Posts by vtcodger

TurboTax to pay $141m to settle claims it scammed millions of people

Paper tax returns

You can still file paper tax returns in the US if you choose. I think many (most?) can also file user fillable PDFs if they have a compatible browser, the winds are fair, and the force is with them. I opt for paper because our return is usually a bit complicated, the modern web is such a goddamn shambles, and I can take and archive pictures of the returns, spreadsheets and scripts rather than trusting that software to read the electronic returns will still be around if the taxman comes back with questions 3 or 4 years downstream. The latter thing, backwards compatibility, has actually been a problem for a few folks using commercial products in the past.

My state (Vermont) also accepts paper returns.

I don't actually have anything against user fillable PDFs and I'd probably use them if our taxes were just wages and a bit of savings/investment income.

SEC nearly doubles cryptocurrency cop roles in special cyber unit

Unsecured Loan

I'm not quite sure how it works, but I think you just claim ownership of an imaginary asset like The Ark of the Convenant, then perform the proper incantations involving blockchain and encryption while turning three times widdershins. I think you can also pledge a real asset you don't actually own -- Niagara Falls or the Trans-Alaska Pipeline -- as collateral.

For hints on how others are doing it, try the Web 3 is going just great website https://web3isgoinggreat.com/.

Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode

"I wonder what response that would give if installed on a quantum computer?"

Possibly whatever sort of response you had in mind when you observed the result?.

Fedora starts to simplify Linux graphics handling

If these people made cars ...

The kernel's fbdev device has been deprecated since 2015. It's a very old-fashioned mechanism for the kernel to display graphics on the system console

Wheels are a very old fashioned approach to transportation. If these guys were car-makers, they'd probably be planning to replace them with something else in the 2026 models. Maybe dozens of tiny feet. Or some sort of serpentine slithering device.

BTW, for those who, like me, have not the slightest idea what fbdev does, it appears to be a driver for the framebuffer. The framebuffer is an area of memory in the X86 architecture that contains a user accessible bitmap of the current video screen. DRM is a acronym for Direct Rendering Manager, not Digital Rights Management. And presumably what this change will do is gratuitously break the workflow of a few folks whose plain old software and perhaps custom hardware just works

References:

. Old proverb "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"

. A. C. Clarke: Superiority ("http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html")

Supercomputer lab swaps lead-acid UPS batteries for alkaline gear

Re: li-ion

"The only viable system would be oxygen starvation..."

Uh ... Maybe. As I understand it, when Li-ion batteries are warmed much above 400C they go into thermal runaway. I don't think the internal chemistry uses atmospheric Oxygen, so I'm not so sure that depriving the battery of Oxygen will shut the fire down. But it will (probably) keep the packaging and anything else in the vicinity from burning. So maybe Oxygen starvation will help ... or not.

If not, what might work is something with high thermal conductivity to get the temperature down and poor electrical conductivity to keep from shorting battery terminals on adjacent cells. Which is to say, not water.

Someone around here probably actually knows how to approach a large Li-Ion fire. My inclination would be to get the hell away from the thing and let someone else deal with it.

US Space Force unit to monitor region beyond Earth's geosynchronous orbit

The High Ground

"Controlling " space from orbit sounds like a great idea until you start thinking out the details. Unfortunately, the reality is that weapons in space are extraordinarily vulnerable to ground based attacks. And ground based attacks on objects in orbit are relatively inexpensive. At least relative to the costs of building and supplying an orbital fortress.

As an analogy, consider climbing a tree with a bag of rocks. Gives you a certain advantage over your enemy. ... Unless they have chain saws.

Take this $15m and make us some ultra-energy-efficient superconductor chips, scientists told

Ones? Zeros?

and they store logic values of zeroes and ones

Real distinguishable ones and zeros? Not quantum? How 2020.

British motorists will be allowed to watch TV in self-driving vehicles

Re: Too early.

