Posts by vtcodger

Baidu crashes the cost of robo-taxis by 75 percent

Let the Chinese Test This One

I have no idea whether Baidu can pull this off or not, but apparently they think they can. And it's certainly possible that after a few years and a bit of collateral damage, (i.e. a number of injuries/fatalities both in and near the vehicle) they can make it work acceptably. At any rate, it seems a lot more plausible than Elon Musk's unending promises of full autonomy OTA Thursday next using a probably entirely inadequate (but real cheap) sensor array and liberal amounts of fairy dust.

There's also the fact that Chinese drivers in general are reputed to be less than great. An erratic robot vehicle may fit right in. I don't know if this is true, but it sounds plausible In Lanzhou a retired school teacher decided to teach bad drivers a lesson and threw bricks at cars that did not yield to pedestrians. Apparently a few other elderly men joined him, while onlookers rushed to get them more bricks and food (to keep up their throwing strength). The men damaged 30 cars before police stopped them. They have become internet heroes here. Source https://chinachange.org/2011/02/21/why-are-chinese-such-bad-drivers/

Note that the steering wheel is "detachable", not "optional". One suspects the authorities will quickly label it to be "essential safety equipment" and require it to be in the car at some handy location. They'll presumably need it for police/bystanders get the vehicle out of the way if (when) it breaks down.

India's central bank calls for cryptocurrency ban

Fiat vs Crypto

Two differences at least:

1. Governments will always take your fiat money to pay debts like taxes or to purchase government products or services. They may not (probably won't in practice) accept money you've "printed" in your basement. Narrow minded of them. But it's the way things are.

2. In the US at least Federal Reserve Notes (all US paper money nowadays) contain in small print the phrase "legal tender for all debts public and private." That presumably means that if Elon Musk decides to pay Twitter $1B to get out of his purchase contract using a long line of semi-trailers containing 1500 or so pallets of $1 bills (are there that many $1 bills in circulation?), Twitter has been paid. Twitter (I believe) isn't legally required to even think about accepting the same payment in crypto.

Indian government starts work on right to repair rules

Re: Popcorn time?

I should make it clear. I'm 100% in favor of right to repair legislation. Stringent Right to Repair legislation. I'm just a bit skeptical of India's ability to craft such legislation and get it right on their first try.

Popcorn time?

Given the somewhat ... searching for an adjective here ... Well, maybe "problematic" ... Not exactly what I had in mind, but I guess it'll have to do.

Given the somewhat problematic results of India's previous attempts at tech regulation, one wonders exactly what wondrous, but likely impractical, regulation(s) will be forthcoming as a result of this effort. If nothing else, India's right to repair regulations will likely be entertaining. ... If you don't have to figure out how to comply with them.

Is the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope worth the price tag?

A qualified success?

As a technical achievement, it's really impressive. Seriously. So much stuff had to go right. And apparently it all has.

As a management exercise, it's been pretty much a total debacle. It was originally proposed in 1995 with an even larger mirror and a projected project cost of $500M. Eight years later when it finally became obvious that wasn't possible, TRW was given a $825M contract for a scaled back version to fly in 2010. Here it is 2023, and it's finally out there only 13 years late and 1200% over (the 2003) budget. A bit extreme even for space tech.

It'll surely be quite useful. My vague impression is that it's not quite as essential to astronomy as it was expected to be when it was conceived a quarter century ago because ground based telescopes have improved much more than was thought likely/possible back then. Perhaps an astronomy buff can enlighten us on that point. But compared to near bottomless and largely pointless money pits like the Space Shuttle, The International Space Station and the current programs to return to the moon without first spending the few billions to explore our satellite with rovers to see if there is any point in going back, I reckon this is a success story ... of sorts.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

Re: Pay up + interest

Let me see if I have this straight:

Musk offered to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share and signed a poorly crafted contract (crafted by whom BTW?) to do so. But Twitter has subsequently lost a lot of (perceived) value and is now only worth $32.65 a share.

Not surprisingly Musk wants out. Anyone would.

Instead of paying the $1B cancellation fee he agreed to and perhaps negotiating a new (hopefully better specified) deal at around $26.4B. Musk is going to kick and scream and hold his breath until he turns blue.

Possibilities:

1. Musk is really as childish as it appears.

2. Musk is engaged in extortion hoping to get a better deal by threatening to drag Twitter through the notoriously erratic, slow, and expensive US court system.

