Re: Foldables
Crikey, that's bonkers – if real.
101 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Jul 2016
JG: I reference McDonald’s a lot cause I go to McDonald’s. I love the silence that follows that statement. Like I just admitted to support dog fighting or something.
"How could you! McDonald’s?"
JG: It's fun telling people you go to McDonald’s. They always give you that look, like,
"Oh! I didn’t know I was better than you."
JG: No one admits to going to McDonald’s – they sell six billion hamburgers a day. There's only 300 million people in this country, it's like... I'm not a calculus teacher, but I think everyone’s lying.
etc. Very *very* funny imho, here's the vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYKGFujJp6Y
To my mind small dev shops should pay less tax, is is the case with progressive tax regimes – a flat tax is quite unfair, no?
[icon is Apple relieving you of a chunk of your earnings]
> The same way the cranks voted to let empire-building politicians try to create another centrally-controlled European empire
EU military budget (20188): €11.3bn EU – parliament briefing: security and defence with 6 ongoing military missions/operations
US military budget (2019): $732.0bn – that's nearly ¾ of a trillion dollars: list of countries by military expenditures with the US operating in “40 percent of the world’s nations”
You tell me, which looks like a centrally-controlled empire to you? Quit pretending the EU is something it is not. EU member states do have a large combined defence budget but those are sovereign nations which act in their own interests and are not subservient to the EU. It's funny how the EU is both evil and draconian yet let Britain (it's second wealthiest contributor and arguably it's largest military power) leave. It's funny how Germany is building Nord Stream II over the objections of the US and its EU neighbours. There are many such examples. Subsidiarity is an actual EU principle designed to counteract the forces of centralisation. I get it, you need a bête noire (apologies for inflicting a bit of French on you there) and you've decided that the EU is to blame for all your woes but any sane person who looks at reality semi-objectively can see the EU is not the anti-democratic imperialist cabal you make it out to be. Sorry, your troubles are mostly all self-inflicted but that would mean you'd have to engage in a bit of self-reflection and soul-searching and we can't be having that now, can we?
Post under your real name next time you xenophobic jingoistic coward.
My anonymous friend; you need not have to look that far afield.
Gov.IE – Ireland achieves world first in contact tracing app interoperability – Minister Donnelly
BBC – Contact tracing app 'working in Ireland'
Business Insider – Ireland's contact-tracing app has done so well that US states want to use it
(puts on lab coat)
This is the Entities List
All entities on this list are sanctioned for national security reasons such as spying – the company allegedly spies on US citizens or allegedly engages in commercial espionage – or is said to be complicit in human rights violations such as forced labour or surveillance or (and this is the kicker) is said to be a supplier of tech to the Chinese military. I mean, China is not technically an enemy of the US, right?
Within mainland China alone I count some *230* entities. That's not including the international operations of these Chinese entities.
So it turns out that the leader of the so-called free world is not that interested in actual free markets.
Just think about all the suppliers to the US military, large and small, being put on someone's entity list. Haven't most if not all big tech companies in the US some kind of ties to the US military?
I'm really struggling to wrap my head around this Tik Tok move by Microsoft. It reeks to high heaven.
Here are a couple of recent examples of Department of Commerce press releases: Friday, May 22, 2020 – 24 governmental and commercial organizations and Monday, July 20, 2020 – 11 Chinese companies
The US is basically at war economically with China and it's not messing around.
Huawei and Tik Tok are just the tip of the iceberg – they've got name recognition so they are what generate the news column inches. Contextually speaking, this is a particularly shoddy article from The Register. There is obviously so much more going on here, this deal is shady as all hell, and El Reg is commenting on it as if it were just another big tech M&A.
> One of the things done with fuel providers here in the USA is the "divorcement" between oil wells, pipelines, refineries, and fueling stations.
Kinda off-topic but kinda not as well. This is why I don't understand how Disney *and* Disney+ is a thing? Both content creation and distribution? Seems sucky for the consumer. Same goes for Amazon becoming an ISP, totally different kettle of fish to SpaceX becoming one seeing as how SpaceX knows how to put things into space cheaply and does not have a massive online retail and compute division.
But what would I know. I second your meh face.
Edit: this is the first time I have upvoted one of your comments. Nurse, get me my thermometer!
Nothing less than global dominance.
“Canada among 67 nations to reaffirm International Criminal Court support after U.S. sanctions”
This is what it is all about. If you do not submit to petro-dollar hegemony you will face sanctions. After that if you still insist on trying to have an independent economic policy you'll face the pointy end of the stick. Supremacy in the realm of high tech is seen in terms of national security. Hell, almost any affront to full spectrum dominance is seen as a threat to national security. Land. Sea. Air. Space. Tech. Why does the U.S. seem to loathe the E.U. (a fairly benign economic and geopolitical project, an toothless ally) – because Europe might *gasp* decide to behave independently on the world stage. How else do you explain the U.S. threatening to sanction Germany (Germany!) over Russian energy ties?