I'm pretty sure you are correct. Most expressway driving is pretty straightforward and, I think, well within the capability of modern hardware and software. Without AI let me add. The few exceptions like proper lane selection in cases where multiple expressways intersect at a point are so few that it may well be possible to hard code proper handling. So, I think we'll see autonomous long distance trucking in the not too distant future.

The trick is recognizing and dealing with exceptional situations -- construction zones (They may need better and more machine comprehensible signage) accidents (Please don't run over the nice policeman waving a flashlight at you). Confusing lines on the roadway. Stuff on the highway. WEATHER, tumbleweeds, critters. There are probably some situations that are so out of the ordinary that the only reasonable action to to pull over and try to get a human to help.

Urban and suburban driving. Much harder. Maybe Waymo and the big auto companies can master it. Eventually. Musk? Could happen I suppose. But I think betting on AI is probably wishful thinking.

Clippy behind the wheel

you actually just have to solve real-world AI

That's assuming that:

1. Real world AI is a solvable problem.

2. An autonomous vehicle with judgement as bad as that of many humans -- a very likely result of AI that "works" -- is acceptable.

3. Manufacturers will not be sued for a zillion dollars every time their product kills or maims a human being.

Personally, I don't think Clippy really ought to be given a driving license any time soon. Maybe not any time ever.

Intel: Our fabs can mass produce silicon qubit devices

Re: "manufacture qubits at scale"

This link might provide some insight into what Intel is talking about -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spin_qubit_quantum_computer Or not.

WARNING -- The article deteriorates fairly quickly into physics-speak. If you, like me, have only the vaguest idea what a Hamiltonian operator is, you'll probably find the latter part of the article utterly incomprehensible. But the initial part does seem to indicate that one can probably do quantum computing using single electrons manipulated within structures that are within the capability of modern semiconductor fabrication technology.

Departing Space Force chief architect likens Pentagon's tech acquisition to a BSoD

COTS

As one who had a couple of decades experience with military systems, let me opine that the US is probably well rid of this guy. Yes, military gear is often a decade behind the times and a bit klunky. That's because it's highly desirable that military gear work after, for example, falling off a truck in a rainstorm and being run over by the next truck in the convoy. And it has to work reliably in Alaska in the Winter and Death Valley in July and in tropical jungles. Do not try that with the stuff you buy at Best Buy or Amazon. As a result, designs are conservative. And in most cases, they have been tuned over many years/decades to be increasingly rugged and reliable.

And where cutting edge technology is really needed, the military is perfectly capable of fielding it although they mostly do not tell us common folk about it. Consider the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. Where is the commercial equivalent of those? There isn't one. No market. Are surveillance satellites today superior to Google Earth? I don't know and probably couldn't tell you if I did know. But my guess is the government stuff is probably vastly superior to what's available commercially. And note that the military continues to launch classified satellites. Maybe that's just for show. But more likely they have sophisticated payloads that do things that commercial satellites don't do today and won't do for decades. If ever.

There is, BTW, a perfectly reasonable mechanism in place for buying commercial stuff where it meets military needs -- things like office PCs, or cleaning supplies. It's called Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) and it's been around forever -- or at least since WWII. It can, and sometimes does, deal with more complex gear if there is an actual need.

Intel commits to net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040

Re: Why is this HOAX still being treated like it is RELEVANT?

@Bombastic Bob: Bob, you might want to look at Modtran. There's a web accessible version at http://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/ Make sure "Looking Down" is selected (Looking Up is incoming radiation). Set everything other than CO2 to zero. As any fool can plainly see CO2 does take a big chunk out of outgoing IR. Since outgoing IR is how the Earth dumps heat, the Earth will almost certainly have to warm a bit to make up for the effect of CO2. I have some technical quibbles re Modtran but I, and most other climate skeptics, agree that it's not utter garbage. BTW, the other greenhouse gas that causes a substantial notch to the right of CO2 is Ozone not Methane or NO2. We probably don't want to get rid of Oxygen even if we could. Methane? Now THERE is your overhyped greenhouse gas. Even if you multiply its concentration by 200 to bring it up toward the current level of CO2, it doesn't have a huge effect compared to CO2.

