Posts by vtcodger

Someone got so fed up with GE fridge DRM – yes, fridge DRM – they made a whole website on how to bypass it

Re: Entirely legal

Everything Marx told us about Communism was wrong. Unfortunately, everything he told us about Capitalism was correct ... modern Russian proverb.

US senators propose $22bn fund for new fabs on American soil because making stuff is better than designing stuff

Re: Meh

What sort of people work at a fab? All sorts apparently. Two or three decades ago IBM's semiconductor fab in Vermont was the largest manufacturing facility in New England in terms of people employed. Everything from highly skilled chip designers down to high-school drop outs trundling materials around the (vast) factory. Problem was, it wasn't profitable. IBM ended up paying Global Foundries a couple of billion dollars to take the plant, its staff, and a bunch of future obligations related to the facility off their hands.

Count how many times the Feds checked Chinese telcos in America weren't spying. Only one hand needed

Ask the FCC?

Why would one ask the FCC about communications? They can't even keep track of US broadband speeds. And their track record on real undertakings like preventing robocalling is dismal. Their forte seems to be doing press conferences and routing taxpayer money to large corporations to pay for services to American consumers that will never actually be rendered.

If you want to know about Chinese Telcom intelligence gathering activities, I think you might do better to ask the CIA and or NSA. They may or may not know something. And they may or may not choose to divulge what they know.

US Air Force wants to pit AI-powered drone against its dogfighting hotshots in battle of the skies next year

Re: Which aircraft will the meat pilot use?

I think perhaps we're confusing ourselves a bit because of the word "drone". I suspect what is being proposed here is not a rather clunky human controlled surveillance vehicle with a bit of armament attached. Could be. But maybe not. Neither is it a full fledged fighter with HAL or Clippy in the pilot seat.

I suspect what will actually be involved is more like a very smart, reusable, Surface to Air Missile with some high level human control and the capability of returning to base if a target can't be acquired. Such a vehicle doesn't have to win every fight with an F35 or A10. Or even most of them. It's likely to be an order of magnitude cheaper to build and (at least on paper) much easier to deploy and support.

China's silicon-self-sufficiency plan likely to miss targets due to Factories Not Present error

Yes and no

"Chips are made by machine not hand."

Yes, they are made by machines. But the IC toolsets are extraordinarily complex. And the machinery often requires reconfiguring between production runs. Lots of support troops. Not just a few folks hustling chip trays around clean rooms and slapping shipping labels on cartons of chips. Lots (hundreds) of engineers, mechanical specialists, etc,etc,etc. And the production lines seem to be in a constant state of flux.

I've never been closer to a semiconductor fab than the parking lot. But what I saw from the quite large parking lot was a VERY large factory with big chemical tanks, a railway siding, and lots of ancillary office buildings (plus more offices in trailers in the parking lot). I was particularly impressed with a row of about half a dozen detached-garage sized squirrel-cage blowers awaiting installation. A serious industrial facility -- comparable to airframe manufacturing facilities that I've worked in in the past.

I think that if you're going to manufacture a full range of complex semiconductors, you really are going to require massive facilities staffed by tens of thousands of highly skilled individuals.

Re: CPU architecture

China's respect for Intellectual Property laws tends to be a bit "flexible", so I imagine they might make x86 chips for domestic consumption. Probably there will be implementation details that differ and some attempt at "clean-room" implementation so that generations of lawyers can argue over whether or not the Chinese versions are legal. Traditionally Intel has sued everyone who challenges their monopolies. But I'm not sure that taking on the world's largest or second largest economy in its own courts is going to look like a brilliant strategy. Time will tell.

Here's a probably relevant link, but its kind of elderly. https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/digest/intel-and-the-x86-architecture-a-legal-perspective

Only a decade

"Which gives the likes of Intel and Samsung ten years to figure out what happens once the China market disappears."

And roughly eleven years to figure out how to deal with Chinese competition in non-Chinese markets. Less than that really because semiconductor fabs are, I'm told, rather specialized, so China will presumably reach 100% plus domestic capacity in some types of semiconductor before the decade is out and will, one assumes, start selling their excess product into overseas markets.

BoJo looks to jumpstart UK economy with £6k taxpayer-funded incentive for Brits to buy electric cars – report

Re: Still no answer...

The awesome and all-knowing internet informs me the batteries for Electric bikes weigh in at 3-6kg. Presumably you could just unplug the battery and take it in to your residence at night to charge it. That might actually work in Southern California where I grew up and maybe in England. However, I would envision a likely marketing problem in winter in Vermont where I live now as well as in Canada.

