Posts by vtcodger 2304 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
"yep... but a Chinese company drops 300 billion and it's just chickenfeed..."
Not to worry man. The Evergrande default situation is "contained". The Chinese have told us so.
Of course the cascading defaults of dubious US loans and weird financial instruments based thereon in 2007-2008 were "contained" as well. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernake told us so.
I think Python in your browser is probably a bit more likely to work as intended than Javascript which seems often not to do quite what the website author intended. I mean, why would one intentionally put an ad with a non-functioning Close button on top of the order form I am trying to fill out? But I agree that working better not necessarily a good thing.
Don't get me wrong. Python in a browser seems an RBI (Really Bad Idea) from a security viewpoint if nothing else. But also it sounds like the real problem is the WASM capability that enables Python to run.
Does WASM have anything much to offer users other than a probably small rendering speed improvement and potential bundle of major grief?
Yes, the technical folks should determine what equipment is needed.
But the decision whether to buy or lease usually depends on things like tax and cash flow considerations. And the people who understand those are the accountants.
Yes, a lot of companies make stupid decisions. In my experience, that usually isn't really the fault of the technical folks or of the accountants. It's the fault of management whose job is to talk to their experts and come up with the most viable solution for their particular situation.
As with most things Musky, it's not all that easy to find technical details on Starlink. But I think it likely that the satellites in higher orbits mostly are there to act as relays -- which won't do wonders for latency, but would decrease the number of ground stations needed.
As for needing a license. India either is, or will shortly be, the world's most populous country. Of course ground stations there will be needed. If not immediately, eventually. And licenses. And, one suspects, substantial bribes to India's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy. All in good time?
"It nice to know the Chinese have bought in to the quantum snake oil, jut like everyone else."
You've got a point there. A bit of skepticism is probably appropriate. On the other hand, China (and US and EU and ...) probably can't afford not to assume that quantum or other advanced decryption techniques might become available at some future time.
"The only data that should be shared is data concerning Interpol and global police operations"
That's a bit too narrow I think. You don't really want to shut down all international commerce I expect.
And laws making the activities of the NSA,CIA and their numerous counterparts in other countries illegal are kind of pointless. Intelligence Agencies don't care if they are breaking other nation's laws. Breaking laws is one of the things they do. (Although a lot of their activity like reading and analyzing foreign newspapers is quite legal and seems harmless and appropriate).
But laws constraining Google, Facebook, et. al. from spying on people seem entirely reasonable and proper. Even more effective, might be to tax their data stores at rates high enough to discourage retention of much more than basic login identification and the details of active transactions. Unfortunately, I can't begin to figure out how that can be done. I suspect it's impractical.
"Not sure how robo drivers are going to make that any better"
My understanding is that Waymo only works within thoroughly mapped areas. Good technical reasons for that. I imagine these are the same. You give it an address (How? If you don't speak a Chinese language or have a basic understanding of Chinese characters, that may be a problem). It goes there. You pay with a credit card or phone app or something. Maybe cash even, No tip presumably. If the address system is like Tokyo (buildings numbered in the order they were built), the last 100 meters or so of your journey may be a problem. But that's not the taxi's fault. And a human driver might well not be any better unless you share some common language.
Nothing wrong with digital currency I think. Really, for significant amounts, in much of the world, those of us not in the drug trade rarely see much physical cash anymore. And we haven't for decades. We use credit cards, checks (in North America at least), and such.
But why blockchain? Blockchain wastes more energy than Las Vegas lightshows and seems necessary only if you don't trust your "bank". But Japan is one of the world's more honest countries. World Population Review (https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-corrupt-countries) ranks it number 19 between Ireland and Iceland. That's lower than the UK,Canada and Australia (tied for 11th place), but better than the US (25th place). Why would one not trust a consortium of Japanese banks? For that matter, why would one trust blockchain? It's extraordinarily complex and seems a good deal less transparent in practice than in theory. At least it appears that a significant amount of cryptocurrency has somehow found its way out of the pockets of those who thought they owned it and into the pockets of ... well, somehow that seems a bit unclear.