@NeilPost: Neil, You might want to look at Modtran also. But instead of getting rid of the other gasses, leave them, but look at the affect of doubling, quadrupling, etc CO2. Yes, that increases warming a bit, but nowhere near as much as you probably expect. You might also want to look at the Paleomap project and specifically at the map of past climates http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm. we are living in probably the coolest period since the Earth seems to have frozen pretty solidly (for reasons we don't remotely understand) around 700 million years ago. It appears that there is plenty of upside margin for warming. Far more than the IPCC's 1.5C.

I wouldn't bother to argue about any of this, were it not for the fact that the climate hysterics seem determined to save a world that is probably not in need of salvation using a tool kit -- wind and solar -- that is almost certainly quite incapable of accomplishing what it is expected to do. I think that quixotic effort is likely to end badly and the price will be paid as always, not by the wealthy, but by the world's poor.

Blood pressure monitor won't arrive for Apple Watch before 2024 – report

Re: it's not measurements

Paul. The errors appeared to be non-random, but not consistent -- which is to say the readings were fairly consistent on successive measurements -- as consistent as BP measurements ever are, but the direction and size of the error when compared to the Omron wrist cuff value varied from day to day. I've checked the Omron against conventional measurements and it's not all that bad -- off by maybe 5 mmHg typically, as long as one knows to keep their wrist at heart level while measuring. Not great, but much better than the notoriously inaccurate readings from the self-test devices sometimes found in drug stores.

Re: it's not measurements

A couple of years ago, I bought a cheap Chinese Fitbit knockoff because it claimed to monitor blood pressure. The good news. It does. The bad news. It wasn't very accurate. Its estimate of pulse rate looked about right, but the systolic and diastolic BP were typically off by 10 or 15 mm Hg compared to an Omron wrist monitor. Not quite good enough to be useful I think. But kind of impressive. And probably indicative that a "wristwatch" BP monitor is possible with enough R&D.

BTW, it didn't/doesn't use a cuff. It shines a couple of bright green LEDs(?) when it's measuring BP.

China accused of cyberattacks on Indian power grid

Re: Taking the eye off the ball

Can't say that I disagree all that much with your assessment of world leaders. But I would point out that most countries are at least nominally democracies now days. And in a lot of them, votes are actually counted reasonably accurately. If humanity is led by a collection of posturing chuzzlewits it's hard to see who, other than ourselves, is to blame.

China's digital currency comes to WeChat. Next stop: over a billion users

Meh?

After thinking about it for a while, I concluded that a digital currency needs either to keep track of all transactions or to somehow move itself from one user to another then wipe itself out on the first user's device. Not easy to do. Maybe there's another alternative. If so, I'd like to hear about it.

So we're left with ledgers recording transactions. Those can either be public, distributed (and probably encrypted) e.g cryptocurrency. The problems with cryptocurrencies are well know. It's really hard to envision them being usable for every purchase of a pack of cigarettes or bottle of cola for a human population of 7 billion plus. Or they can be managed by a trusted authority -- e.g. Mastercard, Visa, AliPay, WeChatPay, PayPal (Why on Earth would anyone trust PayPal?). e-CNY appears to be the latter with the People's Bank of China serving as the trusted authority.

I went searching for some meaningful information on e-CNY. I found next to nothing. The best I could find is this https://digichina.stanford.edu/work/lets-start-with-what-chinas-digital-currency-is-not/ which isn't very deep, but at least seems to have some actual content. It's points I think are:

1. China is taking digital currency (but not cryptocurrency which they have banned) seriously. It's in their long term plans.

2. It is still in its very early stages with a pilot project running in (as of March 2022) ten cities.

3. There is no current mechanism for internationalization of the e-CNY. And probably the only places you can spend any you somehow come by are in China.