3. Musk is stalling for time because he expects Twitter stock to be worth even less in a year or two. (In that case, why not short the stock or buy out_of_the_money put options)?

4. Musk's finances are a shambles and he can't actually find (or borrow?) $1B to get clear of the deal. I'm willing to believe he's leveraged to the hilt. I'm skeptical that finding $1B in his current situation is that big a deal.

5. Something else? What?

=== Tangential Question

Why would any individual who values their sanity want anything to do with Twitter?

Take the day off: Windows Autopatch is live and can even fix cloudy PCs

I'm from Microsoft ...

"I'm from Microsoft and I'm here to help you" ?

Leaked Uber docs reveal frequent use of 'kill switch' to deactivate tech, thwart investigators

Re: Uber is a different company today

Sure sounds like an ongoing criminal conspiracy to me. If you ask me, prosecution couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

I think their only hope is the Federal Witness Protection Program. Maybe they can be disguised as a manufacturer of paper cups and novelty items based in Caribou, Maine?

Canadian ISP Rogers falls over for hours, takes out broadband, cable, cellphones

... And so it goes.

per the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62110358

The company's CEO Tony Staffieri said the failure followed "a maintenance update in our core network".

...

Mr Staffieri said the maintenance work "caused some of our routers to malfunction early Friday morning".

Please explain to me again why this cloud thing is such a terrific idea.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Re: what that "drastic action" may be is unknown

"Would a near EoL battery pack make a reasonable warhead?"

I don't think you can count on a Tesla battery pack exploding on impact. They sometimes do of course, but until the kinks are ironed out, I think a more conventional explosive might be a better choice.

How a botched kernel patch broke Ubuntu – and why it may happen again

"Open Source is promoted by big corporations, so they don't have to pay wages to talented engineers."

Actually I should think the corporations would prefer to pay the engineers and lock their customers in with un/poorly documented proprietary, trade secret protected, and/or patented technologies. But they'll settle for some occasional support of open source as that helps keep the anti-trust folks at a safe distance.

At least that's my guess. Who knows what actually goes on in the mind (if any) of an MBA toting manager?

Re: Never understood...

Mike137:

Having been around in the days of mainframes and batch jobs, let me assure you that early on, the hardware was so unreliable that the fact that the software (mostly) wasn't all that good was not a huge problem. In the 1960s, as much as 8 hours a day was scheduled for preventive maintenance. And unscheduled maintenance wasn't all that infrequent. The software didn't have to do much and what it had to do was often pretty clear, and it usually did it after a fashion. And there were some issues that (thankfully) no longer exist. Like every vendor having their own (incompatible) character set for text. And byte order issues that had to be fixed in application level code. And hardware divide operations so complex that one could spend an entire afternoon trying to figure out how the hardware could possibly produce the results it had from the inputs it was given.

I'm with you in feeling that "software engineering" is, and always has been, pretty much an oxymoron. But I don't see any sign that anyone feels any need to fix that. Maybe when (if) the full magnitude of the computer security problem starts to become evident there will be pressure to change. But probably not.

There is also the problem that writing a decent software specification looks to be extraordinarily difficult, time consuming and expensive. Harder than programming really. In 30 years in the system business -- 1961-early 1990s -- I saw exactly one such spec. Programming to it was a joy. I doubt that writing it was all that much fun.

So, I look forward to a world where most everything except our backyard vegetable gardens is dependent on flaky, poorly engineered, software. I doubt it'll be all that much fun.

But it'll be interesting.

Gtk 5 might drop X11 support, says GNOME dev

Re: Gnome devs who drank the Wayland coolaid...

Superiority link:

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

Is a lack of standards holding immersion cooling back?

Re: Liquid cooling is expensive

"I think some of the Cray supercomputers were designed that way"

Indeed. The CDC 6x00 and (I think) the 7x00 were water cooled. An engineer asked me to shut down my testing and go out and enjoy the sunshine one Saturday afternoon in Minnesota Seems the CDC 6400 we were developing ABM benchmark software on had sprung a leak and he needed to fix the plumbing.

2050 carbon emission goals need nuclear to succeed, says International Energy Agency

Re: Net zero emissions by 2050,

"A great goal but a pointless message if you do not have a plan on how to do it."

make that:

A great goal but a pointless message if you do not have a REALISTIC plan on how to do it.

====

AFAICS, reality has never been a component of "zero-emissions" planning. Mostly net-zero has been a matter of politicians_setting_targets_and_let_the_techies_figure_out_how_to_meet_them. Unfortunately the techies are engineers, not magicians.

