* Posts by jmch

3632 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2017

Think of our cafes and dry cleaners, says Ohio as budget slashes WFH for govt workers

jmch Silver badge

Re: It was only a matter of time

"Oh no, won't someone think of the commercial landlords!"

Yeah, if they pivot to residential they will have to be content with 5% rather than 10% returns, how will they ever survive!!

jmch Silver badge

" repurpose those redundant office buildings as residential"

Yes, this... we need to accept that the 'old' way of designing city spaces based around central work locations just isn't the way forward anymore. There are other reasons why people might want to live in cities (culture, nightlife, friends, basically everything that requires density or network effect) and will continue to do so, and also environmental concerns about land use sort of require more people to be living in less space. But more WFH means that you don't need the surface area per person of flat + office space, at most you will average out to slightly bigger flat for everyone doing WFH, but less (home + office) area occupancy per person overall, which is also a win.

Public transport and all sorts of ways cities are structured can also be optimised if cities are more 'divided' into districts that are largely self-contained rather than have a 'center' and 'hyper-centre' around which everything else is concentrated.

jmch Silver badge

The real reason...

"excuses can be made about the importance of coffee houses, fast food joints, and laundry facilities, or how you can't advance your career from afar, but the bottom line is that property values and their investors' bank accounts are on the line"

The real reason of enforced worked from office right there. The managers, C-level execs, board and shareholders do not give a flying f**k about whether it's cheaper and better for their employees to work from home, nor about the local businesses next to the offices and the people working there. That's impact of hundreds or thousands of $$, chump change to them (even though multiplied by many thousands of people). Doesn't matter so much to them whether it's more efficient to work from an office (it really isn't). Either way a bit of efficiency gain or loss is a few millions.

But big blocks of commercial real estate are tens or hundreds of millions, that's real money, and needs immediate action!!

One year after Roe v Wade overturned and 'uterus surveillance' looks grim

jmch Silver badge

Re: How is it an "extreme" position

"A random guy (it could only be a guy) suddenly thinks he's a qualified OB/GYN"

Yes, I'm a guy, I confess!! Firstly, apologies, I was trying to be a bit tongue-in-cheek without considering the trauma of whoever actually goes through these cases.

"LOL, before I went on the pill to stabilize my periods, six-MONTH gaps weren't out of the question."

So in these cases, how did you know if it was a gap in the period or if you were pregnant?? If your answer is going to circle back to "No time or energy for sex for a few years.", then (a) Sorry you had to pass through such a tough time, hope it's better for you now, and (b) maybe you can actually read what I wrote which is: "If a woman hasn't had a period in 6-8 weeks **and had sex... during that period**, she needs to get a pregnancy test".

OK, so maybe she doesn't *need* to get a pregnancy test. My point is that if it turns out that a woman realises she's pregnant only very late in the pregnancy, 'not knowing before' isn't a good argument to allow late-stage abortions, because a combination of sex+no period should be a warning sign of possible pregnancy even for women who have very irregular periods.

jmch Silver badge

Re: The USSA police state

I might be wrong here but I seem to remember reading about a concept where anyone born of a Jewish mother is considered Jewish (I can't recall if that also applies to father). In theory Jewish people at least historically were only 'supposed' to marry and have kids with other Jewish people but surely not always in practice especially last century or so. Therefore however small minority of Jewish blood anyone has, they are still considered Jewish. I guess that's consistent with most mixed-race Americans being considered 'black' even though they are genetically far more white than black.

jmch Silver badge

Re: How is it an "extreme" position

"How is it an "extreme" position... to allow abortions up until the time a fetus could normally survive outside the womb?"

According to me, it's an extreme position to allow abortions *after* the time a baby could normally survive outside the womb. Note that being able to survive outside the womb makes it, in my eyes at least, a baby and not a fetus. BUT because exactly how far along isn't always 100% known (it's counted from previous period), I would err a couple of weeks on the side of caution.