The metaverse of fantasy worlds is itself still a fantasy

Who Me?

This Metaverse thing is an interesting concept. And I suspect it -- if not Zuck's. someone else's -- will be great for porn, thus pretty much guaranteeing its success. I'll be interested in seeing how it plays out.

Am I personally going to participate in the Metaversian Revolution? ABSOLUTELY NOT!!!

FTC sues Intuit for false advertising, says 'free' TurboTax isn't always free

Re: Classic bait and switch

I vaguely think that it's a bit (maybe not a lot) more complex than Intuit being lying scumbags. My impression is that some simple returns actually should be/are free with the govenment(s) paying companies like Intuit a small fee to act as an online filing agent. Don't know for sure because my taxes are kind of complicated so I do them myself using a spreadsheet and paper forms

Maybe someone around here knows more.

GNOME 42's inconsistent themes are causing drama

Surely the Unix desktop is alive and well

I suspect that the reason that Linux isn't used all that much by individual users is the insistence by purists that users have to be Unix System administrators running as individual users. Unix system administration is really difficult and using that sudo mess to do simple stuff like backups is a bit off-putting for average users. Especially because Unix software isn't all that great about telling one that it can't do that Dave because Dave doesn't have admin rights. It all too often quietly ignores all or part of commands unless one simply ignores the "rules" and runs everything as root.

But really now, Android, MacOS and ChromeOS are all quite popular and they are all Unixen of one sort or another.

I recently bought a cheap chromebook and rather to my surprise I don't really dislike it all that much. My principle complaints are lack of a real Delete key and dubious discoverability. (Well those and Google's spying). And maybe I just haven't discovered how to discover stuff without resorting to the interwebs. There is even a Unix console available if one invokes the proper spells. I haven't really tried it except to verify it does some basic commands. But it's there. And AFAICS this thing is every bit as usable as modern Windows.

Re: Windows XP theming...

"There was no incentive to switch to Linux."

I can't speak for anyone else, but I switched to Linux a couple of decades ago because of a combination of combat fatigue -- I was tired of fighting with my OS to get simple things done simply -- and a (correct as it turns out) guess that market forces would cause Microsoft to become increasingly user-hostile in future decades.

But you're right in a way. Themes had nothing to do with my switch. The @#!% Registry however ...

Re: I've loathed "themes" and "skins"

light grey text on a slightly lighter grey background...

OPINION:Too right. Designers need to understand that few user displays have consistent much less properly adjusted gamma (intensity vs signal level) curves. On top of which one suspects that Red, Green and Blue vary a bit in shade from device to device. I'm pretty sure that is why material that is readable and cool on the creator's display may be garish (OK but jarring) or hard to read (not so OK) for many viewers. Really now. How many users know that selecting unreadable text areas (if one can figure out how) may convert an unreadable blur into a readable color combination when the text is highlighted? And why should users have to do that?

The solution: Restrain creative urges. Use high contrast color pairs -- black on white, yellow on black. We users have enough problems with often dubious attempts to create material that is usable with both PCs and smart phones. We really don't need additional aggravation layered on only for style. (And maybe remember that some users have one one of the many varieties of color blindness and will not be enthused about material that -- for them -- uses near identical foreground and background colors).

Dems propose privacy-respecting digital dollar

Investigate -- why not?

Sure, why not investigate?

Personally, I can't see all that much benefit, and I can see some risks. But probably some folks would think that having their "wallet" compressed, digitized, and embedded in their wristwatch or a ring was nifty and convenient. At least until some errant fast food payment register or parking meter accidentally drains their wallet or locks it or the battery dies in the middle of the night on a holiday weekend.

So, by all means. Investigate. Extensively. Before implementing.

The first step to data privacy is admitting you have a problem, Google

Re: How often do we get to hear "Sorry"......

