* Posts by jmch

3634 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2017

Outage-ous: Twitter OKs cannabis ads, then goes up in smoke

jmch Silver badge

Ads

They should simply keep the ban for states in which it's illegal, and have the same guidelines as alcohol adverts for the states where it's legal. Yes they are not exactly the same but close enough.

As giant data hoovers they know exactly where each of their users is connecting from and their true age, right??? /sarc

jmch Silver badge

Re: Toxic

"if you can become intoxicated by something, you can probably die from consuming too much of it that's a smaller quantity "

With reference to your use of *probably*, pretty much all drugs have a level at which they produce intoxicating effect, and a higher level which is fatal. The more dangerous drugs like heroin have a lethal dose which is not much more than the effective dose.

There is only 1 exception, which is marijuana, for which there are 0 (yes, zero) known cases of death that can unambiguously be attributed to marijuana overdose (and that over many centuries and hundreds of millions of users). [Note and disclaimer - that doesn't mean it can't be dangerous!!! Use responsibly!!!]

Tesla's self-driving code may ignore stop signs, act unsafe. Patch coming ... soon

jmch Silver badge

Re: Recall is right..

Absolutely this - while 'recall' has historically meant physically bringing things back to the supplier, the real core of the issue is that the product was defective and had to be fixed or replaced. If the software has to be fixed or replaced because of safety reasons, it's a recall even if the cars don't need to be physically returned.

An update is merely functional

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Complete stop

"entering a stop sign-controlled intersection without coming to a complete stop"

As a European, I have never understood this 'come to a complete stop' malarkey. We have stop signs of course but usually linked to traffic lights, while most junctions use 'give way', not 'Stop'. Arriving at a 'give way' junction requires a driver to slow down to a speed slow enough that they can safely come to a complete stop if they have to give way to another vehicle at the junction. If there is no other vehicle at the junction and the driver can safely proceed, it is a waste of both time and energy* to come to a complete stop and then immediately accelerate away.

My (to be fair quite limited) experience of intersections in US roads is that there are vast open spaces around and it's quite easy to see oncoming traffic, so the widespread use of stop instead of give way (and the almost complete lack of roundabouts) makes US roads weird. What I would 'import' to Europe is allowing right (left n the UK) turns on red.

*It might seem trivial as a couple of seconds and a few grams worth of fuel, but multiply that by the number of stop signs on a journey and the number of vehicles and it builds up to a significant amount.

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Terminology

Instead of quibbling about what 'recall' really means, maybe Musk should first understand what 'full self-driving' means. Hint - It doesn't mean what Musk/Tesla say!

Unplug that Anker battery pack now: House blaze sparks recall

jmch Silver badge

Re: Argh!

Considering that every single mobile phone and laptop in the world, and goodness knows how many other gadgets great and small, contain lithium batteries (ie Billions of devices), the safety record is actually pretty good.

Most Londoners would quit before they give up working from home

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Re: Cattle

"decent amount of resistance, enough to give you a pretty go of it whilst living in a community, the bulk of whom have had the same jabs as you" and "against old diseases that we, as a species, have lived with for a long time"

The above are a good description of, for example, the measles vaccine, not covid ones.

With respect to the covid vaccines, forget what we were told about it by the makers and see the actual results - Primarily that vaccinated people could still act as carriers at pretty much similair rates to non-vaccinated people, and thus 'herd immunity' is impossible (also meaning that people who choose not to get vaccinated are not affecting anyone else). Covid vaccination gives you a few months window where if you catch covid you will be less affected. You can still catch and/or transmit it. Absolutely makes sense for older and high-risk people. Absolutely no sense to give it to everyone, even less so to force it on anyone.

jmch Silver badge

"how are they going to pay the bills with no job?"

The simple answer is that the market will sort it out.

Companies offering WFH will be able to attract better talent and/or to pay them less compared to other companies requiring office work. The latter also have higher expenses for office overheads, while the former will have less expenses even if they pay to equip their employees' home offices (which at this point are mostly already well-equipped anyway). I also suspect that companies offering more WFH can also cut down on a bunch of middle-managerial positions and streamline their business. Unless companies requiring office work are at least 10-20% more productive than companies offering WFH, they're going to slowly decline over the next few years or simply crash and burn.

