Posts by vtcodger

Microsoft responds to PrintNightmare by making life that little bit harder for admins

No more printing?

Oh well, using a computer to do actual work is kind of twentieth century, right?

The web was done right the first time. An ancient 3D banana shows Microsoft does a lot right, too

Re: Web is already 30

"... a morass of javascript that is generating popups ..."

But, but,but ... How can it function without unending pointless, slow rendering, text boxes in garish colors overlaying what folks are trying to read? That's what modern users demand, right?

South Korea to test grenade-launching drones

Re: Drones

"Can you imagine vaccination drones shooting people with needles.[?]"

Me? Not really. But I'm sure that some of our crackpot right-wing politicians here in the US not only can imagine it, but are mobilizing right wing militas to shut down the criminal mobs of undocumented, mask wearing, aliens who they are sure are roving the countriside doing that very thing.

AI to be bigger than IaaS and PaaS combined by 2025

Let me Guess ...

The prediction is a work product from IDC's very own AI engine and is therefore completely credible, right?

Please, no Moore: 'Law' that defined how chips have been made for decades has run itself into a cul-de-sac

Re: Moore's law expired in 1975

"We will extract structural information from natures neural networks and learn why evolution chooses these structures and then be able to apply them to our own silicon ..."

And then what? We'll end up with a complex device that we only vaguely understand that exhibits the vast problem solving skills of a human hairdresser or sports fan? That would be a remarkable achievement actually But it's difficult to see what it would be good for. I doubt even Elon Musk would let it drive a car or sceen Xrays for abnormalities.

Perhaps we should consider the possibility (which I think is actually rather likely) that AI is a dead end -- a way to sink vast resources and produce little or nothing useful.

Chinese state media describes gaming as 'spiritual opium' that stunts education and destroys families

Re: The cattle

"Having three jobs, just so you can afford a roof and some pellets for eating is just another form of slavery."

I think not. Slave owners need to worry about feeding slaves, housing slaves, providing medical care, etc. Fail to do those things and you'll likely be burying a capital asset.

Capitalists, on the other hand, just need an HR department of sorts in order to hire replacements. If the workers starve or get sick, somebody else will handle funeral costs and such.

US SEC chair calls for crypto regulation

Re: Probably Long Overdue

"It works like this:..."

By far the best condensation of the myriad problems associated with cryptomania I've encountered. Upvoted accordingly.

It's not that immutable, distributed, publically accessible ledgers might not be a solution to some problem(s). Although I can't actually think of such a problem. It's that exchange of value is already handled better and far more simply by existing mechanisms.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

Re: Flow batteries?

Pumped storage actually works pretty well. But:

1. You have to be prepared to lose between a quarter and a third of your input energy due to round trip inefficiencies

2. You need to move a lot of water. My cocktail napkin says you need to move about a cubic meter of water through 100 vertical meters to store 1kwh of energy.

3. You need to have a lot of water (but it doesn't have to be fresh water) available and you need fair sized "hills" that aren't overly pointy to put your upper reservoir on.

4. You need to use the facility a lot, otherwise the fixed costs -- which are the same whether you use it or not -- will make the cost per kwH prohibitive.

On The Other Hand, ideally it's good for many thousands of recharges without performance deterioration.

It's actually used to, for example, store power from nightime water flow from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario for daytime/early evening usage peaks in the New York City area.

Re: Extinguishers...

"Not even close" Nice analysis. And dead right as far as I can see. ... except ... I suspect that a part of the problem might be battery self-discharge rather than combustion of its component chemicals. As I understand it, when a Li-ion battery is raised to a temperature somewhat above 200C, it starts discharging spontaneously. Warming it further. Causing it to discharge even faster. ... Thermal runaway.

A fully charged cell probably contains a watt hour (3600J) or more of energy. That's considerable potential heat. I doubt these cells are shipped fully charged as incinerating your battery bank not only cuts into your profit margins, but sullies the brand. Potential customers for your vehicles might decide to wait another few years before saving the planet. But, my understanding is that unlike some other battery technologies you can't fully discharge Li-ion cells and expect to recharge them later. So presumably they ship with some charge in the cells.

I submit that it's possible that liquid Nitrogen might be more effective than you postulate because it could potentially make it harder for adjacent cells to overheat and contribute to the conflagration.

Then again, probably not.

