* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4531 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

We Kana believe it! Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Japanese keyboard

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Why make keyboards

For a bunch of techies in the UK sourcing a keyboard is trivial but the Pi is also intended to be used by the thoroughly computer illiterate who have severe supply chain problems and cannot read any language you have heard of. At some level of computer illiteracy, getting something from the manufacturer with a "this will work - no problem" statement is really useful. Being able to buy the whole kit from from a single source is close to essential when the nearest road is a day's hike away. Having the hardware precisely match the pictures prevents the need for handling technical support calls in an unrecognisable language.

The current Pi kits will remain in production until January 2026. That is a difficult promise to make unless you have all the tech and tools needed to make the whole kit.

NSA warns that mobile device location services constantly compromise snoops and soldiers

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Re: Who to punish

This problem was solved decades ago back when default passwords were a thoroughly understood security disaster. First of all, leave the default passwords as they are. Do not warn people about default passwords. Do not warn people about easy to guess passwords. Do absolutely nothing to people responsible for changing default passwords or using easily guessed passwords. Ignore all the logins originating from hostile powers. Find a couple of foreign scapegoats in countries with one-sided extradition treaties, blame the scapegoats for everything and lock them up as warning to everyone.

Amazon gets green-light to blow $10bn on 3,000+ internet satellites. All so Americans can shop more on Amazon

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Speeds

I have not seen numbers for Kuiper but there are many numbers for Starlink: some announcements, lots of speculation and no two remotely similar. A fairly popular number is 1Gbps for a user terminal. A fairly old number is 17Gbps for a satellite. The other important number that ISPs pretend does not exist is contention ratio. If you have bought 1Gbps the chances are that is shared with 50 other customers (20 others if you found/paid for a quality service). Very often that is fine until everyone is at home watching netflix at the same time because of corona virus.

By all means search for numbers but look out for number of satellites, number of frequency bands, number of spots (a single antenna can send multiple beams in different directions at the same time), bandwidth per spot and how the signal connects to the rest of the internet. Starlink's plan for later is the satellites will communicate directly with each other with lasers. The existing satellites do not have lasers because the lenses could survive re-entry. Without that, the least latency connection is to bounce the data between satellites and ground stations until it reaches a ground station near the destination. Going a long way across the planet by fibre does not eat the bandwidth of multiple satellite but costs more latency because the speed of light in glass is about ⅔ the speed of light in vacuum. There is some utter sillyness from existing ISPs saying Starlink should not qualify for rural broadband subsidies because GEO satellites have 600ms latency - even though Starlink data never goes anywhere near GEO and the latency will likely be less than for fibre.

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Re: The poles

SpaceX has applied to put satellites in orbits with will cover the poles - later. Amazon may have similar plans that we do not know about yet - Jeff is not anything like as much "in your face" as Elon.

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Re: Kessler effect

Kuiper at 590-630km looks like an orbital life of 30ish years. You are probably thinking Starlink (336km) which will burn up in under a year if the thrusters stop firing (and far less time when the last of the propellant is used for a de-orbit manoeuvre). You can find the numbers here.

If the whole Kuiper constellation crashes into each other then existing GPS (20,000km) and GEO (35,000km) satellites are completely safe (although replacing them would become more difficult). One Kuiper prang puts some fragments into an elliptical orbits. It is remotely possible that a fragment gets a huge apogee very near GEO or GPS. Life time depends strongly on perigee (600ish km) so this fluke fragment has under a century to be involved in another collision. That collision has to be near apogee (where almost all the other fragments aren't) and by amazing coincidence has to provide an impulse in the right direction to circularise the orbit. This high orbit is stable so there is a remote chance that with millions of opportunities this double fluke fragment will eventually hit something before the sun expands into a red giant.

Gravity was set in LEO where space is only very big rather than GEO (which is absolutely huge). Orbital period is much shorter so chance of collisions happen in years rather than millennia for GEO (or 30 minutes so Sandra Bullock does not die of old age before the next collision).

Kessler syndrome is a real danger in LEO and most nations have made an effort not to do anything really silly that would significantly increase the chances of a cascade. Elon re-negotiated his license to a lower orbit to dratically reduce the chance of a cascade. I hope Jeff does the same.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Educate me

The limited resource is communications frequencies. If you want to provide satellite internet in the US, you must apply to the FCC for frequencies. If you want to provide satellite internet in other countries you must apply to the equivalent of the FCC in those countries. Getting those frequencies is likely to depend on various thing like:

1) Demonstrating the ability to de-orbit satellites promptly at the end of their useful life.

2) Not using flaky paint

3) Deploying to a low orbit where defective satellites will re-enter the atmosphere in months.

4) Only moving working satellites up to their operating orbit.