"Some women with irregular periods don't realize they are pregnant until they are several months along"

I've heard of irregular periods, but "several months" irregular?? Sorry, that doesn't cut it. If a woman hasn't had a period in 6-8 weeks and had sex (even protected, accidents happen) during that period, she needs to get a pregnancy test. If necessary set up a programme to get free and discreet pregnancy tests for anyone who asks.

"Maybe 13 or better 15/16 weeks would be workable if ALL the stupid pointless restrictions about waiting periods, multiple visits, needing all kinds of certifications for incredibly unlikely cases that would be referred to a hospital anyway, etc. were tossed out."

Absolutely!! Again, some reasonableness is needed. A visit followed by 1-week waiting period allows someone to really not take spur-of-the-moment decisions they might regret later. Multiple weeks, multiple visits, heaps of paperwork etc are just willfully obstructive.

"punitive laws that make it risky for a doctor to provide care..."

Should not have to be 'proven' that a mother is at risk of dying. If there is a reasonably high statistical chance based on medical case history that a mother could suffer severe illness / injury, it should be her call. These things should be able to be quantified eg X%+ chance of a permanent disability / long-term impairment / risk of death

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Both Roe v Wade and the reversal of it came about because Democrats are too afraid of their left-wing extremists who promote abortion up to 24-26 weeks (basically right up to the point where the baby can survive, because at that point it is a baby, not a foetus), and Republicans are too afraid of their right-wing extremists who promote no abortion ever (even in cases of rape, incest, foetus abnormalities and danger to the mother). A vast, silent majority of Americans (around 60%+ I believe) are in favour of controlled abortion (more or less unconditional in first trimester ie 13 weeks, and in medical cases thereafter - similair to Europe though varies a bit depending on country).

The polarisation of left v right has left reasonable politicians unable to express reasonable views, because the reasonable middle in this case becomes BOTH a woman-enslaver AND a baby-murderer

jmch Silver badge

Negative data

" Google pledged to update its location history system so that visits to medical clinics and similarly sensitive places are automatically deleted."

So there is a trail of locations, then a gap within a standard distance from an abortion clinic, and then the trail picks up again some time later at the same standard distance from the clinic. Yes, that's perfectly private isn't it??

Google can't have it both ways, either they are collecting this intensely private data which can then be abused, or if they really want to protect their users, stop collecting it at all

First pushback against EU's Digital Services Act and it's not Google

jmch Silver badge

Re: Who!?

They are indeed very big in Central Europe as the 10 billion+ revenue figure might have indicated.

They basically have taken Netflix's old DVD business model to fashion.... you order the clothes / shoes you want to try, keep the ones you like and send back (for free) the ones that don't fit / you don't like. The shipping costs more than offset the cost of having a high-street store (and transport / energy costs be damned*), and the volume allows them a much lower margin (and pricing) than high street stores.

*Although to be fair maybe the heating / lighting costs of 10000 physical stores + the travel costs of customers to the stores + the shipping to all the stores are, in fact, higher than shipping all the clothes between a central warehouse and the end client

jmch Silver badge

Is it a VLOP??

"The company also contests the unequal treatment resulting from the absence of a clear and consistent methodology to assess whether a company is a "Very Large Online Platform""

...and...

"The Commission has previously said it defines a VLOP as a company that reaches 45 million users or more, with Zalando saying on its website that it serves over 50 million "active" customers."

Seems like the Commission does indeed have a "clear and consistent methodology", and Zalando are by their own admission/boast falling squarely into that category.

" the European Commission "did not take into account the majority retail nature" of its business model and argued that it "does not present a 'systemic risk' of disseminating harmful or illegal content from third parties.""

If that is indeed the case, surely they can easily demonstrate that they don't spread misinformattion etc, and being regulated directly by the EU rather than by Germany will make no difference

Amazon Prime too easy to join, too hard to quit, says FTC lawsuit

jmch Silver badge

a 'credit rating' is not a thing out of the US (maybe also the UK??).

