* Posts by jmch

3618 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2017

Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech

jmch Silver badge

"The government should never subsidise badly or maliciously run companies"

Governments should NEVER bail out private companies. If the private companies are in trouble and need cash, they got to stump up the corresponding amount of equity. There should be limits on both how much equity the government can hold (it's emergency help, not nationalisation), and the "bailout" should include plans of how to repay the government (buy back the equity), have the government resell it's equity on the market, or unwind the company if it's still failing.

Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

Re: V'Ger

At some point Voyager 1 will reach the edge of the giant simulation we're in and will just start approaching Earth from the opposite side of the screen!

Rancher faces prison for trying to breed absolute unit of a sheep

jmch Silver badge

Re: "The .. crime we uncovered here could threaten the integrity of our wildlife species in Montana"

Species have gradually moved domains over millennia, and all the other species in the 'host' territory have time to adapt (or, as you point out, some will die out). Problems in particular biospheres happen when non-local species are introduced very suddenly over the course of years, and native species have no time to adapt and therefore very little chance to compete.

In this particular case I don't really think a new species of sheep *on ranches or hunted* would be causing any wildlife catastrophe, but if released into the wild (which could also happen accidentally), who knows? In this particular case, I think a large part of the offense wasn't just introducing a new species to the US, but trafficking in endangered species

Telegram eyes IPO as user numbers close in on 1 billion

jmch Silver badge

There's over 5 billion smartphone users in the world, and messaging is a core function. I would think that a huge percentage of those 5 billion had one or more of Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Signal or Telegram installed

jmch Silver badge

Re: It's all downhill once the bankers turn up

"How exactly does Telegram fund its operations, never mind turn a profit?"

The article mentions premium user subscriptions and some sort of limited ads that are channel-only. You can be sure once the bankers turn up there will be a push to find ways to profit. However they should be pretty aware that their popularity really took off with WhatsApp privacy invasions, they will (or should be) well aware that any privacy abuses will see punters flood away even faster than they left WhatsApp (because the privacy-unconscious would have stayed with WhatsApp)

European Commission broke its own data privacy law with Microsoft 365 use

jmch Silver badge

Re: Kicking!

"I'd be all for automated speed restrictors, and black box speed recording. "

I absolutely wouldn't, for 3 very important reasons:

a) Vehicle recognition of speed limit signs is sketchy. My car very often interprets off-ramp / side road speed limits as belonging to the main road I'm driving on. Vehicle/ GPS knowledge of speed limits is also sketchy, seeing that it has no knowledge of roadwork-related temporary restrictions, nor to changes in local speed limits (in some cases even years after the change)

b) even if sometime in the next decade or 2 the functionality of sign recognition and the mapping information update frequency drastically improves, it's still dependent on humans making weird speed limit choices. I've driven along countless narrow mountain roads with a limit of 80km/h when driving anywhere near that would be suicidal, and countless others where no doubt some local council busybody has imposed a 30km/h limit on a wide straight stretch with good visibility and no pedestrian usage. There is zero chance that this will ever be fixed, because human nature.

c) accident recording can be set to have a short buffer of a few seconds with the data overwritten every time. Speed recording means continuous recording of the whole journey, and because speed on it's own is meaningless without knowing the limit and therefore the location, it means a continuous permanent record of the location of every car, which is completely unacceptable..

jmch Silver badge

Re: Kicking!

" mandated black boxes in cars and is trying to work out how to make reporting of speeding mandatory "

The EU's record on privacy is usually such that reporting on speeding would fall foul of a bunch of directives, and there certainly isn't the political climate for anybody to be able to force through any such thing. In fact, 10 seconds googling shows the limits of what these black boxes are recording:

"The device records certain parameters for a short period of time – five seconds before the crash and 0.3 seconds after the impact. According to the documentation provided by the European Commission, an EDR records and stores the following data: speed, braking, the position and tilt of the car on the road, and how the built-in safety systems react."

and

"The information recorded by the EDR belongs to the driver or the vehicle's owner. The device operates on a closed-loop system, and the data is gathered anonymously to ensure it's not subject to manipulation if it falls into the wrong hands. For the same reason, the last four digits of the vehicle identification number (VIN) are not stored."