Not that complicated if you've ever had to look at radar return waveforms. A bit puzzling if not.
If the moon were a glassy smooth sphere, you'd only get one return signal -- from the center of the moon. Any other reflections would go off to your sides. But the moon is bumpy. Craters and such. So in addition to the return from the center point, you'll get some signal bounced back from other lunar features. Those are further away from you than the center of the moon. It takes a tiny bit longer for your signal to get to them and a bit longer for the signal reflected from them to get back. Result: instead of one tidy set of pulses that is mirror image of your outgoing signal, you'll get a reflected signal that's smeared out over (I'd guess) 20 or so milliseconds.
I may have some of the details wrong. It's not like I spend my spare time bouncing radio signals off the moon. But I think the above is the general idea.
Reasonable question -- deserves an answer.
LoRa is a proprietary spread spectrum technology that is used in license free bands. It presumably allows multiple user pairs to communicate over the same band simultaneously without requiring them to find a free frequency slot. The Wikipedia article is at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
There's also a Wikipedia article on EME (Earth Moon Earth) communications in general at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%E2%80%93Moon%E2%80%93Earth_communication
I wouldn't be surprised that the motivation really isn't to save money. It's quite possibly a not entirely unjustified fear that at some future time their operations could be hostage to the whims of MS management. Potentially, MS could increase their subscription fees by 35% a year every year for 20 years, and those users who are locked in would have no choice other than to pay up.
But MS wouldn't do that? Haven't dealt with many MBA equipped beancounters have we?
I'm guessing, but it appears to me that local and regional governments do an awful lot of stuff that may be difficult in some cases to do well with the generalized tools in office packages. Birth and Death records and producing the corresponding certificates on demand. Land titles and zoning restrictions and zoning variances. Police records. Probably medical data subject to complex access rules. Library catalogs perhaps. Maybe lists of library cards and expiration dates. Dog licenses. Canine rabies shot certificates. Tax information. Property ownership data. I actually looked at the latter once for some project of my esteemed spouse's. It's public record information here in Vermont. The property locations and valuations were orderly. But man-oh-man was there peculiar stuff in a few of the owner and owner address fields. The property is jointly owned by several trusts with multiple addresses in multiple countries?
My guess is that sort of stuff they want to do in OS independent environments -- browsers apparently.
My take is that becoming OS independent is possibly feasible. And it's probably a good idea. But it will not be easy. And they will be lucky if they can do it at current budget levels.
This is an interesting problem. Here in North America small farmers have pretty much been decimated because it seems that every economic shock of any sort makes their life more difficult. A century or so of that and it's no wonder that most farmers have sold the family plot and taken up web site design or retired to someplace warm. Currently, the percent of US population engaged in agriculture is slightly over 1 percent. And US/Canadian farms mostly weren't/aren't all that small by Asian standards.
China seems to be doing much better agriculture wise than most developing countries, but they seem to have developed a weird system with some family members intensively farming their leased plot while living in a house they own built on land they lease. And other family members work in sometimes distant cities. It's difficult to imagine such a system working at all much less being transplantable to India. Maybe Japan or Europe offers some answers that will work for India.
So Modi is probably correct that Indian agriculture needs massive structural changes. His problem is that any such revolution is likely to involve politicians hanging from lamp posts. I doubt he favors that part.
And door locks themselves can freeze up in cold climates -- especially on older vehicles where the weatherstripping has stiffened and cracked with age allowing water to seep in. Even if the lock -- mechanical or electronic -- works, the latch may not free up. Solutions involve a hair drier (if you care about the paint job) or a propane torch (if you don't) or entering through a rear door (if there is one, the weatherstripping on those will likely be less worn) and climbing over the seats in order to start the car which can then be run for 20 minutes or so with the heat on full. But won't the latch freeze up again when you turn the engine off? Very likely, Yes.
Waiting for Spring, or moving to a warmer climate will also work.
"Dreadful design."
Think of it as a safety feature. If you can't get into your Tesla you and the rest of us are safe from Musk and Company's sometimes dubious design decisions.