Nevertheless, if you signed up for a service you are legally liable for the cost, so simply cancelling the card isn't enough. You have to at least show a good-faith attempt to contact them to cancel. Best would be an email stating clearly your account number / identifier, date, and wish to cancel effective immediately or at X date (some subscriptions might have cancellation windows and/or notice periods).

'Joan Is Awful' Black Mirror episode rebounds on Netflix

jmch Silver badge

Re: SHOW ME WHERE I SIGNED

"clicking on an OK button is NOT a signature"

I agree with your sentiment BUT, as has been pointed out by others already, clicking on an OK button is equivalent to a signature if (a) it's clear what you are clicking "OK" for, and (b) it's not otherwise illegal, or unenforceable due to a conflict with actual law.

If, for example, you sign up for a service that has a monthly subscription and click OK, that is equivalent to a signature

jmch Silver badge

Re: "it is so easy to forget that terms and conditions are, in fact, a contract"

"But if you've signed up to it, you've explicitly given your consent to them changing things."

No, that is absolutely not the case, and unnotified changes are unenforceable*. Companies changing their T&Cs are required to inform you. If you actually read them and if you find something new that you don't like, you are free to cancel / leave. If you don't object, it's assumed you accept (that's the bit I don't really agree with). If you don't read them at all then that's on you.

*Of course the chances of your finding the exact T&Cs you actually signed up for are remote unless they've been captured on the Internet Archive / wayback machine

jmch Silver badge
Thumb Up

Re: Great spoof

Brilliant episode....

...also good to know - Any terms and conditions that conflict with any actual laws are void and unenforceable. (That's why most contracts include a severability clause through which having one clause voided doesn't void the entire thing). Many companies know this but rely on their customers not knowing it and/or not willing to 'lawyer up'.

In any scenario similair to the 'Joan is awful' episode, GDPR or equivalent legislation allows a data subject to withdraw their consent at any time.

I AM surprised, though, that many people's takeaway from that episode was to check Netflix's T&Cs because by far the most disturbing takeaway from the episode wasn't the abuse of T&Cs, it was the total surveillance that allowed near-real-time spying on every single aspect of the subject's life.

Near Field Communication to get longer, stronger – better at contactless

jmch Silver badge

Re: increased range needs to be optional

"Firstly, that's one reason why phones are more secure. They identify the user and need a positive action before any payment can be taken."

That 'positive action' is exactly what is always needed to make any payment. Allowing a card to be read from a distance larger than right adjacent to the reader (about 2-3 cm and certainly not more than 5) increases possible risk of abuse. And as many people have already pointed out, the card has no idea how far away it is from the reader, only how strong the signal is that it's getting.

jmch Silver badge

"Longer and Stronger" seems to me to be actually backward steps in this respect.

If it's wireless charging, the further away, the more inefficient it will be. What's the idea here, to saturate a room with so much power that your phone will charge while it's in your pocket?

And with regards to contactless payment, one of the most important things has to be that payments can only be made with a positive action on the users' part, hence the 'tapping'. Giving a POS terminal the capacity to 'reach' into your wallet or your phone and take a payment is nuts.

ASML caught in Dutch oven with China export restrictions

jmch Silver badge

Re: I wonder if...

China isn't specifically named. It's likely to be drafted as a limit on countries that are defined by certain characteristics eg lack of IP protection. Of course China can complain about being characterised in a certain way, but has a track record of that kind of behaviour.

jmch Silver badge

Re: An Error?

The Dutch government are also likely to have faced pressure from the rest of the EU, as well as internally, possibly even from ASML themselves (who might want to restrict Chinese access to their machines for fear of them being reverse-engineered and copied, but prefer to have diplomatic cover)

Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson

jmch Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

"It is also Big Brother’s wet dream, but admittedly practical in everyday life."

And yet we hardly look at the Scandinavian countries and think of them as oppressive dictatorial hellholes.... so maybe properly-implemented ID cards don't actually lead to privacy armageddon?? Maybe, just maybe, it isn't the ID cards or the unique identifiers going with them, but the people running the systems, the checks in place on the systems, and the rule of law that keeps in check any potential abusers of the systems??

jmch Silver badge

Re: Unique keys

"...for cultural reasons like picking a name that mono-lingual Brits can pronounce."