Absolutely there will be people who, in the transition period, might find themselves forced to accept a suboptimal (office work) job because the WFH companies are going after the best and brightest first, but generally speaking that will be a relatively short period as these people will be on the lookout for WFH job from the moment they start their office job.

Google's $100b bad day demo may be worth the price

jmch Silver badge

Re: Censorship from Google?

"There is a growing movement of people experiencing and objecting to the increasing medication of the general population"

Absolutely!

Some sort of infection? Prescribe antibiotics (even though the doctor can't tell if it's viral or bacterial!!). Fidgety child in class? Drug them to stay quiet, dog forbid a teacher has to deal with anything less than silently compliant robots. The root cause of almost all of human ailments is stress, combined with bad diet and limited exercise. And a lot of medications simply treat the symptoms. Anything to keep the workers on the figurative treadmill.

Overuse of medication is screwing people far more than helping them, and creating the environment for superbugs to evolve in.

jmch Silver badge

Re: Censorship from Google?

So the title to the 'fake news' is:

"dr_fauci_now_admits_the_mrna_covid_vaccines_hardly_work_and_might_not_be_approvable"

What he actually writes is: "they [covid and influenza vaccines] elicit incomplete and short-lived protection against evolving virus variants that escape population immunity".

That's a sciency-speak way of saying they have limited use as personal protection and can't provide herd immunity, of which "they hardly work" is a completely accurate characterisation.

"...candidate vaccines for most other respiratory viruses have to date been insufficiently protective for consideration of licensure"

Simply said, vaccines for other viruses which have a similair protective level as those for the covid vaccine have not been licensed. My translation of which is that the covid vaccine might not have been licensed if not under emergency because the standards it met had previously been rejected (for licensing other vaccines).

It seems to me that in this quoted text, Fauci is saying EXACTLY that "covid vaccines hardly work and might not be approvable"

Warren Buffet cashes out of TSMC, which splashes cash on fabs

jmch Silver badge

Warren Buffet

"At the time of the purchase in mid-November, TSMC traded at around $72 per share. In February, it traded at around $96. It's unclear exactly when Buffet sold, but he looks to have made hundreds of millions in profit in just one quarter"

chapeau

Wow, so they actually let AI fly an F-16 fighter jet

jmch Silver badge
Facepalm

Unsurprising... and also unwise

Modern aircraft are 'fly-by-wire' meaning the pilot commands are translated to electronic signals and the actual mechanical movements of the plane are controlled through the electronics. On the other hand they have highly accurate simulators which log far more missions than real flight hours, but with close to identical electronic systems. So it stands to reason that

a) fitting an aircraft to accept commands directly from the electronics is presumably quite easy technically.

b) they have tons and tons of training data that is both very clean, and also harvested from their top pilots (unlike other models trained on random datasets trawled from the interwebs.

So its completely unsurprising not only that they did this but that the AI could beat a real pilot in a dogfight.

Question is though, if they don't have anything in their training set for unexpected stuff happening or shit going wrong, how ill the AI respond.

That's quite apart from the generally bad idea of letting a computer autonomously control highly dangerous weapons

US defense forces no match for the unstoppable fiend known as Reply-All

jmch Silver badge
Happy

Re: Ageism is alive and well...

Well, I'm 85 and worked in IT for well over a century!!

whooosh!!!

Learn the art of malicious compliance: doing exactly what you were asked, even when it's wrong

jmch Silver badge

Re: Coffee

Coffee powder from grinding gets everywhere, however much you clean it. Even capsule machines need to be cleaned quite thoroughly every so often.

I tend to use a mocha coffee pot, it requires a bit more effort to do the grinding / filling + washing daily but the results are better than any but the most high-end bean-to-cup machines.

jmch Silver badge

Dishwashers waste a lot of energy 'blow-drying' the dishes.

Much more efficient (not to mention better results) rinsing with cold water and letting drip / air-dry

jmch Silver badge
Happy

Vocabulary win

Love the term "malicious compliance"!!!

Bank of England won't call it Britcoin but says digital pound 'likely to be needed in future'

jmch Silver badge

Re: But why is this necessary?

"Hmm.. appears that people around here do not like the lab leak theory!"