Smart fridges are cool, but after a few short years you could be stuck with a big frosty brick in the kitchen

Re: Never understood this

Afterthought: There actually would seem to be a use case for an internet connected refrigerator with a temperature gauge and internet alerts if the temperature goes out of range. But most people who would be interested in that probably need a fridge capable of storing 20000 kg of frozen shrimp. And they probably expect the alarm to just work. For about 40 years. And they probably have no desire whatsoever to have the vendor or anyone else "supporting" the software/firmware in the alarm remotely.

Re: No, don't check how long it will be supported!

Until you can no longer buy a dumb fridge.

That's the problem. Here in the US, it appears to be impossible to buy a dumb TV nowadays. Instead, every TV at Best Buy, et. al. has a bewildering array of mostly confusing and totally unstandardized options that even computer literate folks have difficulty negotiating. The misbegotten things take forever to turn on, require three or four actions to get a picture. And God help you if you push the wrong button.

Picture quality is great. The rest of the user experience makes one long for the 1970s. (And, yes, we had wireless remote channel selection and volume control in the 1970s).

There are reasons for all that. But as far as I can see, they have little to do with what users would actually prefer.

Re: A solution looking for a problem

"All these "smart" devices are basically shit"

Maybe not the words I'd use. But I agree with the sentiment. The only "modern" device that we have added in 30 years that works noticably better than the mid-twentieth century stuff it replaced is a covey of Panasonic cordless phones that have replaced the dumb phone extensions. And even there, we don't use many of the capabilities of the new phones because they require entering keypad codes that nobody around here can be bothered to remember.

BTW. We networked the house decades ago (with 10-base2 originally. THAT long ago). I put a PC in the kitchen. It had hundreds of our favorite recipes. It did internet streaming. It could keep shopping lists. We were connected!!!

No one used it but me. And I didn't use it often. And mostly what I used it for was playing music. Occasionally we used it to Google something that came up in discussions in the adjacent living room. That's about it. When we rebuilt the kitchen four or five years ago, we didn't allocate space for a computer. Recipes are in a notebook. Shopping lists are on 3x5 cards in a holder attached to the fridge with magnets. If anyone wants music in the kitchen, they find a laptop and bring it in.

Re: Never understood this

Consumer grade appliances are trash, with no longevity and (usually) no repair options[0].

Ahem ... NO That's not my experience at all. Washer, Drier, Refrigerator, Oven, Mixer, Food Processor, Dishwasher. Even the Microwave Oven. All repairable and all have parts available either from the manufacturer or from third parties. I was even able to buy and installed an icemaker in the fridge which my wife for some reason bought without one.

I would agree that connected digital devices offer manufacturers an opportunity to apply our appallingly low standards of software quality to our household appliances. I personally think that -- like much else in our world -- is a really silly idea.

It's a refrigerator. It keeps things cold. Why would it need a network connection?

It could be 'five to ten years' before the world finally drags itself away from IPv4

Re: Maybe ...

"It was, at least from RFC1933 (April 1996). I used exactly that method until my ISP supported native IPv6."

Thanks, I read through most of the RFC before thinking to check the status which turns out to be obsoleted by RFC2893 which was in turn replaced by RFC4213. Overall, the RFCs seem quite sensible. Two things I'd comment on.

"The mechanisms in this document are designed to be employed by IPv6 hosts and routers that need to interoperate with IPv4 hosts and utilize IPv4 routing infrastructures. We expect that most nodes in the Internet will need such compatibility for a long time to come, and perhaps even indefinitely" (RFC1933,RFC4213 both p2)"

I read that as saying it's perfectly OK for us Neanderthalen who for any of a variety of reasons don't or can't do IPv6 to stick with IPv4 forever if we so choose.

"Specified minimal rules for IPv4 reassembly and IPv6 MRU to enhance interoperability and to minimize blacholes." (RFC4213 p23)

I'd be a lot happier if that said "eliminate" rather than "minimize". I have long suspected that blackhole routing is at the root of many of the mysterious problems that affect digital communications. It's not easy to diagnose, and very few people even know it exists.

Re: Doomed to eternal limbo

Not wanting to pick a fight either. But I reckon that I -- and probably others -- had always assumed that IPV6 devices come with a built in unique address and that the unique address would be propagated (hopefully fully transparently) to everything in my network which would then just work. I might (probably would) have to conjure up some new firewall rules and maybe replace an old box or two. But aside from configuration being a PITA and needing a bit of budget, nothing much would change.

