Posts by DS999 6060 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jun 2020
I had made a garbage can sized container of popcorn to eat while I watch this develop over the next few years, but I'm gonna get fat eating it at this rate given how quickly he's driving Twitter's value down to zero.
There won't even be time for nazis and other low lifes to come back to the platform, at this rate he'll have destroyed it before that 'commission' that's looking into that issue comes to their rubber stamp conclusion!
The problem is a fair number of Twitter employees moved - many to other states - in the last couple years on the promise that WFH would be "forever".
I'm not really sure what the law would hold about something like that, but I expect that some remote Twitter employees will be consulting a lawyer right now to find out.
And there's no way those 98% were all selling iPhones and iPads at 20% off retail either, so the stated claim for why they were booted doesn't hold water.
Amazon seems to have no ability to police crap in other market categories - just try buying batteries on Amazon. It is a crapshoot if you get ones that work, even if you buy brand name (supposedly people buy batteries that have been recycled and "recharge" them which for a battery that isn't rechargeable can apparently make them work for a very short time so they seem to work but last less than 1/10th as long as legit ones)
Apple might have put the screws to Amazon to kick off the bad actors, and since Amazon has no way of telling who those are they just axed them all except a few who have a favored relationship as a third party seller on their platform.
That would be way below Apple's wholesale price. Legit third party Amazon sellers aren't going to sell at a loss, that's a quick way to bankruptcy.
Those prices were either scams of some sort (you click on the low price, then discover it is $79.99 for shipping) or they were selling stolen goods.
Depends on where you live I suppose, but around here the police don't have anything useful to do other than show up at fender benders, issue speeding tickets, and arrest college students for public intox when they are responsible and walk home instead of driving drunk.
That's why, where I live at least (US) the advice is that if you're in an accident that isn't your fault to always call the police so there's an accident report on file.
That saved me once when someone tried exactly the same thing, telling their insurance company an accident was my fault and trying to collect from me. My insurance guy sent them a copy of the police report showing it was their client's fault and said he would be sending them the bill when I had the damage to my car fixed.
I think it may have been because I was maybe 20 at the time, and he was probably 50 and figured I didn't know how that stuff worked and thought he could bluff me. Fortunately a bystander had called the police, my insurance agent said that's what saved me a lot of hassle as otherwise it would be his word against mine. I since learned that's the advice every insurance agent will give you.
If another decode or two goes by without any major terrorist attacks I imagine there will eventually be claims that the war on terror has been "won", and it might become a celebration of sorts. We've already got an entire generation that has grown up with the oldest graduating college who have no memory of 9/11, in another 20 years over half the population will have no memory of it. The older crowd who remembers might complain, but people in the US love an excuse for fireworks.
The problem with a politician making the claim we "won" the war on terror is that you'll look really stupid if there's a major attack after you say we've "won", but shame is in short supply with today's politicians so I doubt that would stop them. They'd claim they never said it, their words had been misinterpreted, that it was the Deep State trying to make them look bad, etc. etc.
Why would they trust a platform that makes major changes at the whim of a pot smoking owner dragged in several other directions by Tesla, SpaceX and whatever weird 'hype of the minute today forgotten tomorrow' schemes like Hyperloop and stupid stunts like the flamethrower and cologne?
If he screws up verification so less well known celebrities and 'influencers' have to compete with imposters who can buy the same/similar name for $8/month and impersonate them, they will give up on Twitter for other social media, and the more you shrink the base of content creators the less content consumers will visit and the less interest advertisers would have in coming back even if the chaos stopped.
Its as if he's trying to destroy Twitter just to prove he is so rich he can light $44 billion on fire, or so he can adopt Trump brand right wing victimhood and blame liberal conspiracies for the fall of Twitter instead of his own stupid self.
Republican politicians can't cut him loose because he still has a lot of grassroots support, and would even if he shot someone on 5th Avenue.