(source - https://www.motor1.com/news/706396/black-box-europe-mandatory-july-2024/)

jmch Silver badge

Re: Kicking!

Well, it's absolutely not ideal that a top EU institution can't follow EU rules...... BUT, I have to say, it's unlikely this gets kicked into the long grass. They will, at the very least, have to build themselves a bodge / fig-leaf cover that demonstrates compliance. And since now that they have been exposed, the usual suspects (Schrems et al, but also the European Data Protection Commissioner) will be keeping a close watch, it's more probable that they will have to fix it properly (even if reluctantly)

Dirty data shocks Indian taxpayers with huge bills

jmch Silver badge

Re: Advanced Tax No Job

"There's no safety net, so people dont want to pay any extra taxes"

I don't really know the detailed situation in India, but if there really is no 'western-style' proper social safety net, they have a great opportunity to create a proper one rather than copy the west's broken model. Having today's taxpayers pay for today's pensioners is a recipe for future disaster even though India's demographics currently might support it. Allowing current workers to deposit money into a personal retirement account tax-free would encourage wider adoption of banking without workers worrying about the tax consequences.

How to Netflix Oracle’s blockbuster audit model

jmch Silver badge

Re: Better option

"never to touch any company that has difficult/opaque licensing terms"

Absolutely this. I've come across tons of software where there are a bunch of install options that are activated or nor depending on the license key supplied. That means that if a feature is installed and usable, it has been licensed. Conversely, if a feature is not licensed, it won't be available at all. If I have a 30 concurrent seat license, The 31st user gets a 'no can do' message.

Surely if Oracle really wanted their customers to only use what they pay for, they could automate the auditing themselves.

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

jmch Silver badge

Re: Biden may be in trouble.

"It would be the ultimate vote killer for Biden and guarantee Trump the election."

I think that immigration will be the big US election issue besides the usual "It's the economy, stupid!". Access to TikTok is likely to figure quite far below access to decent healthcare (which Trump has threatened as POTUS) in voter priorities. And frankly, with the US pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza and (re)floating the idea of a 2-state solution, it's unlikely that Gaza will hurt him that much either, primary 'no-votes' nothwithstanding. "becoming a new Vietnam" is WAAAAY off the mark, there aren't any US boots in Gaza, nor US bodybags returning home in the thousands.

jmch Silver badge

Re: Follow the money!

" Trump seems to have had the begging bowl out for one of the Republicans biggest billionaire donors - whether for his own personal legal bills or for campaign donations who knows."

Trump's personal legal bills plus the fine he is facing for the New York fraud case will run into hundreds of millions, and non-MAGA Republicans are (probably correctly) resigned to him tapping general GOP funds for his personal use. Even if he doesn't, any donations to his personal super-PACs (which he definitely IS using for his personal legal bills) are depleting the potential pool of donations to the Republican party, and that's surely going to hurt them.

Swiss cheese security? Play ransomware gang milks government of 65,000 files

jmch Silver badge

Not sure what you mean by: " it's not the only country with its national security freeloading on others. ". Firstly, it's surrounded very deeply on all sides by friendly countries, so it's military spending is anyway unlikely to be as high as any country bordering Russia for example. I don't see how that can be seen as 'freeloading'. One could equally say that they are in the middle of a stable region with friends on all sides because they are skilled diplomats. Also, having a low military spend as %age of GDP is as much due to having a very high GDP as it is to have low spending.

In any case being neutral is very very different from being unarmed and/or militarily unprepared. Switzerland has conscription (meaning even with a relatively small standing army it has a very large and well-trained reserve), and it's a big arms producer. On both counts it's probably quite small in absolute terms but very big considering small size and population.