Off topic, and at risk of poking the bears.... but a simple application of Occam's razor points squarely to lab leak as the most likely explanation.

We can safely ignore whatever the Chinese Government says, but we DO know:

- the virus was most closely related to a bat virus found hundreds of miles away

- it's known that this bat virus was being studied at the Wuhan lab

So, what's more likely:

that the virus travelled hundreds of miles and happened to mutate to the final form in Wuhan, without leaving any trace anywhere along the way nor appearing anywhere else except Wuhan

OR

someone at the Wuhan lab made a very small mistake in safety procedures

?

jmch Silver badge

Re: But why is this necessary?

Nothing, but you would switch back to using gold and silver as cash

jmch Silver badge

Re: But why is this necessary?

"This disobedience will eventually lead to concentration camps."

That might sound tinfoil-hattish in western Europe but is the reality in some places - think Uyghurs in China; women in Iran, Afghanistan etc; gay people in large chunks of the world

jmch Silver badge

Re: But why is this necessary?

True, although banks already loan out money they don't have...

jmch Silver badge

Re: But why is this necessary?

"Why does it need to be centralised?"

Muddled thinking, that's why. "the need for a central ledger to store user balances" is EXACTLY what happens now, except that each bank keeps it's own central ledger, there isn't one central ledger held by the central bank. The idea of cryptocurrency isn't that of digital *money* (which as you say has existed for decades now), but of digital *cash*. For some people the benefit of cash is that it changes hands immediately and is immediately available.... but the new banking technologies already provide this - immediate person to person (account to account) transfer with zero delay. (To be fair, AFAIK these systems are national-only, I'm not sure if international and/or cross-currency ones exist - having said that cash is by definition single-currency). The second benefit of cash is anonymity, which is prized by criminals, money-launderers and tax evaders, but also by people who value privacy and don't want governments poking around in their business *. Which brings me to....

"...great care will be required to ensure the public understands that the currency affords the same privacy as cash."

There is simply no way that any government-issued cryptocurrency could offer the same privacy as cash. The key is in this phrase... "Centrally governed, distributed database technologies might achieve the ledger requirements". In this sense, they are using "distributed database" as a technical term, meaning data is physically stored and processed in diverse locations, but it is still "Centrally governed" ie there is a central authority, the bank, that can see all transactions AND knows the identities of the transacting parties. Allowing people to open accounts anonymously or pseudonymously would completely go against banking regulations like "know your client" - it's never going to happen.

Final nail in the coffin of this terrible idea - the value that people see in Bitcoin is that it is not possible to arbitrarily create more and inflate away the value. A central bank digital currency would almost certainly allow the central bank to issue as many as they want whenever they want, just as they do currently.

* And depending on the level of trust you have in a government, this can be a primary and very legitimate consideration. Would you trust the banks and/or government to have full oversight of all your earnings and spendings if you were living in the Arabian Gulf, Iran, Afghanistan etc etc???

Trust, not tech, is holding back a safer internet

jmch Silver badge

Re: "Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

"So you think the 51 miles of the Bering strait would be a problem for Russia, if it wasn't for the massive spend on the US military, "dummy"?"

No need to throw insults around! And, yes, Russia could cross the Bering strait easily if unopposed, after having to drag it's military through some very hostile terrain in Eastern Siberia, in order to get some troops on a very inhospitable terrain in Northwestern Alaska. And to gain what benefit exactly?? (although I acknowledge that Putin's motives are weird but I don't think he's a complete idiot)

"If it wasn't for the US defense spending they could cross with ease."

The US could slash its military budget in half and still be able to comfortably defend itself. Most of the US military budget goes into 'projecting its power' which is a sort of nice way of saying that it sticks it's nose pretty much everywhere it thinks it can get away with. And seeing what hard work Russia is making of advancing through the mostly flat open spaces of Ukraine, I suspect the Bering Strait could be easily be defended even by the Canadians :)

jmch Silver badge

Re: "Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

"...least likely to be invaded"

I can think of a number of other countries less likely to be invaded because they're pretty good friends with all their neighbours... That's what the EU was created for after all.

Not to mention a few other countries I'd consider pretty safe because no-one would really want to invade them

jmch Silver badge

Re: "Global spending [is] a quarter of the US defense budget"

"... the US also borders with Russia..."

