* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4531 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

Crypto lender Celsius in Chapter 11 deep freeze

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Who is going to buy wadges of crypto

It is more a matter of when than who. Half of when is when the bankruptcy court has decided who is owed money, and with what priority. The other half is when the price of crypto has fallen to slightly below its perceived value. The good news is by that time if perceived value is .1% of the current price you only need to find a bunch of fools worth $4.3M.

Tories spar over UK's delayed Online Safety Bill

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: The British Internet....

I thought the internet was supposed to be a television you cannot turn off, always shows government selected content, watches everything you and and sends it to the Ministry of Love.

Get over it: Microsoft is a Linux and open source company these days

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

judge it by what it's doing today

Microsoft hires people to write software so they own the copyright and have the right to select whatever licenses they want to distribute that software.

I get to read those licenses and to decide for myself whether to rent their software. My dislike of their choice of license has not changed in over thirty years so I do not rent their software. The difference between back then and now is that it is easier to not pay Microsoft for software I do not want. Hate is definitely the wrong word for my feelings toward Microsoft. To me they are mostly irrelevant but they do provide some entertaining news.

Perhaps this article is asking me to trust Microsoft: sure, just as much as Google, Amazon and Oracle.

Twitter sues Musk: He can't just 'change his mind, trash the company, walk away'

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: I'm saving my popcorn for the third act...

At most only two acts.

Musk has bugger all on his side and Twitter have among other things - Musk's self damning Tweets. Delaware Chancery court will wrap this up in about a year. Musk will appeal. In the very unlikely event that is granted, Musk only gets that one do-over - and that will be after a year of Musk posting more evidence against himself on Twitter. A normal person in a hole this deep would have stopped digging already. Musk founded The Boring Company.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Wonder how many Tesla owners...

already happening.

Many people who were going to buy Teslas are either looking elsewhere or deciding to wait an extra year or two to see what else becomes available. At the other extreme, Teslas cannot be modified to roll coal.

With any luck, Musk's demand to buy Twitter at $54.20 will cost him his Tesla shares and Tesla will be better off without him.

SpaceX Starship booster in flames after unexpected ignition

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: N1...

N1 was massively different in just about every possible way starting with money. Because of lack of budget the only way to test an N1 rocket was to try to launch it. SpaceX test each part and sub-assembly at each possible point in production until it they get it right so often that the chance of a test of failing becomes really small.

What went wrong was very clear. The first step in starting a Raptor engine is to blast high pressure gaseous oxygen into the oxygen turbine and high pressure gaseous methane into the methane turbine until the pumps spin up fast enough to pressurise the liquid oxygen and methane. For the outer ring of twenty engines the high pressure gasses are supplied by the launch table as these engines do not have to relight during flight. Someone thought it would be a good idea to test this on several (all?) engines at once without deliberately igniting the propellants as soon as possible. After they had time to build up into a really big cloud the propellants found an ignition source.

Twitter claims Elon Musk bailed from sale with 'invalid and wrongful' reasons

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

I am not expecting such a protracted sequence of delays. Once it was clear that The SCO Group had nothing, Darl focused on delays. Every year he delayed was a year he could convert Novell's license fees into income. (SCO was supposed to collect Novell's fees, pay 100% to Novell and get 5% commission back.) When it became blatantly obvious that continuing wiht the litigation would be trading while insolvent, Darl filed for bankruptcy. The result was not quite what he wanted: a trustee was assigned to spend Novell's license fees on the favoured law and accountancy firms.

Twitter want their money now. Just the idea of Musk having to pay out so much money is a threat to Tesla's share value. Musk wants to cut his losses quickly. Neither side has an incentive to delay.

The current battle is Musk vs reality. Musk needs Tesla stock at a high value while he settles his debts so he needs to convince the world that at worst he is only on the hook for a piddling $1B. He will be trolling like crazy to divert attention away from the $44B specific performance clause.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Melania

I have never played Elden Ring so I looked up Melania. Apparently she can be killed safely because her AI does not recognise a big canon aimed a little off centre is dangerous.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Musk ran X.com. Peter Thiel ran Cofinity. The two merged into Paypal which was run by Musk until he was fired. Thiel took over then Paypal was bought by eBay. Musk owned a large portion of Paypal until the sale to eBay and as far as I know, he has not owned a significant portion of Paypal since. You are welcome to have any opinion of Musk, Thiel and Paypal that you want but please do not associate Musk with the huge rise in the value of Paypal that massively boosted his wealth.