That's why when many walked away after Jan. 6 they all came crawling back within weeks, as he was rumored to be considering creating a third party which would cut the republican party off at the knees. But having him pick nominees is proving to be almost as disastrous as what should have been a red wave rout was barely a whimper, so maybe they should call his bluff and after his party wins zilch in 2024 (or he gets indicted and flees the country before trial, whichever comes first) the "Trump party" followers will be forced to rejoin the republican party to keep the democrats from winning everything.
The late night comedians had a field day with Trump last night, running montages of analysts from all networks (even one on Fox) calling Trump the "biggest loser" of the election. Nothing is worse in his mind than being called a loser, so he's probably been throwing a giant tantrum like the giant toddler he is.
While I agree, we have far more pressing problems like ending gerrymandering (have an open source computer program that selects maximally compact districts along existing county/city lines where possible draw districts for all 50 states) and setting equitable voting standards across the country (i.e. require showing ID, but with rules in place that don't raise the bar too much for poor people who may not have original documents like birth certificates to GET an ID) and mandate equal numbers of voting machines available per capita in all places so people in poor areas aren't standing in line for hours while rich suburbanites and rural voters can walk in and vote in five minutes.
And only allow individuals to contribute money to political campaigns or to any organization putting out ads of a political nature within six months of an election, with their names and contribution amounts public record. No corporation, union, non-profit, or any other "group" of individuals should be allowed to contribute a penny to a campaign. Why should corporations be able to have their management choose who to contribute to, against the will of the owners i.e. their stockholders? Why should members of a union have their dues going towards contributing to politicians they don't agree with? The idea that "corporations are people" and have free speech rights was one of the stupidest Supreme Court decisions ever, but if that's what they have decided we need an amendment to fix that.
Once those things are done, the advantage incumbents have would be seriously reduced, and we may not need term limits.
Read the text of the 22nd amendment, it only talks about restrictions on being elected to office, and handling those currently in office when the amendment goes into force. There is nothing about any "10 year lifetime limit".
Since Trump's handpicked candidates mostly failed yesterday his chances of being nominated again are down, and there are fewer election deniers in positions of power than feared. So things went a lot better than they could have for people who believe the US should remain a democracy with free and fair elections.
Even if Trump can't rig things in enough states to be able to repeal the 22nd amendment he could have a couple puppets run and get himself appointed Speaker of the House. You don't have to be a representative to be Speaker, nor do you have to preside, but you are third in the order of succession. The two puppets resign after they take the oath and bingo he's president again.
The 22nd amendment only says you can't be elected for more than two terms, it says nothing about serving more than two terms.
Of course that assumes the puppets actually follow through, one or the other could decide not to resign and have all those juicy autocratic powers so while it would work in theory it may not work in practice. If one of them decided to seize power for himself Trump wouldn't be able to stop him.
It wouldn't matter (other than to Trump, and I suppose those dumb enough to believe he's some sort of great man of destiny unique among all others) whether Trump stayed in office beyond 2028, once democracy is gone it wouldn't come back. Some other dictator would replace him, almost certainly someone even worse.
They are openly admitting this - the republican candidate for governor said "if I'm elected the republican party will never lose another election in Wisconsin". When have you ever heard a politician make a promise like that before? It is pretty clear what he meant.
When asked repeatedly during debates or interviews they won't say they will accept the results of any election, except if they win. They are running for the positions of power that certify elections as open election deniers who claim Trump won in 2020. Do you think there is any world in which they will certify the results of a democratic win in 2024 regardless of the margin? They didn't need evidence to believe there was fraud in 2020, so they won't need it in 2024.
The only thing that might stop them is lawsuits - if judges intervene and order them to certify the results. But they might decide the constitution says that's up to states to decide however they want, and if their law allows a governor or secretary of state to certify a different winner than the total of certified votes from an election then they can't stop them. I mean, I would hope they would at least rule if a state wants to decide winners outside the democratic process, that they must first dispense with the sham of an election they will ignore. But we'll see.
2022 will be a dry run with different attempts to override the results of voters in different states, but if one or more succeeds they will supply the blueprint for all states in which election denying republicans have control over the levers in those states. If they have control in states with a majority of electoral votes, democracy may end in January 2025.
