Posts by frankvw

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

Re: Zim

"It's not your land, so that ends the conversation."

So that's that sorted then, eh? By that logic both North and South America, including Canada and Mexico, should also be given back to the natives from whom it was stolen.^* And don't even get me started about how Israel was settled; look no further than Gaza and the West Bank to see how well that's been going.

Since you feel your argument ends that conversation, I'm really curious about your plan for dealing with all that.

And once you have ended that conversation, please also feel free to undo more recent and smaller scale but similar wrongs done to many Tutsi in Rwanda or to Bosnian muslims, Croats, and Kosovo Albanians in the Balkan.

ICYMI... It's not that simple.

^* The fact that there are only a handful of them left should make things a lot simpler, though.

Re: "it illustrates how some people insist on remaining stuck in the past."

"On seeing reportage of the Afrikaner "refugees" arriving in the US, I thought they and the whole boiling could trek to rural US and they would fit right in."

They did.

At the very least this proves a complete lack of QA or any other process to properly vet changes to the code. Even Microsoft's dev department isn't that sloppy.

White South African resident here - immigrated 20 years ago and never regretted a single day of it.

""Kill the Boer" is just friendly banter, I suppose."

No, it is not. More than anything it illustrates how some people insist on remaining stuck in the past.

Many politicians here are not shy to keep touting their long-expired credit as freedom fighters (Jacob Zuma's "Umshini wami")^* comes to mind) long after this has ceased to be relevant, and playing the "race card" or invoking Apartheid is their usual go-to response to any form of criticism no matter how justified that criticism may be. But they simply do it for easy political gains.

Julius Malema ("Kill the Boer") is another matter. He grew up during the latter days of Apartheid and became radicalized, but just when he was old enough to take up arms and start shooting, democracy broke out. He never got over that. Listening to him, one would think it's still 1980 and the streets of Soweto are still filled with armoured vehicles belching out tear gas. He's literally become a rebel who has been robbed of his cause, and even 30+ years later he still doesn't know how to adjust to a changed country.

But this phenomenon exists on both sides of the dotted line. Some white Afrikaners still yearn for the days when they ruled the roost and the SA Defence Force fought n the US size of a "cold war by proxy" in Angola. I have seen their Facebook pages glorifying the "honor" of the battles they fought for their country, as they put it. Never mind the fact that the SA border wars cost a lot of good lives for no reason and accomplished nothing. Those wars are mercifully over and have been history for a long time, but still they can't get over it.

Unfortunately this sort of thing seems to be ingrained, to a certain extent, in both black and Afrikaner culture. Black South Africans have been disadvantaged by white colonists since the late 17th century, while Afrikaners have always had a deeply ingrained distrust against English speaking white South Africans, which goes all the way back to the Second Boer War. This does not make for a well-integrated, level-headed and peaceful society.

Which brings us to farm murders. There has been a spate of those in the past, shortly after Nelson Mandela stepped down as president and Zimbabwe embarked on a spate of land seizures from white farmers. During that time farm murders were more than just another crime. But again, this is in the past. Today's farm murders are not unlike other murders. Yes, they can be gruesome - murdering people with farming tools is never pretty, and unfortunately farm houses can be somewhat isolated and difficult to secure, which makes them soft targets, and many farms are still white-owned^** which creates the perception that white South African farmers are being singled out. Statistics and facts prove otherwise.

There are radicals on every side, an perception rules them. Nor is this only a South African problem - Trump managed to win the 2024 elections because of it. And the radicals usually have the loudest voices. Those who appeal to reason seldom shout as loudly. And there is so much nonsense being shouted by all parties that literally anyone can point at it and claims it proves them right.

South Africa has many problems (although not more than most other countries, just different ones) but white genocide and Zimbabwe-style land grabs are not one of them. I'm perfectly happy here and I'm not worried about being genocided anytime soon.