So when I saw your post, I said to myself SLAAC. Self, that must be how they make it all play together. So I Googled SLAAC and found a lot of stuff like this. https://www.hpc.mil/program-areas/networking-overview/2013-10-03-17-24-38/ipv6-knowledge-base-infrastructure/dhcp-on-ipv6-networks

My initial take. I'm nowhere near smart enough to make that work on anything but a trivial network. And neither are most other folks. No damn wonder folks aren't embracing IPV6, the damn thing looks like a booby trapped porcupine. You'd have to be both arrogant and crazy to try to grab hold of it. Especially in a typical non-gold plated working environment with diverse legacy equipment, limited budget, and folks wandering in with all sorts of stuff that needs to connect temporarily or permanently to the network.

What are the mitigating factors? What am I missing?

Re: Every 10 or 20 years....

If you have $400,000 or so laying around and a REALLY long driveway, these folks MIGHT be able to sell you a flying car of sorts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrafugia_Transition

... Or not ... They've been a few months away from delivering a product for a decade or so. Their concept seems doable and their prototype actually worked. OTOH, they still aren't shipping product.

Maybe ...

While I can't see any benefit whatsoever for most users in transitioning to IPv6, I'm told that IPv6 has much better routing algorithms. So if my ISP wants to somehow bridge my IPv4 traffic to IPV6 in the outside world for their own convenience, I guess that's sort of OK. But how do they keep from breaking ICMP(and thus Path MTU Discovery), traceroute, et. al.? I don't know. I don't care. As long as they don't make it my problem.

Re: IPv6 isn't a very good solution?

"We're told that we absolutely have to move to IPv6 because of the Internet of Things -- billions of device that all have to communicate with each other."

Explain to me again why I would want my garbage disposal to be able to talk to a garage door opener in Bangkok. Or to anybody else for that matter. I'm a bit hazy on that point.

Come to that, I'm pretty sure I don't want the electronic junk around here talking to or being talked to by ANYONE without adult supervision. And I sure as hell don't want it loading "improved" software or firmware on its own recognizance.

Moore's Law is deader than corduroy bell bottoms. But with a bit of smart coding it's not the end of the road

Things grow ... until they don't

Moore's law is just exponential growth. It's probably best stated as "a lot of things tend to grow at a constant rate ... until they don't." If you want an equation, try X = R^T where R is a growth rate and T is a time. For Moore's Law -- the growth in the number of "transistors" in a given area of an IC, R is about 1.414, so that for time (T) = two years, X=1.414**2.0 = 2.0. i.e. doubling in two years.

What about "... until they don't". Well, things genuinely don't grow exponentially forever. But feature density has managed a pretty good run -- 60 years. Will it continue? For How long? Who knows?

Amazon declined to sell a book so Elon Musk called for it to be broken up

Re: Twitter is a monoply too

Hey man, best watch your step there. You're talking about, among others, the President of the United States.

Re: Oh Elon - where did you lose your way?

At least, unlike some Hotel magnates, he didn't name the poor kid after one of his products -- Model_3 or Hyperloop or Boring.

We have Huawei to make the internet more secure: Dump TCP/IP to make folks safer says Chinese mobe slinger

Time to upgrade

Sounds to me like they've identified something internet related that actually works surprisingly well most of the time. Clearly that needs to be fixed.

Have I Been Pwned breach report email pwned entire firm's helldesk ticket system

Re: Also an age-old observation:

"HTML has NO PLACE in email"

Of course not. When html email was "invented" about two decades ago, many folks pointed out that it was going to be a security nightmare. Sort of like teaching useful trades like gunsmithing, knife making and locksmithing to prison inmates. They were shouted down of course. HTML email is cute, possibly has a bit of utility in a few cases, and, what could possibly go wrong?

My concern is that in the broad scheme of things, HTML email is a minor contributor to the massive fragility of the "internet". We live in a world that is suffering severe economic dislocations from a disease pandemic that is really rather mild as such things go. I don't mean to trivialize COVID-19, but it's surely not going to, for example, wipe out half of humanity. But it's become a serious problem.

So, what is going to happen if/when electronic communications -- which we are becoming critically dependent upon -- collapses as a result of cyber-warfare, malicious activity, or the sheer mass of dubious design decisions like HTML email, Javascript, npm, etc? As far as I can see, there is no Plan A for dealing with such a contingency. Much less a Plan B.

Have a nice day folks. Party on!!!

