as-a-service or something.

Don't tell me Samsung and other tech-whores are too morally squinchy to sink to such levels. I don't believe it.

From Libra to leave-ya: eBay, Visa, Stripe, PayPal, others flee Facebook's crypto-coin

Good reasons for virtual currencies.

I like being able to shop globally. I dislike rampant consumerism, but for the quite particular things which I decide that I will buy, local availability is often non-existent. Therefore, I need something other than cash or check -- something which allows digital transactions.

A credit card, paid off every month, works fine as an online proxy for cash. Except that people who work hard and diligently at crime would like to be able to ransack the value of my credit card. So there's an evolutionary arms race between users of virtual money and thieves pursuing same. (OK, all money is "virtual" in the sense that it is a stand-in for goods and services of value. That's already been brilliantly covered by several commentards.)

Alternate currencies, more explicitly digital, might attempt to address the issue of security -- security both from criminals and from quasi-criminals like banks and advertising agencies*. But so far, I don't see anything that is in a practical sense much more secure than the sensible (careful, cagey) use of a bank card. Bitcoin is in a theoretical sense more secure, and especially more private, but given the ability of dodgy apps and malware to ransack digital wallets, the cryptos can be at least as vulnerable to theft as bank card identity.

I'd welcome a well-planned, cleverly and securely implemented digital currency backed by a genuinely disinterested organization -- an org similar to the Free Software Foundation, for instance.

But.

Accepting a digital currency managed by Facebook would be like sending your doped-up teenager to a drug detox center managed by El Mencho. It would be the worst possible idea.

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*Personally, I think the internet advertising industry is built on bubbles and candy floss. Really. Huge amounts of money are spent and huge troves of personal data are collected in order to sell toothpaste and soft drinks? Someday someone will notice that online ads yield a spectacularly low return on investment. Or maybe that's just me -- I block online ads, I don't watch TV or listen to commercial radio (so no audio-visual ads there), and about the only ads I see are printed in the magazines or papers I read. And these are easily ignored. Therefore my user case may lead me to overestimate the uselessness of advertising. *shrug*

Egyptian government caught tracking opponents and activists through phone apps

The future arrives incrementally.

Or, rather, what we think of as the present incrementally shifts toward something we thought of as the future.

In stable, prosperous, pseudo-democratic Western countries, we don't necessarily imagine "the future" as being authoritarian, totalitarian, or fascist. Personally and pessimistically, I think it will be. As world population grows and the environment degrades, then instability and mass migration will accelerate. Governments, threatened by outside forces and near-constant asymmetric warfare, will undertake "strong measures". Again, personally and pessimistically, I think the Egyptian secret police -- along with invasive surveillance, mass arrests, and state-sanctioned torture -- are in our future. Arriving incrementally.

This won't end well. Microsoft's AI boffins unleash a bot that can generate fake comments for news articles

Re: Don't legislate, leave the Internet to...

...rooms full of paid activists [and bots] "gumming up the works and trolling everyone/everything...."

Logical disconnect: no regulation, ie a true laissez-faire Internet policy, results in domination of said Internet by Alphabet, Facebook, Amazon, troll farms, malware-slingers, and bots. Lets abbreviate the whole cesspool as AFATFMSB.

How then, Bob, do you keep AFATFMSB in check? Rely on the wise morality of Mark Zuckerberg? Count on the gentle restraint of the paid trolls in Macedonia? Trust Alphabet to limit its intrusion into the privacy of netizens out of benevolence and concern for humanity over profit?

Didn't we just see an article on the worthlessness of companies self-certifying themselves as "good advertisers," the upshot being that a large percentage didn't bother to actually abide by the rules they themselves agreed? Don't we already know that, given a laissez-faire system, corporate and private bad actors will, as you write, gum up the Internet and troll everyone and everything?

Really, Bob, I'm serious. What do you see in the real world as we know it which actually counteracts AFATFMSB and all the rest -- without legislative teeth involved?

In 21st-century tech dystopia, smart TV watches you, warns Princeton privacy prof

"If you want to watch what you want ...TV has to be connected."

Baloney. I watch what I want -- movies, mostly -- when I want to. Which is not all that often, mind you. I use a simple DVD player, simple netbook running Mint, a small library on a portable hard drive. No smarty-pants TV.

I had the unfortunate experience of seeing unfiltered TV in a motel room while on a trip with a friend. What a mass of foul garbage. The "drama" appeared to be an attempt at psychic and emotional emasculation. The ads were worse -- stupid, stultifying, numbing. I finally put in earplugs, ignored the TV, and propped my laptop on the bed.

I choose what I watch, not some sniggering perv of a program planner. But the audio-visual diarrhea excreted by those sniggering pervs may be what is considered "entertainment" in 2020, I don't know.

Whatever. I watch what I want.

TAG, you're s*!t: Internet advertising industry bods admit self-policing approach is a sham

John Wanamaker, redux.

Supposedly John said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half”.

I suspect that in 2019 that should be, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half... er, oh wait, yes I do. It's the online ads."