I think that the relative handful of folks who have actually worked the numbers for providing a decent standard of living for 7 plus billion people have all agreed that nuclear power -- and lots of it -- will be needed.

Not that I'm happy about that. I worry about nuclear proliferation. And the total failure -- at least here in the US -- to deal rationally with high level waste disposal. And I suspect that serious nuclear accidents just might become quite a bit more common if there are 20 or 40 times as many nuclear power plants as are currently in service.

But I suppose nuclear is probably the least bad solution.

Intel ships crypto-mining ASIC at the worst possible time

Crypto is toast?

"showing that digital currencies are aligned with the stock market's downswing. "

More accurately, showing that cryptocurrency "value" is negatively aligned with interest rates and thus is aligned to the availability of oodles of pretty much free money to speculators. In simpler terms, if folks have to pay meaningful interest to borrow money, crypto is toast..

BTW, crypto is not the same thing as "digital currency". Government backed digital currencies may well become a real thing if the security issues can be tamed.

I have to admit that I can't really come up with much of a use case for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). What benefit does society gain from government issued debit cards which is what CBDCs would seem to amount to? It's not like folks can't buy prepaid debit cards from variety of sources. At least they can in developed countries.

On the other hand, I sure could be wrong about CBCDs. Maybe they're the greatest thing since sliced bread.

China's blockchain boosters slam crypto as Ponzi scheme

Re: Ponzi scheme?

"I'm objectively interested in the reason for all the downvotes."

I've tried to make the same point in the past and while I didn't get a lot of downvotes, I didn't get many upvotes either.

And, in fairness, while Bitcoin and Ethereum seem to be pretty much as advertised -- i.e. monopoly money, but they are up front about it -- some of the other crypto based efforts really do seem to be pretty much 99.98% pure scams. However, IMHO they lack the finess and style of a well done Ponzi scheme. Charles Ponzi's original effort. Or Bernie Madoff who managed to become chairman of the NASDAQ in the early 1990s at a time when I believe he was doing little or no actual trading in securities.

(It is remarkably unclear how much money Madoff disappeared. Billions for sure. But somehow, no one seems to know how many billions).

Re: Ponzi scheme?

"Not forgetting that they're not currencies either."

Except in El Salvador of course. OTOH, how many knit T-shirts (El Salvador's largest export apparently) does anyone need?

US senators seek input on their cryptocurrency law via GitHub – and get some

Re: Like Bernie Madoff "Digital Asset"

Actually, crypto is quite different than Madoff's classic Ponzi scheme. Don't get me wrong. Cryptocurrency is an RBI (Really Bad Idea). But a Ponzi scheme it is not.

My understanding is that what Bernie Madoff did was to claim he had developed a sophisticated investment strategy involving using futures contracts to leverage mundane investments in S&P 500 stocks thereby achieving much higher yields than simply buying and selling the same stocks would yield. The scheme was exceedingly complex. So much so that no one understood it. It probably wouldn't have worked. Didn't matter. Madoff skipped that messy investment step. Buying and selling stock is risky. A man could lose money that way. Instead, he simply paid out "dividends" and withdrawals using money from the incoming investment stream and the existing capital pool.

That's illegal because it can rip off even relatively cautious investors.

Crypto mongers OTOH are quite open about how their business works. You print your own money and "investors" line up to exchange stuff with real world value for your freshly minted notes. But that's nuts? People would have to be crazy to exchange real assets for monopoly money?

Yep. Nobody said the world wasn't full of crazy people.

Crypto is really quite odd. And it's probably imploding. But it's nature is not misrepresented. And it's not illegal (except in China).

It's a crime to use Google Analytics, watchdog tells Italian website

It's OK with the EU?

So if Google sets up an analytics server in the EU (or anyplace else not the US?) and makes sure that EU originated traffic goes to that server, Google's behavior is OK with the EU?

Intel withholds Ohio fab ceremony over US chip subsidies inaction

Re: CEO in Training

I believe Intel's plan on this is to hold their breath until they turn blue. Then we'll be sorry we didn't accommodate their needs wants.

Totaled Tesla goes up in flames three weeks after crash

Re: So when one of these things is junked ...

Discharging the battery seems an excellent idea although IIRC Lion doesn't tolerate complete discharge well. You won't be reusing the battery or its component cells if you don't manage the discharge properly. There's also the issue of getting rid of maybe 50kwh (180000000 joules) of energy without (further) damaging anything. I don't think this is something one would want to try at home.