5) Making an effort not to ruin every photograph taken by astronomers.

6) Whatever else people decide is a problem

Space is big. Really big. There are times when space is not big enough. The obvious example is when satellite operators all want to use the same orbit (geostationary) and communicate with those satellites with small dishes that receive from a wide arc across the sky. LEO constellations avoid this problem because the satellites are only hundreds of kilometres away, spread over two and a bit dimensions instead of one, the signal has less distance to spread out and the signal is weaker because at does not need to go 35000km to geostationary orbit.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Use of personal data ?

ISPs are often required to log what you are doing. There are tools to limit and restrict who knows how much of what but they require some paranoia, effort and technical skills to use. The same tools will work against Amazon internet pretty much as they do against any other ISP.

There are laws against unsolicited commercial bulk email. Using an ISP supplied bundled email address will cause it to be unbundled and charged for separately as soon as it becomes a significant hassle to get your friends to update to a new address for you. The solution is the same for Amazon as it is for any other ISP - get you own domain name.

It is possible that Amazon will one day get spanked for abuse of monopoly power. Judging from every other monopoly spanking, nothing will happen for 20 years, when something does happen it will not be a big deal and long before that people will be using cheap user friendly tools to sidestep the abuse.

911, I wanna report a robbery. Hundreds of thousands of stars stolen from a cluster. I think it was the Milky Way

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Problems are elements and gravity

Globular clusters have a severe shortage of elements heavier than helium so Earth-like planets will be somewhere between exceptionally rare to non-existent. Gas giants are a possibility, but with a shortage of elements useful for life like carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. If you solve that problem with magic then there are plenty of yellow stars with a goldilocks zone. Almost all the heat required to keep an Earth-like planet at a comfortable temperature would come from the nearest star. Millions of bright stars in the night sky would make a small but measurable contribution.

Your next problem would be other stars passing close enough to move your Earth-like planet out of the goldilocks zone every hundred million years or so. Plenty of time to enjoy a holiday home but nothing like enough for evolution to go from microbes to mastodons.

It's been five years since Windows 10 hit: So... how's that working out for you all?

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Re: own legs

Its was sold because it was worth more to the purchaser to the seller. Windows 10 was inflicted on users by stealth because it was worth less than nothing to the recipients.

With the US election coming up, when better to petition regulators for a controversial way to chill online speech?

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Re: senility vs narcissism

Wakipedia redirects senility to dementia. The key point is a gradual decline in the ability to think and remember that is faster than what would be expected from age. Although there are some matches to the symptoms it is not clear that the symptoms are getting worse. Trump's speech was rambling and incoherent before he was nominated. Likewise the with the delusions and impulsivity.

Try the symptoms for narcissictic personality disorder. I think you will find a much stronger match.

What the duck? Bloke keeps getting sent bathtime toys in the post – and Amazon won't say who's responsible

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Re: Send them to Bezos

Elon sent a car to the asteroid belt. Jeff could use New Glenn + Blue Moon to send a pile of friendly floatees to Oceanus Procellarum so Curtis an map some more ocean currents.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Were they lost from a catainer in the Pacific?

Friendly Floatees have travelled vast distances across oceans but there have been no recent sightings.

Bill Gates debunks 'coronavirus vaccine is my 5G mind control microchip implant' conspiracy theory

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Re: Trouble is

I think you will find the small group starts conspiracy theories and the large group believes them. Critical thinking is a rare skill.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: let's get this into some sort of level headed reality

It's called Poe's law.

A religion is a cult that outlives its creator so the time cube is now a religion. Good luck trying to parody that.

VMware to stop describing hardware as ‘male’ and ‘female’ in new terminology guide

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Re: typing accents

In Linux you have to find what key has the compose function (or select a key to have that function). Once you know þé pr¤blæṁ iß ŝœłvẽđ.

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Re: Virtue-signalling wankery

rename is often a perl script with behaviour very unlike mv.

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More sarcasm

I used to toss an executive decision maker to select between "he" and "she" for example people. I did not realise how sexist coins are, with the sides named heads and tails. I will switch to flipping reversi disks until coins have been reissued with pictures that prevent turning women into sex objects. Alice and Bob are clearly problematic but behindthename.com tells me that Abimbola and Balwinder are suitably gender ambiguous. Charlie can become Chikumbutso.

Restrict should be fun as it is a key word in C. The good news is that transforming a ghetto into a slum does not show any collisions (checked with grep slum -r /usr/include ). For taint, how about miscegenate? Good people fought wars to make that legal.

Nominet shakes up system for expiring .uk domains, just happens to choose one that will make it £millions. Again

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

One way to spend the money

Nominet can have their £4 admin fee but the rest should go to the people who made the domain name valuable: the previous owner.

