Posts by that one in the corner

Trump says US should kill CHIPS Act, use the cash to cut debt

Re: Sooo

> when I come across something that I am not familiar with I find that Google can be helpful

Ooooh, careful.

He doesn't like it when you suggest looking things up on the Web.

'Cybertruck ownership comes with ... interesting fan mail'

Re: Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

> No it's the cover for the truck bed, most trucks have them I believe as optional extra's

Well, in the face of that, I just had to check again[1] (my French not being what it was); the word has moved across into English (and appears to be the basis for "tun" as well, much more important - see icon).

The bastion of modern knowledge, Wikipedia gives the 'ole at the back as "tonneau" and the tarp flung over the top as the "tonneau cover", which matches what these off-roaders and some detailing enthusiasts[2] are talking about. If we go into third definition territory then it is finally being used to refer to the cover.

Ok, we'll go with the third definition and accept that "usage changes" and all that. But that still leaves us with the Cybertruck owner worried that cheese will ruin his fancy replacement for a tarpaulin, which isn't any great improvement!

> The Lady ... https://da8h1v3w8q6n5.cloudfront.net/aa82/inventory/230491/R01599960_1.jpg

I am sure that your Lady looks gorgeous, but sadly that link gives the poignant message:

>> The Amazon CloudFront distribution is configured to block access from your country

[1] what, me, twiddling my thumbs waiting for The Machine to finish yet another build? Pshaw.

[2] so *that's* what "detailing a car" means! Have heard it a few times but hadn't twigged it just meant a good scrub; well, you live and learn.

Re: spoon-fed by media nonsense designed to make them hate Elon Musk and EVERY technology

(Enter The Tick, stage left) "Spoooooooooooooon!"

Unless a finger smear or a slice of cheese is enough to damage the Cybertruck

Google was good enough to quote an excerpt or two from Facebook posts about this subject, and the answer appears to be - yes!?

"fling the cheese from his Big Mac onto my truck. Glad it landed on the glass because it was there almost an hour before I got out of my flick and found it. Could have done some greasy damage to the trim or the tonneau"

Tonneau? Isn't that just the fancy name for loading bed of the truck? Which can be damaged by greasy cheese? Yikes.

Although there is a strange specificity to the protest: "CT was parked outside my daughter's home during a party and when I left there was a slice of American cheese stuck to the side of the truck.". American cheese? Ok, so that - stuff - will act like one of those vinyl wraps and adhere to the smmoth surface, but wouldn't a decent blue cheese have a more appropriate aroma?

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from 'serious attacks'

> Lets be honest here - C was intended to be a bridging language from the days of Fortran to the 'new' languages that were coming

Citation?

> But C and it's fanatical adherents went out of their way to destroy any language that threatened it.

So, there must be lots of citations you can provide for that, in half a century of C. What is the lust of languages "they" have "destroyed"?

> C or C++ or JAVA or Rust - they are all just derivatives of C.

C++ is a derivative of C? Good grief! Has anybody told Bjarne? Java and Rust just share a similarity in simple syntax - use of braces instead of begin/end, semicolon as a terminator rather than a separator, infix operators and a basic function declaration style.

> That it has taken this long to evolve type safe just demonstrates the fact

Hang on, hang on. The Big Discussion now is MEMORY safety, not TYPE safety! You are complaining about a lack of type safety and you diss C++, Java and Rust? Whoop, whoop, whoop!

> other, much denigrated languages

Presumably, these are the languages that were "destroyed"? Hmm, what languages have been denigrated? There is that famous comment by Dijkstra - ah ha! Got it!

You want us all to use BASIC, don't you! No curly braces, type set by the variable name, that all makes sense.

Re: Can I get away with using C instead of C++?

Depends upon what you mean by "systems work".

C++ design goals start from "if you don't use a feature[1], you don't pay for it" and then "if you do use a feature, you can understand its cost - which is as low as we can make it, under the circumstances".

So if your "systems work" is able to use a C++ compiler, go for it: embedded systems, bare to the metal microcontrollers etc can all gain from appropriate use of C++. I wouldn't try using std strings on an Atmel with 2K of RAM, but would happily drop in a class or two to make i/o simpler - simpler to read when I get back to it in two years "for a quick tweak".

