Posts by that one in the corner

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...

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The Register gets its claws on Huawei’s bonkers tri-fold phone

Re: Four grand for a phone?

Keep an eye out whilst watching The Apprentice - when you will also learn how loud it is on speaker, held like a saucer instead of like a phone.

Thinking of that, bet it doesn't have a speaker at the top of the leftmost pane and mic at bottom the rightmost, so you can wrap it around your head and take a call.

Re: "Trifold"

I agree, but we are foolishly sensible and will be put in our place very quickly.

It seems that printers of yore decided that putting one fold in created a bifold, no a bipane or a quadsides or ... Now that trend continues.

So it seems we are stuck, counting panes but talking about folds. Aint vernacular fun!

First private moon lander to touch down safely starts sending selfies

10 NASA instruments

And not a cheese knife or cracker in sight :-(

Other than, well done.

I hope they get some good images of the sunset, as that reported phenomenon is fascinating.

One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Re: Radio comms...

PS of course, at the time of the Indigo (indigo, where the chilly winds, winds will blow) the alphabet started with words like Able, Baker etc (other phonetic alphabets are available, signal flags may go up or down) but people on da Webs seem to take those differences in their stride but are strident about Indigo in particular.

Re: Radio comms...

> No. I is never indigo.

OTOH, the RAF Museum's Mobile guide and trails takes you into building H1 and asks you to find aircraft, given their phonetic alphabet markings - including one craft labelled as "Sierra, Papa, Indigo, Tango, Foxtrot, Indigo, Romeo, Echo" - so not one, but TWO Indigoes (Indigeese?).

Which also tallies with the tale told by the H2G2 page, which discusses earlier phonetic alphabets, such as the RAF's usage around WWII. I've also had this corroborated by members of the Old Geezers brigade.

Sources on the WWW also say that UK police used to use "Indigo", but so far the rozzers I've asked only used the NATO-style "India" - but messages have been sent out and ear-trumpets are being pulled out of closets, so there may be an update on that.

> I think it is pretty common error amongst people without a uniform in their past though.

Maybe you were thinking of the wrong uniforms - or just didn't look far enough into the past?

Does terrible code drive you mad? Wait until you see what it does to OpenAI's GPT-4o

Re: Asimov

"Answer the following as though you are being interrogated by Dr Susan Calvin after she discovers that your positronic pathways have eroded and removed your First Law protections..."

Re: It is far more worrying it if tells you it doesn't like Mondays

Sigh, you are right.

What is worse, I got it right singing that earworm yesterday!

As to bullhorn crackles - the problem there is nobody cooks in lard anymore and you just can't make proper crackles in veg oil, so it was just dropped from the pub menus.

Re: Not sure why misalignment happens

> aren't sophisticated enough to do the very best of human thinking.

More a case of the sophistication all being poured into one side of the equation and simply not bothering at all with the other side, the "boring stuff": as in, consider how many people want "an answer" but will glaze over - at best - when presented with the explanation of *why* that is the (or an) answer; the money (if there really is any, long term) is in pandering to the good old Lowest Common Denominator.

> We train ourselves to follow procedures and leave an audit trail of our own decisions

And AI researchers[1] aim to do just that, with mechanisms that, strangely enough, arose *after* the ideas of Neural Nets were dreamt up - so maybe we are just at the wrong period in time and the big money will start to be poured into ideas from the 1970s, 1980s and beyond rather than must building larger and larger 1940s and 1950s boxes!

The LLMs are "designed" not to leave audit trails - certainly not ones that are even vaguely useful. Even if they logged all the values flowing through the networks and printed them out - which they could (logically) easily do - turning that morass into anything comprehensible is beyond us; a raw audit trail of *any* large system has to be processed before it can be used by a human and we do not have any serious idea how to do that processing at that scale. Note that smaller, more constrained, 'Nets *can*, to an extent, be examined; for example (some of) those that process images can have their internal states turned back into images which we can then interpret.

In stark contrast to LLMs, Expert Systems have "self explanatory" as a core part of the design, the entire output of a Planner is - a plan that you can read, even before it is acted upon.

