* Posts by Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch

790 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2022

Chinese electric car brands zapped by price surge as EU cranks tariffs

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Re: Unfair subsidization?

Just keep pushing that vested interest barrow.

In a country where baseload generation is coal plus a bit of hydro, the worst case scenario (100% coal-fired) puts the carbon breakeven for manufacturing and operating an EV over an ICE at 38000km. If you choose 100% renewable, that drops to about 16000km.

I know some people change cars like they change clothes, but I'm guessing even they buy a car expecting to drive it for at least 2-3 years.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

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Re: Begins to make sense...

It might be because, without nuclear, they don't have a carbon emission reduction strategy.

That said, with nuclear, they don't have a carbon emission reduction strategy. Best estimates are that nuclear could not be generating before 2038, by which time even the piss-poor commitments they made in Paris '21 will not be worth the toilet paper they were written on.

Remembering that Spud supported Abbott over Turnbull, the bad old days of climate change denial are well and truly entrenched on the opposition benches.

Never mind, the Libs won't be getting Higgins, Kooyong, Goldstein, North Sydney or Wentworth back until they have a climate policy, and they won't get government without their (former) heartland. They will keep tearing themselves apart over this issue until either it destroys them, or the reality of climate change eats them.

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Re: By the time they finish building the plant...

Were you talking about the whole country, or just its nuclear generation infrastructure?

Norway's sovereign wealth fund aims to zap Musk's monster Tesla pay deal

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Norwegian climactic conditions

Something to do with blond(e)s, mountain scenery and akvavit, perhaps?

Chucking Trump etc off Twitter after Jan 6 provides key data for misinfo experiment

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Re: I'm leaving!!11!!1

Would it be right to say that overturning the conviction for procedural rather than evidentiary reasons just gets him another trial?

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Re: So left wing poli sci guy says people he doesn't like are bad bad people..

And that, kids, is an example of an argument ad hominem.

Notice how completely it fails to address the merits of the argument it opposes.

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Re: Shocking!

So we can infer there's a correlation between followers of the felon in chief having access to Xitter and misinformation on Xitter.

Deductions:

1. Musk wants Xitter to have a reputation as a vector for misinformation.

2. Reality has a liberal bias.

California upgrade company aims militarized 'Tactical' Cybertruck at police forces

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Re: Bwahaha. Please do!

How well does it deal with a supersonic dose of lead into its lithium chambers? Just asking, as that might be a limit on its tactical utility.

White House hopes $180M will solve science, tech gaps in commercial fusion power

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Go hard, or go home

Tax 2% of oil companies' revenue for as many years as it takes to develop.

Payback for a century's worth of ecological freeloading.

Defiant Microsoft pushes ahead with controversial Recall – tho as an opt-in

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Re: Total Recall the film has the tag line "How would you know if someone stole your mind?"

And Total Recall was based on a Phillip K. Dick novel, We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

About a corporation engaged in false-memory implantation.

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Re: Bait and switch

I share your scepticism.

Speaking as someone for whom confidentiality is a professional necessity as well as a workplace-cultural norm, the idea of working on a machine where even the threat of a bug like this being installed is anathema.

As a workplace user without admin privileges I have no way of knowing if the backend is installed, waiting to be silently activated by outside malice, managerial paranoia, "updates" or dumb chance. Unless this misfeature is hard coded to give a visual warning every time it takes a screen shot regardless of configuration, I won't run that risk.

I will not use Win11.

New York Times source code leaks online via 4chan

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Anonymous 4chan posters are responsible for all manner of shite, so could very well not be.

I didn't touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke

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Linux

Re: Crows

Your Magpies steal shiny things.

Our Magpies stab you in the back of the head with their very sharp beaks. But they sound tremendous on a sunny late autumn morning, so we'll keep them anyway.

Waddle Giggle Gargle!

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Re: Yeah, sure. Nothing changed. Pinky promise.

So that's two errors: not recognising 9-3 is a Swedish car, and not recognising that Swedish dates are dd-MM.

Tesla chair begs investors to bless Musk's billions or face an Elon exodus

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Floating platforms

Ah, but which one? Of Course I Still Love You, or Just Follow The Instructions?

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Re: What extraordinary talent?

In todays world he is able to manipulate market capitalization of companies by this mechanism.

In the world of 2-3 years ago he was, because, like him, so many others were caught up in his Jobs-esque reality distortion field.

Since then, two masks have slipped: Musk's, whereby the generally liberal customer base of Tesla can see the bare-faced authoritarian behind the company; and Tesla's, since the stock and financial markets have noticed how much better than Tesla conventional and Chinese newcomer car manufacturers are doing EVs right now. Oh, and his decision to pay $44b for a website.