If the "systems" work is getting a userland program to run network traffic really fast - "a better C" is a good choice there as well. Just avoid using something if you can not easily determine what the resource costs are going to be.

[1] of the actual language, as opposed to a library - those can get opaque quickly, in any and every language!

Re: Can I get away with using C instead of C++?

> In C++, struct and class are the same thing... The only difference is ..

Yes.

Precisely.

That is why I suggested, as a starting move for someone wondering about whether to try doing OOP in C, that he just take what he can see is common - 'struct' - and compare the results of "faking" it versus getting the real thing. The ease of member naming is step one.

Next week, step two is adding in some member functions, then I'd suggest switching to 'class' (less typing than writing 'private' everywhere!) to get into encapsulation. And then add some polymorphism.

If someone is wondering about how hard it is to OOP in C (answer: best not) then just take a nice easy route to showing how much simpler it'll be in C++ with only a very, very few changes to their code. When they are happy with that (aka sucked in, there is no going back for you now, we have you in our grasp...) you can move them on towards greater mastery.

Re: ...discouraging C/C++ while evangelizing languages like Rust, Python and JavaScript

> time goes on, new tools become standard, even while many are flashes in the pan, and it's adapt or die

New tools become an addition to the standards and you have decades (probably your entire working life) of codebases written in the extant tools to work on[1], if, for whatever reason, you don't abandon it all for the latest (but not necessarily the greatest) thing.

[1] and as time passes and you are one of the few who still can work on those projects you'll be in demand, more so than "pick any one of these replaceable programming units".

Re: Failure to see

Rust is descended from ML?

Eek.

I never did a program to work using ML[1], I'm probably doomed with Rust :-)

[1] *entirely* down to me, not ML. I'll leave with a feeble excuse about that being when I left the Computer Lab, and the ML environment, to go into normal employment and read K&R...

Re: Can I get away with using C instead of C++?

You don't *have* to use all the features in C++ in one go, especially not if you are just getting it. It is perfectly valid "just" to treat C++ like "a better C": start by renaming your dot-c to dot-cpp...

> What is OOP in C like? Are structs enough?

ESPECIALLY if you are interested in OOP - that is the oldest "paradigm"[1] that C++ added onto C, with cfront in 1983; the template metaprogramming (epitomised by the STL) and the like came years (almost a decade) after - and it was a long wait for compilers that could handle it all!

You can quite usefully - and cheaply - pick up older editions of C++ books, which just cover the basics. Ok, doing that you'll not learn (from Day 1) about some of the library bits that have been mentioned in these comments (e.g. the various flavours of smart pointers that the various libraries provide) but considering that you'll be using a compiler + RTL that does provide them, when you are ready you can pick them up and slap on. If you feel the need - after all, your still be doing better writing OOP in C++ than in C.

> What is OOP in C like? Are structs enough?

But to actually answer that: you *can* do it with structs in C, but it gets messy really, really easily. There are various macro libraries that help, but these days, unless you *have* to, OOP in C is very hard to justify.

Use C++ - even if you just use the struct keyword and ignore class entirely, being able to inherit from a parent struct and then not have to add another layer of self->parent.grandparent.greatgamps.some_field every time is a blessing. But then using class and restricting access to implementation - mmmwaaah! Delicious.

[1] sorry

Re: People will write buzzwords with glee, but will never name the GNU

> why would you use such weakly licensed compiler

* Because it works

* Because you should always run your code through as many compilers as possible to catch oddities in your code (including GCC)

* Because it has allowed for things that GCC is historically bad at (the library-based approach and ability to use chunks of LLVM in your own way, for new languages, new tools that parse languages - GCC first came around in 1987 but trying to make use of its parser to create any other tools has always been non-trivial: GCC-XML (2002 - 15 years!) was a valiant (!) attempt, but that has been superceded by CastXML, based upon LLVM/Clang, because - it works better and isn't based upon a bodged copy of the code!

BTW I use GCC - a lot, as it is a basic toolchain for many processors - but dissing LLVM shows a - distinct lack somewhere.

No they aren't - and even if they were, the language that you use to write the compiler has ABSOLUTELY no bearing on the capabilities of the language being compiled: that is an absolutely absurd idea!