There's a bunch of other cultural reasons beyond pronunciation. In many Hispanic cultures the mother's maiden surname is added on (which in many western systems is incorrectly recognised as the second part of a double-barrelled family name). In many Slavic cultures the name has a patronymic besides a family name (which in many western systems is incorrectly recognised as a second given name). Females usually get an 'a' tagged on to the family name, so members of the same family have different family names depending on their gender. And AFAIK Lithuanian surnames also have different endings for males and females with the added twist that married females have yet another different ending, so father, mother and daughter would all have 3 differently-spelled versions of the same surname (which for computer's purposes qualify as 3 different surnames)

Another potential source of problems is having a name that in your native tongue that uses letters from a non-Latin alphabet which can be transcribed in multiple different ways into Latin alphabet. Or a language that doesn't use a phonetic alphabet at all, in which case the names are simply made up (as is the case for many westernised Chinese names)

BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI

jmch Silver badge
Devil

Re: Useful for staging accidents

You must have fun on Halloween!!

38 percent of tech job interviews offered exclusively to men: report

jmch Silver badge

"Choose the people of whatever age, sex, racial background, etc who are best suited to the job"

Yes BUT candidate selection processes are not very good at finding the people who are best suited for the job, and are usually limited by timing, geography, and what they are willing to pay to who their best-guess would be the best fir out of a limited pool of candidates about whom the only knowledge you have is 2 sheets of paper and half an hour on a video call. That makes the thought process "I'm good at this, so someone like me is probably good at this" quite common, even if unconscious

'We hate what you’ve done with the place – especially the hate' Australia tells Twitter

jmch Silver badge

Re: What type of "hate speech"?

I somehow suspect that both of you are making the same point, just lost in the confusion.

None of that list of "statements that aren't hateful but some people might interpret as that" would ever be thought of as hateful by a child

jmch Silver badge

Re: What type of "hate speech"?

"Don't be a dickhead" is excellent advice, however there is surely a category of comments that are definitely dickhead-ish and offensive without actually being hate speech.

I'd like any platform I'm posting on to keep to the higher standard (The Register comment pages are an excellent example of mostly dickhead-free behaviour even in the midst of some pretty sensitive topics), but having that as a legal standard for all platforms is probably setting the bar too high

jmch Silver badge

"Why are the individuals/organisations that make the comments not being held legally responsible for their own comments if they are *unlawful* rather than simply distasteful?"

A number of reasons, but mainly

(a) some platforms allow anonymity, semi-anonymity or pseudonymity, in which case the platform can nix a post or even block the user even if they don't know who the user is in real life. For tech-savvy haters it's probably fairly trivial to set up a throwaway account over a VPN, fire off a few offensive comments, and dlete teh account. Heck, I'm pretty sure there are dark corners on the internet where you could pay someone a couple of satoshis to do it for you.

(b) local laws vary and posting can be done internationally, so a poster in, say, Saudi Arabia who posts a comment inciting violence against gay people is not going to be even investigated, let alone tried/convicted for that in Saudi, it's simply not illegal there (not to mention it's in support of official government policy). For the same reason, such a person would never be extradited to a country where making such comments is a criminal offence, and even less so if the offence is 'just' a civil one.

So if the law of a country can't target hate speech at the point of origin, it can target them at the point of consumption (where they certainly do have jurisdiction).

Funnily enough, when it comes to these large online platforms, they are happy to sell the idea to their users and to their advertisers that they can customise exactly what a user sees based on their history, preferences etc, but when it comes to filtering out hate speech it's suddenly far too onerous???

jmch Silver badge

Re: A poop emoji

"Tesla 3 Long Range does 0-60 in 3.9 seconds..."