I'd be interested in comments from those who actually know something about Li-ion battery fires.

Re: Flow batteries?

There are proven alternatives to Li-ion for grid storage in the marketplace. Li-ion just happens to be what Musk has on his cart. However, I'm not sure the alternatives like Sodium-Sulphur are any better from the Stuff_I'd_Just_As_Soon_Not_Have_in_my_Neighborhood_point_of_view.

Following Torvalds' nudge, Paragon's NTFS driver for Linux is on track for kernel

Custom kernel

Aside from which if one doesn't want certain stuff in their kernel, it didn't used to be all that hard to build a custom kernel without the thing(s) one doesn't want. Presumably still could be done if one cares enough.

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: Hmm....

Downvoted because I feel that you aren't thinking things through. Yes, hybrids are a complicated solution. But for rural residents they at least represent a solution. And for rural residents in colder climates, the hybrid ICE component provides waste heat to warm the cabin and defrost the windshield -- something that would otherwise have to be done by an already marginal battery system. Hybrids do demonstrably use significantly less fuel (of which there is not an unlimited supply) than pure ICE in similar vehicles.

I'm not against electric vehicles BTW. There are many use cases where they look like a quite good idea. What I am against is the practice of setting ambitious (i.e. almost certainly unrealistic) goals without anything that remotely resembles competent planning. Where, for example, will the electricity to run all these green vehicles come from? Almost certainly not from wind and solar. The problems with those as a dominant energy source are legion. My fear is that it will come from hastily planned and built nuclear power plants. I'm not against nuclear power either. But the prospect of a world with perhaps 10,000 or 20,000 hastily built nuclear plants does make me just the slightest bit nervous.

Do keep in mind that most of the human race currently lives in developing countries and THEIR energy demands will surely increase dramatically in future decades -- a reality that tends to be ignored.

Biden warns 'real shooting war' will be sparked by severe cyber attack

Slow Learners Syndrome

Downvoted for arrogance and stupidity. Bad case of SLS (Slow Learner's Syndrome) there I think.

BTW -- What makes the post author (and the American establishment) think that the US will be able to identify cyber-attackers well enough to target retaliation? Most likely any attack on the US will appear to come from someplace(s) other than their actual source. It'll very likely be like the still poorly understood 2016 attacks on US and Canadian diplomats in Habana and elsewhere(?) in 2016. Real most likely. But a mystery.

If you ask me, the US and others would do well to start identifying their critical infrastructure and moving/keeping it off public networks. Even if that interferes with some folk's (planned) profits.

You, too, can be a Windows domain controller and do whatever you like, with this one weird WONTFIX trick

Re: Right to repair

Would this spell an end to Intellectual Property?

No? There's still copyright. For the most part, you can't simply copy anything more than small code fragments without permission.

Would that (killing Intellectual Property) be a bad thing?

No. Intellectual Property is pretty much an unworkable concept that serves as the basis for unending preposterous lawsuits that the courts are obviously incapable of resolving fairly or rationally. But no one is likely admit that until the end of days when The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat, and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together; ... and lawyers shall commence to do only useful things with their lives.

Thinking about upgrading to Debian Bullseye? Watch out for changes in Exim and anything using Python 2.x

Re: I'll hold on for as long as poss.

One day our descendants will look back ...

As I understand it, the logic was. Python needs good Unicode support. In order to do Unicode properly, we will need to break backward compatibility. And if we are going to break backward compatibility anyway, let's fix ALL the stuff we wish we'd done differently in one fell swoop. Then, hopefully, Python will never, ever, have to break backward compatibility again.

True? I have no idea. But it's not really crazy. (Probably.)

Re: I'll hold on for as long as poss.

Sadly, the industry motto is becoming, If it ain't broke, break it. Seems like kind of a dimwitted strategy to me. But who cares what I think?

China sets goal of running single-stack IPv6 network by 2030, orders upgrade blitz

But once China goes completely IPv6 good luck to anyone trying to source IPv4 or even dual-stack kit.

I think it possible that the Chinese just possibly might be able to manage export versions of their kit that support IPv4 or dual stack just as they currently support various combinations of 50/60Hz 110/220v power with a near infinite number of wall socket variations.

Re: At least they won't have to worry about international payment security

For those who are as baffled as I was by this post, PCI-DSS = “Payment Card Industry -- Data Security Standard.”