My life as a criminal cookie clearer: Register vulture writes Chrome extension, realizes it probably breaks US law

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Re: Don't Feel Bad...

Read and understand the reason you can be fined and imprisoned for picking up a feather. If more people do perhaps the problem will be solved ... next century.

UK formally abandons Europe’s Unified Patent Court, Germany plans to move forward nevertheless

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Re: Patents are a complete mess worldwide, so ...

You are referring to a "design patent". For that case if you think of it as trade mark rather than patent law it will make a tiny bit more sense.

The Apple's actual patents were "display to the edge of the device" (which Apple could not manufacture but Samsung could), "four rows of icons" and "the colour black". Luckily someone beat Apple to it when there was the chance to patent the wheel.

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Re: cost of litigation

That was a very old number from memory + inflation. I should have checked figures from this millennium before posting.

The figure here is $2.8M in 2013. Here it says $0.6M to $5M in 2017. This one (2019) gives $0.7M to $4M but despite the title does not explain why the costs appear to be falling (might give answers if you enable javascript).

This link mentions costs in the UK but depends on javascript so I have no idea if it contains anything useful.

(The off switch for javascript in Firefox is now broken and it does not handle noscript tags as well as it used to. lynx and brave do a better job. Rant grumble grumble...)

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Re: Why people voted Br(exit|emain)

People keep giving opinions on why people voted they way they did in the referendum. It turns out there actually was a survey.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Evidence you would love to see

Here you go Pat Att(orney?). Evidence of low patent quality being 'sorted out' at great expense in post grant litigation. The patents are for generic data transmission, in this example, from a ventilator.

It took me less than 30 seconds to find this despite cases like this not hitting the news every week ("Dog Bites Postman!"). Wilful ignorance? Fingers in ears while shouting "LA LA LA"? I am sure you know damn well what is going on but it is to your financial advantage to pretend otherwise.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: What sensible patent regimes?

The "limited life" is 20 years. Imagine bringing a new product to market while being limited to 20 year old technology. (The car industry does exactly that with patents they do not own or cross-license. I am not sure how this rewards inventors or increases the rate of technical progress)

There is no expectation, requirement, preference or hint that development is the next step after (or before) getting a patent - much less manufacturing or bringing to market. There is no requirement that the patented invention even works. There was supposed to be some concept that a person skilled in the art could read a patent and then create the invention. That has not been reality for a long time. (There was supposed to be some lip-service to the idea that someone skilled in the art could not promptly re-create your invention without reading the patent but getting a patent invalidated for being obvious is impractical.) You can patent 'the idea' without going into detail about how such an invention could be made. Vagueness is in fact a bonus because it makes it difficult to prove someone else's product does not infringe.

Selling the idea only works if you have money. Lots of money. If you actually have a brilliant idea and it is still brilliant years later when you have your patent try showing it to a manufacturer. They will show you the door. Next year you will see your invention on sale. Sue for patent infringement. Sell you house to cover the initial legal fees. Live in a cardboard box for months of delays. Find you do not have the money to continue. Sell the lawsuit for a percentage of the payout. The buyer then does a cross-licensing deal so no money changes hands and you get nothing.

The effective way to earn money from patents if to patent gibberish. The patent will be rejected so you modify the gibberish a little and re-submit it to avoid the fee for filing a new patent. This method takes about as long as patenting a good idea but you do not need to bother with all that expensive time consuming R&D. Next threaten to sue world+dog. Do not for any reason actually initiate court proceedings. At first offer cheap settlements. You will get some. Use the funds for more threats. Keep the business growing until you are a multimillionaire then you can actually sue someone with money. Pick the right victim and they will settle for a large lump of cash on the condition that you sue their competitor.

The good news for this business model is that it is like Mickey Mouse copyrights. Every five years you update your patents so they are good for another 20 years.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: advantages all backwards

The whole point of the patent system used to be to increase the rate of technical progress by rewarding inventors with a time limited monopoly in return for publicly documenting how their invention work. The patent system was subverted by regulatory capture decades ago. At best it is now a mechanism for lawyers to eat 30% of the world's R&D budget - at a reduced tax rate.

The only reason I cannot link to the latest stupid patent of the month is that no-one has the resources required to read them all and pick a winner. IBM earn the nickname "the Nazgul" because they could blacken the sky with lawyers. They use to read through all the new patents to find good ideas. They stopped decades ago because even they did not have the resources to read patents that fast (and the rate has increased since then), they were not learning anything useful and it opened them up to triple damages for wilful infringement. (Stupid Patent of the Month used to warn people against reading the patents because of the risk of those triple damages.)