To be fair, I once knew a fellow who believed online ads conveyed useful information. He was weird in other ways, too. Credulous to a fault.

But like most here, I block ads and tracking, and don't use Microsoft's OS when I go online. When 90% of netizens run ad blockers, then the advertising industry will weep, and try to clean up their various pig-and-pony acts. Oddly, I don't see that happening. Most people seem content to spend lots of time on Facebook, but no time setting up decent security measures on their browsers. Alas, the world was ever thus.

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google told: If you could cough up a decade of your internal emails, that'd be great

But wait, this is... like... invading the privacy...

...of the executives of Facebook, Amazon, et al. It is assuming that everything said execs ever wrote can and therefore should be scrutinized and the information used in decisions which will, inevitably, impact their livelihoods and lives!

Oh wait. That's what those corporations do to the rest of us already.

Well, carry on, then. Pitchforks and hot tar at the ready, I hope.

Those fake spying cell towers in Washington DC? Ex-intel staffers claim they're Israeli

Insecure communications, indeed.

"President Trump has been criticized for using insecure communications..."

Most of his tweets reveal deep insecurity, all right. ;)

Trump's got daddy issues, IMHO -- Daddy Fred always told Donny that he had to be the best, do anything and everything to stay on top. But Donny couldn't let himself be as good as Daddy, because Daddy was the best possible. It would be a betrayal if anybody was better. So Trump had to fail, at least enough to avoid betraying the Daddy that dominated him. Bad decisions on casinos, Trump Airlines, various loser golf courses, etc. He always had to go back to Daddy for money, and when Daddy died he (and his siblings) looted Daddy's deep pockets one last time.

Trump is hypersensitive to being wrong because Daddy said he has to be the best -- always right -- but his subconscious knows he's not the best. He's screwed up quite a lot, and he is forced by his inner baby to keep screwing up. Otherwise he would have to betray Daddy by being better.

And this nugget of freshman psychology, fresh off the bullcrap line, is brought to you by an aging USian with fewer synapses than a squirrel. Take it as an elaborate joke. Which it is.

I could throttle you right about now: US Navy to ditch touchscreens after kit blamed for collision

Re: Touchscreens have their place -- on phones.

Ever used any drawing program? Notice how important it is to position the cursor or pointer exactly when selecting, say, all the #00C1F0 color in an image?

Ever notice how, as you move your finger to select on a touchscreen, your finger hides the target and a wide area around it?

Touchscreens are inherently imprecise. If you need to control something complex, and therefore have a complex interface, don't use touchscreens.

Which is what the Navy has decided. Wisely.

Reminder: When a tech giant says it listens to your audio recordings to improve its AI, it means humans are listening. Right, Skype? Cortana?

Re: Its standard software testing -- and privacy armegeddon.

Nicely put, martinusher. If I may condense:

"...the prize that they're after is much bigger than listening in on any individual. ...the combination of directional microphone arrays and speech recognition means that you can be tracked anywhere... Combine this with facial recognition and its spinoff, identifying people by the way they look and behave, and there truly will be nowhere to run or hide."

I feel damned stupid not to have connected the dots and come up with the possibilities that you've noticed. Have a cold one.

Re: Here's an idea, that would cost real money

Andrew Jones 2: "You know why that doesn't work right?" -- Individual people have different accents, etc.

Obviously, the tech companies just have to hire a lot of people with a lot of different accents. Think what it will do for employment in the UK! Fifty thousand or sixty thousand full-time positions for working to improve Cortana's accent, dialect, and regionalisms training!

Or MS, Apple, and Amazon could pay users to assist them in the task. No recording unless the company pays the user for the info. That's probably more reasonable.

But neither will happen, as has been discussed elsewhere. As long as user information can be "harvested" surreptitiously at no cost, that's what will happen. It's up to the user to protect himself: no voice assistants, lock down cell phones, block browser ads and tracking, falsify online info wherever possible and legal. Etc.

Personally, I don't need Skype. No Siri in my house, no Alexa, no Cortana. Well, I suppose Cortana lives in my grandpa-box where Win 10 lurks, but that box is not connected to any network. If "my" Cortana was human she'd be in solitary confinement, slowly going insane.

Cloudflare punts far-right hate-hole 8chan off the internet after 30 slayed in US mass shootings

Re: See how ignorant I am?

You are right, Mark 85. As you say, machine guns are legal, but only under very tightly controlled conditions.*

I didn't research the laws on heavier arms, but I'm sure you're right there too.

It's an interesting indicator: American mass-murder shooters have not used full-auto (machine) guns in an attack. So tightly regulating arms works. Do it with high-capacity clips too.**

One crazy-guy fantasy is of spraying a crowd with a hail of bullets, shooting so fast that no-one has a chance to stop you. Eliminate weapons which lay down a hail of bullets, and the fantasy gets disconnected from real-world action.

Another crazy-guy fantasy involves armed resistance to some kind of government perfidy -- the Red Dawn scenario. Frankly, if the US military is arrayed against you, a semi-automatic rifle is not going to make you victorious. Nor is a full automatic, for that matter. The Red Dawn fantasy is about as realistic as the Lord of the Rings fantasy. But it's taken seriously by the Turner Diary crowd.