Re: Failure to see

> It was bootstrapped in OCaml.

Yeah, and what was your OCaml written in, eh, eh? Yeah, it all comes down to C in the end! Phhhffttt.

Which is an entirely pointless statement. As would be any claim that "Language X can't be safe because its compiler was written in C".

What the compiler is written in has no bearing whatsoever on the abilities (or lack thereof) of the language being compiled (or interpreted or any of the weird half-way houses we get with runtime VMs and JIT and...).

If your compiler is written in C and happens to have a buffer overflow, triggered when you use a variable name longer than 44 characters[1], then it won't generate any runnable code. Bugger. If you trim back to 43 characters then it'll generate code - and that generated code does not magically inherit the 44-character problem or any other *possible* problem that the C code might have buried inside it.

Unless you believe that compiled code has some weird Lamarckian relationship with the code of its progenitor compiler?

[1] totally random choice of possible problem, honest.

Re: Speed of Transition

> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Is El Reg extraordinary enough for you? The wild world of non-C operating systems

Although, as C was only created in 1972 to '73 (by which time it had struct! yay). K&R was only published in 1978 and the PCC was released in 1979 - that means that *any* OS, other than Unix, being written in, oooh, the late-1970s and before was, by necessity, NOT written in C.

Whether or not those OSes are still running to the current day isn't really important to the argument - especially given that "the majority of computer users" are *not* using "the majority of the different hardware architectures" that are still in use, let alone those that are now used mainly by die-hards.

FWIW I've had hands-on experience with TRIPOS (written in BCPL), AmigaOS (BCPL with C on top), Perq (Pascal), Apple ][ (UCSD Pascal), various Forth boxes (Forth), Pr1mos (FORTRAN, PL/P; it also used Modula-2 but probably not the version I was using).

We were taught about (but sadly could not afford to get the hardware for) Lilith (Modula-2, Oberon), the variants of LISP machine (LISP), the Xerox machines such as the Alto (BCPL, Mesa, Smalltalk).

As these are mostly Old Geezer OSes, I'm sure others can fill in some more recent examples[1]

[1] hmm, TempleOS isn't written in C, although it is probably only its author who considers it to be written in The Language Most High!

Re: Speed of Transition

> The failure of that experiment

Cough, there are those who take exception to that idea. Multics didn't sell many copies, but the literal experiment that was Multics worked and the lived a reasonable lifetime: "Bull canceled Multics development after 21 years. Multics continued to be used by customers for an additional 14 years". And, as Tanenbaum wrote, "[MULTICS] was designed to support hundreds of users on a machine only slightly more powerful than an Intel 386" and it showed that was possible for an interactive system.

> The failure of that experiment drove the development of unix + C

Thompson and Ritchie both worked on/with Multics, but Ritchie has said he was influenced by CTSS; Thompson just took the ideas he really liked (hierarchical file systems and a shell as a simple user process) then they created something that would fit onto the kit they could actually get hold of, starting with aassembler on a PDP-7. In 2007, Thomson decribed Multics as overbuilt and overengineered - and compared to Original Flavour Unix, it was.

As with Unix, which has given rise to Unixy variants, Multics legacy lived in on Pr1mos and others.

> Multics, which by its name really is many, was written in PL/I.

Well, PL/1 - and assembler.

Maybe cancel that ChatGPT therapy session – doesn't respond well to tales of trauma

Re: Go to bullshit factor 10

> To address your other point

My other point? What, the one that if you actually gave a shit about LLMs - good, bad, bollocks, whatever your stance - you might want to remember something like this as an argument when someone IRL tries to tell you how amazing LLMs are?

> this entire thread will be consigned to history in a couple of days

Yes, of course. What else did you think was going to happen to it?

> the world is not a "debating society" ...

Which is why you, yes, YOU, was being urged to actually listen to what the article was talking about and take that away to use elsewhere.

> and crafty point-scoring is not ultimately going to lead to any kind of "victory".

Glad you realise that, as you are introducing the idea of being in some kind of "debating society".

(BTW, "debating societies" are something that you could call "bollocks" and I'd agree - nothing good comes out of the practices they espouse)

Re: Errrrrrrrrrrr...

> This does not mean it understands either what it's exposed to or what it's emitting

Which this article - including the quotes from the researchers - agrees with, from my reading of it.