And in this nobody's humble opinion the mistake the Feds are making is exactly this. Why does Europe have not a single high tech software or hardware company when China does? Because Europe did not protect and grow its markets. What will threatening China with hardware supply (Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom) and software (Google, …) do? It will force them to stay on the path of self-sufficiency: “Semiconductor industrial park in central China seeks to secure supply amid foreign restrictions”. Japan rose to economic ascendancy in the 80's and the U.S. beat them back down. China has *ten* times the population of Japan, this time will be different. Consider that in 2019 that 119 of Fortune's Global 500 were Chinese and 121 were from the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortune_Global_500 – I'd be willing to bet dollars to donuts that this year China will be numerically on top.
Will Apple sales be affected in China because of this move by the Feds? I think very much so, yes.
Huawei builds up 2-year reserve of 'most important' US chips
“Huawei's stockpiling efforts focus on central processors made by Intel for use in servers and programmable chips from its peer Xilinx, the sources said. These are the "most essential components" for the company's base station business and emerging cloud business, and it has enough inventory to last between one and a half and two years, they added.”
This heavy-handed tactic can only have focussed and redoubled Chinese initiatives on high-tech self-reliance. If the USA had only but spoken softly while at the same time reminding everyone subtly about the big stick it carries then it may have paradoxically achieved a better outcome. Between having Meng Wanzhou arrested, fining ZTE $1.4 *billion*, and threatening to cut Huawei off from fundamental tech (and thus essentially crippling it) the USA has done in broad daylight what it should have done in the shadows. Either the USA is prepared to break Huawei, or it isn't. Threatening it without destroying it will only serve to make Huawei and the broader Chinese high-tech scene much more self-reliant which will grow them from a formidable adversary to an implacable one. Expect 10nm tech followed by 7nm chip tech in shortish (measured in tech terms) order.
If the USA were truly to restrict ARM licensees, for instance, that could trigger a full on cold war. But either the USA is prepared to trigger a new cold war or it is not. Which is it? Dithering will only backfire on them.
Arson (criminal damage by fire) – UK Sentencing Council
There's a 3x3 matrix on the page: 3 degrees of harm on one axis, 3 degrees of culpability on the other.
Our friend's actions here were pre-meditated (not done on impulse), there was some degree of planning, and they used accelerants, and they intended to cause serious damage. That's high culpability by the parameters on that page. The category of harm appears to be level 1 (the highest): serious physical harm caused / serious consequential economic or social impact of offence / high value of damage caused …
Looks like they could have gotten 8 years!
3 years appears non-punitive and within the parameters proper sentencing guidelines.
Unfortunately, that's not true either.
There's this "EMF radiation is dangerous" dude, Martin L. Pall, who to the best of my knowledge is to health and WiFi (and 5G and 4G and 3G) as Andrew Wakefield is to vaccines and autism.
I've had the misfortune of having this article https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935118300355#t0015 waved in my face: “Wi-Fi is an important threat to human health”
I won't reproduce any of the "research" here – suffice it to say that they claim there are biochemical/bioelectrical pathways that are being messed with.
There *are* the conspiracy nuts who think the whole thing is a giant cover-up/conspiracy – those folks are well into tin-foil hat territory and are seriously out to lunch, as in they have (and I mean this in a very literal sense) very little grasp on reality. There's another segment who are scientifically illiterate but realise that they have to make scientifically grounded claims and for these folks quacks like Pall (who push junk meta-analysis fear-mongering) are just the ticket.
And if that wasn't bad enough these two groups are not even the same crowd as the "don't-tread-on-me, it's just the flu bro" folks.
Not one, not two, but at least three distinct Sars-cov-2/Covid-19 rejectionists !
I've lost friends over this so I know what I'm talking about :/
As pointed out in the comment section of this announcement on HackerNews,
“
> This also enables third party APIs, such as the popular NVIDIA Cuda compute API, to be hardware accelerated within a WSL environment.
Dollars to donuts this is why Microsoft is implementing this. GPU acceleration is becoming a critical feature for many users (but especially developers) and this will continue. If WSL is to be a serious competitor, this is necessary and I'm glad to see it showing up. This is true of cloud compute, too, and Microsoft is betting big on cloud as its future growth area.
> Only the rendering/compute aspect of the GPU are projected to the virtual machine, no display functionality is exposed.
The Linux gaming folks will be pretty sad about this one. Anyway, this isn't really a Linux port of DirectX. This is GPU compute via DirectX APIs.