The point to these examples is, if you defuse the fantasy by making the necessary kind of weapon very hard to own, then the fascination with a "ending it all" in a Götterdämmerung hail-of-bullets becomes unreal. Which is good.

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*"The main federal law governing fully automatic weapons is called the National Firearms Act, or NFA. First enacted in 1934, this federal law regulates fully automatic weapons, suppressors, short-barreled rifles and shotguns, and destructive devices such as bombs or grenades. The NFA was subsequently modified in 1968 by the Gun Control Act and in 1986 by the Firearm Owners Protection Act. ... Under the NFA, it is illegal for any private civilian to own any fully automatic weapons manufactured after May 19, 1986. Only certain types of FFL/SOTs may make them, and then only for purchase by qualified state and federal agencies. There are no exceptions. According to the ATF’s official handbook on NFA laws and regulations, it’s not even legal to make new replacement parts for pre-1986 machine guns: 'There is no exception allowing for the lawful production, transfer, possession, or use of a post-May 18, 1986 machinegun receiver as a replacement receiver on a weapon produced prior to May 19, 1986.'"

** There have been two instances (since 1986) of a full-auto weapon being used in a killing. Alan Berg was killed by white supremacists, and (in Dayton, Ohio) an informant and drug dealer was killed. And bank robbers in Hollywood used illegally converted full-auto weapons; they wounded a number of people and were themselves killed by police.

Re: A well-regulated Militia...

Huw D, one would think so. AFAIK, however, the initial phrase seems to be taken as a justification for the amendment, not as a prescription for how it shall be enforced. The last half of the sentence has been taken as legally prescriptive, ie, "...shall not be infringed."

Obviously, Americans' right to "keep and bear arms" has been infringed, and with good reason. Most sensible people -- nearly all Americans -- agree that the right of civilians to own howitzers and cluster bombs should be infringed!

If the amendment were phrased, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed when they are constituted as a well-regulated militia" then the militia part would be prescriptive and the rights would flow from that prescription. But it's not phrased that way.

Guns and the second amendment.

The Second Amendment guarantees American citizens the "right to bear arms". "Arms" are weapons. Fifty-caliber truck-mounted machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and stinger missiles are all arms. They're all illegal for American citizens to own.

As a society, Americans have already decided that not all arms should be available to civilians. The debate is not about the right to bear arms, the debate is about where we draw the line between military arms and those allowed to civilians.

One of the most dangerous aspects of current US gun ownership is the ubiquity of semi-automatics with quick-change high-capacity clips. The Dayton shooter killed 9 people and wounded 27 in under 30 seconds. He was firing an AR-style rifle with 100-round clips.

In Oregon, large-game hunters with rifles are restricted to 5-round magazines. Bird hunters with shotguns are restricted to 3 rounds.

Yes, shooters kill, and inert weapons are harmless. But try a simple thought experiment: put two men a field with 300 sheep. Give both unlimited ammunition. Arm one with a bolt-action 30:06 with a five-round magazine. Give the other a Colt AR-15 semi-auto with 100 round quick-change magazines. See who can kill the most sheep in sixty seconds.

Those are the points of discussion as far as I am concerned. We are not talking about taking away all guns. We are not talking about repealing the Second Amendment. We are talking about where we draw the line on civilian arms. To my mind, semi-automatics with high-capacity quick-change clips are on the wrong side of the line, along with RPGs and land mines. They give no particular benefit in hunting (and, as mentioned, are illegal for hunting in at least some states), and no benefit in target shooting.

Finally: Yes, the US needs to do a better job of identifying dangerously unstable people. Whether they are racists, conspiracy nuts, religious extremists, or despairing teen sociopaths, we need to keep them from killing. But it would do a lot of good if weapons with the capability to kill many people rapidly were eliminated from the civilian population.

-- Funny, when I was a teen I used a bolt-action .30-40 Krag with a flip-out 5-cartridge magazine. Very old-fashioned rifle. I remember it as being kind of fiddly to load without getting the cartridges jammed in the magazine. Can't imagine a shooter even trying a mass attack with it -- "Hold on and don't jump me for a minute while I reload... dang, it's in crossways... gimme another 20 seconds or so, OK?"

It's Friday lunchtime on International Beer Day. Bitter hop to it, boss'll be none the weiser

Re: Bugger me - Fosters?!?! Urgh. Coors.

Had some Fosters once. Couldn't tell if what I drank had already been passed through someone else's kidneys or not.

But as a left-pondian, I have to be embarrassed by not only Coors (Rocky Mountain beaver widdle) but also Busch (seriously, seriously don't flush it down the toilet, it would be a waste of water) and, of course, Budweiser, the Pig of Beers.

We have a lot of craft breweries on the West Coast now, and by God if they put anymore wretched grapefruit rinds in the wort to give it a "citrus tang" or -- as one commentard mentioned -- frigging RASPBERRIES in the mix, then I will be driven to the harder stuff.

Por moi, Pilsner. Urquell will do.