Which is pretty ridiculous, since 99% of their customers would probably be extremely happy with 0-60 in 8 seconds if it meant increasing the range by 10%

MIT discovery suggests a new class of superconductors

jmch Silver badge
Pint

Hey Boffins

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Have a cold one!!!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Room-temperature superconductors might still be science fiction, but even getting that at 'normal-ish' freezer temperatures would be a game-changer for many applications

Restaurant hired 'priest' to extract workplace confessions from staff

jmch Silver badge
Devil

Re: "If this "god" thing is so all powerful and all knowing..."

And if god always knew what you were going to do anyway, does that imply there is no free will?

jmch Silver badge

Re: Another job at risk - why confess to a priest when you can confess to God directly?

"If this "god" thing is so all powerful and all knowing, why are priests, confessions and attendant mumbo-jumbo a thing in the first place? "

*In principle* the point of confession isn't to let God know about your sins as he/she/it already knows. The point is for the "sinner" to admit their "wrongs", first to themselves and then to others. While a lot of the surrounding details around confession and penance is indeed mumbo-jumbo, there is actually a strong psychological insight to the process, which at it's core is very similar to modern therapy sessions.

Mark Zuckerberg would kick Elon Musk's ass, experts say

jmch Silver badge

Re: he starts his day with octopus, a bowl of ice cream, eight oatmeal biscuits, and a donut

"I certainly feel more guilty when eating cephalopod... “

That's why I have heavily cut back on eating octopus myself...

" just how delicious they actually are"

And that's why I have just cut back rather than stopped altogether

Where's my money?! Now USA Today publisher sues Google over online advertising

jmch Silver badge

Re: Actually ...

Just to keep numbers simple (not to mention very wildly approximate).... Let's say I could build a battery farm that charges for free when supply runs in excess of demand, and can then sell it at a high wholesale price when supply is low and demand high (say $400/MWh*)

Battery cost at volume is trending towards $100/kWh or $100,000/MWh, meaning I would need to charge / discharge them completely at optimal prices 250 times to break even. Given the real-world probability of less than full charge / discharge cycles, that charging isn't always going to be free, discharging isn't always going to be at optimum price (even more so since the larger my battery farm, the less the price I can get), and high-low difference isn't constant all year round, it would probably take 2-3 years just to break even on the battery cost alone, before considering massive infrastructure costs.

At current battery prices, even with optimal rates such a project could at best break even. (And I'm guessing the reason nobody is doing it yet is exactly that no-one can see a profitable way to do it yet)

*guesstimated based on https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/update/wholesale-markets.php

jmch Silver badge

Re: Feel the sympathy melt away

"The problem is, they didn't outsource the advertising voluntarily, it was outsourced away from them. Advetisers went to the platforms, because it was quicker & easier than negotiatig with millions of websites individually, so they had to use the exchanges Google's exchange or not use advertising at all."

That right there (slightly edited) is the core of the argument. Advertisers used to spend a mint before and they still do now. Even before the internet there were ad agencies, exactly because both advertisers and publishers want to have to deal with as few people as possible. Except there were a few agencies to deal with so they could get a fair market deal.

The real issue is Google's monopoly not just at one place but in 3 different chokepoints - through search they control the customer eyeballs, through doubleclick they control the ads, and through the auction mechanism (which IIRC they were shown to have rigged), they control exactly who sees what and who gets paid for what.

I would guess that ad agencies, like any of that sort of agent or intermediary, would have taken a cut of 10-20%. With adsense, Google takes a cut of 32-49% (that's straight from the horse's mouth, see link below).

https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/180195?hl=en

That's not even coming to the other elephant in the advertising room , which is that the only entity that knows what and how many ads are being served through what pages and to which users is Google, and advertisers just have to trust that the ad analytics are showing real numbers of ad impressions and clicks.

jmch Silver badge

Re: Actually ...

"...the more solar you add to the grid, the less valuable it becomes. It's supply and demand."

If it's simply supply and demand, surely you could say exactly the same about nuclear, oil, coal, gas, wind, hydro and indeed any and every means of generating electricity. In practice electrical demand is increasing and will continue to increase as more electric vehicles replace ICE ones, and more heat pumps replace boilers and furnaces.