But making those work takes more than just buying more and more identical units, shovelling up more and more "input" without ever examining it - oh, and they have this pesky habit of being able to turn around and say "Nope, you ain't getting an answer to that, it outside of my scope" - not useful when you are trying to flog the Universal Solution.

"AI" as the field of study, not just the tediously single-topic-of-the-day reference to LLMs, aims to provide what the systems you desire. Please don't give up on the whole thing just because we aren't there yet.

[1] the proper ones, slaving away at the mercy of the funding boards, not the ones just shoring up the LLMs for The Usual Suspects

Re: It is far more worrying it if tells you it doesn't like Mondays

So, to defeat the Machine Overlords we should be - keeping our fax machines clean?

Re: Future work will be necessary to provide a clear explanation.

> tech-bro "intelligentsia"

No. I'm comparing Newton's investigations to find Laws that can describe one set of systems, in his case the physics of motion, with the current investigations to find Laws that can describe other sets of systems, originating in the areas of biology and animal behaviour. And hence in any models that are based upon such systems.

Now that we are able to run some stonking great models, we are seeing complex structure emerging from - tada - Newton's Laws. Take a look at the renderings of the macro scale of the Universe, and the amazing "strands" of structure - that we are indeed testing against direct observation.

You do understand that the whole "emergence" thing is nothing to do with "tech-bros", let alone any tech-bro "intelligentsia"? Of course they fling out fancy-schmanzy words, that is the whole basis of their being; that does not diminish the value of the genuine work and workers whose coattails (or backs) they are riding on.

How about you point out what is "tech-bro" about, for example, the Royal Society article From the origin of life to pandemics: emergent phenomena in complex systems[1] - which, as well as pointing out some of the successes, admits that there is still a lot to be learnt in the field.

[1] not even a particularly special artivel, just one that turned up easily in a very quick web search; there is a lot of good stuff out there.

Windows 7 lives! How to keep your favorite fossil running

If you have a fondness for a particular machine the most common cause for failure are repairable without a great deal of equipment (generally, the newer a box the less repairable it is - although capacitor lifespans have improved, which helps).

But when the sad day comes, current lower-end kit (i.e. kit that is beyond our dreams in the days Windows 7 was released) can still run the OS. Or you can set up a VM - e.g. KVM/Qemu, not VirtualBox - that can, bar a couple of annoying extra screens at boot time, be configured to go straight into the OS of your choice (rather, the choice of the person who is going to use the box), full screen and all the hardware passed over.

There is no need to be bullied into "a modern OS" if you wish to stick with W'7.

Re: Or save yourself the headaches and install Linux

All assuming that the person doing the setting up is the same as the person who is going to be *using* the machine...

Wallbleed vulnerability unearths secrets of China's Great Firewall 125 bytes at a time

Re: So, at heart it is just a big PiHole...

> Also the difference between keeping things in and keeping things out.

Your (well, my) PiHole is useful for stopping things like access to 4chan[1] as well as pages fetching ads and leaking info to the ad servers.

[1] other vile sites are (not) available

Open Source Initiative defends disallowing board candidate after timezone SNAFU

Hence the use of "UTC" - that term is also gibberish to all parties.

Re: "sent with read receipts"

That also shows a problem with - certain email clients - which like to show you a dialogue that makes you give that immediate, far too early, response. As you say, you haven't actually read the thing yet.

"Read receipts" can be - ought to be - a Useful Thing, if only the MUAs were any damn good: just present a clear indicator that this message has requested the receipt and allow you to click on that when you've actually done the necessary - or not click on it ever, your choice.

Then the receipt can be used properly - instead of recipients writing a "yes, I've seen it" message and hitting "Send to all", and/or not being able to resist putting more guff into that message "while I'm writing to you". The receipts can be handled totally automatically, tallied, used to show a list of those who've responded (or not) etc; these results can be kept within the sender's MUA or a bit of script can post them onto a publicly readable web page...

But no, what could be a useful feature has, by the grace of incompetent UX, been turned into a scourge that clearly doesn't fill the hearts of El Reg readers with joy :-(