I think we are all very aware that LLMs have no understanding of anything and can not even explain why they spat out one response in preference to another.

How about we save this repetition, at least until responding to some credulous fool who claims otherwise, then we can all dogpile onto them.

Re: Go to bullshit factor 10

Care to elaborate?

And remember:

>> The team freely admits in their paper that they know LLMs aren't capable of experiencing emotions in a human way.

If you believe LLMs are intrinsically bullshit (and I'm not going to argue that point here), be aware that they *are* being pushed into contact with people and this research is providing evidence that that is demonstrably *not* a good idea in this area. In which case, shouldn't you be cheering the researchers on and using this work as another stick to beat the chatbot-everywhere-brigade?

Cybercrims now licking stamps and sending extortion demands in snail mail

Re: Wouldn't work round here...

TIL that there is an eBay category for letterboxes.

A mere £265.00 for an "ex display" (ho, ho) box - claims to be a "reproduction" but you can get those for a ton less.

So unless they lucked upon a lot of grannies sending fivers out to their little darlings then they probably did bin the contents, not worth the trouble.

"Extortion demands contained within are illegitimate"

As opposed to all the thoroughly law-abiding extortion claims?

(and none of your second-definition usages either!)

Raspberry Pi launches CM4 variant that laughs in the face of frostbite

Re: I wonder if...

> subject to ITAR paperwork

What if we launch it carefully, so it always stays within the footprint of the USA (or its territories) and goes into geosynchronous orbit?

Please fasten your seatbelts. A third of US air traffic control systems are 'unsustainable'

Re: Hmm

> Are you new here?

He[1] arises in the morning[2], a fresh new person[3], innocent[4] of the cares of the world, optimistic in his[1] hopes for the future, happy[4] to be alive, a joy[6] to be around.

Then something[7] goes horribly, horribly wrong and he[1] starts to comment on the Internet.

[1] generic usage, no assumptions being made

[2] or whatever time of day he[1] deems appropriate

[3] however much is allowed for by his[1] metabolic rate, which may, or may not, be average for his[1] age. Thus, this much is, indeed, "new here", that being the key hypothesis[5] of this comment

[4] as compared to exhibited norms

[5] which may be proven fals by observation, don't want to be caught making assumptions

[6] a purely subjective statement, observers may differ; please use the appropriate section of the report

[7] the nature of this is yet to be determined, further study may be warranted

Re: Sure, what could go wrong?

Well, yes. Get a redundant fibre.

Although, over the years, we've been sharing happy stories about the backup fibre leaving the site down the same conduit, right under the farmer's drill!

That aside, the basic argument still stands: when your redundancy is at risk, the landline is cheaper to repair (and once the temporary link is up, you get back some extra bandwidth, to get things back to luxurious and not just at workable speeds.

Re: Sure, what could go wrong?

Don't forget the self-destruct nature of Starlink. All of its satellites have a fixed lifespan and the constellation needs to be continually topped-up. Once Musk gets bored with it, or it is just no longer *quite* profitable enough, the whole thing will simply - stop.

If you have landlines, fibre or otherwise, the individual comms companies come and go, but they can all sensibly take over the infrastructure and give you continuity of service.

Which infrastructure, on the whole, has a lifetime way longer than the satellites. There is a measure more redundancy in the space option - once one satellite goes down, others can take over (whilst there are still enough up there). But when Fred The Farmer ploughs up your fibre that can mean a total break in service - although, lookie here, you have a temporary microwave link up as soon as the helicopters arrive with the boxes, meanwhile you only need Dan Dan The Digger Man to replace the line, not a Falcon launch.

America's National Science Foundation workers fired in bulk by Trump now reinstated

Re: Hmm

> So DOGE is right to have identified this as one of the good funding projects and restarted funding. Great. So DOGE is making them focus on aid projects then. Great!

Yet, no criticism at all for DOGE having misidentified the situation in the first place. Like I said, a very, very low bar for cheering them on.

And how many others have DOGE incorrectly, even by your standards, shut down - and haven't (yet) been embarrassed by public reporting to backtrack on? Any word on how much effort DOGE are putting into performing sufficient analysis before acting?