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

Re: Sub-orbital flight

Byproducts -- water, Carbon Dioxide. Probably a bit of Carbon Monoxide. Maybe a few Nitrogen Oxides. Perhaps a bit of uncombusted Methane.

Not to worry

"Am I incorrect in thinking you could get pasted up the wall of the capsule if something goes wrong?"

If anything goes wrong with a hyperloop vehicle traveling at speed, passengers will probably be reduced to a thin scum of organic material so quickly that they won't even notice there's a problem. Might want to get your will up to date before embarking.

Talk about a control plane... US Air Force says upcoming B-21 stealth bomber will use Kubernetes

Re: Open-source nuclear warplanes

I expect that 3D printing truly is the manufacturing technology of the distant future. But my guess is that it's going to be many, many decades before you can 3D-print a functioning cell-phone, food processor, or DC-3.

And the B52s?

The B52s were designed 72 years ago. 1948 to be exact. They work. Reliably. I wouldn't be in a rush to replace them with something dependent on modern software. Arthur Clarke was making a serious point when he wrote "Superiority". http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

OTOH, maybe a world without functioning strategic bombers would be a better place.

Watchdog slams Pentagon for failing – for a third time – to migrate US military to IPv6

Plus which ...

On top of everything else, the DOD has real and long-standing security concerns and elaborate systems for dealing with those concerns. Industrial security failures can and often do have serious consequences. Military security failures, however, can have immediate and lethal consequences. Plus which, they are likely to be career limiting for those involved. Assuming they survive.

I moved on from DOD related work before PCs became ubiquitous, but let me tell you that I can't imagine any security officer in any military related organization having any enthusiasm whatsoever for a technology that potentially allows folks anywhere in the world to browse the contents of its computers if any of thousands of things go wrong.

That said, some DOD work is just ordinary business operations. Keeping track of employee vacation days, paying payroll taxes, running the Base Exchange. There's no conceptual reason that can't support ipv6 as well as it does in non-defense businesses. Trouble is that the same facility may well also deal with material of tactical or strategic importance. How does one keep the two separate? And how does one keep mistakes from happening that, for example, make the details of a Hawaiian facility's weapons capabilities and current status available to nation state hackers in Novosibirisk?

I suspect that "upgrading" to ipv6 is right at the bottom of priority list everywhere in the DOD. And possibly rightly so.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

Could someone check the numbers?

I'm in no way shape or form an aeronautical engineer -- which should make all of you feel a bit safer. But if I take the empty weight of a Cessna Caravan (2145kg), subtract maybe 200kg for replacing the normal turboprop with an electric motor, add 2 tons of batteries (1814kg), I get a takeoff weight of 3759kg with no cargo, no passengers, and no pilot. Subtract that from the maximum takeoff weight of 3969kg and the payload would be 210kg. Enough for a pilot, a parachute (I suspect any sane test pilot for this thing would want at least one),a sixpack of beer, and a not overly large dog.

I wonder if someone who knows what they are doing could check the numbers.

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

Re: This is a driver assist not an autopilot !

"I'm sure they would also fly straight into an overturned truck floating in their flight path."

My understanding is that commercial aircraft tell the "driver" when they think he/she is about to fly into things. for mountains, it is "Terrain Awareness and Warning System (TAWS)". For other aircraft it is Airborne Collision Avoidance System (ACAS)

Perhaps Teslae and other perhaps some other autonomous vehicles as well need an obstacle awareness and warning system.

Re: Call it what it is

"It's not Artificial Intelligence that's driving the car, it's Artificial Guessing."

Perhaps Clippy's driver's license should be suspended until he learns a bit more about geometry and physics?

80-characters-per-line limits should be terminal, says Linux kernel chief Linus Torvalds

Re: not the terminal, the punch card

And one quickly learned to sequence by tens or hundreds in order to allow for inserting patches.

Punched cards with sequence numbers worked pretty well compared to stuff like paper tape, early disk drives, and even magnetic tape--all of which tended to be probabilistic media. IMO, About the only things that worked better back in the good old days was that keyboards. If we're so damn smart, why don't we have $12 keyboards with the touch and feel of IBM Selectric typewriters?