”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_&_Melinda_Gates_Foundation#Global_health_division
The .gov.uk decision will indicate how tight the leash is.
If an outright ban then we can infer that UK foreign policy is dictated from across the water.
This fairly mundane tech story is getting a *lot* of coverage: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=huawei&iar=news&ia=news
“The PM's comments came after Robert Buckland, the Justice Secretary, said the UK will 'take into account the views of other sovereign states' but ultimately the 'decision we make will be based upon our own sovereign right to choose'.” –– possibly directed at the likes of Pompeo? We'll see, won't we? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7933473/Justice-Secretary-Robert-Buckland-warns-against-trying-bully-Britain-Huawei.html
The chap's musical legacy is humbling†.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno_discography
His initial quartet of albums "Here Come the Warm Jets" (1974), "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)" (1974), "Another Green World" (1975), and "Before and After Science" (1977) are widely regarded as mini-masterpieces, influential in the way that Kraftwerk are.
9.5/10 – HCTWJ
10/10 – TTMBS
10/10 – BAAS
Dunno why AGW is not one of them: “Though the album failed to chart in the United States or the United Kingdom, Another Green World was initially met with high praise from critics. Contemporary reception of Another Green World has been very positive; several critics and publications have placed the album on lists of the greatest albums of all time.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Another_Green_World
Eno has also contributed significantly to the art of *generative music* which marks him as a greater experimentalist than most in my book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_music
Whatever you think about Assange, how Eno's legacy is treated in this article *because of his association with Assange* is breath-takingly ignorant.
† (NB: I'm not saying that quantity = quality)
Studio albums … 26
Compilation albums … 13
Video albums … 8
EPs … 2
Singles … 7
Collaborative albums … 26
Production … 43
There are many terrible ideas; the idea that the best way to police so-called "hate" speech is to repress it is a particularly terrible idea in a sea of terrible ideas.
Look. You can have a free and open society, or you can have a censorious environment – you can't have both, isn't that obvious? Do you want to live in a free and open society? I know I do. If you want to be able to speak truth to power then you're going to want to live in a free and open society. However, there are some consequences as a result – the first of which, that we all grow a thicker skin, stems from the reality that there are *always* going to people with ideas you don't agree with and some of those ideas you're going to find very objectionable.
The following points have been made over and over again but they bear repeating in light of the very bad idea that you're spreading.
(1) Banned/censored/repressed ideas don't "go away", they get pushed underground into an echo chamber.
(2) If you ban/censor/repress something then paradoxically you make victims – the purveyors of the ideas and others who support them will claim victimhood. The victimhood lends *legitimacy* to the bad ideas.
(3) Some people have conspiratorial natures and if you suppress something they'll think that there's something important "they" don't want us to find out about which gives the suppressed ideas an aura. Related is the notion of the allure of the forbidden fruit.
(4) Over time alternative platforms will spring into being to cater for the de-platformed ideas. We've seen this happen in real time recently. Thus censorship on YouTube/Twitter/Facebook/… has given rise to Minds/Gab/Dlive/Bitchute/… This is not new, in the past you had alternative presses and private presses. Look it up, let history guide you.
(5) All ideas need to be challenged, by forcing some ideas underground those ideas go unchallenged thus thwarting the battle of ideas in the crucible of reason (if you'll pardon my mixed metaphor).
(6) Contrarian types will naturally push back because of "who are you to tell me what i can and cannot read or watch or listen to"
(7) The whole *point* of freedom of speech is to protect the edgy and uncomfortable ideas. After all, when you think about it, anodyne ideas need no protection.
This! (I hate when commentards say "This!" but here it fits)
What do they say? All publicity is good publicity. And Huawei has been in practically every news cycle for the past two months. You couldn't even begin to pay enough ¥¥¥ for that amount of free air time.
They're nearly a household name at this point, no?
"content moderators" => "censors"
"hate speech" => "speech that I don't like" or "speech that hurts my feelings" or "speech that upsets me"
"terrorist propaganda" => "freedom fighting news" or "legitimate revolutionary communication"
"adult nudity" => "breastfeeding pictures"
"sexual activity" => "won't someone think of the children?!"
"graphic violence" => …
I don't envy Facebook. They have placed themselves in an unenviable position. Sometimes we're able to foresee certain technological developments and their social implications because scenarios get played out in fiction. I think the ills of social media blind-sided humanity. Things might have been better if Facebook had more of a libertarian backbone, like the Elders of the internet. Facebook made too many bad decisions for them to all be coincidences, their decisions spoke volumes about how they see the world. But Facebook are not alone.
The recent political purges coordinated across the tech industry are shameful.