^* "Bring me my machinegun"

^** This is only in part for historical reasons. Farms that were handed over to black South Africans almost invariably failed within a few years.

Annual electronic waste footprint per person is 11.2 kg

Re: If only we didn't appear to be trapped

Unfortunately a main aspect of modern business is that its goal is not to satisfy a demand but to create one.

Quality is a main issue

While planned obsolescence is a major factor here (Windows 11's TPM requirements have already been mentioned) lack of quality is another one.

My wife bought a food processor just over a year ago. Not wanting to skimp, we decided to choose what we believed was a good brand: Bosch. It wasn't cheap, but then we didn't want cheap rubbish.

Except that's still what we got, because now the machine is failing. The warranty has no lapsed so I decided to have a look myself, having a background in electronics. Much to my surprise I could open the casing fairly easily; there were no Tri-Wing screws (just Torx) and no clips that could not be unlatched without breaking them. "Let's hear it for the Right to Rrepair!" I said to myself, said I.

Unfortunately I then discovered that the switch inside consists of a flimsy copper strip that had ceased to make contact, and the speed control knob is not attached to an actual switch, but merely consists of a flimsy tinned copper strip that slides past a few tinned studs soldered into the PCB, which is a recipe for contact problems as soon as the surface starts to wear a little and corrosion does its thing.

It's not serviceable (beyond applying some contact spray as a temporary stopgap measure) and the PCB can't be replaced because in spite of being a fairly recent product release the model has been discontinued and spares are only stocked for about three months.

So that's it. From expensive food processor to E-waste in one easy go.

And this is Bosch we're talking about, mind you, not some anonymous OEM outfit in Long Dong Province, China.

Ironically the rest of the machine isn't all that bad. But they tried to save about a Euro and a half on the production costs by replacing proper parts with something no more robust than some sticky tape and paperclips, and here we are. Well done, Bosch. Next time just advertise it as "future E-waste" instead of a kitchen appliance.

Microsoft blows deadline for special Azure for EU hosters

Or not...

"Microsoft has failed to deliver a special version of Azure for EU cloud providers on time..."

That is, of course, assuming they actually made a serious attempt to deliver such a beast in the first place. I remember when for the longest time they continued to insist that they had an ironclad commitment to OS/2, and we know how that suddenly turned out.

So let me go out on a limb here and make a prediction: there will be no such special version. Not now, not ever. Place your bets. :-)

You think ransomware is bad now? Wait until it infects CPUs

Re: Pay us money to unlock the other CPUs and memory.

True., my laptop would be toast. But CPU Ransomware is no insignificant weapon. Which means it will mostly be aimed at large organizations who can and might be willing to pay serious random money, which means their affected systems will mostly be desktop and server hardware. Most servers I've seen lately still have CPUs stuck in a socket.

Re: Pay us money to unlock the other CPUs and memory.

Maybe (probably!) I'm being naive here, but if your CPU is infected with ransomware, isn´t the simplest and cheapest way to deal with it to just swap the infected CPU out for a clean one fresh out of the box? Yes, that does seem far too easy, but can someone who knows more about this than I do explian to me why it can't be that simple?

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Pandora's box has officially been opened...

Because now I'm getting ideas myself:

- An app that connects to the lift controls based on proximity of a beancounter's phone. Call it the Hotel California lift option: you can enter the carriage any time you like but you can never leave...

- Sliding doors and halon releases triggering automatically based on the number of outstanding support requests a user has, once again proximity-triggered

- Camera and microphone linked to servers (TODO: install device file /dev/blackmail on all Android devices, or hook into device files already installed by Chinese home automation apps)

- Remote controlled NFT payment features (the beer fund needs topping up!)

...

This could work...

Feeling dumb? Let Google's latest AI invention simplify that wordy writing for you

Re: for the first time

"As for avoiding prolixity look at the number of words used in each example. The original is ten lines, the "simplified" version is twelve."

Google Translate already does then when it converts English into French.