Toyota, Samsung accelerate toward better EV batteries

jmch Silver badge

Re: Energy density

Update to add....re ""charge to percent capacity in nine minutes." is missing a number in there somewhere, but typically quoted measures are 10%-80% "

In the linked press release it says "8 to 80% in just 9 minutes" which is a bit more weirdly specific, but in line with what is more usually advertised (after 80% charge, charging gets slower which is why it's usually 10%-80% that is advertised rather than 10%-100%)

jmch Silver badge

Re: To give some context

Petrol energy density is 32MJ/l, or a bit less than 9kWh/l, so that's around 10x rather than 14x. But also to put in context, per-mass energy density is much worse for batteries than legacy fuels since oil is considerably less dense than batteries. Petrol 45MJ/kg (12.5kWh/kg), while for these batteries I would estimate around 450 Wh/kg (which is more than 25x!!!!)

BUT to give yet a little bit more of additional context, around 90+% of the energy in batteries can be transferred into vehicle motion, while less than 40% of legacy liquid fuels can be transferred to vehicle motion. Which brings the volumetric ratio down to around 5x and the mass ratio to about 13x. And then, still one more last thing, which is that an ICE and transmission are great big hunks of metal while electric motors are rather smaller hunks of metal. Best numbers I can find are around 5 kW/kg for electric, so a 100 kW (134 HP) motor would weigh around 20kg (plus probably a few more KG of various bits of wiring, cooling etc). An equivalent petrol engine would be around 200kg (diesel engine would be heavier), and add another 50-80kg for the transmission.

So for a dual-motor electric car with 100kWh of this new solid-state battery (approx 500-550 km range), around 250-300kg for battery + motors. For a similair size and power ICE car would have 250-300 kg would probably cover the weight of engine + transmission + full tank (say 600-700 km range). Diesel engine would be heavier but longer range.

Bottom line is that ICEs are still marginally better than this (projected, not real yet!) battery vehicle (especially in terms of quick refuelling which I haven't touched on), but the trend is very clearly in favour of battery. ICEs are very mature, there is almost no room for improvement in efficiency or cost-cutting. I wouldn't be surprised if by 2030 we have battery cars that are at least as good as ICE cars in terms of power, range, efficiency and weight, and possibly even in terms of charging time. By 2035-2040 they might also be cheaper as well as better.

jmch Silver badge

Energy density

Not sure if it's intentionally misleading, but specifying the energy density in Wh/l rather than Wh/kg *does* make it seem more impressive. 900Wh/l is probably around 400-450Wh/kg (which is still, by the way, VERY impressive seeing as current-best mass produced Lithium batteries are around 250Wh/kg). That might also be the energy density for an individual cell not for the battery as a whole, which could be less.

Regarding the charging power "charge to percent capacity in nine minutes." is missing a number in there somewhere, but typically quoted measures are 10%-80%. Again, the actual power capacity depends on the packaging not only on the individual cell. Back-of-an-envelope, this enables a 100kWh battery at 250-300kg (which would shave around 200kg off the weight of current cars and increase efficiency), and loading 70kWh in <10 minutes would add >400km range (still not nearly as quick as ICE but getting mighty close). In this case of course, they had better start working on a network of the 500kW-1MW chargers that would be required to fully use these.

And making it safer is always a plus even without the big step forward in energy and power density.

So *if* they can mass-produce this to spec by 2027 (and at reasonable cost, which isn't mentioned!!), it's a huge step forward.

Lawsuit claims gift card fraud is the gift that keeps on giving, to Google

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Re: To sum up ...

"Google (and many other businesses like phone companies) are receiving the proceeds of crime. It's very simple. "

No, I don't think it's as simple as that. Google are not making money at the point that the card is redeemed, they do it at the point of sale, ie if I buy a $50 Google Play card, that $50 minus a small seller commission goes to Google, and I am in possession of a 1-time code that grants me $50 worth of goods on Google Play. Once the code is redeemed eg by buying an App off Play Store, Google will send 70% of the purchase value to the developer and keep it's usual 30% fee. But there is really no way that Google can police whether a code entered into Play has been scammed off the original purchaser.