I somehow think that directing an invasion force through the frozen wastes of outer Siberia to invade the frozen wastes of Alaska is a strategic folly even for Putin.

Could 2023 be the year SpaceX's Starship finally reaches orbit?

jmch Silver badge

Re: ozone holes - NOT from rockets (instead, volcanoes)

"Err, my cell phone doesn't use satellites..."

GPS?

But I agree with your general point.

Also, carbon footprint of 650 Australians is pretty small

Wikimedia Foundation confirms, and bemoans, Pakistan ban

jmch Silver badge

My point was that articles about Pakistan can still be read by anyone else. So might not be up to date if only people outside of Pakistan can update it*, but the vast majority of Wikipedia articles are not that time-sensitive ie it will be mostly fine to go unupdated for a couple of years

*I assume there are a couple of people in Pakistan that can operate a VPN

jmch Silver badge

"A block of Wikipedia in Pakistan denies the fifth most populous nation in the world access to the largest free knowledge repository"

That somehow seemed wrong to me and I had to verify online (ironically, on Wikipedia) that Pakistan is indeed the 5th most populous country in the world. Even after verifying it somehow seems wrong.

"If it continues, it will also deprive everyone access to Pakistan's history and culture"

Do the Wikipedia foundation know themselves how Wikipedia works???

Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU

jmch Silver badge

Re: Policy driven

That's about electricity prices and how it's priced within the market and to the consumer. I don't know much about the exact details of how it's done in the UK except that is completely effed up.

My point was more generally about the at source subsidies and tax exemptions for fossil fuels which are upstream to the electricity generation, and therefore are factored into the electricity generation cost.

One does not exclude the other

jmch Silver badge

Re: Policy driven

"In Western Europe, hydrocarbons have always been taxed, not subsidised"

Exploration, refinement, transport and storage are all either heavily subsidised now or have been heavily subsidised at some point in the past. From a western POV, it doesn't matter if the ones providing the subsidies are local or foreign governments like the Saudis, the end result is that the market price of hydrocarbon products is lower than it would otherwise be without current or historical subsidies.

Yes, consumers (not industrial users) have to pay tax on fuel, which isn't levied because the governments want to discourage its use, its levied because its an essential that governments can easily raise revenue from without fearing a drop in consumption because of the tax. That tax would still be levied if there were no subsidies and the base price was higher.

jmch Silver badge

Re: Policy driven

"Gas and coal are expensive because of policies designed to make them expensive."

Gas, coal and oil have been historically artificially very cheap because of massive subsidies. It's only last year due to market forces brought on by Russian invasion that they are priced closer to what their real cost is.

jmch Silver badge
WTF?

Numbers???

"Wind, solar power outstrip fossil fuel generation for EU"

"renewables delivered a fifth of all EU juice"

So, renewables (not just wind and solar but also hydroelectric, geothermal, wave, tide) delivered 20% - , meaning just wind + solar were less than 20%. Unless The Register has a different meaning of 'outstrip' than mine, that means fossil fuels were at less than 20%.

So those 2 headline statements together only make sense if nuclear is 60%+

This is clearly contradicting what is said in the article "...overtaking natural gas as an energy source for the first time". The article makes it clear that it's only natural gas that's been outstripped by wind and solar, not "fossil fuel" total, with nuclear also at around 20%.

The "outstrip fossil fuel generation" headline is total bollocks

Should Google location data be a tool for cops?

jmch Silver badge

Re: Why Google?

" it is likely that the defendant used an Android phone"

How would anyone investigating know that the bank robber had an Android phone? Unless he actually pulled a phone from his pocket during the robbery, there's no way they would have even known he had ANY phone. And even if he did pull a phone out, I doubt the resolution on security cameras is good enough to identify the model, or that any witness was both close enough to see AND reliably alert enough to identify if it was an iPhone or not.

Seems very much like a fishing expedition to me... and frankly, even if the police DID have evidence that n Android phone was used, it's still a fishing expedition with overreach of powers.