Re: An AI dumb-downer made in 'murca.

It's not just 'Muricans.

One of the thing I've been doing for a living over the past 30 years is write product manuals. Which was never a problem, except that for the past 10 years I've been getting more and more users asking me if I couldn't just give them a YouTube video instead.

And that's a global phenomenon. Reading is difficult. It's hard work. Makes brain tired. Want YouTube on phone. Duh.

So the next iteration of this will probably not just simplify text but provide a link with an AI generated talking head so the Great Unwashed won't have to read anymore.

Idiocracy is just around the corner here.

Microsoft moved the goalposts once. Will Windows 12 bring another shift?

Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12

"...are there security threats that previous versions of Windows absolutely couldn't be adapted to respond to?"

Well, let me put it this way: Windows 11 want your hardware to have a TPM "for enhanced security" and is still subject to a whole parade of vulnerabilities every month. What does that tell you?

Re: Reasons not to upgrade to Windows 12

"AI"

True, but I have an even better one: Windows 11 offered nothing that we wanted but Windows 10 didn't have, and Windows 12 will offer nothing that we want and Windows 11 doesn't have.

30 years of MySQL, the database that changed the world

Re: Avoid If Possible

"Think of banking, accounting, critical records keeping, policing, personell records..."

With all due respect: nobody needed to be told that. ;-)

MySQL is most often used in the FOSS world, for websites and for DIY applications (i.e. software that's been/being developed in-house). That's fine, but how many banks, accounting firms/departments, critical archiving organisations/departments, HR departments etc. actually contemplate using FOSS or DIY software for that sort of thing? If I suggested using LAMP to a bank for critical applications I'd be booted out the door so fast I'd cause a sonic boom.

Re: Datatabases, or datadumps?

"MySQL's excellent performance for individual tables, combined with its awful performance with joins, helped convince developers that joins and thus the relational model were the problem and that it was far better to implement the logic at the application layer."

I've tried that a few times. I was young, stupid and deadlined. I soon learned that trying to solve this programmatically in PHP comes with even worse performance penalties.

Re: OTT

To call mySQL a 'toy' is indeed unjustified, IMO. That said, it has serious shortcomings and limitations that make it unsuitable for large scale mission-critical applications. And yes, some of that is related to myISAM which was the default until 2009 when it was replaced with InnoDB, but still - there's a lot of room for improvement here.

As it stands, mySQL s a free, quick-enough and good-enough go-to for most low and medium end websites that call for a fairly simple schema and to lots of reads and only a few writes. I've been making a living with these on LAMP stacks for the past 25 years and it works fine, provided you are aware of the limitations and don't try to use it for something that has to be scaleable into high-end territory.

At least (to the best of my knowledge) 45% of the world's websites use mySQL. That's not a toy.

Hydrotreated vegetable oil is not an emission-free swap for diesel in datacenters

Re: No shit

"What's even dafter? How about growing actual food (corn) and turning it into alcohol to put in fuel?"

Indeed. Putting it in fuel while you could drink it is probably the worst idea I've ever heard.

Do the math: I need several litres of liquid fuels everyday to heat my house in winter. Whereas half a litre of whisky, brandy or gin will make me feel comfortably warm for at least two days!

Meta blames Trump tariffs for ballooning AI infra bills

"Look for DC sites outside the US. And make it clear to Trump that this is what tariffs do."

And while you're at it, make it clear to your tech bro's that this is what supporting and idiot presidential candidate does. This is exactly what you wanted everyone to vote for. Moron.

AI models routinely lie when honesty conflicts with their goals

Well, duh.

1. AI's are being developed, configured, trained and run by Big Business..

2. AI's are designed to mimic human behaviour.

3. When AI models face a conflict between telling the truth or accomplishing a specific goal, they lie more than 50 percent of the time.

Uh-huh. The only thing that surprises me is that this surprises anyone...