Maybe Google need to make it much clearer on the packaging etc that the card is only redeemable in the Play Store, code is valid once only, and absolutely not to give the code to anyone else (or to be aware that giving someone the code is equivalent to giving them the card value). And there should be better mechanisms for users to for example block gift card purchases linked to their accounts. But if a scammer convinces me to give them the code, I am the one being scammed, so if the money isn't recoverable from the scammer, why should Google cover it? Look at it another way, if Google were to refund the value of the card to anyone who said "hey I bought a card but someone scammed the code off me", it would be an invitation for scammers to make such fake claims themselves directly to Google.

Now, there is one other issue to raise, which is if Google's voucher system is generating codes that are guessable - then fraudsters can guess a code, and use it if it is correct, active and not redeemed yet. If that is the case it is certainly Google's responsibility (but in that case it's a serious flaw that would destroy the whole voucher business)

EU users can't update 3rd party iOS apps if abroad too long

jmch Silver badge

Re: I hope they get sued out of existance

"Citizens of a given country are only protected / subjected to the laws of that country while they are within its borders."

Go tell that to any US citizen living outside of the US, they might have some IRS-related expletives to direct at you!!

Copilot can't stop emitting violent, sexual images, says Microsoft whistleblower

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Well, duh!! If it's trained on material it found on the internet *of course* it's going to be chock-full of scantily-clad ladies!!

jmch Silver badge

Robo-corp-speak

"we have established in-product user feedback tools and robust internal reporting channels to properly investigate, prioritize and remediate any issues,"

The guy apparently spent weeks trying to get his feedback listened to, this sounds completely like corporate bullshit waffle....

...although to be fair, based on my experience of big corporations, "we have established in-product user feedback tools and robust internal reporting channels " and "employee spent weeks trying to find a way to report what he found" are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I can easily imagine "robust internal reporting channels" that have been developed in some committee ages before, written to a Sharepoint site somewhere, sent out an incomprehensible link to it to then-current staff (most of whom probably ignored it) and failed to include any mention of it to new hires, so the higher-ups *think* there's a reporting channel just because they checked some boxes on a to-do list but in practice hardly anyone in the company knows that it's there or how it's supposed to work. (and the cynical might say it's by design so the higher-ups can claim reasonable ignorance)

US and Europe try to tame surveillance capitalism

jmch Silver badge

Re: Just ban tracking/targeting

"if the products were indeed as good as advertised, advertisement wouldn't be necessary in the first place"

This is not strictly true, word of mouth is great but by itself isn't going to get the brand recognition to allow a vast / vastly increased customer base. There certainly IS a non-zero value both to businesses and to customers of some sort of advertising.

The way I see it, the big issue isn't so much the advertisers as the ad brokers (primarily Google and Facebook), who on one hand are sucking up everyone's data to build detailed profiles (that are not necessary because it has been shown that micro-segmentation as currently implemented does not work), and are then conning ad buyers into spending more for these ineffective segmented views, and then double-conning them because they also own the ad exchanges and can therefore artificially set any price they can justify, and then triple-conning them because there is no independent way that advertisers can verify that their ads are being seen by humans (or the specifically targeted humans) at all.

On the one hand it's up to advertisers to be smart enough to stop advertising through the ad brokers that are ripping them off and realise they could get the same results with traditional targeting ie advertise domain-specific goods/services on domain-specific websites, magazines, physical spaces. On the other hand it's up to users to block as much targeting as they can and lobby their politicians to outlaw indiscriminate data scraping.

World-plus-dog booted out of Facebook, Instagram, Threads

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Food for thought

"It's a well known scientific fact that food has no calories unless photographed and put on social media."

So it follows that a large majority of Register readers are underweight??

German defense chat overheard by Russian eavesdroppers on Cisco's WebEx

jmch Silver badge

Re: Huh?

"They talk about the Kerch bridge not being a significant military target, it's a civil structure..."

Except that it's the only overland connection between Russia and Crimea and allows Russian supplies to flow freely to the southern part of the front line without coming in range of Ukrainian weapons along the Northern part of the front line. As such it is a significant military target....