" ...so many PV systems attached to the grid in the US Southwest right now that on bright, sunny days the price of electricity being generated can dip into the negative."

This is an issue with (a) grid distribution (the local grid has to go to negative charging because the grid infrastructure doesn't allow electricity to be 'exported' over long distances) and (b) lack of storage (no idea on this one, grid-scale electrical storage is at least half a century away).

The better option with solar is molten salt installation that provides less power overall BUT can provide it more evenly throughout day and night, thus smoothing out those peaks and troughs and also the wild price variations.

We just don't get enough time, contractor tasked with fact-checking Google Bard tells us

jmch Silver badge

Subverted use case??

Google's origin and raison d'etre as a search engine seems to have been turned upside down. It used to be that if I type "what are the side effects of drug X?", or "who is Mr Y?", I would get back multiple links to source material that I can easily find. If necessary I can quickly cross-check multiple sources. Inserting an LLM in between is of zero utility if I anyway have to crosscheck the output with a different source. Even worse if the LLM is unable to direct me to the source material (which it can't ever do because of how it works).

Bard, Chat-GPT etc etc are also pre-trained, meaning they are immediately out of date (therefore useless on current or recent events), and require gigantic amounts of processing power to deliver a search result that can be generated much more easily by a search engine's indexed search. While LLMs could be useful for generating (bland, grammatically correct but possibly inaccurate) sections of text, they are pretty useless as a search engine replacement.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

jmch Silver badge

Re: As luck would have it....

"L-2-R conversion isn't expensive..."

There are some huge LHD markets, not just the UK but India, Australia, Japan to mention just 3. There isn't any "conversion" involved, just a mirroring of the design (trivially easy in CAD). Most parts don't even need to be changed (AFAIK stalk and dashboard controls are the same whether RHD or LHD), and the few parts that need a mirrored version are anyway produced in such large amounts (because of the above mentioned large LHD markets) that they aren't any more expensive than the 'RHD' parts.

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Re: UK specific model?

"They'll design phones with snap on backs and glue them shut"

Last Christmas I got an underwater camera for my kid. It has a removable battery and SD card, covered by a simple sliding hatch secured by a tiny latch. It's not just 'splash-proof' or 'water-resistant', it's 'can be held and operated completely underwater for long stretches of time'. It was even pretty cheap.

Waterproofing a removable battery phone doesn't require any glue, nor much (if any) additional expense, just a decent design. The reason phone companies don't like removable batteries has nothing to do with waterproofing, it's to gouge customers on repairs, force them to upgrade after 2-3 years instead of 5-6, and making the case half a mm thinner (against any reason since beyond a certain slimness, it just makes the phone less comfortable to hold).

Elon Musk's Twitter moves were 'reaffirming' says Reddit boss amid API changes

jmch Silver badge

Re: He needs an icon -->

"All that hosting, server farms, bandwidth..."

None of that is any different from AWS, Azure, Apple, Google, Facebook, none of whom seem to have a problem making humongous profits and margins in the 30-40% range

"... offices in multiple countries, legal 'stuff', financials, interest on loans..."

None of that is any different from any big international company, all of whom can be and are highly profitable

"I have a feeling your estimates of salary costs don't cover the actual cost of staff."

Both my personal experience and external quick-search (link below) tell me those numbers *should be* in the ballpark. If the actual cost of staff was higher, Twitter were, on average, overpaying their staff compared to the value provided.

http://web.mit.edu/e-club/hadzima/how-much-does-an-employee-cost.html

Once again, I'm not making any claim that the financial side of Twitter is any more profitable now than it was before, but it almost certainly isn't worse off as a going concern using normal financial metrics. Not because it could be particularly healthy now, but because it was disastrously unhealthy before.

jmch Silver badge

Re: He needs an icon -->

"look at Twitter's past year and think "Cor! I wish that was happening to my business.", could they?"