BOFH: The Prints of Darkness pays a visit

A particularly good episode

Bad things happened to my keyboard twice when I read this while having cofee... First the contract cancellation prodecure, then the heavy equipment disposal method. Brilliant!!!

Google, AWS say it's too hard for customers to use Linux to swerve Azure

A thirty year old problem

Remember Windows '95? It was rubbish. But right after its release, world + dog was writing applications for it. Not just large companies who bet on the market going that way (and who saw what happened to those who had bet on MS's earlier promises about OS/2, sunk their R&D budgets into it and then had the carpet yanked out from under them) but also smaller developers who had until then made little or no DOS or Windows 3.x application software.

Why? Because MS released a slew of cheap (sometimes even free) and easily accessible development tools, frameworks and suites along with Windows '95. Suddenly making applications for Windows '95 looked a lot easier, cheaper and more attractive. The flipside of that was of course that by the time Windows '95 became Windows '98 the application development market was firmly locked into the MS Windows ecosystem with vast piles of code that was less portable than the Rocky Mountains.

Which, of course, was exactly what MS intended. Cheap and accessible development platforms to produce code that was nigh impossible to port to any other OS, ever, was the whole point.

And the rest is history. For three decades it's been a matter of rinse and repeat.

US senator warns 'China is cheering' for proposed NASA budget cuts

Re: Harvard

Trump's reason for systematically demolishing higher education is simple. This data from the US Dept of Education says it all:

Using publically available data, states coded as “blue” based upon results from the 2004 presidential election were significantly higher in education funding than were states coded as “red.”

While the above is from 2004, the concern that a higher education makes people vote blue rather than red still exists. And, if various statistics are to be believed, not entirely without reason. Think of it what you like.

The LittleGP-30: A tiny recreation of a very big deal from the 1950s

Re: Memories

A copy of the LGP-30 programming manual is still available online. It starts by explaining that:

"Programming is planning how to solve a problem. No matter what method is used -- pencil and paper, slide rule, adding machine, or computer -problem solving requires programming. Of course, how one programs depends on the device one uses in problem solving."

Which is the exact same explanation I used Way Back When while teaching software development. Compare that to IBM's "A ... is a sequence of non-whitespace characters separated by whitespace characters" and "This page intentionally left blank." Huh!

And then it starts delving into the intricacies of "recirculating registers" and the physics of the rotating drum that are central to Mel's legendary heroics. :-)

Tech CEO: Four-day work week didn't hurt or help productivity

Re: Define "productivity"

The best answer to the question of how to define productivity that I've ever come across is based on a surprisingly simple metric. You're welcome. :-)

Brit universities told to keep up the world-class research with less cash

And the terrible thing is that a 10% or 20% cut can decimate a university and the stream of (badly needed) proper qualiity graduate students it produces, but as far as gov't spending across the board is concerned it doesn't even move the needle. Much more effective savings could be achieved in other areas where they will do far less damage.

This is a typical case of being penny-wise but pound-foolish. Perhaps those deciding on the funding of education should be better educated themselves.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

Little lugging required

A solar furnace would not require a lot of "lugging". A light-weight parabolic frame, assembled on the Lunar surface, fitted with thin, light-weight mirrors would work quite well and needn't be bulky or heavy. It could be made much lighter and packed much smaller than, say, a Lunar Rover.

Bill Gates unearths Microsoft's ancient code like a proud nerd dad

Re: The Moral of the Story

"I'm altering the source code. Pray I don't alter it any further."

-- Darth Mouth

Re: The Moral of the Story

"one way to succeed in business is to lie"

It's a good way to get elected as US president, too...

Re: "Bill is clearly very good at programming"

Not just kids - grown-ups, too. Tim Paterson of Seattle Computing Products pretty much "created" Q-DOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) by taking CP/M, filing off the serial numbers and giving it a new paint job, then renaming it to 86-DOS and making it commercially available. Gates bought it, put a Microsoft sticker on the box and sold it as MS-DOS. The similarities between CP/M and MS-DOS 1.0 are painfully obvious.