So now Tesla stockholders are being to judge their own self-interest against their perception of Musk's decision-making ability. Do they feel lucky?

Microsoft Research chief scientist has no issue with Windows Recall

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No, I'm a professional who is personally liable for any confidentiality breaches that happen in respect of data generated about my clients on my watch.

I will not use Win11.

Windows 11 and Linux gain ground among Steam gamers

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We can drop the pretense

Micros~1 aren't dropping support for Win10, they're dropping free and general availability support. You can have it - if you pay them for it.

What they are doing is levering customers off one product, which customers have come to tolerate, if not actually like, on to one they have more fully built in their subscription models, with a dash of added planned obselescence if you haven't bought the latest shiny.

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

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Actually no. I have rooftop solar and a domestic storage battery. And I'm a net generator, even at night.

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Re: it's called b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶, f̶l̶y̶w̶h̶e̶e̶l̶s̶, pumped storage...

Apparently if you rub them against an amber rod, you generate positive charge on the rod and a negative charge on the sheep.

FTX's $24B tax bill written down to just $200M

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Re: Got to hand it to the IRS

Ok, so the IRS gets $0.04 in the dollar, but with it, IRS gets open access to the corporation's ledgers and transaction histories.

Suddenly all that anonymous finance isn't so anonymous any more. That information might be worth >$1 on the dollar.

Australia drops legal action that aimed to have X take down stabbing vid

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In other news

Marine Biologists on the Great Barrier Reef today reported witnessing a Tiger Shark vomiting up an Echidna.

Some warning there for pricks who think they can get away with doing whatever they want in Oz, anyway.

(Echidna = Small spiky egg-laying mammal that looks something like a hedgehog or porcupine, convergently evolved to the same body habitus.)

More layoffs at Microsoft: What's really going on here?

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Re: Mixed Reality group

There is reality and unreality - its an either/or binomial thing.

exp(iπ)=-1

Twitter 'supersharers' of fake news tend to be older Republican women

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Re: If they had been on the left ?

The populists and RWNJs abandoned the notion of correct long ago, unless you're happy to count "whatever moulds the most recent occurrence to my worldview" as a substitute for objective truth. Cognitive dissonance is hard to come by when you find cognition painful.

IT worker sued over ‘vengeful’ cyber harassment of policeman who issued a jaywalking ticket

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Re: Strange thing to do someone for

- Have you any idea of how much damage that bulldozer would suffer if I just let it roll straight over you?

- How much?

- None at all.

Thanks for coming to help. No, we can't say why we called – it's classified

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Re: USS Dallas

According to Tom Clancy, it had a run in with a certain ballistic missile sub Красный Октябрь, but according to repeated statements from both governments, none of it ever happened.

55 years ago, Apollo 10's crew turned the airwaves blue

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Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

Apollo was private enterprise. Grumman (who built the LM), North American (who built the CSM and part of the Saturn V), Boeing, Douglas, and Rocketdyne (who built the rest of the Saturn V) would all have a problem with you giving NASA credit for all the private enterprise work they did - huge swathes of it as unpaid overtime, anecdotally.

Modern parlance would call it a public-private partnership. NASA was contractor, coordinator and executive. There was just to much expertise needed to try to bring it all in under one umbrella.

'Little weirdo' shoulder surfer teaches UK cabinet minister a lesson in cybersecurity

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Re: Situational awareness is rare

Or Escher it: madness is trying the same thing, twice, a little bit smaller and in different directions, taking the results, doubling it, and trying it again, a little bit smaller and in different directions, and then taking the results...

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Re: Situational awareness is rare

So, same scenario as elsergio's, then.

Tape is so dead, 152.9 EB of LTO media shipped last year

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Re: "take even longer when there's compression or decompression to be done."

Trying to draw the distinction between spinning rust and spinning rust that - very briefly - goes in a straight line before spinning again is a fine one, when it's really just density, substrate and latency.

Was there no one at Microsoft who looked at Recall and said: This really, really sucks

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Re: There's a gem of a good idea in there...

And this is why we can't have nice* things.

* fast, safe, stable, secure, trusted

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Re: Maybe everyone DID point out "This really, really sucks"

It's easy to focus on the idea that your screenshots are being taken every n minutes, and overlook that Micros~1 plan to integrate their Copilot AI* with it. Gigabytes of yummy training data of dubious copyright status to feed to their glorified predictive text generators.

"Copilot, send my boss a screenshot of the round figures I was looking at this morning. NO, NOT THOSE ONES!"