There's a Wikipedia article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Card_Industry_Data_Security_Standard

My immediate reaction was to wonder whose security we're worried about here -- the card user's, the merchant's or the card issuer's? It appears that my concerns might not be entirely ill-found. From the Wikipedia article ... "The PCI system is less a system for securing customer card data than a system for raking in profits for the card companies via fines and penalties. Visa and MasterCard impose fines on merchants even when there is no fraud loss at all, simply because the fines 'are profitable to them'."[16]

I don't know anything about this. I just found it interesting.

I do doubt whether China much cares about the preferences/interests of round-eye Credit-Card issuers.

Reserve Bank of India official suggests country may soon have a digital currency pilot

Cool?

I'm probably just extremely dense. But I have trouble seeing what the difference is between a government backed digital currency and a prepaid debit card. You hand over something(s) of value and you get some some sort of token that you can use to buy stuff until it runs out of value. Nothing wrong with prepaid debit cards. But you can buy one today from Visa, MasterCard, AmEx etc. What's the rush to get governments into the deal?

Other than the need to be cool of course.

Russia's ISS Multipurpose Laboratory Module launches after years sitting on a shelf, immediately runs into issues

Re: 30 orbits

All near-Earth orbits have period near 90 minutes. Much longer and you aren't near Earth. At least not at apogee. Any less and drag will bring you down into the atmosphere within at most a few revolutions.

Will it bend? That is the question: Arm boffins boast of first flexible 32-bit chip

Not that I know anything about chips

.. But wouldn't footprint tend to vary with the area of each feature rather than linearly with the feature size? That is to say that the difference in feature count/footprint between 800nm and 40 nm would be closer to 20**2 = 400x than to 20x?

Won't someone think of the kids? China's Cyberspace Admin steps up, orders massive cleanup to make the net safe for minors

Re: The internet as we know it

"No rudeness. No cute kids spruiking tat. No violence. No fan frenzies. And no smutty emoticons"

Jezum ... Everything that makes the Web a success. Take all that away, and what's the point of opening up a browser? You might as well just read a book. I wouldn't know from personal experience, but I'm pretty sure they still print those.

(... and books rarely try to steal your personal data or encrypt all your files).

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

Re: re-sizing and re-wrapping text

You're correct of course. For one thing, I doubt that it will ever be possible to secure an internet that permits Javascript or any other form of scripting. You'll surely end up playing Whack-a-mole with an boundless sea of exploitable OS and application vulnerabilities. BUT, if you don't allow scripting, how are you going to do slippy maps (Google Maps, OSM, etc)? Editable forms? Spell checking?

For example, composing and posting this message looks to require Javascript.

Maybe

"His argument seems to be that HTML is too flexible"

I read it as something along the line of "HTML has standards. But nobody adheres to them. Because standards are so confining"

Seems to me like a pretty good analysis.

I'm not so sure about the proposed solution. For one thing, PDF supports scripting and once you allow scripting, every evil in the digital universe probably swarms out of the box if you open it. see -- https://nora.codes/post/pdf-embedding-attacks/

You'll want to shut down the Windows Print Spooler service (yes, again): Another privilege escalation bug found

Re: "Oh, FFS (not again)".

The blame is firmly at the feet of Microsoft for this ...

At the risk of being rude, what good is railing against Microsoft going to do you, other than making you feel better for a few minutes?

Perhaps you should be looking at mitigation strategies?

Several levels:

1. Immediate: Well, it's probably a good idea to consider following Microsoft's advice and quit printing through your domain controller. And if you can't live without printing? If you have only a few users who actually need to print, maybe you can connect them directly to the printer(s)? Perhaps you can set up a print server on an spare PC -- assuming you can get Microsoft's rather bloated software to run on it. If you don't print much, maybe you can sneakernet, or email essential print files to a directly connected computer. Perhaps a Unix print server? CUPS seems pretty reliable nowadays (Is that even technically possible?)

2. Nearer term: If you believe that Microsoft is incapable of or uninterested in providing adequate support to your operation, maybe it's time to think about voting with your feet. But what's the alternative? Apple? Unix? For many(most) operations that's either daunting and probably expensive solution. Or it's flatly impossible. I don't have an answer. I don't think anyone does. But it won't do any harm to think about it And it might help.