With the giant caveat that I don't know the internal financial situation at Twitter, but they WERE losing money with revenues of 5 *billion* before the Musk takeover.

What I can work out from quick Googling is a current staff count of 3900 at average $150k. Call it close to $200k when you have to factor in employer social security, health insurance, bonus allocations.... comes to an annual wage bill of around 780M. Taking a (very generalised) estimate of staff costs being 40-50% of expenses, total expenses are less than $2bn, which means that even with half the revenue of pre-takeover days* would be comfortably profitable.

Pre-Musk, the headcount was 7500 employees, and even if the average cost to Twitter to employ them was $250k (totalling almost $1.9bn), it means either non-staff costs were well over 60% of costs, or the staff were on average overpaid compared to what they brought to the company. Either way, however successful or not it was as a platform, it was, financially, a shitshow.

Or to put it another way, pre-Musk Twitter was a cesspool that was deeply unprofitable, but loved by investors because, giant user base and somehow we'll make some money eventually (probably by selling our overpriced shares to the next mug rather than any hope of profit-sharing dividends when there's no inkling of profit). Now, it's a cesspool where a lot of the murky water has been drained out, leaving a far higher concentration of turds, but still with a pretty large user base and much lesser costs, ie it's more of a shitshow but might, just might, be able to turn a profit.

*Yes, that's a big assumption I know.

FCC questions ISPs' selective memory about data caps

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Re: Which century are we in? Data caps on residential connections?...

" ineffective regulation? a lack of actual competition in the marketplace? cartel behaviour from broadband providers? "

The answer is (d) all of the above

Google searchers from years past can get paid for pilfered privacy

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Location?

Not sure how it's going to work... Since this is searches from any OS / browser over a 7-year period, it's impossible to identify all of the potential claimants, nor will it be possible to prove that one is a valid claimant (even though in practice "did a Google search and clicked on a link while in the US over a 7-year period" is probably 95-99% of US adults, at least 200 million I would say). What will probably happen is that most people will (a) never even hear about it (b) most will not bother to jump through all the hoops for $7 (c) a bunch of applicants will be rejected by the administrators because paperwork and bureaucracy and, most of all (d) the administrators / lawyers will be taking their cut, as is usual with class actions.

So end result is probably $20 million divvied up between the lawyers and $4-5-ish dollars each to a million-ish people

EU boss Breton: There's no Huawei that Chinese comms kit is safe to use in Europe

jmch Silver badge

Why rip and replace?

Most of this kit will need replacing in the next 3-5 years anyway. Anything with a longer lifespan can be put on accelerated depreciation, rather than immediately writing off billions of Euros of working kit 'just in case the bogeyman'.

And since it isn't fair to target just China, simply mandate that strategic kit be made in EU, and then classify telecoms networks as strategic. No point sending billions to the US when you can get the kit from Nokia and Ericsson.

Now, as to where Nokia and Ericsson factories are located....

No-no cop: Illinois bans drones from using facial recognition or weapons

jmch Silver badge

Facial recognition restrictions?

"the law enforcement agency possesses reasonable suspicion that, under particular circumstances, swift action is needed to prevent imminent harm to life or to forestall the imminent escape of a suspect or the destruction of evidence."

Reasonable suspicion of possible le destruction of evidence covers 100% of use cases.

Refreshing to see that weapons ban is unequivocal and total, including non-lethal

Recipient of Europe's largest ever seed round doesn't even have a product

jmch Silver badge

Sirocco is, in fact, the exact opposite of Mistral, being a wind coming from the South-East.

AFAIK Mistral is particularly a cold NW wind, with sirocco being a warm, humid/sticky wind carrying warm air from N. Africa that has picked up a lot of moisture over the sea. On the other hand, variations of 'mistral' and 'sirocco' are in use in other parts of the Mediterranean and N. Africa, having originally being used to express the direction, and only later being adapted to refer to a specific type of wind.

Open the pod bay doors, GPT, and see if you're smart enough for the real world

jmch Silver badge
Terminator

Re: We should, within our limitations as humans, act responsibly

"I do not believe that I am a robot, but how can I tell?"