Re: Hmm

> ?Do you think the Georgia company shouldnt have been funded in the first place and support DOGE for stopping it? Or happy the US is restarting funding for actual aid

I think the Georgia company had been doing a good job for years, should never have been stopped. By DOGE. That is the point to remember - DOGE was in the wrong to stop their funding.

> Or happy the US is restarting funding for actual aid?

It is good that DOGE was embarrassed into backtracking one at least one thing. However graceless they were doing it.

> One way or the other you can say something positive for this administration (I know it upsets you).

So you think they deserve a great big pat on the back for backtracking? They didn't do anything actually *good* - like make reparations for the losses the firm had in the interim, the damage done further down the line as the news that the life-saving goods were not going to be available and plans drawn up - only to have that effort be wasted.

You have a very, very low bar for something that warrants saying anything positive about DOGE et al - such a great contrast to how much USAID would have to do to garner your approval.

Re: Hmm

> I think we may have to just give up this conversation as a dud.

Aw shucks, and we were getting on so well.

Re: Hmm

>> "You really haven't got the hang of this "empathy", have you?"

> So you agree it had nothing to do with aid. It was a simple question and you have to retreat to 'empathy' to try and validate misbehaviour of an agency.

Sigh. USAID are (were) meant to be doing more things than whatever your narrow definition of "aid" might be. Basically, everything and anything that benefitted the US interests abroad. And those interests include helping all sorts of people in various sorts of bad situations (with a great big sign reading "this help was brought to you by the USoA", to drive the point home).

The "empathy" thing was that you are refusing to accept that persecution of trans people is - anything bad.

> Part of a corrupted agency spaffing money against its purpose

Notice that you haven't got any actual examples of work they did that wasn't helping US interests abroad - let alone that there was so very, very much of it that it rendered the entire agency corrupt.

>> "You think funding research to stop covid is against the US interests?"

> You are confused. They funded the labs that created covid.

How very carefully selective you were, forgetting to copy the rest of that (very short) paragraph: "Or are referring to the conspiracy theory that covid was deliberately created in a lab? Either way, stupid". Perhaps you got confused when you were copy'n'pasting?

No, "they" did not create covid in a lab.

Re: Hmm

> Even Americans seem to argue over what can and cant be done so your stupid comment doesnt really help over the pond.

So, stop reading Reddit and go read, ooh, the US Constitution? It really isn't that long and the language isn't too outdated to understand. Then a couple of junior-level civics courses that discuss the Constitution and give commentary.

If you seriously don't know how to start doing that, then, well done sounding stupid, I guess.

PS I never said Legal Eagle has ONE video about the Constitution - he points it out in context. So try the last few about why what Trump is doing is against the Constitution. If you are not able to watch those and then constructively criticise his analysis then you ain't gonna lurn nuttin nohow.

Re: Hmm

> Does that include funding the covid labs

You think funding research to stop covid is against the US interests? Or are referring to the conspiracy theory that covid was deliberately created in a lab? Either way, stupid.

> Trans stuff across the world..

You really haven't got the hang of this "empathy", have you? Trans people have a hard time of it (and not just inside the US, although they are trying hard to reach the bottom) and anything to raise their spirits makes them think better of those who helped them.

> That depends how you want to question it.

Yup, you have indeed just repeated my question. Well done. At least rephrasing indicates some comprehension.

Now, consider: if it was restarted because it is "real" aid (which, btw, it is) then why was it shuttered in the first place? Was Trump et al unable to determine that it was "real aid"? Was that so hard to understand at time? Or was it just because Elon was embarrassed when people called him out? Incompetence/illiteracy or back-pedalling? And which do we think those two understands moste? Money? Or angry voters?

Re: Hmm

> populism

WTF has that to do with this?

They weren't out for long

So hopefully won't be returning to the chaos as WFH is halted.

> Trump’s in-office mandate has been coupled with a push to slash government real estate, setting up a dilemma of too little space for too many people. Even before Trump took office in January, the federal government was downsizing office space due in part to the shift toward telework during the pandemic.

> Trump and Elon Musk, de facto chief of the Department of Government Efficiency, have both threatened to fire workers who do not come back to the office

The work of a Stable Genius(tm) in action.