3. Long Term: In this case I expect that for most operations your internet connection is much more of a threat than your employees. I think that's true of most of the problems we hear about. What are you going to do if it turns out in the long run that this Internet thingee is truly unsecurable? That's unacceptable? Sure. But it seems far from impossible. After all, Security looks to be a really HARD problem. Not accepting reality has generally worked out poorly for most folks in the past. Reality is that you'll either live with it somehow or unplug your connections to external networks -- at least to the extent that's possible. We'll surely know better about this in a few years. Again, thinking about it probably won't do any harm.

I'm sure that I'll be downvoted for this opinion. So what? But if you truly think I'm mistaken, how about articulating your objections in a comment for a change?

NASA fixes Hubble Space Telescope using backup power supply unit, payload computer

Re: Great news....until.

While the Perkin-Elmer designed Hubble camera is said to be very similar to those used in reconnaissance satellites, I'm not sure that the rest of the platforms are all that similar. Hubble's orbit is higher presumably because it isn't trying to capture high resolution images of Earth bound objects. And the inclinations are quite different -- 28 degrees vs (mostly) 97 degrees. The probable reasons for the high inclination are interesting, but more complicated than I care to get into. They wouldn't apply to Hubble whose orbit parameters likely depend more on the latitude of the Cape Canaveral launch facility than anything else. Inclination is important as it strongly influences what latitude band the deorbiting satellite can come down in.

Actually, I doubt the spooks care all that much if their 12 tonne (or more) spy satellite lands on someone, but I'm guessing that that they very much care if it crashes in Russia, China, or some place else where (potentially) hostile intelligence folks can collect and analyze whatever pieces survive. So deorbiting is presumably a significant part of spy satellite mission planning.

For Hubble on the other hand, deorbiting seems to have been left as a problem for future generations. At least that's what a quick internet search leads me to believe.

Cyberlaw experts: Take back control. No, we're not talking about Brexit. It's Automated Lane Keeping Systems

Why bother?

Sounds to me like using ALKS as it exists today is going to be more difficult for a non-suicidal driver than driving without it is. You have to do everything you'd do while driving except the trivial job of manipulating the steering wheel plus watching out for early warning that your car is going to try to kill you. What possible benefit does the driver gain from this technology until it is truly ready for prime time?

Iffy voltage: The plague of PC builders and Hubble space telescope controllers alike

Re: Old Power Supplies die eventually

It'd be interesting to know how they design PSUs for long term space missions. My guess would be that the electrolytic capacitors that are ubiquitous in Earthly gear would be about the last thing you'd want to use because they are sort of ephemeral. But what do you use instead for smoothing voltage flows -- inductors?

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Re: "The current regulatory system is broken"

My guess has been that Musk's electric truck is targeted at transport from distribution centers to retail stores within a few hundred miles. That is to say, containers of Vietnamese TVs, and Korean PCs and Chinese pretty much everything arrive at Long Beach California by ship. Make their way across the US by train and eventually get broken down at huge warehouses built in repurposed corn fields in the middle of nowhere. From there, a delivery of the many different products needed to restock the retail stores are assembled into shipments delivered by (electric) truck.

I could be way wrong. It's not like actually I know anything about this other than that the container terminal in Long Beach (Wilmington actually) exists and that some of those distribution centers also exist. But it seems to me to make sense -- if the economics work. If they don't Musk presumably won't sell a lot of trucks.

Re: WTAF - this is bullshit

The FAA requires approval of any structure in the US taller than 200 (61m) feet above local ground level or near an airport. Musk's towers are more than twice that. Roughly the height of a 40 story building.

Of course he should have asked for approval. Assuming that they aren't actually an air travel hazard of some sort, I imagine he'll get approval. Along possibly with a (well deserved) fine?

Re: And yet

"He has planning permission from the local council"

We're talking about Texas which -- outside of Travis County (Austin) -- is notoriously lacking in meddlesome regulation of just about everything. At least as long as you are the right sort of person. Being white and wealthy goes a long way toward making you the right sort of person. Bringing jobs to the neighborhood helps a lot also.

I doubt the local planning commission (if any) had any substantive objections to Musk's plans. If he even bothered to present them.

Don't get me wrong. Texas is not that bad a place if you are roughly the right sort of person, can tolerate interminable 35C (95F) plus most days Summers, and don't get nervous around dimwits with firearms. I wouldn't want to live there, but there are much less attractive places in North America.