Key fobs ARE convenient. I've been known to install an Avital unit into an older car without remote entry in order to get that convenience. But twice in the past three decades, I have had to deal with key fobs with weak batteries. Once -- on a subfreezing night in rural Vermont -- warming the fob by vigorous rubbing got the door open and engine running. The other time I jury rigged something with a battery from another device and some scraps of wire. Neither car was mine incidentally. I think cars without physical locks are a problem waiting to happen and won't buy one.
As for a vehicle that requires an internet connection for entry and use. That'd be really odd. Maybe for an armored car or some other special purpose vehicle there's some rationale. But for just another set of wheels... Really, that's bizarre. I have to believe there must be some alternative method of access even though it may not be obvious.
Incidentally, having a physical key in the fob doesn't help if there is no physical lock to insert it into. Tesla is not the only car maker whose designers possibly are better suited to jobs in the food service industry.
I'm sure the Chinese among others would be happy to submit a very attractive bid and might very well deliver a superior product at very low cost. With adequate backing from their intelligence people, they would not be burdened by unpleasant constraint like the need to show a profit.
Of course the US requires a US contractor for a DOD data management system. They'd require that even if the country didn't have much in the way of qualified candidates. Fortunately the US does have a number of companies that look to be as qualified as any in the world. Now whether there is a meaningful job there. That's a different issue.
You got me curious, so I spent 15 minutes on the internet and am therefore now an EXPERT. It looks to me like "sandboxes" maybe aren't exactly built into the Javascript language or its interpreter as many of us assume. Perhaps we are expected to bring our own sandbox to the party which we do through our choice of browser(s). I certainly hope I'm wrong about that.
Perhaps someone who actually understands Javascript sandboxes would care to explain to you and I how they work and how they can possibly be anything other than a thick application of cosmetics over a massive collection of security issues.
BTW, I'm not sure one actually needs admin privileges to overwrite the MBR even without the help of Javascript. As least in older (pre UEFI) disk setups, the MBR (and all of track 0 for that matter) are not part of any file system and aren't protected by the usual OS mechanisms. You may have to bring your own "device driver" to overwrite them, but maybe that's not all that hard to do.
Would Google sell my fingerprint to an advertiser? Of course they would. They'd sell my saliva if they could find a customer and had a way to collect the spit. (Log on by tongue-print anyone?) Would any advertiser actually pay for it. Ad people are pretty weird. But not THAT weird. ... I think ...
My GUESS would be that the sensor and associated logic works just fine for some fingerprints including the one you use, those of the Google developers and those of the Google test team. But that it fails for some. I wouldn't be at all surprised that if you spent a rainy afternoon testing the fingerprint sensor with all ten of your upper extremity digits, you might find that some work reliably and some don't. They're all different y'know.
As for "enhanced security". If logging in doesn't work, IT'S SECURE. Maybe not the optimal solution to providing security ... But, to a spin artist I can see "works poorly if at all" morphing to "is much more secure".
"It's in a low earth orbit, at a lower altitude than StarLink satellites. As I recall, there is enough atmosphere at that altitude that StarLink satellites would deorbit themselves in just a few years"
Not that simple. Nothing ever is it seems. Last I looked, there were to be three batches of Starlink satellites. One batch (most of the satellites) to have perigee around 330km, a second batch around 550km (comparable to Hubble) and a third batch around 1000km. It's the low orbit birds that give (some?) users lower latency, but burn up quickly. But that really is (if they are approved) the majority of them.
Hubble is expected to reenter in the mid 2030s. Presumably it could be moved to a higher orbit before then if it is still working. That probably doesn't require a manned mission.
Depending on what's wrong with HST, I wouldn't ignore the possibility of one or more unmanned repair mission(s). I think that we're a long way from robots that can do everything that humans can. OTOH, we can make robots that can do many straightforward mechanical jobs and whose operation can be tweaked a bit remotely. And if (when) things don't go according to plan, you can probably simply stop and think things over without having to worry about problems like running out of Oxygen. And you don't have to bring robots home safely after the repair.