French lawmakers say oui to Olympic video surveillance, but non for faces

jmch Silver badge

Re: Seems good to me

As someone who has been in my fair share of football crowds, I can say with near-certainty that there are patterns of crowd movement that are indicators of "things about to kick off". Have some experienced crowd control officers monitor the cameras real-time, and they can send backup to potential hotspots ASAP. It might have already kicked off by then, but getting officers close to the scene is key. The other thing is having a bit more intelligence that can be relayed to crowd-control police in real-time. Otherwise you end up in situations like the Champions League final in Paris where French police ignored the local yoof jumping over fences and pepper-sprayed fans with tickets waiting outside the blocked turnstiles.

jmch Silver badge

Seems good to me

Crowd trouble can start up quick and spread real fast, so having real-time feeds that can analyse movement patterns, while blocking the possibility of facial recognition (which is anyway unreliable) is a good way forward to police large crowds.

Sweating the assets: Techies hold onto PCs, phones for longer than ever

jmch Silver badge

Most corporations are knee-deep in 20+ years of technical debt and legacy systems triple-locked into Windows and MS office.

Libre office will do everything anyone might want to do but cannot replace some beancounter's master spreadsheet. Whole business models are being propped up by some custom built, undocumented, Windows-only code written a decade ago by someone who left the company years ago. A new startup could very cheaply and easily start as Linux-only. The cost to a large organisation of swapping Windows for Linux is probably far more than simply paying the Windows licenses.

Google ready to kick the cookie habit by Q3 2024, for real this time

jmch Silver badge

Re: You know

"The server gives you what you ask for."

No, the server gives what you ask for and then independently asks another server to also send you a bunch of stuff you didn't ask for.,

McDonald's pulls plug on Wi-Fi, starts playing classical music to soothe yobs

jmch Silver badge

Weird connection, but I have a soft spot for Wrexham as I used to 'manage' them in one of the old Championship Manager games (must be all of 20 years ago now, but still...)

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

"Wrexham in Wales, a city put on the map for the purchase of its ailing football club by US actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney."

No need to be offensive to poor Ryan Reynolds... He's Canadian!

BT in tests to beam down 5G coverage from the stratosphere

jmch Silver badge

Re: Possibly a sensible solution

Re solar-powered - I believe that there was an experimental solar-powered aircraft that could in theory keep aloft indefinitely, but I guess it only needs to power its own propellers and electronics, and a bunch of comms equipment would increase both weight and power needed. I suspect the reason for hydrogen power is that they can't get it to work as reliably with solar.

Japan, Netherlands reportedly join US in China tech export ban

jmch Silver badge

Netherlands

It's significant that the Netherlands are on board since the only producer in the world of the extreme UV lithography machines used for the smallest process nodes is Dutch.

"China utterly dominates production of photovoltaic solar cells, with over 80 percent market share. Such products are increasingly in demand around the world as nations transition to renewable sources of energy. If China won't allow exports of photovoltaic silicon wafer preparation technology, rivals will have a hard time getting into the biz."

It dominates production because it has the necessary raw materials without worrying too much about environmental issues and it's cheap. But it doesn't matter if they won't allow exports of wafer preparation technology because other countries have that too. It would probably be expensive (for a while, until other places catch up), but it's not a complete blocker. In fact, it's probably good if western countries anticipate this and start building up their own capacity.

Have we hit a climate tipping point? Green power attracts big money

jmch Silver badge

Re: Still not good enough

"Climate change isn't a problem. This is why the target shifted from 'preventing 2C' to 'preventing 1.5C'..."

Actually climate change / warming was never the problem in and of itself, the problem (mainly for flora and fauna) is the *rate* of change. many plants are very sensitive to 1 or 2 degrees difference. If the change happens over thousands or even hundreds of generations, they can adapt to the changing conditions. That same change in less than 100 years, which is a few dozen generations for small plants and a handful of generations for bigger trees, means that there could be massive negative effects on flora (cascading down to the fauna that depend on them, and eventually to us humans)

jmch Silver badge
Boffin

Still not good enough

"For the low-carbon power sector, in which BNEF includes "renewable energy, energy storage, electrified transport, electrified heat, carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen and sustainable materials,""

Electrified transport and electrified heat are ways of consuming electricity, which still could be produced with fossil fuels, so I don't think that should count. So if you count only, renewable production, storage and CCS, new investment is still lagging behind new investment in fossil fuels. Of course that's a global amount and I guess a large part of the fossil fuel investment is going on in places like Russia, China, Middle East and other oil-rich countries, but that is being done on the back of money pumped there by the west.