"... and yet Urkaine seems obsessed with blowing it up"

...and besides being a significant military target, the reason Ukraine are obsessed with blowing it up is that it is also a significant political / symbolic target. Putin made it a point to build the bridge ASAP as soon as he annexed Crimea, so blowing it up is a poke in the eye for the Kremlin. Besides that, it is the only connection between Crimea and mainland Russia that is not part of the internationally-recognised territory of Ukraine.

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Paranoia Is Mandatory In 2024!!

Very interesting, I had heard of it but had no idea it went so deep. Very interesting that Belgacom top brass did not allow their security consultants to investigate the hacked Cisco routers and instead left that to Cisco themselves - that strongly indicates a Cisco-installed or Cisco-approved backdoor, with Belgacom board or C-level leaned on politically at a very high level to avoid that going public.

jmch Silver badge
Happy

Re: Paranoia Is Mandatory In 2024!!

"who would bother listening in on Belgians?"

That brought a laugh!!!

But on a more serious note, lots of important EU institutions in Brussels

jmch Silver badge

Re: Huh?

Totally mixing up 2 seperate issues....

Yes, referring to German military as Nazis is a slur, and it's obvious propaganda from a Russian point of view - unite the locals through a perceived outside attack.

Re misinformation.... I agree that, as confirmed by German government, the call is authentic, however they also expressed reservations as to whether the call was completely unmodified. 45+ minutes is plenty of material to AI-sample the participants' voices and get them to add a few select words here and there that can change the meaning of the conversation. Also plenty of material to selectively edit. So whether it is "misinformation" depends on a number of contextual factors. And of course the Russians are only going to leak anything that makes the Germans look bad and can be used to paint themselves as innocent victims.

None of this changes the big picture - it's the Russians who are the aggressors, invading a neighbouring state on the pretext of protecting their fellow countrymen minority in a small region of that country. If you want to talk Nazis, that's textbook Hitler-invading-western-Czechoslovakia tactics right there.

Cruise's valuation halved after its driverless car hit and dragged a woman

jmch Silver badge

Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

"The real question is : how much other information is going to be biased and transformed with Google AI ?"

Absolutely. at this point, you can't really trust anything the model tells you (I mean, I know it's a statistical mashup model that can't be 100% trusted anyway, but at least I could have expected that it could give close-enough answers on most topics to act as a solid starting point)

jmch Silver badge

Re: "We've always sought to give users helpful, accurate, and unbiased information in our products"

"No problem ever got fixed by pretending it doesn't exist, and no problem that ever was fixed stayed that way if people started pretending it had never existed in the first place."

True, but what Google is doing here is *inventing* stuff to either make a problem seem more severe, or because they think *other people* are too stupid/racist/unwoke/etc to *really* understand what's going on and therefore have to be manipulated / subtly brainwashed until they see the light. That is absolutely not OK!!

Amazon goes nuclear, acquires Cumulus Data's atomic datacenters for $650M

jmch Silver badge

Buy existing vs build new

While it's great that Amazon is looking to expand it's access to renewable and carbon-free power, simply buying existing capacity makes zero net difference both environmentally and to the general power supply.... better build your own! Although one would expect in a free market environment that such purchases will encourage power providers to invest more into nuclear.

American Express admits card data exposed and blames third party

jmch Silver badge

Re: AMEX subspot baby

Not been using Amex that long myself, but never had any problems either. Quite the opposite, when placing an order to an obscure delivery site, I got a call from their customer services to confirm it was legit, so they have some sort of screening to flag suspicious transactions (even if it does sometimes as in my case generate false positives, I'd rather that than having fraudulent charges against my card)

In any case, what Amex disclosed (attacks through 3rd-party merchants) are attack vectors that could, I guess, affect all cards (ie also Mastercard and Visa, but also debit cards)... so maybe Amex is the only one disclosing them because of the Massachusets statutory requirements? Or Visa and Mastercard are also disclosing similair breaches but it's not that noteworthy?

HDMI Forum 'blocks AMD open sourcing its 2.1 drivers'

jmch Silver badge

Re: media on NAS [Ripping Backups]

Absolutely this. Discs don't last forever, even under normal circumstances. Digital copies aren't guaranteed to last either, but can be backed up, even offsite if necessary, moved from device to device and so on. And it has already been established in case law* that backing up of one's own private copy is not infringing

*might differ in other jurisdictions!!