I look back on the days when all it seems we had to worry about was open-source (ok, ok, free software, don't yell at me!) versus proprietary software with distinct nostalgia. Linux versus Microsoft, the evil SCO Group, that kind of thing. Ah, happy innocent times.
VISA, Mastercard, Paypal blocking Wikileaks. Such brave patriotic companies. Complicit now in the murder of innocent civilians no less. YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Instagram, Twitter taking it upon themselves to police the internet of "extreme" political views. How nice of them. Why does any nation need laws and law enforcement when corporations from the United States will wade into the murky waters of the internet and web and clean it of sewage for us.
Great times.
Fuck their militarism, fuck their strong-arming, fuck their sanctions, fuck their embargoes, fuck their extraterritorial drone strikes, fuck their torturing, fuck their regime change wars, fuck their endless wars, fuck their interventions, fuck their trouble-making, fuck their support of dictatorships, fuck their blockades, fuck their arrogance, fuck them not for not following international norms, fuck them for all the treaties they haven't signed up to, fuck them for all the treaties they've pulled out of, fuck their double-standards, fuck their imperialism, fuck their support of Israel, fuck the lot of them.
I hope and pray that China is the rock upon which the USS Hegemon is shipwrecked.
The other say I was walking past this high-rise and a grand piano crashed into the ground *inches* from where I was. “What a coincidence,” I thought to myself, “No more than four months in practically the exact same spot a similar grand piano almost clobbered me. Well, nothing to worry about, it must be the law of large numbers.”
Personally I'd cross the street in front of that building until I found out why grand pianos were randomly dropping from the sky in front of it.
Dear Bob,
I just reported your comment as abuse to El Reg because the random CAPS have made my eyes bleed. You'll be hearing from my lawyers once El Reg is done with you. We're talking a figure compo Bob, I hope you got deep pockets…
Meanwhile, even though I'm actually not super traumatised by Trump like world+dog is I'd like to see a progressive like Warren or Sanders or *especially* Tulsi Gabbard win just so I can taunt you with it mercilessly :)
If we ever stop hearing from you we'll be having visions of you slumped over your keyboard foaming at the mouth. Please let us know how we can contact your next of kin.
I like tables so I put together this handy guide to satellite navigation in the top 10 economies of the world.
country global nss regional nss gdp 2017 (ppp) share %
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 China BeiDou-2 (2020) BeiDou-1 23159.107 18.2
2 U.S. GPS 19390.6 15.3
3 India NAVIC 9459.002 7.45
4 Japan QZSS 5428.813 4.27
5 Germany Galileo (2020) 4170.79 3.28
6 Russia GLONASS 4007.831 3.15
7 Indonesia 3242.771 2.55
8 Brazil 3240.319 2.55
9 U.K. #Brexit ? 2914.042 2.29
10 France Galileo (2020) DORIS 2835.746 2.23
“As an attempt to sweeten the deal for luxury lovers, Samsung says that W2018 buyers also get perks like concierge help at airports and subways, free software tech support, and a hotline just for VIPs. The phone will get released in China first and the price is yet to be announced, but we can guess it might be even higher than the W2017’s price tag of $3,000.”
I wonder if this is the same 'Dave Lee', who is a BBC Tech Correspondent who lives in LA and is a serial subscriber and owns nothing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44829976
Probably not but the same name got me thinking.
Ashamed to say but I've been on a bit of a YouTube binge of late and can confirm that (unless said chap has had a race transplant) we are *not* talking about the same Dave Lee.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVYamHliCI9rw1tHR1xbkfw
Dude refers to himself as Dave2D and is a prolific tech vlogger who knows what he's talking about and is unbiased unlike yawn inducing Mr. Fanboy Anon above.
Took me a while but now I see what you're getting at. You're saying that you're smarter than all the comms engineers at Mediatek, Qualcomm, and Intel, and all the mobile network base station equipment manufacturer engineers in East Asia, Europe, and North America.
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.” should actually have been phrased as “Only two things are infinite, the universe and *the human ego*, and I'm not sure about the former.”
something does not compute cowardly anon:
Assuming Brits voted for Brexit primarily to take their destiny into their own hands you can't with one and the same breath decry the EU's desire to be independent of the US when it comes to a vital tech like global navigation systems. More simply put: if Brexit is a matter of sovereignty then so is Galileo – to say that it is not is wilfully misleading.
And then you saying that sure it's all grand because the Brits can piggyback on the US system is dumb because that means moving from being an equal partner to a subordinate one. Why Brits should be happier living under Uncle Sam's shadow rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their European neighbour is beyond me. As we have recently had confirmed the EU are a far more reliable political entity than the US.
@Ellipsis
Classic Shell guy may have given up but he open sourced the code before he left so it hasn't been abandoned! Classic Shell on Github