However, Digital Research (who had created, and owned, CP/M in the first place) never gave permission for their IP to be used in that manner by any third party, which essentially means MS-DOS was released as a stolen product. IBM knew this. They went ahead with it anyway. DR was too small to be considered a threat to Big Blue. When DR threatened with legal action IBM agreed to offer CP/M as an option for the IBM PC next to PC-DOS (the IBM-branded MS-DOS) but ensured that the pricing was such that CP/M was immediately pushed out of the market.

Kids, my rear panel RS-232 port! Gates and Allen stole computer time at Lakeside to develop their own work that they then commercialized, then willingly and deliberately bought and sold stolen property. The rest of Microsoft's history simply continues that trend.

"Bill is clearly very good at programming"

From Programmers at Work, Microsoft Press, Redmond, WA [1986]:

Interviewer: "Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?"

Gates: "No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating system."

'Nuff said.

FAA closes investigations into Blue Origin landing fail, Starship Flight 7 explosion

Meanwhile, at the FAA...

Xkcd 2148 suddenly makes a lot more sense now.

Now Windows Longhorn is long gone, witness reflects on Microsoft's OS belly-flop

Pretty stable

"It's not quite *that* bad. Windows 2000 was reasonably stable and functional. Windows XP SR2 and Windows 7 were pretty stable too..."

You're not putting the bar very high here, mate. For a mainstream OS that is supposed to run most (or, as per Redmond's intentions, all) PCs in the entire world I would expect something better than "resonably stable" or "pretty stable". But maybe that's just me.

NASA rewrites Moon mission goals in quiet DEI retreat

It hardly matters anymore

While the Trumpification of NASA is deplorable and sad, as far as Artemis is concerned the whole point is moot, I'm afraid. With Boing being unable to build a capsule that works, a conservative billionaire being put at the helm at NASA and the list of contractors including SpaceX which is owned by a guy who claims trying to go back to the moon is only a distraction from more important goals and who has his nose stuck up the presidential backside, can you really see Artemis actually going ahead and achieving its stated goals?

I can't.

Boeing's Starliner future uncertain as NASA weighs next steps

On a different note, Artemis is pretty much dead, too

While Boing has seriously borked a lot of their own operations lately (as already commented on above) the more serious issue here is the bigger picture.

NASA, for political reasons, always has worked with as many different contractors as was practical. They have always been forced to award expensive contracts to Big American Companies so as to ram home the politics-driven image of a government organization that spends the taxpayer's money to the benefit of American blue-collar workers. They have to, because Joe Sixpack couldn't care less about space exploration and the development of technology; look no further than how American citizens immediately lost all interest in the Apollo project after the first moonlanding had been accomplished and the US had beat the Ruskies.

So for Artemis the usual list of prime contractors was compiled: Aerojet Rocketdyne, Axiom Space, Bechtel, Blue Origin, Boeing, Jacobs, Lockheed Martin, Maxar Space Systems, Northrop Grumman, and SpaceX. Unfortunately there is only one contractor in that list who currently has his nose stuck into the presidential backside, who has stated that the moon is a distraction and we should go directly to Mars instead, and who is a member of the industrial billionaire's club that also includes the new director of NASA.^*

With that one contractor and his bitter orange pretty much having taken over NASA, I think we can safely write off Artemis, at least for the foreseeable future.

^* Note that I'm not seriously counting Blue Origin here - they primarily lead a consortium of more established contractors and, IMO, were included mostly as a token gesture. So far they have contributed little successful new technology to the project, and as for a New Glenn putting a Blue Moon HLS on the lunar surface this year... Well, we'll see.