Policy in US and EU should really be directed to 90% plus investment in renewable energy, nuclear energy, and improving the grid, to get to minimal fossil-fuel use ASAP. It shouldn't even be about climate change, although that is of course a big consideration, but for me it's mainly to eliminate dependency to Russia for gas, and the Middle East and other assorted twatocracies for oil. Oil should be limited to a strategic reserve, and to produce materials that we can't produce otherwise.

Techies ask PM to 'prepare UK chip strategy as a matter of urgency'

jmch Silver badge

Re: It depends on what they are trying to achieve

"I do not disagree with the sentiment that UK's has to look to the high-value added sector to work"

the thing is....

- every other country is also looking to increase their slice of the high-value-added pie

- the low-value-added work still needs to get done.

- you can't get any high-value work done if you don't have basic infrastructure in place.

It's useless having thousands of bright university graduates who can design the best chips if there aren't the builders, plumbers and electricians to set up infrastructure, planners and architects to design everything and make sure it all works together, technicians to get the work done, competent teachers giving everyone their first steps, primary healthcare workers taking care of everyone.

Assigning priority and status (and related decent salaries) only to high-value technology cannot work if *everyone else on the lower levels of the pyramid is treated like shit* which seems to be the current ethos in the UK.

User was told three times 'Do Not Reboot This PC' – then unplugged it anyway

jmch Silver badge
Trollface

To be fair....

It said do not reboot and she didn't reboot....

Microsoft shells out for 2.5GW of solar. Not that it'll make a big dent in its emissions

jmch Silver badge

Re: Eh, what???

"the vast majority of Microsoft's emissions"

absolutely, but still - "the vast majority of Microsoft's emissions"?????

jmch Silver badge

Eh, what???

" the vast majority of Microsoft's emissions — 13.7 million metric tons of CO2 as of 2021 — are attributable to emissions from the purchase or sale of goods and services, the transportation of those services..."

What goods or services are Microsoft producing and shipping that are nor part of it's core software business?? Are they still selling Zunes in unimaginable quantities??

"... and the use of those products over their lifetimes."

Is that implying that if I run a Microsoft OS on my PC, that someone is counting that emission as Microsoft's? That's pretty insane even by green-nutjob standards!!

Uncle Sam greenlights first commercial nuclear small modular reactor design

jmch Silver badge

Re: Hope

"It's just less scary when everyone collectively decides not to think about it."

Most certainly this! People's attention is focused on what others are talking about or what's on the news or their social media feed. What's out of sight is out of mind.

That in turn, results in too many decisions taken by, and influenced by, people who not only know very little about a topic (bad enough), but who actually think they are well-informed (which is even worse). Classic Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

jmch Silver badge

No-brainer

"...companies developing appliances that want to "smartify" should first consider having local control on the current Wi-Fi network, and then make the cloud optional"

Being able to remotely turn on an oven is a huge security risk. There is very little reason to want to control appliances from outside the home except for "how cool it is" (for most users tried once and forgotten about)

Local WiFi only should be the norm

Space mining startup prepping to launch 'demo' refinery... this April

jmch Silver badge

Re: How does this work?

Probably the largest costs of such an operation would be how to change orbits to (a) reach a mineable asteroid and (b) move the mined materials to a useful place.

However the description of how the refining works gives a small clue - If the material is heated to a plasma, has the useful bits separated out and re-solidified, that leaves a bunch of waste, possibly already in a vaporised or otherwise more manageable form (eg solifified into pellets), that can then be ejected out one end to push the refinery (or possibly the whole asteroid with refinery attached) the other way.

It still leaves the question of the energy required to vaporise the rock in the first place - will solar panels cut it?

Well that escalated quickly: India demos homebrew mobile OS

jmch Silver badge

Interesting...

"The OS is reported to ship with no pre-loaded apps, and to share no user data. Only private app stores work with the OS."

That is an excellent path to take, if that can be independently verified I hope the OS can be available outside of India

"Pradhan claimed the OS is incapable of running malware, without elaboration."

What bollocks!