Even robots have the right to learn from open source

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Huh?

At a guess, if I put your work in github without your permission and you are unhappy about how it gets used Microsoft can try to recover their loses (if any) from me.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: profiting off your code

What is the licence? There are "not for commercial use" licenses but they are incompatible with some of the popular FOSS licences. For example, you would not be able to link your code to GPL libraries. Also, check the github terms of service. By using github you may have promised to bake them a birthday cake as well as given commercial use.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Tone deaf article

AFAIK, Microsoft are not doing anything wrong by renting out copilot, even though it is trained on source with different authors and licences.

The problem comes from anyone using code generated by copilot. There is the minor risk of getting sued for billions for something as trivial as rangeCheck. There is the more major problem of the copyright holder's intent. Some code is written by universities founded by government grants. They often select a BSD/MIT like license so they can track where their code is used and use it as evidence that last years grant did something productive and they should get more next year. People often select GPL so that improvements cannot be hidden in binaries and must instead be returned to the community.

I respect the intent of Microsoft's licenses: pay up (inclusive?)or fuck off. They should respect other people's licenses by getting copilot to generate accurate attribution and licensing requirements.

Robots have not rights at all and certainly do not have the right to ignore copyright law. If there is a problem with the law it is that it may not be possible to hold Microsoft to account for actions taken by their badly programmed robot.

API rate limits at the core of Elon Musk’s decision to ditch Twitter

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: specific info on that contract

There are ways that Musk can get away with only paying $1B, like the government stopping the sale. There are ways that Musk could get out of the deal and get $1B from Twitter, but that would require Twitter's board of directors to ask their lawyers "what is the most stupid thing we could do right now", then follow the instructions.

The board of directors are reasonably smart, they hired skilled lawyers and Musk signed a contract against the advice of his lawyers. All the Twitter board have to do to get a really big payday is jump through the required hoops - which is what they are doing even when it is not clear that a cheap hoop is actually required.

I think part of the reason for the $1B section is to appeal to Musk's Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: specific info on that contract

Yes many people do know different. Section 9.9 of the agreement as filed with the SEC is a specific performance clause. On Musk's side, performance means paying $44B for Twitter. Unless Musk lawyers can prove Twitter did not hold up their end (see section 7), Twitter can legally compel completion of the purchase at the agreed price. Musk's lawyers have a monumental task as Musk waived due diligence.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: specific info on that contract

We have Twitter's SEC filing.

I agree the board will not sell out for less than $44B but they might accept a settlement for less with Musk getting nothing but egg on his face.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

More than that, Twitter share holders are happy to be bought out at well above market value. They would also be happy with a judgement or settlement well above legal fees and court costs. They were probably thinking something along the line of "the fool signed!" but did not say it out loud because they have enough sense to let their lawyers do the talking.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Musk has signed a contract with a specific performance clause and his only way out of paying $44B is to prove Twitter breached their side of the contract. Part of the contract is that Musk can ask anything, including questions that Twitter cannot answer. It will be up to a judge to decide if Twitter's responses were adequate. The bot numbers are going to be a difficult point for Musk as his publicly announced reasons for buying Twitter included doing something about the large number of bots. Most likely, a settlement will be agreed before a verdict is reached with Musk paying something between 1 and 44 billion.

Musk is already in breach of the non-disclosure and non-disparagement clauses so it will not be a clean fight. If he has taken advantage of Twitter's lowered share price to quietly buy shares via proxy again he will be in even deeper shit.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Skimmed it. It is large with plentiful legal jargon and IANAL.

Section 9.9 covers specific performance. So far Twitter appear to have jumped through the required hoops to apply for it. Musk's drivel about 5% bots does not come close to a way out and if he had anything better he would be shouting it from the roof tops. It will go before a judge and there will likely be a settlement before the judge reaches a decision. It will take years but Musk will not wriggle out of this for a paltry $1B.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: BBC reporting Musk's bid is ended.

That is shitty reporting from the BBC. I thought you had been cherry picking the quotes so I read the article. They are only quoting Musk. That specific 5% is Musk deliberately misquoting Twitter. The actual quote from Twitter's filings is "less than 5% of its first-quarter monetizable daily active users were made of bots."