Photoshop FOSS alternative GIMP wakes up from 7-year coma with version 3.0

Big improvement

I have tried to use GIMP any number of times, but eventually I always fell back on Photoshop CS6 (for which I ran Windows 10 in a VirtualBox and only recently managed to get working half-decenlty on WINE. But after having downloaded and installed 3.0.0 with the Photogimp patch, I am impressed to the point where I actually have been using it for things that I used to fall back on Photoshop for. Which is no mean trick.

Yes, there are issues in this point-zero-point-zero version, most noticably that saving my JPG export settings doesn't work, and that's something that even in an initial major release should not have made it trhough QA. I'm hoping that 3.1 or 3.2 will address these and other problems. That said, the UI and features are now actally usable (which in 2.1 they weren't really, IMO) and although I've got the PS hotkeys stuck in my muscle memory and GIMP will require a bit of getting used to, compared to the previous version using this one is a breeze.

US Space Force warns Chinese satellites are 'dogfighting' in space

"What are these space "objects" if they're not satellites?"

Whales? Bowls of petunias?

Cloudflare builds an AI to lead AI scraper bots into a horrible maze of junk content

Re: AI generated content is poison for AI

"AI generated content has been shown to very quickly poison any AI build on it."

Given that AI tries to mimic organic intelligence (I won't call it real intelligence, given some of the people I encounter with depressing regularity) this is actually not surprising. Consider the drivel one encounters on social media, which poisons the minds of those consuming that drivel and then continue to spread more of it.

Art does imitate nature.

OpenAI asks Uncle Sam to let it scrape everything, stop other countries complaining

Is deep learning a copyright violation?

"I don't think the comparison is the problem. The problem is that, no matter what the activity is, we decided that it was illegal. Now, it is easier to do it."

Fair enough, you do have a point there, and +1 for that.

"You've decided to try to pull in the irrelevant additional argument about whether using a work as training data to an LLM is the same as a human reading it. It's not, by the way. We could have that discussion in a separate thread if you like."

New thread started. So here goes, starting with a look at the definition of copyright. Collins Dictionary states that "If someone has copyright on a piece of writing or music, it is illegal to reproduce or perform it without their permission." The Brittannica Dictionary defines it as " the legal right to be the only one to reproduce, publish, and sell a book, musical recording, etc., for a certain period of time". However, Brittannica's encyclopedic article goes further, expanding these definitions with: "Now commonly subsumed under the broader category of legal regulations known as intellectual-property law, copyright is designed primarily to protect an artist, a publisher, or another owner against specific unauthorized uses of his work."

The term "unauthorized use" is what I believe the current discussion hinges on.

i

The way an AI processes information fed into it mimics the way humans do it. The information becomes an integral and inseparable part of a body of knowledge, identity and decision making (simulated in the case of an AI but based on the same principles as the organic neural networks that AI is modeled after) and does not continue to exist within that AI's memory as a separate "work" that the AI then redistributes or publishes in whole or in part.

I myself in the past have borrowed books on programming, learned their contents and then proceeded to teach programming techniques directly based on the contents of the book. I have done that for a living. Is this "unauthorized use" in terms of existing copyright and IP protection legislation? Currently it doesn't seem to be considered as such in the case of humans. But if an AI trains on information in manner similar to the way humans do it, and they process and then proceed to use that information in similar ways, then IP legislation should be applied in similar ways, too. THAT is what I mean when I say that current legislation is made outdated by new technology and should therefore be adapted.

You claim that the way I used this book is different from the way an AI trains on it. Explain that to me, if you will. Because I can't see the difference.

Re: New technology calls for new a new copyright paradigm

"Does that argument make any sense to you?"

No, because your comparison is flawed. Absorbing information which then becomes an inseparable and indistinguishable part of a greater whole is an entirely different matter from malware.

Re: New technology calls for new a new copyright paradigm

"Ok. The AI companies use that vast computing power to track which information they assimilate and every time they use a bit of it they pay the original author for it."