Methane isn't considered to be toxic although there might be times when one would wish it were. Methane-Oxygen mixtures from 5-14% are explosive though.
The rather infamous SpaceX toilet is, it would seem, still busted. Astronauts will be issued high tech "underwear" which is -- I suspect -- Newspeak for "diapers". No, I am not making that up. https://fuentitech.com/spacex-toilet-issues-make-astronauts-dependent-on-underwear-silicon-valley/328181/
"I lived in China from 2012 until 2017 ..."
Fine. Sounds interesting. But how do these Superapps differ from what Apple is peddling and Google would like to drag us into?
I don't even use a smart phone. Have one. Rather slow, confusing, poorly thought out UI. Worse in its way than emacs if that's possible. But from what I see at the supermarkets here in the US you know you're in trouble when someone in front of you in line hauls out a phone to pay for their groceries. Sometimes the transaction goes smoothly, but very often it descends into three or four store people clustering around the register and customer trying to get the damn thing to work. And very likely the customer ends up paying with cash or plastic.
Do the Chinese do something different? Or do something radical like testing their products before they ship them? Or what?
"because the majority of its users ... demand it"
Citation needed.
When was the last time anyone heard a typical web user exclaim. "What I really want is for my phone/PC to run slower ... and more erratically. And I **LOVE** ads. Please send me more of them. And I don't think I'm being spied upon anywhere near enough."?
"Semiconductors will be about 20 per cent of the bill-of-materials of a car by 2030"
OMG. Can nothing be done to save humanity from this calamity?
Oh well. I suppose it will cut miles driven by a lot. It'll probably be next to impossible to convince these digitized vehicles to go anywhere other than back to the dealer for "upgrades".
why all the complication?
Just guessing because I gave up on Windows a long time ago. But my GUESS would be that the problem(s) isn't/aren't drivers so much as print queue management. Queues for shared printers can contain files from multiple users with differing access privileges. Can't let just anyone tinker?
Last time I looked CUPS required some credentials in order to tinker with print queues -- restart jobs, clear problem jobs, etc. Windows is probably similar? I had to create an lpadmin user and add said user to my list of printer administrators when I set up printing on my personal linux machine many,many years ago. And I need to claim to be good old L P every now and then to persuade CUPS to do what I want. But maybe there is a better, simpler way. It's not like I'm a super qualified Unix system administrator.
Not like I haven't had issues with Windows not keeping the correct time between restarts ...
Two or three decades ago that used, most often, to be due to the battery powered motherboard aka "CMOS" or "BIOS" clock. Those things used to be, and probably still are, designed to be cheap, not accurate. It wasn't at all uncommon for them to drift seconds a day. Adds up. Plus, the batteries that provide them with a tiny trickle of power when they PC is off, like batteries (almost) everywhere and always, wear out even if they are rechargeable. I believe many (all?) PCs still use those clocks. Sometimes the batteries are easily replaced. And sometimes they aren't.
But there is bugger all that data sharing can do for type 2
Perhaps not. On the other hand, there is are researchers who contend that "Type 2" is very likely a heterogenous group of people with differing glucose handling characteristics who need different (and possibly in some cases no) treatments and that the way to sort THAT out is to assemble Continuous Glucose Monitoring data from "Type 2 diabetics" plus a reasonable number of purportedly "Normal" individuals. The contention is that once there is sufficient data. a spectrum of conditions and treatment approaches may well emerge. Possible result -- better (and cheaper) treatments. Insulin is expensive. And somewhat dangerous.
Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But how can one tell without data?
I'm a type 2 diabetic with (currently) well controlled blood glucose. Having gone through a number of years of trying to control blood glucose with insulin before discovering that I'm lucky enough to be able to control my blood glucose levels pretty well with Metformin and diet, I have nothing but sympathy for those of you that need supplementary insulin. I found controlling blood glucose with insulin and a blood glucose meter to be extraordinarily difficult.