Twitter sells adverts based on the number of monetizable daily active users. It arrives at this number by filtering out a large number of bots some of which provide interesting tweets, but none of which use the user interface or see adverts. Twitter says that the number of users that it claims see adverts is includes less than 5% bots.

Any journalist capable of minimal fact checking would have spotted Musk's malicious misquote. The judge in Delaware is going to find out really fast too. I used to expect better from the BBC.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Next shareholder meeting should be interesting

The board and share holders were clearly aware they were selling a pig in a poke. The board exploited Musk's haste to get a specific performance clause to up the payout beyond $1B and a due diligence waiver to hog tie Musk's defence in the inevitable litigation. If I were a share holder I would be impressed by how well the board had maximised the value of my shares. As a cherry on top, the board got Musk to sign a clause about not trash talking Twitter on Twitter. It was obvious that once Musk spotted he was penned in his immediate response would be to squeal. Twitter's lawyers will argue that any reduction in share value is a result of Musk's tweets.

Somehow Musk's lawyers were able to get him to stay off Twitter for 9 days. He has come back with a photo of him meeting with Pope Francis. The only way this could get stranger would be to announce a coal rolling option for Teslas.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Surprisingly honest wording from Twitter

A batch of workers left when this deal was signed. A batch more will go if Musk takes charge. Twitter have reduced the number of staff they employ for hiring new staff. Musk has already worked out that even if his original plans for Twitter had made any sense he would have difficulty getting them implemented.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: He was never going to buy it

I think he intended to make the purchase when he was nominally worth $240B but when he announced he intended to restore Trump's account Twitter and Tesla shares took a dive. Here comes round two. He won't be nominally worth $200B for long.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

It is not just a matter of inciting violence. Republicans hate the idea of other people having free speech.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Try to understand that in this instance, Musk is being really really stupid.

If he wants to buy twitter he needs to talk up its value to just below the purchase price so he can get good interest rates on the required loans.

If he wants to back out of the deal he needs to talk up the share price until it is well over his offer so Twitter shareholders decide they would be better off voting against the sale.

Trash talking Twitter again is just going to repeat the financial battering he took last time he did it.

NASA's CAPSTONE silence down to a software flaw

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Cost of a lost mission

This is a really cheap mission, intended to test software that will be used with multiple really beyond ridiculously over priced missions ... some with astronauts.

FBI and MI5 bosses: China cheats and steals at massive scale

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Firefly leased Vandenberg Space Launch Complex 2 for their launches then were told they would not have access.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

I haven't tried, but what do you think would happen if you tried to get into Vandenberg Space Force Base with and expired pass? (Date valid but serial number on a list of rescinded passes)

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

The actual litigation was Apple accusing Samsung of copying glass to the edge of the device (which only Samsung could manufacture at the time), four columns of icons and the colour black. Not an example as requested and doubly so because Apple lost and were required to publish an apology on their website (had javascript to size the image above to hide the apology to where scrolling would be required to see it) and in newspapers (so unobtrusive and badly worded that they got a scolding from the judge).

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: immediately stating that the US is worse than China is simply wrong

Agreed, which is why I didn't do that. Mitigating circumstances although certainly valid were not required in the request for an example. At the moment, this is a case of a spider calling an aardvark an insectivore. Although the US has not gone any near as bad as China they have made real efforts to catch up and have a significant opportunity to close the gap further.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

I agree with the false equivalence but believe I provided a valid example as requested. "Asked" with big quotes is about right. Firefly were effectively locked out of US government launch contracts and their launch facilities at Vandenberg. Firefly were effectively dead until they did as they were "asked". If holding that stick had not been sufficient, the US government would have found a bigger stick to shake at Firefly while politely asking Polyakov to sell.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

I will start the bidding with Maksym Polyakov's investment in Firefly Aerospace and the demands from the US Committee on Foreign Investment.

(For the time being I see China as a bigger problem than the US but if Trump wins the mid-terms Roe v. Wade will look like a mild introduction to what will happen next.)

Tech world may face huge fines if it doesn't scrub CSAM from encrypted chats

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Client side scanning

OK, lets try this. First I will need to gather collection images including CASM and have it tagged by cheap labour so I can train my AI. Next, to prove that I am forwarding only CASM to Priti Patel I have to publish my dataset.

Is any part of that legal?

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Way to go, Priti

Mostly right, but opposition - no matter the colour - have consistently provided sufficient support for a surveillance state.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Nobody can sensibly deny that this is a moral imperative

Nice of the home secretary to openly admit that she thinks I am nobody. I am shocked at her honesty and fully expect her to be pressured by her peers into a prompt resignation.