Simple answer maybe. Tax storage of non-anonymized data beyond a few hundred bytes of basic identifying information -- user name, contact info, password. Apply the tax to any digital storage on your country's citizens anywhere on the planet (No more "the information is stored in Ireland and you can't tax/examine/whatever it the US/EU/wherever). Make the tax high enough to discourage random data collection, but low enough that businesses can store data data on online transactions without increasing prices. Enact substantial fines for violating the spirit of the rules. Multiply the fines by 50 if the violation appears to be deliberate.

Hackers remotely start, unlock Honda Civics with $300 tech

Re: Steering Wheel Lock Anyone?

My dad was an LA city fireman. He told me once that their usual procedure when a car was blocking access was to bash out the side windows and run the firehose through the car.

In the graveyard of good ideas, how does yours measure up to these?

Re: Annapurna Fallacy

Nobody will ever have seen anything like it!

The film Who Killed Roger Rabbit? comes to mind.

FIDO Alliance says it has finally killed the password

Re: Who are these people?

I really looked, but could not see one consumer group or user representative

M'god man. Are you daft? If we have to consider usability, we'll never get this internet thingee secured. And if we can't secure it, there goes our IPOs and the chance to be wealthy. And we'll face a grim future of working for decades and decades just to stay alive.

Get thee, and thy odd notions, behind me Oh Satan.

How CAPTCHAs can cloak phishing URLs in emails

A bad idea

Of course HTML email is a security risk. That was pointed out (and ignored) two and a half decades ago when the notion was first broached.

Sort of like website scripting is a security risk. But it not only still exists, but is the only possible future for the Web. At least if you believe Google.

The key to understanding why these dubious ideas are embraced seems to be that the individual/organization at risk is not the one creating the questionable material. It's those trying to use it.

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

Re: Software to arbitrate between two soldiers -- haven't they heard of rank?

Clippy goes to war? Doesn't sound promising.

Re: Who cares....

According to the Wired story -- which may not be an unbiased source. What she was looking down at was her work phone on the console which was displaying work related slack messaging. (Seems to me like a bad idea BTW. If reading messages while driving really is part of the job, surely the phone should be mounted on the dash or in the upper left corner of the windshield). According to Wired, her personal phone showing/playing The Voice was on the passenger seat. And -- according to Wired -- the dash video shows her reaching over there to get the phone to dial 911 after the accident.

Re: Who cares....

There's a long article on Vasquez and the accident at https://www.wired.com/story/uber-self-driving-car-fatal-crash/. Complicated situation. For example, Vasquez claims she was Listening to The Voice, not Watching it. And the pre-crash dash camera video might well support that. Listening to a broadcast seems OK and was also permitted by Uber's "driver's" rules. On the other hand, there is some reason that the authorities decided to charge her but not Uber, and I'd like to hear their side of the story.

BTW, the article does not reflect all that well on Uber. On the positive side, they did have rules and the cooperated in the investigation. On the other hand, it sounds like their "self-driving" software might be awful. Even worse than Tesla's -- assuming that is possible. And they disabled the vehicle's collision avoidance system which might have worked. And their system clearly was not designed with "If you must make mistakes, error on the side of safety" in mind.

China's chip-making ambitions face setbacks

Re: Why manufacture in China?

Might take a while. China can make acceptable versions of most things including complex things like nuclear reactors. But there are a few areas where they're tried and haven't quite succeeded -- high performance jet engines for example. And all the big players in the semiconductor business seem to be running as fast as they can to make the latest cutting edge products. It's not like the current leaders are sitting around drinking rum drinks with little umbrellas while congratulating themselves on another great sales year. China may well need to run as fast as they can just to stay a few years behind.

On the other hand, if you figure that China is mostly interested in making and selling consumer goods, do most of those really require cutting edge? One suspects that the chips, if any, in your washing machine or electric toothbrush are quite a ways behind state of the art (and cost about $0.07 each in quantity 10,000). China can presumably turn out as many of those as the markets need.

Why manufacture in China?