*For a very limited value of intelligence.

Giving Windows total recall of everything a user does is a privacy minefield

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Privacy invasions

Windows, show my boss a screenshot of the rounded-off figures I was looking at earlier - NO, NOT THOSE ONES!

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Re: It begs the obvious question...

Du thé, s'il vous plaît.

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Re: It begs the obvious question...

It's hard, you have to cache them at it.

UK PM Sunak calls election, leaving Brits cringing over memory of his Musk love-in

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Re: Disappointing

Not dragging Scotland and NI out of the EU against their democratically-expressed wills would have been the perfect way to express that sentiment, particularly with the Scottish Independence referendum so fresh in the memory, but no. The tyrant minority shouted and shouted.

Where I'm from, a referendum is only carried if it gets a majority of votes in a majority of states. US constitutional amendments happen on a similar basis, but 2/3 of states have to ratify.

Changes that fundamental should be difficult, for good reasons which get more obvious in retrospect.

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Re: Disappointing

And when you arrive here in "the Colonies" (123 years out of date, but still, living memory - overrated), you'll have to stand in the long queue to get in, with all the other riff-raff.

Then find yourself buying petrol in litres, pork scratchings in grams, and proper cold beer in mL. Enjoy the nice warm feeling having a passport the same colour gives you.

Thanks for colonising us by the way. Undoing the process is still painful, especially for the people who already ran the place when you arrived. Your lack of gratitude for all the wheat, wool, coal, steel, gold, lead... (you know, the stuff you use to build empires with) has been noted.

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Re: Disappointing

Because the aged don't have to live with the consequences of their mistakes.

I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite – and no one wants to fix this model-breaking bug

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Re: Trifecta of ignorance demonstrated

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

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Re: "Apple has completely lost touch with its customers."

Obligatory xkcd.

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Re: Just think

At that price, it's certainly an expensive way to scratch your but.

An attorney says she saw her library reading habits reflected in mobile ads. That's not supposed to happen

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Re: Land of the Free

All remaining provisions of USA PATRIOT Act expired in 2020.

Doesn't mean some of them weren't snuck into some form of reincarnation under even more sinister things like FISA.

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Re: Not a good move

It will set in when a precedent is set: Ts & Cs which it is impractical for a reasonable person to comprehend in the interval between being shown them and being asked to accept them are void. Ts & Cs that you actively have to seek out else not shown, with the option to just press an "Accept" button, likewise void.

Dublin debauchery derails Portal to NYC in six days flat

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Pint

Foolishly, I followed you to Dublin

Like a ghost I walked the streets of Temple Bar

And all the bright young things were throwing up their Guinness in the gutters

And once I thought I saw you from afar.

Now I'm in a nightclub in Helsinki

And they're playing La Vida Loca, once again,

And I can't believe I'm dancing to this crap but I'm a chance here

And every fucking city sounds the same.

- Every Fucking City, Paul Kelly

(Okay, so Temple Bar's the other side of the Liffey...)

Oklahoma saddles up bill of rights for crypto wranglers and miners

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Re: Dodgers and hammer that stein

O--Oklahoma! Where the blocks come sweepin' down the chain!

What's with AI boffins strapping GoPros to toddlers? We take a closer look

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Re: The brain is also 3-dimensional

...and too cowardly to use the slur they were thinking.

Cybercriminals hit jackpot as 500k+ Ohio Lottery lovers lose out on their personal data

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Re: Why do they need so much data anyway?

The tax man got paid when you bought your ticket.

Gambling winnings aren't income. Even people who run businesses based on gambling have argued that point and won. For one thing, that's why the Museum of Old and New Art (Hobart) exists.

UniSuper Google Cloud outage caused by an unfortunate series of events

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Re: UniSuper

Every Australian employer is obliged to put a fraction (currently 11%, up to a limit of $27500/year) of each employee's wages into a retirement superannuation fund which becomes accessible to the employee when they retire. This has been the case since the early 90s.

The funds under management as a result of this scheme reached AUD3.5 trillion in 2022.

Unisuper started as the industry fund for tertiary education. They are the 5th-biggest such fund and the $120b mentioned in the article is in AUD.

BOFH: The greatest victory is that which requires no battle

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Maybe BOFH will ask his new overlords: hey boss, I've just written these programs. Can you tell me what data I need to give them so that the programs always return?

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Re: Who knows a future AI Boss could be in play?

Wall-E's child care bots were too cute.

My premonition is more like the Michael Sheen bartender bot in Passengers when he goes on the fritz and starts making drinks out of the glassware.