Trump continues on the warpath: Now US tariffs cover nearly everything arriving from China

Re: "Rare earth" elements -- a bit more research

A bit more reading on REEs, for those who like rocks.

Geology for Investors gives a good write-up on REEs and their sources. Geology.com also has a good overview, though they do not mention laterite ore.

I could be mistaken on the sources of China's REE mining. So far, my limited understanding is that bastnasite and monazite ores provide the most concentrated sources of REEs, while laterite ores -- which are primary sources of aluminum -- can, in some cases, also be further processed to extract REEs.

As noted higher up in the comments, it's not that China is the only source of REEs. Due to various factors -- environmental aspects of processing, and the available reserves (according to Geology.com, China has twice as much REE ore as Brazil or Vietnam, the next-highest on the list) -- China is currently dominant. If it restricted exports of REEs, there would certainly be a short-term disruption in industry. But Australia and other sources would kick in eventually. "...while a restriction on rare earth exports would have some immediate adverse effects, the US and the rest of the world would adapt in the long run." (Linky: The Verge).

Mea culpa: it's not monzanite, the close relative of granite, as I wrote earlier. It's monazite, "...a reddish-brown phosphate mineral containing rare-earth metals."> Broody herr. Phirip's garreons ale hele.

Compared to gold, iron, or aluminum, the processing of REE ores is complex. "Unlike most metals which have very standard processing that varies little between mines, processing of rare earths is considerably more problematic. Companies who develop a new REE deposit have to do extensive research to establish how to process the ore. The details of a deposit’s processing requirements can make or break the economics of a particular reserve." (From the Geology for Investors site.)

Therefore a lag between initial exploitation of a deposit and production of refined product. The Mountain Pass mine stopped processing in 2002. Environmental concerns included accidental discharge of some 600,000 gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. The mine was sold in 2008, and re-opened, but shortly afterwards the new owners -- Molycorp -- went bankrupt.

In short, it's complicated. And I apologize for derailing the thread into matters geological.

Re: "Rare earth" elements -- US readiness

TL:DR: Crikey this is a long post. I advise skipping it.

I don't know this subject well, but I understand that there are 16 rare earth elements (henceforth REEs), useful in varying degrees.

The US mine at Mountain Pass, California, extracts bastnasite-(Ce) ore -- hard rock mining. Right now any ore they dig up is sent for processing to... wait for it... China. I'm not sure what minerals Ucore found at Bokan Mountain, Alaska, but the REE deposits there appear to be hard-rock mining as well. The mine is a long way from production.

China's largest mines (mostly) extract lateritic ores -- essentially, tropical and sub-tropical soils (or paleo-soils; the climate doesn't have to be tropical today). These soils have been heavily weathered and leached in ways that concentrate REEs in near-surface lenses. Mines in Australia, Brazil, and Madagascar also dig up laterites. (Africa, surely? Dunno.)

Laterites are relatively easy to dig up, and the REEs they contain are (again, relatively!) easy to separate. Easier than the hard-rock monzanite and bastnasite ores, anyway.

The ore from Mountain Pass produces primarily cerium, lanthanum, neodymium, and praseodymium, with other REEs together making up only 0.4% of the yield. (USGS publication.)

Chinese lateritic ores produce substantially more samarium, gadolinium, dysprosium, erbium, ytterbium, and, especially, a large amount (relatively speaking!!) of yttrium. (Ibid.)

A quick Google doesn't find references to lateritic rare-earth mines inside the US. There is speculation that some paleo-laterites in Georgia may be valuable, but there appear to be no identified exploitable deposits. Let alone any mines ready to go.

(Sorry, but I think geology is one of the coolest things going. Can't help myself. Found a tiny vein of asbestos in the mountains once, got all excited.)

The obvious point is, no single country has a full complement of the resources necessary for high technology. Therefore globalization of supply chains is mandatory.

The Chinese have been playing the trade-war game with sangfroid, IMHO. They have not weaponized the trade in REEs, nor have they directly attacked the US service economy (I think). (The US has long since slipped from a primarily agricultural economy to an industrial one, and gone on to become a service economy -- read, "business solutions", banking, distribution of goods... Microsoft, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, that kind of thing. I wrote "primarily". Yes, ag and hard industry remain important.)

The Chinese seem to be holding themselves in reactive mode. Unlike Trump, they seem to be wary of burning bridges.

Obviously, they are cultivating ties with Russia. Putin is reciprocating. They are lowering trade barriers to countries other than the US. They are pushing hard on the RCEP trade agreement, which, if ratified by all proposed members, would create the largest economic bloc in the world. It would be one which excludes the US.

These are flanking moves with the potential to alter global economics for a long time.

The Chinese strategy makes Trump's tactics look ... well, childish. Stupid. It appears that Trump is the way the largest economy in the world enables its own replacement.

Ah, Trumpeting to the unthinking masses.

Trump: "Until such time as there is a deal, we'll be taxing them."

Of course Trump pretends he is taxing China. But of course, the tariffs are paid by US importers, who pass the cost on to American consumers.

But we all know that. It's JAL for Trump -- just another lie.