Why would a western company open a manufacturing facility in China? To get access to the Chinese market. If you don't make stuff there, China may cut off your imports. Or your own government may cut off your exports. Of course China may throw you out and force you to sell your factory -- probably at a loss. But likely they won't.

China's economy is currently about the same size as the US economy and will in all likelihood grow faster. It certainly has grown faster for the past four decades. There are a LOT of Chinese. Four times as many as in the US. Twice as many as in Europe. And many of them lack things those of us in developed countries take for granted. They're likely going to be buying a lot of stuff in the next few decades.

So yes, making stuff in China is risky. But there's money to be made ... probably. And isn't making money the object of business?

Rate of autonomous vehicle safety improvement slowing – research

Re: I disagree

Boston will even worse

No kidding. What those who haven't driven there don't know is that the actual rules of the road in Boston have no relationship at all to the rules you have to learn in order to pass a Massachusetts driver's license test. The actual guiding principle of Boston driving is Vehicle with the least to lose from a collision has the right of way. Once you internalize that, Boston driving becomes not so scary. Actually, in a way it's less scary than Los Angeles where the drivers expect you to know what you're doing and to be paying attention to what's going on around you -- a concept that ends to be beyond the comprehension of many out of towners.

Re: Wish you were wrong. But I don't think you are

But first, all the autonomous vehicles need a mandated comms system standard so they can talk to each other.

That'll happen eventually I imagine. But like a lot of other stuff, it's probably harder than it looks. Failure to communicate because of equipment failure or dirty sensors or whatever won't leave anyone the worse off. But negotiating a merge or turn with the wrong vehicle by mistake because of reflections or probably a dozen other unanticipated conditions is likely to be disastrous.

BTW, I imagine that autonomous vehicles not built by sociopaths will follow other vehicles at a safe distance and will probably allow merges according to some set of rational rules. So traffic will still flow. As well as it does now. Probably a bit better. But it can certainly flow even better if vehicles can communicate.

Wish you were wrong. But I don't think you are

I'd like to be wrong, but I fear you are pretty much right. Expressway driving is pretty simple most of the time. Except when it isn't. So I think autonomous long distance trucking may be feasible. ... As long as the vehicles reliably pull over and wait for a human to help them out when they come to something -- snow, an accident, construction zone, whatever -- that they can't handle. Maybe a human can shepard them to the expressway on-ramp and to the terminal at the end of the trip? I have no idea whether the economics work. And the potential problems are legion. But just maybe that works. And if that works, you and I will likely be able to put our vehicles into autonomous mode on the expressway with some confidence that it'll wake us up when it needs help rather than assassinating us or innocent third parties.

But the notion that autonomous vehicles can safely drive urban, or suburban, or rural roads now or any time soon seems to me to be crazed. Too bad. I'd feel a lot safer sharing the road with well designed, reliable, autonomous vehicles. If only we knew how to build them.

Customer service chatbot sector forecast to be worth $7bn this year

Re: Alternate Reality?

It's taken a couple of decades for telephone -- "Dial 1 for Useless marketing hype, 2 for more of the same, 3 to hear a garbled version of your last transaction, ... 7 to talk to an actual human (located somewhere in Asia and connected via a noisy phone line)" interfaces to improve to the point where some are actually useful. I've had some success using them instead of chatbots. And there's usually a web interface. About half of those actually work.

I imagine that in 20 or 30 years many chatbots will actually be useful and we'll be using them instead of whatever dysfunctional technical wonder is going to be their 7-gazillion dollar this year replacement.

400Gbps is the new normal for biz networks

The eternal questions

Meanwhile, in the real world, most users still struggle with a few Mbps. If they're lucky. We have a relatively fast connection for our area (Northwest Vermont). OKLA speed test just run -- Download. 4.86 Mbps, Upload 0. I'm too lazy to figure out what contortions are required to get the upload test to run. A few folks no doubt do better. Rural users (and they really do exist) stuck with a plain old telephone line don't do anywhere near that well.