Investors start betting against Bitcoin with short-trade products

Re: Investors or gamblers?

"If I put £10 on Dobby to win the Grand National, am I investing or gambling?"

If blockchain is somehow involved, you are investing. Otherwise, you are gambling,

Former chip research professor jailed for not disclosing Chinese patents

Re: Honestly, guys

If the CIA/NSA et. al. aren't the largest collectors of other people's data on the planet, a lot of we American's tax money is being wasted.

EV battery can reach full charge in 'less than 10 minutes'

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

In fairness, Tesla demonstrated a fast battery swap. Once. In California. In order to harvest a healthy additional subsidy on every vehicle they sell there. But they don't actually offer a battery swap service at their charging stations. Presumably because you don't need to offer the service to get the subsidy.

Re: Full charge in 10 minutes?

In addition to whatever technical problems exist with replaceable batteries, there's this economic problem.

A large part of the cost of an EV is the battery. And batteries get tired over time -- especially if they are abused by whatever it is their particular chemistry doesn't tolerate well. Too many quick charges. Too many deep discharges, etc. So if you haul into the charging station with your brand new Whizbang Dominator and swap out the battery. You may get out of there in a few tens of seconds. But if you've you've swapped a brand new battery for a battery that is near end of life and worth a tiny fraction of the battery you exchanged for it, you're also leaving with your wallet many thousands of dollars/euros/pounds/drachma lighter.

Maybe there's a way around that, but I'm not sure what it is.

Oh yeah. And I doubt your new car warranty covers that replacement battery. Or any damage it might cause if it fails before your next swap.

Crypto market crashes on Celsius freeze, inflation news

As you can well imagine

As you can probably imagine, it's a busy day at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/

Last five headlines:

. Tron's algorithmic stablecoin (USDD) wobbles

. Crypto.com and BlockFi announce layoffs

. Binance pauses Bitcoin withdrawals for 3 hours due to "stuck" transactions

. Terra investors file class action lawsuit against Binance.US

. Lido-staked Ether (stETH) loses peg

And so it goes.

EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

Re: In other words...

"Corporations are poised to make enormous profits on this EV thing."

Of course they are. That's what corporations do. But I suspect (and hope) their visions of vast fields of low-hanging profits waiting to be plucked are delusional.

I direct your attention to the Wuling Hong Guang MINI EV. It's the best selling EV in China at the moment. Roughly 50,000 units in March 2022. It seats 4, goes 60 mph (flat out) and is a bit less than 3m long. (Sticker) range 75-110mi depending on the battery selected. It sells for between $4000 and $6000 depending on the configuration. That, my friends, is likely the future of EVs -- electric VW bug equivalents, not electric Roll-Royce equivalents.

Of course the US/British/EU version will cost much more. It will need to actually meet safety standards and it needs a quick charge capability. And probably a few other things. But the car companies probably are not going to end up rolling in vast wealth from profits on the sale of $12K-16K cars.

Re: In other words...

"are we going to have flying cars at last ?"

Probably. A few. At least there will likely be some vehicles you can drive to an airport, fly to some other airport, then drive into town for lunch. They'll probably be mediocre aircraft and worse cars. And they'll be expensive. And most likely, you'll need a pilot's license of some sort to fly one.

And they probably won't be battery powered. Fossil fuels have significantly higher energy densities than any battery we can currently conceive and for early personal flying machines, weight is surely going to be critical.

So yes, there will be flying cars, but no you and I won't have one in the driveway.

Which is OK by me. People mismanaging massive vehicles in two dimensions is scary enough. No need to add another dimension to the mix.

Re: In other words...

Battery tech isn't standing still. But it's also not advancing especially quickly. LOTS of money has been is and will continue to be spent on battery R&D. Will batteries be better in two decades? Yes. Are your expectations realistic? Probably not very.

Recommended reading: Tom Murphy's articles at https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ Murphy is a physicist at UC San Diego who for many years has driven electric vehicles and run his household largely on solar power. But he does that largely by living in a very mild climate where heating and cooling needs are minimal and by consuming far less energy than most of us in other areas as well. His opinions are worth taking into account. He is not all that optimistic about the non-fossil fuel future.