Health trusts swapped patient data for shares in an AI firm. They may have lost millions

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Sensyne Health

I was half expecting Palantir but I believe they have our medical records already.

ESA's 2030+ roadmap envisions Europeans on the Moon and Mars

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: No one comes close to SpaceX for lots of cheap launches

Come back in two years and look for RocketLab's Neutron. Come back in ten years and ask about New Glenn's engines.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: If ESA was smart

Superheavy boosters will not splash down - they will return to the launch site and land again for re-use. Apart from that, I agree that French Guiana is an excellent launch site.

Long term plans for Starship includes becoming a competitor to long-haul air travel. The noise level would restrict landing to ~20km away from the coast. Not sure if French Guiana is a popular enough tourist destination to get one of the early landing sites but coastal European cities are like a fairly high priority.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Mixed blessings

The private part of the public/private partnership that funds Ariane 6 based their investment on getting returns from commercial missions. When Falcon 9 ate those l[a]unches there was panic about the financial viability of Ariane 6. Bob Smith rescued the project by screwing up New Glenn so badly that Jeff had to buy Kuiper launches from everyone else (except SpaceX). With Ariane 6 brought back from the brink, the Eurpean Large Logistical Lander has a launch vehicle again. E3L will get 1500kg to the Moon and 15kg back again.

If Bob had not come to the rescue, think of what else could be done with the money instead. NASA has bought two rides to the Moon and back on Starship HLS for $3B. Bob has helped out again by advocating US funding for a "competitor" to Starship that will cost at least $6B and has under 5% of the payload capacity of a Starship. NASA will not have the funding to build any payloads in the 100,000kg range that Starship can take to the Moon (and back). That $3B is mostly R&D. We do not have a direct price for a Starship HLS ride but we can get an estimate from Dear Moon. Plan A for Dear Moon was a crew Dragon launched on a Falcon Heavy - probably about $250M (based on prices for Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon). Plan B will send Starship (not HLS) around the Moon, probably at a lower cost to SpaceX.

ESA could fund Starship sized payloads and have them delivered to the Moon for something like $100M-$200M. They would be able to achieve things that NASA could not because whatever funding NASA gets will be earmarked by congress to the companies with the loudest lobbyists. On the other hand it looks like ESA has exactly the same problem: the Terrae Novae road map reads like a "jobs" program advert aimed at politicians.

UK signs deal to share police biometric database with US border guards

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Bit that wasn't mentioned...

I did not see anything along the lines of "US signs deal to share police biometric database with UK border guards". My expectations of the UK government are so low that I would have been shocked to see anything of the kind. Perhaps one day we will find out how much UK tax payers paid for the privilege of this one-sided deal.

Intel ships crypto-mining ASIC at the worst possible time

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: more energy efficient

If other things had remained equal, increasing the power efficiency of hash calculation would only have increased the number of hashes that need to be calculated to mine bit coins. As it is, the lower value of bit coins reduces the number of required hash calculations and this will result in a coincidental correlation between reduced kWH/bitcoins and the release Intel's ASIC that is not based on causation.

Open source body quits GitHub, urges you to do the same

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Make sure to FLOSS to keep your ecosystem healthy.

Top of that handy list was AGPL. One of the limitations of GPL is it does not address Googlization: taking GPL software, adapting it, renting it out as a cloud service and not distributing the source code for the adaptations. Googlization is legal for GPL code because Google does not distribute binary version of GPL software. That may not represent the copyright holder's intent because the license may have been selected before Googlization started.

The AGPL fixes this loop-hole. AGPL software is intended to be run as a service. It includes the ability for users of the service to download the source code. The service provider may not remove this ability from AGPL software and if they choose to provide modified AGPL software as a service, the modifications must be made available to clients.

Google rejects the AGPL not for legal reasons. They could legally use AGPL software and charge for it as a service - if they do so in accordance with the license. They reject AGPL for financial reasons: they would not be able to lock users into a monopolistic relationship with services based on secret modifications to GPL code.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: What they do

Purchase close source projects and change the license to open source. Create the own open source projects. Maintain open source projects with a professional level of quality assurance. Distribute open source software in accordance with the licenses. Offer subscription based customer support.