Chinese 'connected' cars are a national security threat, says Biden

jmch Silver badge

" conduct an investigation into connected vehicles with technology from countries of concern"

...as you imply, all connected cars should be subject to the same safeguards

"Why restrict it to Chinese connected cars?"

It's election year!

Google to reboot Gemini image gen in a few weeks after that anti-White race row

jmch Silver badge

The problem that many wokeists don't see is that 'people of color', 'white', 'black' etc have ceased to have any meaning, *especially* in places like the US which is a giant melting pot. There is a huge and growing number of people in the US with mixed heritage. It is vanishingly unlikely, in fact, that there is a majority of people in the US whose great-great-grandparents are 16/16ths the same ethnicity. And the 'racial' categories make no sense. Some Indians are black, some are white, most are on a vast range. North Africans are considered 'white' but they are very different from Northern European whites (and indeed, rewind a century and the debate in the US was whether to allow immigration from Southern Europe rather than only Northern Europe, and the people being discriminated against were the Italians, Greeks etc). "Hispanic" makes completely no sense as a classification, lumping as it does any person from South and Central America, but also, actual Spanish people, who are otherwise as completely Caucasian as most of western Europe. 'Black' includes African Americans, Africans, Aborigines, and large swathes of southern Asia, South America and the Caribbean.

You want to be not racist and diverse? Just drop race classifications altogether, and judge individuals on their own merit!

jmch Silver badge

"Developers must make a conscious effort to create models that produce diverse and fair results"

It seems that ACCURACY of results is being sacrificed in the name of 'fairness', which is pretty stupid especially considering that there is no real way to determine 'fairness'. And if I know that Google is poisoning my search prompts in order to promote diversity of people in images, what else is going on under the covers that they're not telling? If I do a search for a politician they like, is it going to hide unflattering news about them and show me only nice things? And the opposite if I search for some politician they don't like? If I do a search for Google failures, is it going to whitewash over them? If I do a search for Apple or Microsoft, is it going to prioritise articles that show their rivals in unfavourable light?

The bottom line is, we all already knew that Google were inserting paid links into their search results, but we knew to look for the tiny 'ad' tag, and maybe there still was some expectation of accuracy in the search rankings (which, if anyone remembers, is the very reason Google rose to prominence in the first place). From now on, there is no trusting any of their search results, nor even anything like DuckDuckGo (which adds a privacy layer to Google results but still returns Google results for searches).

For the first time in close to 2 decades, we need a completely new search engine.

Google sends Gemini AI back to engineering to adjust its White balance

jmch Silver badge

Re: Can't think why...

"Building in implicit bias is the last thing DEI should be about"

You haven't been paying attention. "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" is the 'public face' of the moral vacuum of the new radical left wing. Because after all, who would argue against inclusion? But the reality is that under the covers, the new doctrine is, essentially, an inverse racism which is basically Marxist in the sense that the individual does not matter, it only matters what group (and therefore what minority) a person can be assigned to.

"Building in implicit bias" isn't how it works only because teh bias isn't implicit, it's explicit. Black ranks above Native American, then East Asian, Latino, and last of all white. Women rank above men. Trans trumps gay, gay trumps straight. It doesn't even matter if many of the categories are in and of themselves, broadly irrelevant. If you are a black daughter of wealthy West Africans who emigrated to the US this century you are deemed to be as underprivileged as a ghetto-born slave descendent (and therefore it is your right to be actively favoured specifically because of your race and gender). If you're the white son of a trailer-trash meth-head you are deemed to be highly priviliged and should be actively discriminated against.

Apple promises to protect iMessage chats from quantum computers

jmch Silver badge

Re: How long?

It depends on the timescale. Things that happened 10-20 years ago, there's probably actionable information in there somewhere. The further back you go, the more likely it's just going to be of interest only to historians and internet trolls looking to score points in a weird niche argument that nobody really cares about.

"Putin has a way of collecting that encrypted message, and holds onto it, and 10 years later he can decrypt it. Now he knows who is to blame for that proof getting out, and that guy is going to be dead soon."