Re: Hmm

> As seen with USAID the agencies intentions and purpose were different and it was squealing over the agency intending to spend how it wanted vs the purpose of the agency.

The USAID programs were all intended to aid US concerns abroad - by the application of "Soft Power", basically to get people to think that the US are the Good Guys, and to reduce non-military/non-commercial threats, such as incoming disease, and "threats" such as incoming refugees. NOTE: reduce, not stop!

All of the programs that have been complained about and that were shuttered fulfilled that purpose. And for very, very little money. Much (most?) of which money was spent *inside* the US, such as supplies of foodstuffs bought from the US[1].

The big issue here seems to be that too many people don't comprehend "Soft Power" - if it ain't done at gun point it cain't be doin' nuttin'. For Joe Bloggs that shows, to begin with, a total lack of empathy. For a "World Leader" it shows a total lack of understanding, a complete inability to read the history of their own country's policies.

[1] USAID reinstates contracts for Georgia company that helps feed malnourished kids after Elon Musk responds to CNN reporting: was it the starving kids that got that reinstated, or the fact the plant in Georgia was going to lose out?

Re: Hmm

> Isnt congress supposed to be a separate arm of government?

Go and have a watch of Legal Eagle. You may not agree with what he is saying, but he does do a good (introductory) job of pointing out what the jobs of the various arms of the US government are supposed to be.

> I am in the UK so my understanding may be a little off.

Resources exist on this funny little thing called The Web.

> Don't believe the big media because they are receiving a lot of money laundered this way as are NGOs and fake businesses that provide no useful outcome

And yet, the Whitehouse blog At USAID, Waste and Abuse Runs Deep has a list of "waste" - which has managed to find ONE URL to a US govt source[1] to back up their claims - all the rest of their "evidence" is stories in the media[2] - and not even as many stories as they claim (lots of repetitive links to the one report).

So, if we aren't to trust "the big media" and the Whitehouse can't manage to provide links directly to the pages, within their own government's systems, that describe these programs where they were paying NGOs etc, what does that leave us with? AC commentary?

[1] which is, um, the USAID website - which page has been deleted! Guess why!

[2] Daily Mail, Breitbart - well, "media" is a value-free word.

SpaceX loses a Falcon 9 booster and scrubs a Starship

Re: vblather

> When Australia was settled it was a 250 day one-way trip to Australia. If they were missing something from supplies, by the time you got a message back to England, and a new supply ship sent, you were looking at at least 2 years until delivery.

The BIG difference being, of course, that when Australia was being settled, the things they would be missing were all effectively luxuries. No matter they'd forgotten to bring sewing needles[1] they still had air, water, food and shelter - and a wide variety of life all around[2] that could be used by the resourceful: bone needles.

> I dont expect the first Mars colonists will be happy to sit around and rely on Earth to send it everything they need

The time before the Mars colony is anywhere near able to make everything they need from local resources is a long way in the future. Hopefully we'll get to that point in our abilities.

[1] one of the small things that can make a real difference, sewing up people as well as clothing, tentage, baggage

[2] including the spiders, but let's concentrate on the positives

> multi-planetary

Unless we find lots of useful resources on Mars (as in, water, breathe-air gasses) Mars never seemed that great an environment to move into. Its best advantage is gravity, to keep our bones strong(ish). But that also makes getting there and back expensive, climbing up the well. As Mars doesn't have a decent magnetosphere to protect against Solar emissions, getting inside a nice big rock, say Ceres, might be better, if we are going to leave Earth's neighbourhood and have to haul all our supplies from home in the weekly shop.

Gentlemen, start your arguments...

Scientists create woolly ma-mouse by looking at mean genes from the Pleistocene

But the costs, for shampoo and conditioner alone!

(Take *two* mice into the shower?..)

Re: Boring

They were out in their community, holding regular dialogues with their constituents, when the Ark sailed without them.

How Google tracks Android device users before they've even opened an app

Re: Phone fun

> but I've not fully committed to switching over yet.

Misread that as "but I've not fully committed to switching it on yet" and thought, yup, that is the way to keep yourself safe.