But that's sort of beside the point. The issue is should my medical data be available to drug companies and medical researchers? Of course it should. I'd strongly prefer it be anonymized Insurance companies? For population studies and other meta-analyses? Of course. For setting my personal policy rates. Probably not. But there would seem to be some room for discussion there. Should it be available to scumbag marketers (is there any other kind of marketer?) Hell no. And speaking only for myself, I'm in favor of jail time -- lots of it -- for those marketing types who will inevitably try to pierce the veil of anonymity.
Now they just have to make it work
Not exactly. They just have to recover their investment plus an obscene profit before folks discover that it doesn't work. If quantum computing should, unlikely as it may seem, actually have useful applications, that's a (quite likely) unexpected bonus. For reference, see penny mining stocks, and/or cryptocurrency.
Aside:
History of Blue Sky Laws
The term "blue sky law" is said to have originated in the early 1900s, gaining widespread use when a Kansas Supreme Court justice declared his desire to protect investors from speculative ventures that had "no more basis than so many feet of 'blue sky.'" https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blueskylaws.asp
On top of that, if you want to make me download a terabyte of blockchain data ...
Ahem ... Possibly (one hopes -- Probably) not. Cryptocurrency is digital. But not all digital currency is crypto. A huge fraction of the world's "wealth" is already digital in that it consists mostly or entirely of bits stored in computers. Is it real? Yeah. In some sense at least. You can accumulate it, buy and sell it, use it to buy stuff, or borrow against it. And in many (most?) cases, it has at least some tangible value that will remain even if the trading value goes (temporarily?) to zero.
A digital currency in the sense the HCB is talking about is digital assets that are backed somehow by a credible institution like a government or (a) major financial institution(s) that guarantees to try maintain some short term stability and to take the stuff off your hands and pay you something for it even if the ordinary markets are somehow paralyzed. It's also somewhat anonymous in that you can spend its tokens without proving ownership. Mostly, having the tokens makes them yours.
Cryptocurrency has most of the trappings of a currency. But it lacks a credible guaranteer. Its "value" can and very likely will go to zero during the next major crash of the world's financial markets. A crash which, incidentally, seems to me more and more imminent as the volume of financial excess worldwide builds. I, for one, won't miss crypto. It's a significant waste of resource and a vehicle for way too much questionable activity.
Blockchain is an interesting technology that genuinely seems to have no known useful application other than making counterfitting of cryptocurrency so difficult that it's easier to just follow the rules and create it "legitimately".
What's at issue here, I think is what problems would have to be addressed should governments/central banks decide to go into an activity that looks to me like government backed debit/prepaid-credit cards. Why would they want to do that? Well, it might make some forms of nefarious/unpopular activity more difficult. But mostly, I doubt they will. I sure could be wrong.
But getting back to the original issue. I doubt, they would need or want blockchain to lock down their credit/debit tokens.
This is an issue for economists. I am not (and would not want to be) an economist. Economists are very clever people. And, unlike most "soft scientists" they are not afraid of math and sometimes manage not to make too much of a hash of its application. Nonetheless, it is clear that they are a VERY long way from actually understanding economics.
but I sometimes lose patience with it (firefox)
Indeed, it appears that many useful websites have security certificates that expired on Sept 30. That includes Wikipedia and Stack Overflow amongst many others. Did they remember to renew the certificates? Of course not. Apparently failure to update your security certificates is a sign that you are human. (Maybe we could somehow use that characteristic of humanity to replace captchas?) Firefox won't let me see those sites. Chrome -- which I normally avoid -- warns me, but lets me see the site if I really want to -- which I do. So I am using Chrome this week even though I'd rather not.
Last Saturday my esteemed spouse said unto me. "I have couple of promotional coupons from a new deli. I'm going to pick up dinner there after work. Let me know if you'd like me to pick up something for you." "Fine", said I. "Their menu will be on their website. I will visit the website and see if anything appeals." As it turns out, no I won't, three different browsers show me a blank page. So I applied wget or curl (I forget which) to the home page. 1,8Mb of utterly incomprehensible Javascript. That's 1,800,000 characters. None of which have any readable content. ... and it doesn't work.