So nice of China to put all of its network zero-day vulns in one giant database no one will think to break into

Re: Interesting Article 7

"It potentially gives Beijing from that 2 days until a patch is released to do exploits."

My first thought was that that's a pretty reasonable point. Followed by -- but 2 days doesn't seem like a lot of time for a government to isolate a defect, code, debug, test, and use an exploit. Why not give themselves a week or two weeks?

Then, about an hour later the light dawned. There doesn't seem to be any indication I can see that this government data base will be accessible outside the government. Two days possibly is important but for exactly the opposite reason. It looks to maximize the amount of time Chinese intelligence has to isolate and exploit weaknesses before they are patched.

Re: Database vulnerability

"The requirement to submit the bugs within 2 days implies that it is either FAX or more likely electronic."

Or, if security is really important and time isn't of the essence, postal mail. Most people aren't aware of it, but here in the US, quite highly classified information used to be -- and probably still is -- routinely moved around by registered mail. Given the current state of network security perhaps we should be thinking in terms of alternatives to adding additional complex layers of digital "Security" on top of a sort of wobbly foundation. Making things more complex doesn't necessarily make them more secure.

Database vulnerability

"Another part of the order that worries Moussouris is the central Chinese vulnerability database that will be created to house all of these reported bugs: "

Just because we live in a connected world, doesn't mean China's network vulnerability database has to be on-line. It could be stashed on properly backed up USB sticks on computers never attached to a network. My guess is that the database will be tiny -- a few thousand items. It could probably have been handled nicely by a 1980s 8086 PC with 5.25 inch floppies.

In fact, it likely doesn't even have to be computerized. A physical file of 3x5 (OK, OK in China, possibly A7) index cards written in Chinese and kept in a safe in a secure facility could probably do the job -- whatever it is -- just fine.

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Re: 250 mile range/19 passengers

250 miles is basically my "might as well drive" range.

Wrong use case. The traffic they are anticipating almost certainly is international travelers and/or business trips that depart/arrive at a relatively small number of airports. If you live in New England and want/need to travel to Germany would you rather drive 4 or 5 or 6 hours to Montreal, JFK or BOS, deal with difficult traffic, and pay through the nose for parking? Or would you rather drive 50 minutes to a regional airport, Lebanon, NH perhaps, park for free or at minimal cost, and check in there? Yes, you may spend an extra hour or so hanging out in airport lounges. And yes that is ... ahem ... terminally dull. But if the alternative is an hour or so fearing for your life in Boston's notorious traffic, airport lounges begin to look better and better.

IPv6 still 5-10 years away from mainstream use, but K8s networking and multi-cloud are now real

Re: Version 6

I have no idea what 6G actually is. And if prior experience is any guide, neither do most of the folks babbling about it. But my first question would be whether it's going to use higher frequencies (shorter wavelengths) than current technologies. If so, is it going to work worth a damn indoors without specialized construction that includes "windows" that are transparent to 6G wavelengths?

Microsoft names Chinese group as source of new attack on SolarWinds

Rarer than unicorns?

"Bad actor likes to work through insecure consumer routers"

Is there such a thing as a secure consumer router?

Google fined €500m for not paying French publishers after using their words on web

Re: Thick skin

There may well be a legitimate problem here, but I wonder if you've described it correctly. Google news credits its sources, limits its description to short snippets and provides a link to the original source. Always has I believe. At least here in the US. Its news operation looks to be designed to be compliant with "Fair Use" under US copyright law because they'd surely be in deep trouble at home and most everywhere else if they weren't.

Look for yourself https://news.google.com/topstories

I'm not especially fond of Google for a lot of reasons. But I'm not sure Google News is especially evil except for its contributing click data to Google's extensive dossiers on every sentient creature on the planet.

BTW. I imagine that Google's response other than sending a platoon of lawyers to France to argue compliance with EU copyright law will be to stop ever reporting news from French sources.

Google killed desktop Drive and replaced it with two apps. Now it’s killing those, and Drive for desktop is returning

Re: Google - great at search...

Their maps are pretty good also -- when they aren't broken. (But Open Street Map is Much faster).

Lenovo says it’s crammed a workstation into a litre of space – less than three cans of beer

Might get a little warm in there

Cosmetics seem critically important to much of humanity, so maybe there's a substantial market amongst those who believe that you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too compact a workstation.