Which leaves us with the eternal questions:

1. What are the people who write these articles smoking?

2. Where can I get some of it?

Amazon Alexa can be hijacked via commands from own speaker

It all depends on what you mean by "smart"

Assigning the label "smart" to these devices or these people is very problematic.

It would depend on whether your standard for comparison is the average fireplug, the average ad-monger or the average human.. No doubt Alexa is smarter than a fireplug. At least current model fireplugs. Next year? who knows? The average ad-monger? probably. The average human. No way.

Current "smart devices" look to have an IQ of about 70. At best. I have some doubts about how well Asimov's three laws -- e.g. A robot shall not harm a human ... -- will work with devices that probably don't understand the concept of human. Nor of "harm".

The zero-password future can't come soon enough

Passwordless

I am going to assume by passwordless they mean that terrible "SMS the user a one time password"

Probably. Most likely what they really mean is that they haven't any more idea than anyone else how to balance security versus usability, so they'll go with whatever is popular. And what's popular today is 2FA using SMS with one time codes that are a monumental PITA for many (very likely most) users. But they can pretend that's a user problem, so it's someone else's problem and therefore OK.

Personally, I was paying bills on line 30 years ago. But about 25 years ago, I came to feel that computer security is so difficult that paper was not only safer, but overall probably less effort. It's REALLY hard to straighten things out on-line on the rare occasions when things go wrong. I do keep a couple of minor conventional accounts with passwords and 2FA. If they ever become both secure and easy/convenient to use, I'll consider going fully digital. I do not expect that to happen any time soon.

FAA now says 5G airports may interfere with Boeing 737s

Re: In conclusion

* "Award winning" appears to be a compulsory grammatical particle in any sentence related to the award winning United States of Erica.

Indeed. "Award Winning" is an example of the a ninth grammatical category on top of the traditional eight -- noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection. The ninth category is called the hype and apparently entered the language in North America in the mid Twentieth Century. It is used in place of, or along with, adjectives or pronouns and has no known utility other than being occasionally useful to pad the length of a line of poetry or song.

China details relocation plan for up to five million datacenter racks

Re: I'd be amazed if they intend to power them with coal.

"Coal remains very much the cheapest large scale energy source on genuine all-in whole-of-life basis."

Depends on where you are. In North America, huge volumes of natural gas are produced as a byproduct of oil production from organic rich shales. In North America, natural gas is cheaper than coal. In China similar shales exist, but they are technically more difficult to exploit, so -- for now -- coal it is. FWIW, China expects domestic coal production to peak around 2035. Which is to say they expect to run out. China is said to have 46 new nuclear plants in planning or under construction (The US has two.)

Re: Also aids employment

"I'm wondering why it is necessary to make a plan out of it though. In the US, it seems simple optimization has already ensured data centers end up in relatively empty areas with cheap energy."

Probably because in the US, a "remote" data center is a few hours away. Maybe the Mohawk River Valley between Albany and Utica for a New York City based enterprise. What seems to be under discussion here would be putting that data center 3000km away in Beaver Bog, Montana. Which, except for the NSA's huge building in the wilds of Utah, doesn't seem to happen.

Also, the Chinese believe -- with some reason -- in planning. It's worked for them. (Although they reject the Soviet version of economic planning). In the US, there is a powerful constituency that believes that governments can never do anything properly other than bullying foreigners. A government plan to put data centers in remote Western areas of North America would not have much support.

Also, I wouldn't be shocked to find that the Chinese intend to power those data centers largely with coal, and they would like to help clean up the air in their Eastern population centers by burning the coal where there are fewer people and fewer other air pollution sources.

FreeDOS puts out first new version in six years

USB?

Happy to hear that FREEDOS is still out there. I'm wondering if it includes USB support? IIRC, two decades ago the lack of a DOS USB driver that could be shoehorned into the the 1.1MB of directly addressable (with a memory manager) X86 real mode memory was a significant problem. Apparently USB is sufficiently complex that even with hand crafted assembly code, it's difficult to address all the logic possibilities without more address space. There was some doubt back then that there would ever be FREEDOS USB support.