What keeps Mandiant Intelligence EVP Sandra Joyce up at night? The coming storm

Re: Fiddling about around the Edge whilst Rome burns ..... a recipe for guaranteed disaster

Actually, I believe the lipstick is extra and you need to buy a subscription. But not to worry, there's a free coupon in the crate for a two week supply,

IBM AI boat to commemorate historic US Mayflower voyage finally lands… in Canada

Sticking with tradition

The ship's namesake in 1620 wasn't trying to go to Cape Cod. It was trying to go to Virginia. And its voyage didn't go all that smoothly either. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayflower

Seems to me that tradition has been upheld.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

Re: Great, but. I wonder how-effectively it'll be enforced

Another real problem that I and I imagine most folks who try to repair their stuff run into from time to time is repair parts that are on the parts diagram, have a part number, maybe even have a price published, but aren't available. And that isn't necessarily the result of malice. My understanding is that what happens is that when specialized parts for machines are made or ordered from a supplier, a certain number of spares are made/ordered. After the parts are made, the tooling is reconfigured for the next order. Those extra parts are the repair parts. Ideally, there are just enough of them that the parts bin is empty when the last device in service is scrapped many years in the future. But no one is smart enough to guess the exact number of spares that will be needed for the next X years. And tooling up to make more spares would be expensive so it doesn't often happen. So sometimes you need to cobble together a substitute or find a used part.

Maybe someday in a better world, 3d printing will solve this problem. But 3d printers that can make a wide variety of parts on demand at reasonable unit cost probably are a good many decades away.

Clipminer rakes in $1.7m in crypto hijacking scam

Chickenfeed

$1.7M? Hardly worth noticing. If I am to believe what I read at https://web3isgoinggreat.com/ $1.7M is a mere pittance. These crypto people wheel and deal in tens, hundreds, thousands of millions of dollars on a daily basis. Of course it's all imaginary supported entirely by happy thoughts. But they do think BIG.

Watch out for phishing emails that inject spyware trio

Re: So, you're not opening an email in Excel

"Because of course I'm going to open this attachment from some random stranger I've never met."

YOU probably won't do that unless the file content is obsfucated in some way and your OS somehow allows what appears to be a simple text file to invoke Excel. But if you have any significant number of employees, it's almost certain that a few of them can be prevented from doing so only by denying them access to email and/or Excel or by amputating their fingers.

Experts: AI inventors' designs should be protected in law

Re: 'Creative' Artificial Intelligence

Arthur C Clarke once said "A patent is a license to be sued"

And he was certainly right to some extent.

How do you sue an AI?

Cloud security unicorn cuts 20% of staff after raising $1.3b

Gypsy Curse

Obviously a gypsy curse is in play here. Here's a link to a dude who says he can remove gypsy curses. https://spellshelp.com/articles/gypsy_magic/how-to-remove-a-gypsy-curse/

I'm sure that a $8B company will not even notice the cost of hiring him. Might even be tax deductible (although I think tax deductible only matters if you have actual profits).

IBM-powered Mayflower robo-ship once again tries to cross Atlantic

Re: What is the actual goal?

The web site -- https://mas400.com/ -- appears to have been put together by a professional communicator and is therefore somewhat incomprehensible. But my best guess is that this is an early prototype of an autonomous marine research vessel. Think a lunar or Mars rover type thing designed for Earth's vastly more dynamic environment. I think that the eventual objective might be the construction of a fleet of autonomous rovers that can collect data on the oceans without requiring a research vessel the size and cost of a tech titan's yacht.

And to its credit, it's managed to travel considerable distances without sinking or running into other ships or running into fixed objects like Ireland or Europe. So maybe it's doing OK.

For the curious, there are (or were last year) some schematic drawings of the boat and its layout plus some other technical data somewhere on the internet.

Foxconn factory fiasco could leave Wisconsinites on the hook for $300m

"File a lawsuit ..."

Yeah. Except Foxconn has lawyers too. And they'll probably argue that the folks in Wisconsin failed to live up to their side of the agreement in numerous ways. And the Wisconsinites probably did fail in some ways because it was a complicated deal. And the case will drag on for years. And so will the appeals. And the appeals of the appealate decisions. And the appeals of the appeals. And eventually everyone will get tired of the case and will settle for some deal that will cost Foxconn a lot less than what they originally promised to pay but will allow everyone to claim victory.

Indian stock markets given ten day deadline to file infosec report, secure board signoff

How fun

I think maybe if you are an Indian IT worker, grabbing a begging bowl and setting off to wander the countryside is probably beginning to look like an attractive alternative future. Better perhaps than living in constant fear of what short-deadline task the government is going to impose on you next.