But what worries me about great capability in very little space is heat. Even in 2021, great capability tends to come with a certain amount of toastiness. Can this thing really shed all that heat effectively in worst case conditions?

Tencent uses facial recognition to enforce China’s curfew on gaming kids

Confucius say

If Tencent's facial recognition algorithm works as well as most, I expect that using dad's phone with a picture of dad or for that matter a picture of a random adult Chinese like, for example, Confucius, in front of the camera will probably keep one on line past curfew. And if so and if Chinese kids are anything like American kids, 97% of the youngsters in China will know that within about 3 days of the first kid discovering it.

The James Webb Space Telescope, a project dating back to the late 1900s, may launch this very century

Re: Please Please Please go to (latest) plan.

If you're just interested in spectacular images of very distant objects, you're probably OK no matter what happens with the Webb observatory. Several large earth bound telescopes with mirrors approaching the size of a soccer field are scheduled to come on line in the next decade. What Webb will give you that they won't (I think) is well resolved false color images of cooler objects radiating at wavelengths longer than the visible spectrum.

Re: Well

The Webb telescope is supposed to fly to the L2 point 1.5 million km out. Technically it will be (if it gets there) in solar orbit, not earth orbit. I'm not sure that Falcon 9 could get it there. Somebody around here probably does know.

It's also huge -- the mirror is 6.5m (21 feet) in diameter. That's larger than all but a handful of earthly telescopes. Building optical devices that size takes monumental effort. Building a new one every 3-5 years would probably take significant chunk out of mankind's space budget which is currently around $70B a year and is largely committed to useful stuff -- e.g. communications satellites, weather satellites and to politically popular but (IMHO) rather pointless manned missions. Personally, I'd rather see the money go to things that will tell us potentially useful stuff -- more lunar and Mars rovers and resource surveys of asteroids.

YouTube's recommendation engine is pretty naff, Mozilla study finds

A Journey through the digital sewer

Youtube has content policies? You're kidding, right?

I'd block the site if I didn't want watch the occasional how-to video and didn't, for some obscure reason, find the lock-picking lawyer (https://www.youtube.com/c/lockpickinglawyer) entertaining.

Microsoft patches PrintNightmare – even on Windows 7 – but the terror isn't over

Re: It is about time

Downvoted for obliviousness. While I agree that Windows isn't really as awful as the O.P. posits, I think Windows has long since become unmanageable. At least Microsoft can't manage it. I doubt anyone could. Other OSes don't seem to have that problem -- at least not to the same degree.

I also think that the IT industry has done at best a mediocre job of meeting user needs. A "Users, who cares about users? They'll take what we feed them and like it." mentality has driven the industry for decades.

Robots still suck. It's all they can do to stand up – never mind rise up

Re: Musk, are you listening?

The Elon is presumably well aware of the capabilities and limitations of robots. His attempt to manufacture the Tesla Model 3 largely with robots wasn't a total failure. But it was anything but an overwhelming success see https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/13/17234296/tesla-model-3-robots-production-hell-elon-musk The factory did end up using a lot of robots we're told. But apparently he ended up with many more human workers than were in the initial plans.

Pentagon scraps $10bn JEDI winner-takes-all cloud contract

Re: Oh no ...

"MS will now spend the next 10 years fighting to get the contract cancellation revoked."

I suspect that the MS folks will probably be way too busy padding the bill they will send the government for work already performed and for contract termination costs to waste effort trying to get the contract reinstated.

Re: Obligatory Star Wars MisQuote

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Might be appropriate also.

Things that needn't be said: Don't plonk a massive Starlink dish on the hood of your car

Re: Spaced-GenX?

"Besides, given the need to keep the antenna pointing at the right bits of sky, wouldn't you need an auto-adjusting gyro aiming harness ,,,?"

I'm not a expert, but my understanding is that the Starlink antenna is a phased array antenna whose beam is electronically steerable, But I would think that adjusting for changes in the vehicle's direction might require satnav and some non-trivial mods to its standard beam steering software.

Big Blue's big email blues signal terminal decline – unless it learns to migrate itself

Re: It's Terminal

If it's truly terminal, I'm guessing that the number of mourners at the funeral will be small and most of those will be there either to gloat or for the free food at the reception.