Seems to sum up Internet-2021 pretty well.
BTW, I think I can code a blank page in about 13 bytes of html. (Haven't tried it. Might need a bit more) What do the other 1,799,987 bytes do?
I don't know whether I hate smartphones or not. I bought one on sale. And I managed to set up wi-fi. Then I tried a few things. And the more things I tried, the less I liked it. So I never activated service. If I need to make a phone call, and I'm not at home, I use my 15 or 20 year old Nokia which doesn't aggravate me at all and costs about a third of what the cheapest smartphone service would cost.
Yep. That was my thought. And it's not just Washington. Indeed, the largest glacial floods were apparently further East draining into -- at various times -- the Mississippi, St Lawrence or Arctic drainages. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outburst_flood. Similar floods occurred in Asia during the last deglaciation.
What I'm not sure of is whether the geological (areological?) signatures of glacial floods would be easily recognized from orbit or whether perhaps they require boots/wheels on the ground observations.
Dead on. I suppose they can upgrade/break the vehicle entertainment or climate control systems and such over the air without serious consequences, but if they try that with safety related features, the results are likely going to be a field day for morticians, and ambulance chasing lawyers. Elon Musk doesn't understand that. Yet. But the rest of the automotive industry likely does. I think we're likely looking at the fantasies of marketeers here, not the future.
The one hope "they" might have of pulling this nefarious scam off would seem to be maps. If future cars are dependent on maps for routine tasks, maybe they can sell the notion that having the very latest map is essential to safety and vehicle operators must pay generously for regular updates. But they better be damn sure that they can deliver valid maps reliably and never end up with cars with no usable maps at all or vectoring tens of thousands of commuting vehicles onto some dead end street instead of the bridge or tunnel entrance four streets over.
Upvoted because you clarified some things I wondered about.
I agree that it's seemingly not really what is claimed. But it sounds like an interesting project none the less. Probably things will be learned. How do they plan to "train" the thing? It's not like humans pop out of the womb equipped to discuss philosophy or quantum mechanics. We need a few years of preparation.
My one quibble is your first paragraph. Animals may not "have language" whatever the heck that means. But many are quite effective communicators. Dogs, for example, manage to convey their desires and opinions far better than many humans. And most understand the limited components of human speech that are of interest to them. That portion involving food, walks, etc. They do not seem to give a damn about climate change, Brexit, or whether the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Makes them pretty bright in my book.
The concern about collisions between satellites is understandable, but very likely largely unwarranted. Even if humanity ends up with 100,000 communication satellites zipping around in Low Earth orbit, that is only a small fraction of the amount of junk already up there. It is estimated that there are in excess of 500,000 sand to small pebble (1-10 mm) objects "flying" around up there. Since closing velocities between orbiting stuff are potentially very high -- if things want to stay in orbit, they have to move very fast -- roughly 8km/s -- even small objects are potentially capable of punching right through anything they hit. Since that does not seem to happen very often, I expect that satellite collisions will be quite rare. If collisions do turn out to be an issue, that can presumably be handled as it is with aircraft, by small, mandated, vertical separation.
(However, it possibly is important that only the satellite makes it to LEO and that any associated junk -- fittings discarded during deployment, etc -- returns toward Earth and burns up promptly in the atmophere.)
Why on Earth would anyone want to do this? (Not a rhetorical question).
I've never been entirely clear on all the reasons for ActiveX, but when it was invented in the mid-1990s, it was a way to temporarily download capability from a website to do some job or other. It's still in use because some people/businesses see no reason to change something that is integrated into their processes, works just fine, and is either paid for, or is a known cost that is budgeted for.
We don't actually need it nowadays because we have have Javascript which is even more capable/dangerous and has the advantage from the malware author POV of being likely to run under any OS, not just Windows.
Now, how much did you agree to pay me to say that?
The Good News:
You will be paid
The Bad News:
The payment will be in a cryptocurrency called Badcoin which is currently trading at $0.02 asked, nothing bid.
The fee to convert your 100 Badcoin payment to US dollars will likely be around $35.
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