Surprise! That £339 world's first 'anti-5G' protection device is just a £5 USB drive with a nice sticker on it

Pawing through my junk drawer, I found a 256mb USB drive with a paper label. It's presumably kept me safe from 5G or any other usable form of high speed data connection for decades. And, yes, it seems to have an LED on the circuit board. In all likelihood it'll continue to keep me safe for decades into the future. (Welcome to rural America)

Boeing brings back the 737 Max but also lays off thousands

Re: "more than a dozen initiatives focused on enhancing workplace safety and product quality"

My guess would be that Boeing has a bunch of customers with contracts signed many years ago that are obligated to either take the aircraft -- certified or not -- or pay a substantial contract cancellation payment.

I mean, why, other than locked in prior bad luck/judgment, would anyone buy an aircraft from Boeing or anybody else given the current air travel market? I should think that there will shortly be hordes of slightly used aircraft available for lease or purchase at very attractive prices.

So ... perhaps one more year of whopping bonuses for Boeing management ... then ...

It wasn't just a few credit cards: Entire travel itineraries were stolen by hackers, Easyjet now tells victims

Re: Oh dear.

There are a lot of folks out there who sincerely believe that personal details hacked from the Internet are a marketable entity of great worth. Credit card account info, yeah, I can believe there is marketplace in some dingy corner of the dark web where that can be sold for a tiny fraction of a Bitcoin. (How does one do that BTW? Bitcoins aren't pieces of eight that any fool could carve up with a chisel.) But who, in or out of their right mind, would pay for your travel itinery?

Microsoft drops a little surprise thank-you gift for sitting through Build: The source for GW-BASIC

Re: every byte mattered ...

Indeed, the 8086/8088 addressing and instruction set was and is unremittingly ugly. It has only gotten worse over time. Somewhat reminiscent of a third world bus put together from a number of 1950s automobiles by a self taught mechanic whose only tool is an oxyacetylene torch.

But my impression is that while the 68000 had a saner instruction set, it faulted if one attempted to fetch a 16 bit operator from an odd address. X86 only charged a small execution time penalty (one clock tick?) for fetching 16 bits from an odd address. That was a meaningful difference in storage needs back in the days of $100+ for a few 100K of memory.

Could have that all wrong. Never had an MC68000 computer to play with. I did play around with Motorola's 8 bit MC6809 which was a joy to program.

Mind your language: Microsoft set to swing the axe on 27 languages in iOS Outlook

Re: You vill parle Amrecianish Da!

As to the status of Gaelic as opposed to Welsh, they are roughly similar in that they are both protected in law and used by a proportion of the general population and government.

Are you suggesting that the activities of American tech companies might be subject to the rule of law? That's not going to sit well in some quarters.

IBM cuts deep into workforce – even its Watson and AI teams – as it 'pivots' to cloud

IBM assets

AFAICS, long term IBM has only two real corporate assets -- its staff and its patent portfolio. It's dumping the first, and the second is perishable. The phrase "burning the furniture to warm the house" comes to mind.

Well, that's something boffins haven't seen before: A strange alien streaks around Jupiter

Re: Looks like a job for...

Why would squids or any other variety of aliens want to invade a planet overpopulated with 7 plus billion cantankerous entities who appear to be completely lacking in any useful skills and utterly unable to manage their own affairs? Nothing good could possibly result from such an invasion.

Hey Siri, are you still recording people's conversations despite promising not to do so nine months ago?

What **I** want seems to be a matter of no interest at all to either Capitalists of Socialists.

Wait, I happen to have a not yet completed Absentee Ballot here. Let me check. Nope. No Nihilists or Anarchists or anything like that running for office around here this year.

Of course, everything you are doing on that tablet is being sent back to Amazon.

I expect that a bit of chewing gum in the microphone's listening port will fix that. At least for this year's technology.

Internet of Tardiness: Microsoft puts on a brave face as IoT boat prepares to set sail

IOT as a boat

Missing the IOT boat may not be the worst thing Microsoft could do. So far, the IOT boat looks a lot like the Titanic. Lots of promise one supposes. But so far pretty much a lengthy vista of ill-conceived products and failed concepts. And that's before taking into account the associated security nightmare. It seems to me possible that the IOT will really never be more than an extensive collection of expensive, highly specialized products -- each sold to a comparative handful of customers with specialized needs. More like the automated manufacturing machinery market than a mass market.

That's perhaps not an ideal marketplace for a company that mostly sells huge numbers of not too specialized thingees to a huge customer base.

Easyjet hacked: 9 million people's data accessed plus 2,200 folks' credit card details grabbed

Re: Never store CC details

If they're doing it properly, then the credit card numbers will be passed to a CC processor, who will return a transaction number.