German privacy probe orders Google to stop listening in on voice recordings for 3 months

Re: Fundamental to the product, so, um, hell freezes over.

Yeah, spold, I agree. The only way paying users fair value for their personal information would happen is through legislation, and no country is actually concerned enough about citizens (versus corporations) to even attempt it. Well, maybe Iceland or Norway. Damned ethical Nordic democracies...

Odd, my tiny brain jumped a few rails -- "Just dump the sewage in the river, no need to pay to clean it up" was the 1950s mantra. Now -- "Just grab the user information, no need to pay for anything". In the one case, the environment was degraded; in the other, privacy is eroded.

Make of that what you will. I've had a glass too many to sort it.

Re: Fundamental to the product, so, um, worth money.

Google (and Apple, and Amazon) need to do something ethical for a change: they need to pay users who are willing to participate in product development.

It's really that simple. Spy corporations home-automation makers can only use your recorded interactions with their product if they pay you for value received.

Oughta be a law.

Juniper Networks struggles with service providers as US-China trade war continues to suck

Re: I'm quite surprised, really -- survival and whatnot.

Mmmm, Pascal, I somewhat agree. My father lived through the Great Depression in the US, and it shaped his thinking in good ways. (Resourcefulness, care for the common good, respect for working people, an understanding of value.) Mind you, he was a very young man then, not in late middle age with the savings he'd hoped to retire on gone in the Crash.

You and I are of an age; I missed being drafted for Vietnam by one year, and Tricky Dick left office in disgrace the year I graduated high school. Explains some of my political tics, I suppose.

But now, in retirement, I would like not to see my pension evaporate. I would like not to see the money I've paid into social security taken to underwrite a bankers' bailout. I would like not to have my IRA evaporate. Things like that happen in an economic crash.

Yeah, I would survive, Pascal. I could find a job again, some kind of work, and start over. I live in a particularly privileged and sheltered part of the Western world. Very lucky that way.

But the point is, thick gits in high positions really do make stupid decisions which fsck things up for other people. Even where I live. In a serious recession, or a full-on depression, the big guys globally will make out fine and common people -- not just talking US or UK now -- will lose their jobs, their savings, their pensions.

And yes, they too will survive -- although because poverty and stress (linked) are well known to shorten lives, the people that get economically fscked over in a recession/depression will actually not live as long as they might have. On average. Nor will they live as healthily as they might have.

So, in the jargon of our youth, Pascal, I don't fully dig the rose-colored shades, man. Like, there's some sh*t the high brass cats pull that damages lives, man, worldwide. And that ain't cool. Ain't cool at all.

I'm quite surprised, really --

-- that the world economy has not fallen into a recession. Yet.

The so-called business cycle generally drops into a "correction" every 6 to 10 years, so we're overdue. (Chart: Fed Reserve Bank recession indicator.) I see the economic consensus, as much as my shallow attention span allows, being that an economic "slowdown" is to be expected, though expectations are that it will be relatively minor and indeed amount to a "market correction" rather than a full recession.

However. Martin Wolf in the Financial Times:

"The issue to worry about then is not the state of the short-term cycle. It is perfectly likely that there will be a modest and manageable slowdown, with nothing much damaged as a result. The worry must rather be over the context in which such a slowdown might occur. It is the political and policy instability, combined with the exhaustion of safe options for credit expansion, that would make handling even a limited and natural short-term slowdown potentially so tricky."

Here is where destabilization of global trade becomes an issue. And where the article to hand -- Juniper Networks and the way tariff wars cause difficulties and expense to companies -- comes into play. Any business which sources materials and labor from China, the US, or the UK, now faces uncertainties on top of economic cycling. It doesn't matter if you make routers, cars, or HVAC systems -- if you're big, then your supply chains are global. Fear, uncertainty, and doubt tend to drive economic downturns down, downer, downest. And we have two large economies, the US and the UK, playing with matches in ways that are likely to ignite a global FUD fire -- obviously, Brexit in the UK and tariff wars in the US.

We also have political instability in parts of the Middle East: In Syria and Iran, and in the Yemeni civil war -- where the UAE and the Saudis are, or were, deeply involved. This wouldn't matter much if the global economy did not run on oil. But to a large extent, it does. Thus it's a serious threat to stability, with attendant FUD even if the Strait of Hormuz does not become a free-fire zone.

Europe faces a refugee crises which will not abate (North Africa is a humanitarian nightmare, especially Libya and Sudan, and people are running away because they want to stay alive). The political situations in Italy, Turkey, and Greece have become volatile (partly) as a result of the influx of refugees.

So, given all this stuff, it is exactly the wrong time for Trump and Johnson to hurl wrenches into the gears of the global economy.

Well, anyway. We continue to draw breath. And I may be full of pessimistic crap; I usually am. But you might put your money in a safe place (not bitcoin...) and pray for rain.

South Africans shivering in the dark after file-scrambling nasty hits Johannesburg power biz

OS makes no difference --

-- unless, of course, the phishing attack loads binaries that can't run on that OS (Haiku OS). Or, for that matter, if the OS uses VMs set up to make system-wide attacks very difficult (Qubes OS). But obviously businesses must run commonly-compatible business software, so getting wild and crazy with your choice of OS is not the first option.