Safari is crippling the mobile market, and we never even noticed

Re: Screen size will always be the limiting factor

"but none of that overcomes the problem of, well, it's a tiny screen (in the grand scheme of things)."

I don't disagree because I think you are right. And I'd add that my wife's (mostly) elderly friends love smart phones ... except for the tiny print.

But isn't this exactly the problem that HTML was intended to deal with? "You give us the content with markup to tell us (roughly) what it is, and we'll figure out in the browser how best to present it." Is the difficulty in handling it a failure of HTML (and scripting as well) or of browser design? Could it be solved with different/better markup and/or browser changes and/or some training of Web developers?

"why do you think nobody designs or builds mobile apps using a mobile?"

The tiny print doesn't help, but a cheap pair of +6.00 reading glasses could fix that. At least with hi-res screens. I think the problem is more the lack of an input device suitable for easy typing and editing of a lot of text. Phone keyboards may be fine for posting on Twitter. But I think you'd quickly become frustrated trying to type a novel, an article, or a program of any size on a phone "keypad".

The Return of Gopher: Pre-web hypertext service is still around

Re: doesn't solve ad bloat

"They'd be text-only"

Y'know, that might be fine. I sort of automatically ignore most ads in newspapers and magazines and even TV because they clearly aren't of interest to me. Don't need cat food. No cat. I'm moving on. Not currently in the market for a car. Moving on. Don't think solar panels in a rather cloudy and snowy climate at 45 degree N latitude can possibly be a good idea. Moving on. Once in a great while, they offer something of interest. I've even been known to buy stuff as a result of reading them.

I think text only ads (within reason) MIGHT be OK. At least, unlike the web's Javascript abominations, they probably can't infect my computer with nasty malware.

Deepfake attacks can easily trick live facial recognition systems online

The Shaman was Right

Those damn camera thingees can in fact steal -- if not your soul -- your wealth.

BTW, anyone remember the Mythbuster's successful attack on fingerprint scanners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MythBusters_%282006_season%29#Fingerprint_Lock? My guess is that fooling facial recognition is going to be easier than fooling a fingerprint sensor. At least for the forseeable future.

And it's not like many, probably most, smartphone users haven't cleverly posted pictures of their face online.

Re: Artificial Mimickry

"Artificial Stupidity" might well be more accurate, but I guarantee you that the Artificial Stupidity label will never make it past the folks in marketing. At least not until they are replaced by AI agents.

Intel plans immersion lab to chill its power-hungry chips

Re: Not a new idea, correct

An engineer threw me off a CDC 6400 mainframe one afternoon in the 1960s because it had sprung a leak and he needed to check the plumbing. I hadn't realized until then that the 6x00 (and 7600 as well) were liquid cooled.

BTW, in the 1990s, overclockers experimented with running x86 chips of the time immersed in mineral oil. It worked pretty well, but was, I'm told, kind of messy as the hot oil tended to work its way under the insulation of wiring to the power supply, keyboard, monitor, etc. At the terminus of the wires the oil would seep out.

Google Russia goes broke after bank account snatched

Re: Very bad idea

And the victors did grab a lot of German non-military assets. Thus leading to the famous incident where both the British (Rootes Group) and American (Ford) car makers turned down the opportunity to take over the VolksWagen Wolfsburg plant where the Germans were bringing the production line for the VW beetle back into service.

State of internet crime in Q1 2022: Bot traffic on the rise, and more

Re: Spike on Skype

"one trying to sell me bank fraud software"

Would that be software to detect bank fraud? Or software to assist in committing bank fraud?

Bad neighborhood

Cyberspace isn't safe. Who could possibly have known?

Shopping for malware: $260 gets you a password stealer. $90 for a crypto-miner...

Surprise !!!

How do I know that the $90 remote cryptominer I bought from these fine folks isn't going to encrypt my disk and tell me that I have until Tuesday next to come up with 10.0 bitcoin if I expect to ever see my data alive again? It's not like they appear to be paragons of honesty and integrity. Maybe they are like vampires. Invite them in and you have a problem.

Email domain for NPM lib with 6m downloads a week grabbed by expert to make a point

Sparse arrays

• Enumeration of array-likes includes the holes which all the builtins would skip. You shouldn't have holes in arrays. But if you have, that could be obscure breaking change that turns up who knows where and how.

Question: An array with holes is a "sparse array"? Or something different? I'm not sure what one would use a sparse array for as I've never used one or seen one used. But a lot of programming languages seem to support them so presumably there are valid use cases?