To abuse Shakspeare.... "If you cut me, do I not bleed?"

Although that doesn't exclude the possibility of....

<oblig. Austrian accent> "I'm a cybernetic organism. Living tissue over a metal endoskeleton." <\>

Florida man insists he didn't violate the law by keeping Top Secret docs

jmch Silver badge
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Re: What I cannot understand ...

Absolutely ego. The man in question (by the way, love the way the article identified the perp through a long long list of misdeeds rather then by name) is a narcissist egomaniac who believes that rules are for other people. Simply being told that he couldn't keep the documents is enough of a trigger for him to want to keep them.

US senators and spies spar over Section 702 warrantless surveillance

jmch Silver badge

Consequences, what consequences????

"...even stronger disciplinary action for those incidents deemed deliberate, reckless, or particularly egregious," Abbate said.

"Penalties, based on the facts, range up to dismissal from the agency.""

So what they are proposing is that anyone abusing this will be given a stern talking to. Actual consequences for repeated egregious violation is simply dismissal from one 3-letter agency, no doubt to be rehired in another 3-letter agency or law enforcement within the week. Unless the penalties are jail time for the perpetrators and jail time for those bosses whose negligence allows abuse, the abuse will continue as before.

Scientists think they may have cracked life support for Martian occupation

jmch Silver badge
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Re: May??

I completely agree that there's no point in boots on Mars before we have a much better handle on the technology, which we can develop further on Earth , LEO, or boots on the moon. Wanting to go is just dick-swinging. I was simply thinking of how possible a return trip was, not whether it was desirable.

"The relative orbital positions of mars and earth repeat roughly every 2 years."

If that's the case, that clinches the argument, and that's my new thing learnt for the day!

jmch Silver badge

Re: May??

"The lunar lander had the luxury of not having to transfer back to another planet. All it had to do was getting 2 of the 3 astronauts back to the CSM which remained in orbit. "

As I mentioned in the original comment, Mars mission could easily adopt a similair pattern with a lander that just needs enough fuel to cushion the landing and then get back into orbit, and a separate orbiter. Of course, the orbiter in this case would still need enough fuel for both the trip to Mars and the return, but I don't see why that amount would be so much more to the fuel requirement to get to the moon and back because you only need it for acceleration / deceleration. Minimum distance to Mars is about 160X that of moon, trip to the moon takes <3 days, similair-speed trip to Mars would take approx a year (yes I'm surely over-simplifying, but my point is that fuel requirements aren't THAT high if one is ready to arrive a bit more slowly)

"For 2 years"

Where is this value is coming from? A first mission is likely to be much shorter, maybe less than 2 weeks on the surface (longest moon landing was just under 13 days).

Also on further thought, maybe we are talking at cross-purposes? If your "not returning from Mars" refers to a colony-type mission, you're probably right, but then again it would be crewed by people who knew they were leaving Earth forever. I am referring to teh possibility of return from a brief mission, similair to Apollo missions but scaled up about 2-3X in terms of craft power and fuel requirements (although probably 100X food and water requirements, which is maybe why missions are proposing LEO resupply before trip to Mars)

jmch Silver badge

Re: May??

"We might get some long-term presence on the Moon, but only because regular resupplies are somewhat feasible."

I agree, and I wonder why the obsession with boots on Mars. The challenges of 'colonising' are similair between Moon and Mars - no soil, no nitrogen, no atmosphere, close to no water, reduced gravity, radiation exposure etc etc. You anyway need to live in caves to start off with at least. On the moon, you have the advantage of being closer to Earth for resupply and initial support, and an order of magnitude more solar power available. If we can't establish a moon colony there is no way we can do so on Mars (and whatever we learn on the moon would help later on Mars)

BOFH: Good news, everyone – we're in the sausage business

jmch Silver badge
Coat

Re: gigaspandrels

"Have to wonder what Mu-Ram is?"

Cat dreams??