That is hardly feasible. If I borrow a book and read it, the contents become an integral part of my knowledge base. How should it be determined when I "use a bit of it"? Every time I write a bit of code I use the sum and total of all books on computing, software development, algorithm design and what not. Knowledge, including the contents of books, visual media, recorded lectures, news articles and what have you is not kept or used separately. It all becomes part of a greater whole and no amount of vast computing power can treat every bit of information separately. That's simply not how it works.

New technology calls for new a new copyright paradigm

L'Histoire se répète...

Before 1990 the media industry was content in its copyright position, since it had the monopoly on multiplication facilities and therefore on media distribution. Very few people had a record pressing plant in their basements or a CD multiplication facility in their attics, and OCR to scan and digitize books was also still very much in its infancy which meant a photocopier was the only way to duplicate books.

Then along came the CD-ROM drive, compressible media data formats (MP3 being the first mainstream variety of those), cheap document scanners, accurate OCR software and sufficient Internet bandwidth to distribute digital media. Suddenly the genie was out of the bottle and the rules had changed forever.

The industry, predictably, went up in flames, screamed bladdy murder and dug in their heels to resist the change that had already taken place. It didn't help one bit. Then some media houses decided to go with the change, embrace it, and ride the wave. Digital distribution, DRM that actually didn't get in the way too much of enjoying legally bought media, and different business models all took some time to mature, but here we are. Those who adapted survived, those who didn't, didn't. Darwin would have nodded approvingly.

Now we see the same. There's no really effective way to keep any content whatsoever from being accessed by an AI. If you and I can obtain a copy of something (and we can) then so can an AI. And that means, simply put, that our ideas about copyright and the associated legislation have to change to adapt to the new situation. It's that or be left behind.

First off, what constitutes copyright? I'm not a lawyer (heaven forbid) but it seems to me as a layman that copyright focuses on the right to multiply and distribute. If I publish a copy of a book that I do not have the rights to, I commit a clear copyright violation.

But then there are different scenario's. In the mid-1990s I wanted to learn Perl. I borrowed the O'Reilly Camel Book from a colleague, read it, and after about a week I returned it with thanks and a cup of coffee. Then I proceeded to utilize that knowledge in my work, writing Perl for a living. I did not pay O'Reilly for the right to read their book (my mate had already done that) and yet I used the information therein to my commercial advantage.

Is that also a copyright violation? Some would argue yes, some would say maybe not, but all would probably agree that enforcing copyrights in this case is impossible - after all, who would police the lending of a book to the guy sitting at the desk across from you?

But for the sake of argument let's say this is a copyright violation. So I'm a good boy and I don't borrow the book. But I'm a little broke that month, so I don't buy it, either. Instead I ask my colleague, who has paid for the book and read it, how to solve certain problems in Perl. That means my colleague now disseminates the information in the book, or at least gives me commercially valuable advise on the basis of what he has read in the book. Is that a copyright violation?

I ask because the latter is exactly what AI is doing right now.

Clearly we need a new copyright paradigm. In today's world the old one no longer works.

Microsoft quantum breakthrough claims labeled 'unreliable' and 'essentially fraudulent'

Gasp!

So... What you're saying is that... Microsoft is better at marketing bluff than at... developing actual technology???

No... Surely not....

I am shocked, SHOCKED! Who'd have thunk it? Who could possibly have seen that coming?

<cough>

Is NASA's science budget heading for a black hole?

Nothing has changed, or will

In 1972 the Apollo program, one of humanity's greatest endeavors that could have been the start of something even better, was ended prematurely to save cost, because over the course of ten years a scandalous $25 billion of taxpayers' money had been wasted on a frivolous enterprise that produced nothing more than few rocks. I kid you not, that was the sentiment in Congress at that time.

Meanwhile the US spent over $80 billion in that year alone (1972) of that same taxpayers' money on military expenditures. Nobody in Congress complained.

US politics have been anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-progress for most of recent history, and there is no sign whatsoever that that will ever change.