Free Software Foundation rides to defend AGPLv3 against Neo4j license add-ons

FSF is both the drafter and the licensor of the AGPL

Glad to see that stated clearly, it appeared to be a matter of debate here last week, whether the AGPL was the copyright of the FSF and hence being licenced by them to everybody using it.[1]

Also glad to hear that the FSF's previous "no comment" was the sort of "no comment" that meant "we're doing a bit of polishing, we'll let you know when it's ready", rather than "go away, little person" or "it weren't me, guv, and you'll have to prove otherwise".

[1] Of course, the court could take issue with that and then we get into another fascinating (!) set of arguments; we shall see.

TSMC promises $100B US expansion that Trump hails without clarifying chip tariff threat

Biden gave them 10% as a sweetener

TSMC put in the remaining 90% of the first tranche, then 100% of the second tranche.

Yet this somehow shows "the power of Donald Trump's presidency".

Power?

As in, he hasn't fucked it up *so* badly that it would have just been cheaper for TSMC to simply write the whole thing off entirely and walk away from the Arizona plant? Sure, the tariffs make it more interesting, but even without them TSMC could make hay with a bigger plant within the US[1], no matter whose bum was in the Oval Office.

[1] e,g. still saving on transport and other normal, sane, importing costs; waving the flag and shouting "Made in USA" for those who might care (whose own customers might care); getting hold of the talent instead of letting Intel (or whoever) have it; having a bulwark against a takeover of TSMC's home...

The ups and down of a virtual trip to the Moon in Zero G's 727

Re: Do this now

Thanks for that.

PS

Good use of "yclept",, but now my head is full of Harold Shea's sorites - oh, and btw, Yngvi is a louse!

So … Russia no longer a cyber threat to America?

Re: Neville Chamberlain

And thinking of military aircraft...

Seeing a Typhoon coming off the civil airport this morning, either the local Draken outpost is getting ambitious or...

Normally, seeing - hearing! - one of those means there is an airshow nearby, grab a chair and watch all the interesting flights go by, away from the crowds.

Today, wondering if I should go out and buy some larger garden waste bags and gaffer tape: I've put on weight the last few years and wouldn't want to be a bother, feet sticking out and all that. The wife is a surgeon and knows where to cut, but there is only so much you can do with a hedge trimmer.

US stocks slip as Trump pulls trigger on Canada, Mexico, China tariffs

Re: Candada is to the USA as Ukraine is to Russia ?

> Why hit US neighbors with higher tariffs than China?

Because it will encourage them to, finally, pay for their walls along the US border?

/s

Told US farmers to "have fun" with the new deal.

Maybe there is a bright side for US farmers?

If the electronics for John Deere suffer due to the tariff war with China, maybe they'll decide to go back to making simpler vehicles, with the mechanical parts from their US factories[1]. The old machinery that the farmers could repair themselves, at a reasonable cost.

[1] JD have factories in China that turn out complete vehicles, but those are AFAIK (from trying to read ag news on websites) not imported into the US. Corrections to that gratefully received.

SpaceX receives FAA blessing for another Starship test

The upper atmosphere? Don't you understand the danger that represents? Oh, sure, dense parts will burn up as they descend towards the ground, but anything that can, well, flutter as it drops is likely to land safely.

If you haven't realised what this means, how The True Controller of The Satsuma will be left alive to terrorise the land, as we were warned:

"and then it began to creep like a slimy red animal across the land, covering field and ditch and tree and hedgerow with living scarlet[1] feelers, crawling, crawling!"

[1] as it unlatches from its host, all the colour it injected into the bulk will be drawn back inside itself, darkening its hue.

Techie pulled an all-nighter that one mistake turned into an all-weekender

Re: All nighter

Night pay? Next you'll be expecting to have overtime pay or time and a half for New Year's Day! You get your salary and be thankful for that.

Ah, the joys of working in a profession and not a trade.

The totally pointless all-nighter

Is to be the only member of the team who did *not* work on the "to be installed tomorrow on the very expensive customer kit for first acceptance tests" (was working on the off-kit PC subsystem that (a) wasn't part of the test and (b) was in good enough shape to show the data from the kit was being collected, it just didn't have all the post-processing in place).

But, the *entire* team was going to stay overnight.

Oh, I also lived further away than anyone else, so next morning, I drove out of the company carpark, pulled over next an undeveloped field (peaceful) and slept - not napped - before going on to the motorway home.