So basically we replace a token known to me, the merchant, and my "bank" with a token known by the merchant, the "bank" and a trusted third party but unknown to me. I'm not sure that's a bad idea. But in addition to being kind of complicated, its potentially risky if the "trusted third party" turns out to be not so trustworthy. Or they ae compromised by -- say-- ransomeware. Or if they go out of business. Or if they decide to charge outrageous fees for their services.

Don't get me wrong. Sometimes the best answer for a problem is more complicated than the simplest answer. But ...

Re: Never store CC details

Doesn't make any difference.

I'm pretty sure you are correct for actual purchases. I'm unsure how the vendor could handle a chargeback or refund without having the CC number stashed with the transaction data. Likewise monthly subscriptions for services. The alternative to a stored CC for those would appear to be direct charges to your bank account. Somehow, that sounds even worse to me.

But I think the OP was referring to vendors like Amazon who allow one to use a stored credit card number so one doesn't have to type it in every time they order a box of chocolates.

I kind of wonder if it isn't about time for governments to start working on a set of explicit worldwide standards and conventions for digital commerce. Of course there might be a problem if it turns out that no set of standards and conventions that actually allows commerce and is also secure is possible.

Equifax finally coughs up the money for its 2017 monster hack… to the banks for having to cancel your cards

To the barricades

You ... pull that ATM over here. You .. yeah you ... park that Uber van on top of the ATM. Kids -- get out there and add every Network Interface Connector and router you can find and put them on the pile. Now ... the torch

Boy, look at those cops run. They know whats good for them. You two take those police cars and round up some regulators and financial execs. We're gonna put them to work cleaning the sewers with a toothbrush.

A flag? Great. Stand next to the bonfire and wave it. Ignore the damn teargas and the rubber bullets. Show some brass ...

Now, everybody ... On three ... One ... Two ... Three

"Do you hear the people sing?

Singing a song of angry men?

It is the music of a people

Who will not be slaves again"

...

OK, OK -- not gonna happen. But I can dream can't I?

Huge if true... Trump explodes as he learns open source could erode China tech ban

Re: 1% are the 1%

It's *only* fat people and I'm just big boned!

Nonsense! Your weight is fine. It's your height. You're too short.

(Joke borrowed from Neil Gaiman -Neverwhere I think.

I'll return it. I promise)

Tales from the crypt-oh: Nvidia accused of concealing $1bn in coin-mining GPU sales as gaming revenue

How the hell ...

How the hell is NVIDIA supposed to know what the cards it's customers buy are going to be used for?

One suspects that NVIDIA's marketing folks might have some notion of what the company's marketplace looks like. If not, why are they on the payroll?

And lying -- especially to the shareholders that, conceptually at least, own you -- seems a bit iffy.

But still, in what way have the nice folks who have filed this lawsuit been significantly harmed?

If American tech is used to design or make that chip, you better not ship it to Huawei, warns Uncle Sam

Re: Good incentive for China

I'm told that there are a few things the Chinese still can't make. High performance aircraft engines for example. But they are mostly stuff the US won't sell them anyway. And they can probably get by one way or the other

If the idea is to cripple Chinese manufacturing, Trump is somewhere between two and four decades too late. If the idea is to somehow bring manufacturing jobs back to the US, he's at least a couple of decades too early. Mostly those jobs aren't coming back until manufacturing costs in overseas countries with decent education systems approach the costs in the US.

And by the time manufacturing returns to the US, manufacturing will probably be so heavily automated that it doesn't employ all that many folks.

Swedish data centre offers rack-scale dielectric immersion cooling

Re: You

you can have liquid cooling without putting your computer in a bath.

Indeed -- CDC's supercomputers of the 1960s were water cooled. I know that because I was thrown off a CDC 6400 in one of their labs on a chilly May afternoon because -- as an agitated engineer informed me -- the computer had "sprung a leak".

In days of yore

In the distant past -- say two or three decades ago -- some folks cooled REALLY high performance PCs by dumping the whole device into a container of oil and cooling the oil with a heat exchanger. I never tried that. But I was told that it worked fine as far as cooling went. The problem that limited the utility was that the oil eventually found its way out into the environment through every minute opening. Like between the gaps between the insulation and conductors in the wiring leading to the power switch and indicator lights. Things got quite messy after a few hours I was told.

Xiaomi Mi 9 owners furious after dodgy Vodafone software patch bricked their mobes

Re: Android One

You're talking about those antiquated phone-like things where you just popped an aging battery out and replaced it yourself? How quaint. Gone the way of the quill pen and TVs that turn on nearly instantaneously when you press the power button.