They do not take software from multiple sources with different copyright owners and licenses, remove the attribution and licenses, chew what is left together and sell the result as if it were not the creation of others and mostly likely stand back and laugh when the recipients get into legal trouble for distributing the resulting code.

Arrogant, subtle, entitled: 'Toxic' open source GitHub discussions examined

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Hoping they can publish a fix soon.

In proprietary software, duplication of effort is a waste of money. With software libre, it is people's own time to contribute or not as they see fit. After a fork, one side will be more valuable to the community, attract more contributors and make more progress until the other side fades away from neglect. Truth found by experiment, not direction imposed by by the winner of a debate conducted in the absence of evidence.

China is trolling rare-earth miners online and the Pentagon isn't happy

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: The Pentagon

Bush's appointees stood up in front of cameras and openly told whopping lies.

If Winnie the Pooh wants to tell whopping lies he has the ability to hold a press conference. He does not need to hide behind thousands of fake social media accounts.

Is computer vision the cure for school shootings? Likely not

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Poor market research

An AI gun detector would be socially unacceptable in the US and buying one with tax payer's money would be politically toxic. A product that would sell like hot cakes and guaranty re-election would be an AI based video game detector. This has the added bonus that the problem of dead children would remain unchanged and create an opportunity to sell an upgrade to AI video game detector version 2, and 4 and 8 - each at twice the price of the last.

Returning to the Moon on the European Service Module

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

SLS - going where RocketLab has gone before

CAPSTONE launched this morning and is on its way to NRHO.

Cloudflare's outage was human error. There's a way to make tech divinely forgive

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

beckups

Did anyone else stop at that point then read the rest of the article with a posh accent?

You need to RTFM, but feel free to use your brain too

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Check you can complete before you start

I came across an amazing exam paper. It had the following instructions:

*) Write you name in the space provided.

*) Read the entire exam paper.

... various questions with space for answers ...

*) Hand in your paper to the examiner.

To get full marks you have to not answer any of the questions. It got me into the habit of reading to the end of the instructions before doing anything. Documentation should be written so this in not required but in the real world there is an advantage to knowing you have all the required tools to hand before you take something down for maintenance.

NASA circles August in its diary to put Artemis I capsule in Moon orbit

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: end one of the work experience kids to do it

Cost plus: Point out the absence of recovery, hope for a change order.

If a change order arrives: redesign end-caps again to include a hatch for parachutes. Redesign avionics to include calculating the correct time to open the hatch and deploy chute. Add appropriate pyrotechnics control outputs to avionics. Redesign cable harness to connect new avionics to required pyrotechnics. Re-write assembly manuals for new end-caps, pyrotechnics, chute, cable harness and avionics. Write re-fit manual for upgrading existing hardware. Create computer simulation of new hardware. Test new hardware by simulation including determining survivability for all conceivable failure modes. Build and install new hardware. Re-write operations manual to include an extra roll-back to the VAB to fit pryrotechnics and check the pins are correctly inserted to connect the parachute to the SRB. Write procedure for dealing with Viking invasion during SRB recovery. Write procedures manual for re-qualifying recovered hardware for a second flight ...

With just a few minutes thought, a 5-minute job for a work experience kid can be stretched to occupy multiple teams of skilled engineers for two years. With a bit of care the design can require detaching the SRBs to fit the pyrotechnics between the wet dress rehearsal and launch.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: hardly going to be economic to use it ... monthly

This is tax payer's money being spent by politicians indirectly on their own re-election campaigns. With that goal, the high cost is an advantage and efficiency is irrelevant. RS-25 engines are individually crafted by skilled artisans. Aerojet Rocketdyne can only make four per year - enough for one launch per year. Boeing can only make one main tank per year. I have not seen numbers for SRBs, service modules or Orion capsules but you can bet every contractor in the US and EU sized their production in the sure and certain knowledge that there could only ever be up to one launch per year - the minimum cadence considered acceptable to retain institutional knowledge for human space flight.

There has been talk of upgrading to two launches per year - but only talk. In theory the $560M/year ground support equipment maintenance cost would be divided by two launches instead of one but that would get dwarfed by the cost of doubling all the unique production equipment. There has also been a statement about dropping the launch cost from $4B to $2B. I will take that as loquitur ex ano rather than an accusation of fraud in a meticulously accounted cost plus contract.

SLS could not fly monthly even if politicians wanted that much money. A sustainable Moon program means Starship as much as possible until a competitor can offer something equivalent at a similar price.