This should terrify those who live outside the US, even those who are conservative and in favor of Trump's policies, because Trump as an autocrat with complete control of the US military and economy will throw the world into chaos.
Whether republicans have big gains or democrats hold both houses there will be individual races that that will be close. The republican lie machine will claim those races were stolen. Heck, they will probably claim races in urban areas where democrats win by 20 points were fraud and that republicans actually won every race in the country and every democrat victory from senator to dog catcher was fraudulent.
Electing the kind of people who would make those claims with a straight face is the plan for 2022, so that they can "win" all the races everywhere in 2024. The republicans who are just going along with it all because it means they win too will be sorely disappointed, because the power behind the takeover (Trump and Murdoch) don't have republican values, they have their own narrow interests that will drive the autocracy they crave.
98% of the current republican party will be left behind, because once they have their people in place to certify false election results they no longer need to care about the interests of the republican electorate. When votes don't matter you don't have to listen to any voters anywhere, ever again. So since neither Trump nor Murdoch are religious in any way, god will be forgotten. An autocracy has no interest in an armed populace, so forget about the second amendment too.
Hadn't seen those before, that's an interesting possibility to explain where quasars came from. It would seem their size would have no practical limit, so long as increasing amounts of fresh hydrogen and helium are drawn in by the increasing gravity to generate an increasing outward pressure to balance the increasing gravity. In a galaxy consisting of many of those quasi-stars born in the densest center regions, eventually they will no longer be able to collect increasing amounts of material, as it has been drawn in by another nearby quasi-star. Gravity wins, and leaves behind a 10k or 100k solar mass black hole.
It has long been a mystery how we observe truly monstrous billion plus solar mass black holes when the universe was less than a billion years old, since the radiative pressure can't support that much growth in such a "short" amount of time. But a galaxy with Pop III 'quasi-stars' born in the dense center regions might create thousands and thousands of 10k or 100k solar mass black holes at their centers that over millions of years eventually merge.
Improved gravitional wave detection capability, like LISA should provide, may allow us to see those mergers if that was happening...
The question would be what happens to the 10k solar mass black holes created in less dense outer regions in fewer numbers that are too far away to merge with the supermassive central black hole? Does the big black hole eventually eject them out of the galaxy, or are they pulled in? What happens to them in a galactic merger? i.e. shouldn't we see evidence of at least one in our galaxy? (though our galaxy may have had a rough history, as it seems we may have lost our original supermassive black hole at some point given how puny ours is)
That Pop III stars were far far larger than any we observe now (and there are some stars in the hundreds of solar masses range out there, though few in number since they live such short lives)
There was speculation they would be 10,000 solar masses at a minimum, with lifetimes of less than a million years, because the density of matter in the universe was so much higher then - due to the much smaller size of the universe.
The amount of water a fab uses is less than what a typical farm in Arizona does, and there are a surprising number of farms there.
There is also a lot of work ongoing to reduce fab water consumption through recycling so that footprint will get even lower. Arizona should ban watering your lawn or golf courses before they worry about fabs which generate so much economic activity they could pay to have water trucked in from the Rockies and still come out way ahead.
After Musk railed about how those numbers were inflated, he's probably going to wait for his antics to drive millions of people from Twitter. Then when he makes much lower numbers public he will claim he was right all along and the reason the numbers are low is because he eliminated all the bots, and hide the fact that so many real users have fled.
The best thing though was when he suggested Twitter might move behind a paywall. That would be awesome, hardly anyone would link to Twitter anymore since few would be willing to pay for an account just to read tweets. It would die on the vine and his $44 billion would go up in smoke. The only bad thing is that SOMETHING would replace Twitter, and that something would probably be TikTok which could easily adopt short form messages in addition to the videos.
Obviously SOME Tesla shareholders care because the stock has fallen by more than half since the beginning of the year, with most of the drop since his "I'm gonna buy Twitter" tweet.
They are selling because they think he's too distracted, or by so openly courting one side of the political spectrum he will reduce sales of Teslas to the other side and hurt its long term prospects. I'm not in the market for an electric car but if I was I would be scratching Tesla off the list for that alone, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a pillow from that crazy Trump pillow guy.