Yet.

In five years, ten years, perhaps anything web-facing will be so rife with threats that it will make IT departments resort to running Qubes (or something like it) as a framework, with users relegated to a tightly controlled VMs -- whether the user wants to run Windows, Linux, BSD, or whatever. Perhaps.

Hey, Windows Insiders! Sorry about that whole 20H1 build thing. Won't happen again – honest

Sid -- via Siduction, anyway.

I've been running Siduction on my daily driver grandpa box for a couple of years now, and no update glitches. But it's not really the same as Microsoft's testing rings, I think. Sid has up-to-date kernel and software packages, but I don't think it is really a test-bed. Or perhaps it's just that the Debian team doesn't push a software package out to Sid unless it's considered by the package dev(s) to be a stable release -- ie, not a beta. Whereas MS uses the test ring -- at least the internal rings -- to check what are in essence beta packages?

Here we go: Uncle Sam launches antitrust probe into *cough* Facebook, Google *cough* Amazon *splutter* Twitter...

Re: White suprematicist / racist violence vs antifa

Get real. The Antifa movement in the USA have not been responsible for a single death. Not one.

Since the Oklahoma City bombing, racists have carried out 37 attacks and killed 77 people. White supremacists murdered 18 people in 2017 alone.

Discourse? That is really a face-to-face activity. It's conversation. Twitter is not conversation, it's a soapbox. Facebook does not facilitate conversation, it specifically facilitates private echo-chambers where radicals can reinforce each others' radicalism.

Here's where the rubber of opinion meets the reality of the road: when you have groups which have proven themselves willing to kill people, then society needs to control, disarm, and break up those groups. Just as society needs to face and disarm any deadly threat. Where do you look? You look where objectionable speech has been proven to lead to violence. Racial supremacists. Religious extremists. Anti-social conspiracy nuts like Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski.

Of course you preferentially ban racial supremacists, religious extremists, and anti-social conspiracy nuts. They're the ones that have proven violent. Who the hell ever read Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn and then went out to bomb a daycare or shoot up a gay club?

Silly money: Before you chuck your chequebook away, triple-check that super-handy digital coin

In most countries it will be a long time --

-- before wave-n-pay phonecoin replaces everything else.

I mean, if I so choose, I can still pay for stuff the same way Samuel Johnson did, with little bits of officially-minted metal. Or with paper. Or with a different kind of paper, which I have to write on first and sign. Or with a debit card, or a credit card. And some places I could wave-n-pay.

The point is, though, all these ways coexist now because people have different ideas about the symbol-system we call money. And that variety of ideas means that a canny capitalist organization will keep on taking different forms of payment in order to maximize opportunities to sell stuff.

Backwards compatibility will be very, very slow to disappear. And that's assuming the global financial system continues working as we expect it to. Otherwise we'll be back to bartering animal hides for barley.

Rust in peace: Memory bugs in C and C++ code cause security issues so Microsoft is considering alternatives once again

Re: Eh? Assembler OS?

Twould be Kolibri OS then. Blimey, the application ecosystem is a bit sparse...

US border cops' secret racist Facebook group a total disgrace, says patrol chief. She should know, she was a member

@Danny 2: DHS: part of the Brownian ratchet effect?!

Thanks for that reffy. Dang it! Will we never break the chains of thermodynamics and achieve free energy?

Um, I guess not. To quote XKCD, "Science, bitches. It works."

DHS: part of the ratchet effect?

Ratchet effect meaning that it is relatively easy to empower the various apparatus of a police state, but quite hard to demolish those apparatus again. Personally, I don't see the demolition of DHS happening any time soon. It has become an apparatus of power, useful to those who want power.

(The plural of apparatus is either apparatus or apparatuses; both look wrong to me.)

Freedom of speech appears subject to contingencies. (No surprise there.) Yes, citizens in the US (and also in more advanced democracies) are "free" to speak their minds, no matter how shallow and polluted those minds are. Unless the speech reveals that they may be a danger to the other people they must deal with in their job. I mean, you don't want to hire a professor who talks about how easy it is to coerce students to have sex, or a fireman who posts designs for homemade incendiary devices, and so forth.

And so, yes, free speech. But we should, nevertheless, take notice when policemen in Philadelphia and St. Louis make racist and misogynistic posts on FB, and ditto DHS officers.

Grav-wave eggheads come closer to nailing down Hubble's Constant – the universe's speedy rate of expansion

Re: Red-shifted gravity

Mmmm. That's a question for physic maths.

I'm uncertain whether the properties of electromagnetic waves and the properties of gravity waves are identical in that regard.

Thinking intuitively, with no real physics to back me up: gravitational waves induce a stretch-squeeze as they pass through spacetime, and through matter. Similar (but not identical in detail) to the tidal stretch-squeeze of the Moon.