Sure, I get the argument, and probably whistleblowers will want security that's going to last 50+ years. But I like the construction of your sentence in the way that "that guy" dead in 10 years could refer to Putin, who is 72 now!

More seriously, once not only the message content but also much of the metadata can be encrypted or obscured, the attacks you describe become unfeasable. If a government doesn't know who's phone / email address / IP address belongs to whom, then it can only really target people who don't take measures to obscure these (mostly relatively easy to get e burner phone / throwaway email address / VPN), or else attempt to store every single email, instant message etc etc being sent in the world for a few decades. We're probably talking Yottabytes here. Then once you CAN decrypt them, good luck filtering through the lot for some useful info. We're not talking 'needle in a haystack', we're talking 'bacterium in a haystack'

Gelsinger splits Intel in two to advance foundry vision

jmch Silver badge

Re: A bold vision

"All that administrative overhead is now going to be doubled"

I wouldn't be so sure of that.... admin overhead doesn't really scale linearly with organisation size. Given the amount of overlapping cross-organisational communications, policies etc it might well be that it scales quadratically if not exponentially, so the overhead of 2 large organisations *might* be equivalent or less than the admin overhead for 1 gigantic one.

Boeing-backed air taxi upstart Wisk plans to fly you across town at UberX prices by 2030

jmch Silver badge

Traffic is easier in the air

"...reluctance is understandable given the recent spate of accidents from autonomous cars, which don't even leave the ground and travel far slower than aircraft"

While the height factor would make any potential accident in an air taxi far more serious (indeed probably fatal) than a small prang in a robo-car, autonomous navigation is far, far easier for vehicles that are free to move in 3 dimensions in a much less congested space. Of course there needs to be a sort of local air-traffic controller, and as with other aircraft it is the takeoff and landing that are the riskiest, rather than flight itself. If it's regulated by aviation authorities to the same standard as aircraft (hopefully also to a better extent than FAA-Boeing!!!), combined with the incentives from the company side (essentially one single crash with passenger fatality could send the company instantaneously bust) mean that I expect reliability to be quite high.

On the other hand, delivering flights at the same cost point as an Uber is a WTF?? However much volume the flying taxis are produced in, it's never going to be as cheap as a saloon car, and it clearly takes more energy to go from A to B in the air than on the ground. That's not accounting for extra initial calls for aviation regulation, and additional ongoing costs for the traffic management. In fact the company is probably betting on the fact that people are willing to pay (much) more than Uber prices to avoid traffic (not to mention the 'cool' factor)

Italy's military mulling space-based supercomputing cloud

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

Re: Free solar power ?

"That way they can have lasers as well."

So, military units of 2 soldiers and a shark??

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

Re: 100TB in orbit

" those vast distances that lay between the pub cafe-bar and the opera."

There really isn't such a thing as a pub in Italy!!

jmch Silver badge

Re: Free solar power ?

The solar power itself is free, but there is the cost of lifting all those solar panels into space. That's before even considering the processing, memory, comms and additional cooling which all have to be space-hardened (so costing much more than datacenter-grade kit), and all of which also needs to be lifted to space. There might be a bunch of reasons to want a datacenter in space, but "lower cost" ain't one of them!!

Trident missile test a damp squib after rocket goes 'plop,' fails to ignite

jmch Silver badge

Possibly, but they still have no way of REALLY knowing that "had this been a real mission rather than a test, the launch would have been successful"

And hopefully, we will never know, either!

Staff say Dell's return to office mandate is a stealth layoff, especially for women

jmch Silver badge

"Sorry, how can you do that while you're working?"

Mostly remote-working parent here.

I am required to do my 8.25 hours a day in any convenient timeslot. In practice that means that a lot of those hours are between 9-5 to be able to have meetings with other people. But also in practice it means that I can do most or all of my work between 8-6 and still have time when if necessary I can drop off / pick up kids and do some errands while shops/offices are actually open

Remote work would lose much of it's appeal if I *had* to be at my desk during fixed and inflexible hours

China could be doing better at censorship, think tank finds

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Unfunded mandates

""The practice of imposing unfunded mandates on [government entity] has resulted in suboptimal [results]"

So politicians are the same the world over, and no matter what political system they are under, when it comes to them wanting unrealistic implementation of their utopian policy. Who'd have thunk it??