Earth's atmosphere is shrinking and thinning, which is bad news for Starlink and other LEO Sats

Re: Starlink?

It depends on what you mean by 'losing satellites'. Starlink is occasionally "losing" satellites all the time, because these sats simply stop working as a result of particle impact or radiation. And that is in turn because these sats are designed to be relatively cheap, as well as easily discardable and replacable, rather than super-robust but super-expensive. This is how the sats and the network they form are designed.

If you mean "losing satellites" in terms of these sats falling out of orbit and plummeting down in flames... No. That's not happening right now.

Cheap 'n' simple sign trickery will bamboozle self-driving cars, fresh research claims

Who's surprised?

Human-piloted moon landers have so far had a 100% success rate while self-guided probes have failed to stay in one piece and right side up in half the cases. [1] And that's on the moon where there's no other moving traffic, pranksters with stickers and tape, or a variety of objects in all shapes and colours to confound the unwary algorithm.

And yet we expect self-driving cars (produced within consumer budgets rather than using aerospace-grade technology) to do much better? Really?

[1] Granted, this is based on a very small sample size. Still, the trend is there...

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

It all depends on where you land.

The Surveyor probes landed in relatively flat, dust-filed basins. As did the Blue Ghost. None of these had exotic adjustable landing struts and none of them fell over. Landing in a crater on the lunar South Pole, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter, because this is entirely different terrain.

Incidentally, the Viking probes that landed on Mars had regular struts too, but they were lucky enough not to be upset by boulders. Had they come down a few meters from where they happened to land things could have ended badly. Sometimes it's just a matter of luck, given the limitations of robotic probes to deal with unfavourable landing locations.

"Could someone with more engineering chops than me explain whether something like rapidly expanding telescoping legs could work? Such that they extend asymmetrically."

Such a design could very well be implemented, albeit at the cost of considerably greater expense, weight and volume, thus reducing mission options. The main limitation is, though, that it is a solution for the wrong problem.

Unmanned probes landing on the moon suffer from both limitations in altitude measurement and terrain scanning on the one hand, and a limited ability of flight software on the other to make intelligent decisions on how to deal with a final descent onto an unsuitable landing spot. Boulder fields are notorious for throwing off altitude measurements (both RADAR and LIDAR based), and recognizing one upon final descent, hovering, and then flying sideways aiming for a more suitable spot is simply beyond the current robotic capabilities. For the Apollo pilots this was routine (they were pilots after all) but automated probes continue to struggle with it.

What we need is better flight software that can make more accurate assessments of altitude regardless of terrain quality, that can recognize unsuitable landing spots, and can navigate autonomously to a better landing location using whatever fuel remains (and, if necessary, choosing the best possible option among multiple less-than-ideal spots). That's not easy.

That said, probes falling over is nothing new. Luna 23 was the last one to do so, if I am not mistaken, in 1974. And while the Surveyor probes were low and squat and by design very hard to tip over, the Surveyor program's good success rate (5 out of 7) was mainly due to the fact that these probes landed in smooth terrain.

So the design of the landing struts is not the main problem here, nor is center of gravity. The problem is that a good landing in less than perfect lunar terrain needs piloting skills, including recognition, assessment, decision and dexterity which current robotic systems still cannot meet.

Moonshot goes sideways as Intuitive Machines' second lunar lander seemingly falls over

Re: I know it's not easy...

"the issue seems to be more from creating a design that just isn't stable enough."

It appears that Athena came down in a boulder field some 400 metres from its intended landing spot. That's exactly what Neil Armstrong managed to avoid, thus proving the advantages of a human pilot over the guidance system of an automated probe.

I imagine image recognition, more advanced terrain scanning upon final descent and more flexible algorithms (perhaps AI) will improve the success rates in the future. But for now (as it has been in the past 60+ years) the absence of a human looking down and saying "Hang on, this isn't going to work; let's pick that better spot over there instead" we're going continue seeing more of this.