For waves of frequency X, pretend that the stretch-squeeze happens 10 times per minute; after the frequency is expanded by a factor of 2, the stretch-squeeze would happen 5 times per minute. So if you had something which extracted energy from the waves -- a piezoelectric crystal the size of Scotland, for example -- then the waves would transfer less energy per minute from the redshifted gravitational wave. Or so it would seem.

But imagining an event like the merging of two black holes, then the entire wavetrain generated by the event would have the same total energy after redshifting as before -- the wavetrain would just be twice as long, and would take twice the time to deliver the energy to your giant piezoelectric device.

I hope someone with knowledge of the theory and maths involved pipes up. I just hung my hat on a bunch of intuitive BS...

Incidentally, it's worth noting (again) that physics is mathematical. When one says that "the speed of light is measured experimentally using experiments that themselves are based on how fast forces propagate ... You cannot rely on the speed of light being a constant just because you measure it as such." that's kind of true... but in fact the speed of light can also be derived from Maxwell's wave equation. And like all well-established mathematical descriptions of the Universe, Maxwell's descriptions of electromagnetism, in math, has stood innumerable experimental tests coming at it from many, many angles. And of course his laws are retested every day inside your computer. The Electric Universe guys can toss out the bathwater, conceptually, but they don't realize the number of babies they toss out with it.

Re: potentially stupid question -- no, not really at all

Seems quite sensible.

However, as you hypothesized, gravitationally bound systems defeat the expansion. This means forces stronger than gravity -- the strong nuclear force, electromagnetic force -- stomp all over the cosmic expansion. No chance for our bodily molecules or atoms to take part.

I'd have to look it up to be sure, but I believe that clusters of galaxies, and even superclusters, are bound together by gravity such that the individual galaxies inside the cluster are not receding from each other.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean Google isn't listening to everything you say

Google: "The leaker is the problem, not the fact that -- "

" -- we're listening to and recording your conversations."

Or, as quoted in the story:

David Monsees: "We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data."

No, the problem is not the leak, it's that you shouldn't be recording and keeping private conversations in the first place.

It's one thing to record a conversation in a sidewalk cafe. Public place. Quite another to record conversations inside an individual's home. Even the police need a fricking warrant to do that. And terms of agreement cannot confer permission to break the law.

Remember Stuxnet? You'll endure its hated-by-critics sequel if you don't patch your holey Siemens industrial kit

Ah, that really takes me back.

Indeed -- the initial setup, and subsequent troubleshooting, can make strong techs weep like schoolchildren. Before I retired I got to watch a factory tech slog into the bowels of an installation, muttering, to crouch like a balding gargoyle over his laptop whilst trying to get the SULFUROUSLY DAMNED Allen-Bradley PLC to take instruction. For... days.

That said, and as you say, once it is up and running the hardware is solid. Well, mostly. Unless the power supply gets jiggy.

And for those who say air-gap, air-gap: Yes, well, tell it to the vendors. Tell it to management. I tell ya, vendors are pushing online-everything -- diagnostics, data collection, remote troubleshooting, etc -- and management wants it all. So do the vendor's techs, 'cos house calls are so very twentieth-century. "Nobody does that anymore. Come on, plug in the ethernet and let us remote in!" Even if the equipment is spinning uranium isotopes at very high speeds.

Trump: Huawei ban will be lifted!
US Commerce Dept.: Yeah, about that…

US economic dominance --

-- is fading. Trump's trade wars make it fade faster.

The US has gone from comprising around 50% of the global GDP in the 1950s to around 25% now.

One of the consequences of on-again-off-again bans and tariffs is that companies try to reconfigure their supply chains to avoid vendors in national economies which they see as unreliable. Unreliable, right now, means Trump's America.

*shrug*

Frederick Kempe: "What's clear already is that friends and rivals are more interested than ever before in exploring alternatives to the U.S.-dominated system. Such a transition would take many years, involve enormous costs and unfold in stages. However, consistent overuse of U.S. economic power has made the unthinkable more plausible."

Google's Fuchsia OS Flutters into view: We're just trying out some new concepts, claims exec

Google, Amazon, MS, ads...

For sure, the advent of photography changed the way we perceive imagery. The view through the lens -- monocular, limited, incredibly detailed -- became a standard of "reality". The still camera, the movie camera, the television camera, all sang us a song that got inside our heads. The song began to tell us it was really how we see things. Photographs, movies, TV, YouTube: we think they are "real", somehow.

Surveillance and data expand that fake reality. Advertisers look to customize propaganda to fit consumer profiles. This is a quote from "a data scientist" involved in marketing, anonymously referenced in an article in the Guardian: "We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way. We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance."

The "them" in the sentence is, of course, us.

And so, to Fuschia: if deep surveillance can be inserted in an OS (as Microsoft is doing) then it's even more effective (and invasive) than putting it in browsers and search engines. It's almost like having a spy in your own ... oh, wait, Alexa. Right, we're there already on that count.

But Fuscia is supposedly open source. Can it be forked, cleanly? Perhaps a good strategy for Google is to build a clean, fast, secure OS and then engineer the ecosystem for surveillance rather than embed it in the kernel. Hell, I know nothing about OS design. Tell me if this is all off-base.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Some people like to tilt at windmills, I think.