Europe's datacenter dilemma is that hyperscalers are hogging them all

jmch Silver badge

Re: Fixes for night time solar

For some applications that don't require short latency, could work, but for a lot of applications not. Though I guess it's easier to send bits rather than Watts halfway around the world

jmch Silver badge

Re: +601MW demand last year

"...how many solar panels do you need to satisy that demand ?"

At 200W/sqm, 3 million sqm worth, which is 3 square km. Even doubling that to account for gaps between panels, 6 sq km is trivial in the context of the whole of Europe (total area >10M sq km).

At $200/sqm (2023 costs are $1/W for utility-scale installations), that's $600 million, again seems like gigantic, but in the context of Europe-wide spending, ie, to service a market of over 700 million people) is not a lot.

The problem is that those bits need to be pushed 24/7/365, so you need nighttime power, so, windmills?? Even running with the absurd notion that windmills are fully operational at night year-round, you would need a similair or higher area and cost, simply to provide nighttime power. And of course specify a maximum power at about double that to allow for cloudy days and days with light wind. And add to that a gigantic (and far, far, more costly) battery farm for when there's no wind at all, and your costs (and lead times) have snowballed into territory where the supposedly far more expensive nuclear power now looks like the cheapest option.

It strikes me, in fact, that the preference of solar/wind over nuclear, in prioritising lower cost over reliability, is a reflection of the modern IT industry!

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

jmch Silver badge

Re: Star wars?

Mostly true, except that EU GDP spent on 'defense' is AFAIK 2% or less, relying on US to do most of the NATO heavy lifting. And the bloc alignment isn't so black/white. If push comes to shove, it will most likely be China vs US over the pacific, and Russia vs UK + EU in Europe. Some of the bloc partners will help out, but not as significantly as to make much difference (Australia / Canada / Japan won't really contribute much to European defense).

Even if UK and rest of EU were to increase their defense spending to 3% of GDP (and given the uproar caused in the EU when increasing military spending is suggested, it's difficult to imagine going over 3%), 3% of UK + EU is still $0.67 trillion, which is next to nothing vis-a-vis China, but about 40% of Russia's total GDP. But Russia won't hesitate to use 10%+ of it's own GDP for military use if it feels threatened (which, given Putin's paranoia, is always)

The other major issue is industrial capacity.... if the EU are spending 0.67 trillion on defense, who is it going to? Some European companies, but I would guess a big chunk would be to US companies, and a hefty wedge would be misspent in procurement, and many orders would have very long lead times. I agree with you that long-term it would increase the industrial base in US/EU and erode that in China, but that would take decades to realise itself. And spending a $ in US/EU is getting you much less bang for your buck than spending it in Russia/China, so even with repatriating a lot of industry from China to US/EU will have significant economic cost for US/EU not only China.

jmch Silver badge

Re: That was my thought, too.

"Then Trump comes along and seems to love Russia"

There is only one thing Trump loves, and that is Trump. Any other entities are 'loved' simply to the extent that he can personally profit from that 'love' (real or perceived)

jmch Silver badge

Re: Russian diplomacy:

Some pretty big things missing from your timeline there, particularly Yanukovych's refusal, under Russian pressure, to follow the democratically-elected parliament's decision to sign an EU accession agreement. Putin sees any western lobbying of Ukraine as 'undue foreign interference', but of course he feels free to interfere himself whenever he wants. When his puppet was ousted and the new government put in place measures resisting Russian influence, Putin invaded Crimea (with Russian soldiers pretending to be local Crimeans )

AI won't take our jobs and it might even save the middle class

jmch Silver badge

As I already said "people in the UK" <> humanity.

And whatever is happening in the UK has far more to do with late-stage capitalism than anything that happened with the development of the Internet, nor with anything to do with any future developments in AI