That Zuck would blame Apple for allowing its customers to take back some shreds of their privacy, and ignore a similar sized hole in the P&L caused by his wet dream of the "metaverse" that's never going to happen. At least not for a couple decades or more, and if it does he sure won't be the one to make it happen!
Yep, the fact that Ampere hasn't been notified of the changes in licensing Qualcomm claims other licensees have makes Qualcomm's claims less likely to be true in my book.
Surely if ARM was notifying its licensees of such a major change to its licensing, one of them would make some noise. If they fear doing so on the record, they'd at least be willing to contact some tech site and let them know on background. That would be a pretty major scoop if a couple ARM licensees told The Reg this so they could write an article that Qualcomm's claims were confirmed by multiple sources at companies with ARM licenses! So the fact no such articles have been written by anyone is telling.
You think Apple is behind this? They haven't owned a piece of ARM for a long time, how are they going to exert that type of influence over their operations that even their actual owner at Softbank's Vision Fund is powerless to override? Talk about a conspiracy theory!
If anything Qualcomm SoCs with Nuvia cores would benefit Apple. People aren't buying iPhones because their CPUs are faster, so they won't leave iPhone if Android phones are able to match their performance. ARM based PCs being competitive with x86 PCs would be a good thing for Apple, as it would force Microsoft and Windows devs to treat ARM/Windows as a first class citizen, which would help Mac sales (as they'd be a viable alternative for people who "must run Windows" at times like x86 Macs have been)
At worst Nuvia is a non-issue for Apple.
Way back when, when I was a sysadmin, there were pretty much no times I'd need to be within 6 feet of another person, or even 60 feet. So I wouldn't have been worried about catching covid, and not allowing walk ins in my office and getting interrupted would have improved both my mental health and my productivity!
You really doubt that? This is obviously a dodge that the US government will presumably close as quickly as possible. They could say you can't offer something that uses the same chip offered in configurations that violate the rules.
There are legitimate arguments whether the US should even be doing this, but if they're going to do it having it be easily worked around so it doesn't ban anything is the worst of all worlds.
"Bunch of wires" sounds like the interconnect Apple is using, i.e. a variant of one of TSMC's offerings though that extra layer would make it more expensive. At least "bunch of wires" is how I would define Apple's M1 Ultra with more than 10,000 I/Os connecting the two M1 Max dies, and the M2 Max will be able to connect four dies together which would be 30,000 I/Os.
I don't think the startup has fully revealed that yet.
We'll have to see if this is real or just hype, but this field is pretty new so I expect there are plenty of avenues to try not all of which TSMC and Intel have explored, so maybe they've found something better.
If so I imagine they will be snapped up by TSMC, or one of their major customers like Apple or Nvidia who wants a competitive advantage.
I'm pretty sure a judge would rule it has to be based on the value at the time of the theft. If I steal a painting from a gallery priced at $5000 and they discover it in my possession and that I was the one who did it 30 years later when that artist is famous and it is worth $5 million, they can't charge me with a $5 million theft.
It would be a more interesting argument if I stole a painting valued at $5 million that was later discovered to be a forgery worth very little. I might try the argument that I knew it was a fake and I hated seeing that fake hanging in the Met so my theft was really a public service!
They probably didn't give a shit about bitcoin theft in 2012, and didn't have the knowledge/experience with it to be able to track it. That was all developed much later than 2012.
Its nice to argue some conspiracy where the FBI was just waiting until bitcoin went up 1000x in value to try to recover the loot, but they didn't have any more idea that was going to happen than you or I did.
When he stole the bitcoin in 2012 it wasn't worth $3.6 billion. It was $5 to $10 per bitcoin so more like $250K to $500K if he followed the "immediately liquidate it" strategy you advocate. Or $25K to $50K if you are willing to accept only 10c on the dollar.
Hardly enough to afford a beachfront hotel at for very long, let alone live there for the rest of your life.
He told them they were being let go, they should just take their severance and use this time to find another job. Unemployment is still only 3.7% and someone Twitter considers 'essential' after jettisoning half the staff presumably has some highly marketable skills.