And that's fine for them. Kudos, even, for the work.

But a run at an open-source Windows-clone OS is rather a lost cause from the beginning: there is no way a small team of unpaid developers can keep up with Microsoft's OS. They can recreate Windows 97, I guess, some 20 years after the fact, but they can never catch up to modern Windows. And how many applications which are actually used in the year 2019 really run well on Windows 97?

Not knocking the ReactOS team. Their efforts are (arguably) more useful than making a touchscreen version of Atari. If ReactOS is their karma, they should follow it.

Now, what about security? The popularity of Windows makes it a malware magnet, a big fat bullseye for hacking. If ReactOS is Win32 compatible all the way down, then it faces the same panoply of attacks as old Windows computers would. Hmmm.

But I wish you all buena suerte, amigos. Have fun, and don't bother listening to squeaking from Rietschin -- it is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nobody cares.

Iran is doing to our networks what it did to our spy drone, claims Uncle Sam: Now they're bombing our hard drives

Re: In other news... lying liars.

Yeah. It goes back forever -- the Gulf of Tonkin incident was heavily fictionalized by the CIA and the Johnson Administration in order to start the Vietnam fiasco, there were lies in the run-up to the Gulf War in 1990, there were multiple lines by multiple liars leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Any US politician who advocates going to war with Iran should be drawn and quartered, old-style, and his head put on a pike. Lookin' at you, Johnny "Chickenhawk" Bolton.

Curioser and curioser: Little Mars rover sniffs out highest ever levels of methane

If, and it's a big if, the methane in this case is biological --

-- it would be no surprise, really.

Most planetary geologists think that Mars had lakes and rivers early on (linky). Paleontologists think that life got started on Earth very early (linky). And since Earth's biological realm goes very deep underground (linky) then it would seem unsurprising if life started on Mars, and also that it persists deep underground. Flourishes, even.

'Bulls%^t! Complete bull$h*t!' Reset the clock on the last time woke Linus Torvalds exploded at a Linux kernel dev

Whew.

Torvalds got sweary. I'm relieved. It's like the sky is still blue.

I guess OS complications are complicated, and sh*t happens. Linux is my daily driver, and I'm very glad it's there and glad it runs as well as it does.

Tech jocks tell Trump: Tariff tiff with China will not achieve what you think it will achieve

RE: "lower middle class and working class people..."

"...have been taking it in the shorts economically for a long time."

Agreed.

However, the Orange One is not addressing that problem by imposing tariffs. He's just screwing Americans from a different angle.

Here's something: I'm on a fixed income (comfortable, but watching my purchases a bit). Back in May, I bought a low-end drafting table. Made in China, $127 on Amazon. Now, post-tariff, it sells for $150.

How is making American consumers pay a large (percentage-wise) additional tax on goods from China helping low- and middle-class Americans?

How does the trade war -- the retaliatory tariffs imposed by China -- help American companies? Don't they shrink the American market share by making Chinese consumers prefer non-American products?

Yep, the lower and middle wage earners in America have been taking it in the shorts. For a long time. You can blame low wages in China or Malaysia or Mexico. But an American enterprise makes $XXX K per year. Out of that, the workers get wages. Out of that, the stockholders get profits. Out of that, the company officers -- CEO etc -- get salaries and bonuses.

Obviously, most CEO and company officer salaries have risen astronomically over the last decades. Corporate profits (as a share of national income) have just about doubled since 1992, and stand near a record high.

Workers' wages have not risen astronomically. Workers' wages have not tracked profits.

Workers are taking it in the shorts largely because the top tier take more and more of the money. Trickle-down economics in America means the workers get pissed on.

The solution is to legislate closer management of capitalism. Minimum-wage reform, returning to a 50% tax on the highest brackets, nationalized health insurance, etc.

It won't happen. The political system in the US is run by the wealthy. (It was designed that way from the beginning, incidentally; the period from the 1940s through the 1960s was an aberration.)

I saw a bumper sticker a few days ago that put it succinctly. It read, "Eat the rich."

You like magic tricks? See this claim that IBM bungled an Obamacare IT project? Whoosh, now it's a $15m check

The things salesmen promise --

-- are like the legs on a snake.

I had a chat with an elderly gentleman of high degree (PhD in both theoretical physics and computer science, for Deity's sake) who said he wrote an OS for microprocessors intended for industrial automation. Joshing a bit, I said that I could blame him, then, for the maddening quirks with which we front-line automation programmers had to deal.

After a bit of banter, he said, quite seriously, that he -- as the designer of the OS and the chief programmer -- had never been allowed to speak with a customer about the system, its functionality, and its limitations. Only the salesmen were allowed to do that.

And of course they promised that their snake had legs.

To counter that, I have to say that when I was a contributing member of society (ie, before I retired) I did some exceptionally rewarding work with certain field reps from automation firms. Thank you, Raul. Thank you, Eliseo. And others, too, whose names I have forgotten.

But that the diffy, in't it: field guys are not salesmen.