Should we expect to keep communication private in the digital age?

Re: Still can't decide

"Taxes don’t pay for anything. ...

You might want to read up on something called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) which is kind of in accordance with your thinking. https://www.businessinsider.com/modern-monetary-theory

Do I agree with MMT? Nope. I think that if anything, it crazier than the right wing notion that if we just abolish all taxes, we will (based on the appropriately named Laffer Curve) prosper beyond our wildest dreams.

Re: Still can't decide

Upvoted because I also didn't vote because I couldn't really figure out what was being asked.

If the issue is whether everyone should attempt to keep personal information about others private, I think the answer is YES. With rare exceptions, data the originator wants to be public, or data with an overiding public interest (e.g. contact tracing info for a dangerous disease) backed by reasonable due process, they should.

If the issue is should we personally expect information entrusted to a public media to remain secret forever. The answer is clearly NO. Even today's state of the art encryption is tomorrow's easily readable text or viewable picture. And even today, at some point, the text/image/whatever is surely going to end up in human comprehensible form. Every now and then, it'll get picked off there.

Microsoft offers defense against 'ice phishing' crypto scammers

Re: It's going great

It's the drinking water I tell you. It has to be the drinking water. The CIA and the Illuminati are putting something in it that deprives people of what little sense they normally have.. Worldwide apparently.

And I think the animals are starting to act funny too.

It has to be the drinking water.

5G masts will be strapped to lampposts and traffic lights – once £4m project figures out who owns them

5G mind control needs a few patches

On top of everything else, 5G mind control doesn't seem to work very well. If it did, these folks, far from fighting Gates and the Illuminati, would presumably be under its control, assembled in the streets, and chanting "What do we want? 5G. When do we want it? NOW!!!"

NASA taps Lockheed Martin to build Mars parcel pickup rocket

Re: Still on the drawing board

My impression is that the sample tubes are -- over time -- removed from the carrier one by one, filled with a sample, capped, and put back in the carrier, Presumably what's returned to Earth is the carrier with 43 capped sample tubes, I could be wrong, If so, someone who follows this mission more closely will presumably correct me.

Re: Are they actually going to open them on Earth ?

Surely, they will open the samples in a sealed chamber filled with a vacuum or an inert gas. Aside from the (miniscule) alien virus concern, opening a capsule in an Earth atmosphere environment would contaminate it with Oxygen,water vapor, diverse particulates, assorted micro-organisms and who knows what else. We've spent a whole lot of money to get a few thousand grams of Mars surface material to Earth. We'd presumably treat it with a bit of care.

Cheaper?

It'd certainly be cheaper to ask Elon. However, it is well to remember that Musk is prone to make promises he can't/doesn't keep. e.g. Tesla battery exchange -- which looks not to be implemented for economic rather than technical reasons. Or Autopilot full self-driving that actually works well which quite possibly will be a few weeks/months away for all eternity.

Can SpaceX potentially get astronauts to Mars orbit and home again? I expect so although I'm skeptical that there is much point in doing so. Can SpaceX get astronauts to Mars surface and back to Earth? That's a LOT harder. Not any time soon I think. Can NASA collect 43 tiny rock sample tubes on Mars? Difficult. But it's doing so. Total sample mass including packaging? I don't know and can't quickly find a source to tell me. But I'd guess maybe 10kg give or take a lot. Can NASA retrieve that and get it from Mars surface to Mars orbit? Probably. It won't be easy. But probably. Can NASA then get that package back to Earth Orbit? This looks to be easier. Can NASA (or SpaceX for that matter) get the package down from Earth Orbit? For Sure.

I believe the current cost estimate to get that modest package of rock samples from Perseverance back to Earth is around $4B. It'll likely cost more. Current plan is to get the samples back in 2031 or so. Wouldn't be surprised if that turns out to be optimistic.