If the letter of the law says they have to "work" during the contracted 60 day WARN ACT period they can do the "quit quitting" thing and do the bare minimum - show up and pretend they engaged at solving whatever problems cropped up due to their absence but without actually solving them. They know the plan is to let them go once they've showed a (presumably younger and cheaper) person who wasn't laid off their job. They can screw that up too.
I would never lift a finger to help a company that let me go "by mistake" during a Thanos snap layoff (you can't even call this "decimation" as it was much worse) and if I was forced back to work to earn my severance I'd do my best to actively sabotage them. They can't take away my severance, and they've already fired me, so their only power would be to make me show up and sit at my desk (or on a Zoom call if I was remote) for 60 days before my firing became official.
Seems clear there was little to no thought put into this layoff. Maybe it really was a Thanos snap - just cull 50% of people in a fair, random and impartial way like he promised? Knowing Musk's twisted sense of "humor", that idea would probably appeal to him.
If the contract says you can't sell chips containing ARM's "circuit diagram" with a GPU unless it is GPU also licensed from ARM, then that tactic would work. It may not be legal, but when has that ever stopped e.g. Intel, Microsoft or IBM when they've had similar contracts so why would it stop ARM?
In fact, the "charge the end OEM a cut of the device's price" tactic Qualcomm claims ARM is planning to move to is a page from Qualcomm's playbook (remember those Apple lawsuits from a few years back?) so maybe Qualcomm should add a claim to their suit for plagiarism of business model.
The typical hobbyist who wants to compile their own kernel has no reason to leave secure boot enabled, unless they are dual booting Windows 11 I guess.
Apple ARM Macs allow a way in firmware to set secure boot per OS, so you could leave secure boot enabled for macOS but disable it for Linux.
Except he tweeted today that revenue has massively declined due to advertisers fleeing, and calls that a "free speech" issue. So I guess he wants the government to step in and force companies to advertise on Twitter against their will?
I think he will have to lay off a lot more than 50% of Twitter's employees eventually. Perhaps as many as 100% depending on what direction he takes the moderation.
The problem is those taxes need to be universal. Otherwise companies who operate in countries with the taxes will rightly complain that they are at a disadvantage to companies operating in countries that don't.
We've seen stuff like that for years e.g. companies complaining that China has lax environmental regulations (though that's been changing over the past decade) and encouraging tariffs or other measures to level the playing field.
If they go nuclear on global supply chains, it hurts them just as much as anyone else since their economy is so export dependent. If Apple can't ship as many iPhones due to China withholding rare earths then everything else in an iPhone that comes from China, which would be anything from the aluminum used in the body, some ingredient in Corning's glass, some components in Sony's cameras are not purchased because there isn't a phone to put them in. And Chinese workers at the Foxconn plant are laid off because they don't need as many people when they can't make as many iPhones. The shipping companies get less business because there are fewer iPhones to ship, and so on. Now multiply that by the countless thousands of western companies that have production in China.
But the biggest problem is that Apple and Foxconn would go into overdrive to move production away from China, and once moved it would never come back even if China and the US ultimately kiss and make up. Inertia and the amount of supply chain inside China is the reason that hasn't happened, but if the Chinese supply chain becomes unreliable then there is nothing holding Apple back from moving production to a country with cheaper labor than China's ever more expensive people, or investing in automation to cut people mostly out of the assembly process and move production to North America.
ARM makes a pittance. Apple makes several times as much money in a day as ARM makes all year. There are tons of profitable companies Apple could buy that won't bring them all the legal headaches. One of the reasons Apple has been so successful is they have a very narrow target for the businesses they want to be in - and licensing or any type of B to B has never been one of them.
The tech world is replete with tales of companies making big acquisitions outside their core competence and losing billions. Apple has been very smart to avoid making any acquisition that doesn't fit in with their consumer focused business lines, and no big splashy acquisitions at all, ever. Their M&A department is very boring and almost never generates news, and Apple's shareholders like it that way.
Control of the platform is worth zero to them, because from their perspective they already control their ARM platform. They don't have to care what others do with it.
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