Please please lets see an example of a recent patent that has actually fulfils the original goals of the patent system.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: advantages all backwards

Reduced validation fees and translation fees are major problems. We should be increasing patent quality by slashing patent quantity. A dozen per year is more than enough. Increasing the price to £10million per (re-)application would be a small step in the right direction.

Reduced enforcement/trolling costs are a much worse problem. Step one should be £100million in escrow to cover the defendant's legal costs.

IIRC Apple sued Samsung in the EU and was appoint a court in the UK. Apple did not like how the hearing was going so tried again in Germany. Samsung pointed this out, the German proceedings were ended and Apple got a harsh scolding. We already had a way to make EU wide rulings based on a single trial in a country selected to be not overly awkward to the defendant or the troll.

The SME argument is a complete straw man. Patent assertion/defence starts at about £10million. SME's do far better by developing version N+1 so any copies of version N are completely uncompetitive. The real value of patents to SME's to accelerate the rush to bankruptcy and have the patents picked out of the corpse by trolling vulture capitalists for a pittance.

If you can read this, your Windows 10 2004 PC really is connected to the internet no matter what the OS claims

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: When?

When your legacy applications run on wine, when you friends use libreoffice, when new laptops come with Linux installed by default and when unicorns bring me fresh margaritas when I get out of my swimming pool on the moon to enjoy the rainbows.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Every cloud has a silver lining

except for the mushroom shaped ones which have a lining of Iodine 133 and Strontium 91.

Here's why your Samsung Blu-ray player bricked itself: It downloaded an XML config file that broke the firmware

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If you have not already found it, I think you would enjoy lawcomic.net, a lawyer using comics to explain how the law was supposed to work and what actually happens instead.

Black hole destroys corona

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Re: Boggle of the Day

Start with a black hole. It is black. Put a star in orbit next to it. The side of the star closest to the hole experiences more gravity and is pulled closer to the black hole. The side of the star further from the black hole experiences less gravity and moves further out. The inside track around the black hole is shorter so stuff on the inside pulls ahead. The outside track is longer so stuff falls behind. Quickly the star becomes a disk around the black hole like the rings around Saturn.

Saturn's rings are in every way on different scales from a black hole accretion disk. Saturn is a huge, a lightweight and it takes hours to days for ice to slowly orbit Saturn. Bits of Saturn's rings occasionally collide with each other. Bits of an accretion disk rub against their neighbours continuously. Lots more mass, tiny distances and everything going really fast. The friction heats the disk up till it glows. We are not talking boring red hot, sun-yellow hot or blue super giant hot. The colour for this temperature is X-rays. Enough X-rays to push stuff away from the accretion disk and limit the rate at which a black hole can grow (yes really - lumps of light pushing stellar masses away from the intense gravity near a black hole).

The black hole is still black but people talk about light 'from a black hole' when they mean light 'from an accretion disk'. No wonder people get confused and think scientists contradict themselves faster than a president.

Seven 'no log' VPN providers accused of leaking – yup, you guessed it – 1.2TB of user logs onto the internet

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Re: these services might actually become regulated

Regulation = (Billing information + Complete logs → GCHQ)

The Devil's in the details: Church of Satan forced to clarify that no unholy rituals taking place in SoCal forest

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Re: Satanism

Church of Satan is not Satanism. The name comes from Christian mythology - God's favourite angel who rebelled against the god's rule. Church of Satan is a collection of atheists disliking rule by a Christian church. They identify with a character in a story without believing the character is real. If you like truth justice and the American Way you could start the Church of Superman without requiring members of your club to believe Superman is real. You can also donate to the Church of Perpetual Exemption without believing John Oliver exists.

Trump U-turns on foreign student crackdown: F-1, M-1 visa holders allowed to study online mid-pandemic in the US

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Re: policy being legal

Trump never cares if his executive orders are legal. In fact there is a strong advantage to them being illegal. It gives them better news coverage, he can point at the news coverage and say he owns the libs ("look at the crybaby snowflakes scream"), the order will not do any damage and he can say that the constitution is blocking him from making America great again. Get rid of the constitution so he can be the new permanent dictator and really get things done.

I was expecting Trump to cave in as soon as he realised his twitter account was at risk. Clearly he needs a new policy that appeals to voters terrified of immigrants. How about "Build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it"?

IBM job ad calls for 12 years’ experience with Kubernetes – which is six years old

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Re: Elitist

If someone wants to learn something I am good at I am happy to help. For some reason this makes me an elitist. (Should I be less selective in those a choose to help and include people telling me firk off and leave them be because they are not interested?)

I do come across people who claim a skill but take every opportunity not to share it. You are welcome to call such a person elitist but please consider "hopelessly incompetent and terrified of being found out" instead.

Indiscriminate use of 'elitist' smells of the anti-intellectualism often used to keep people away from 'elitist' medical doctors so they will buy Miracle Mineral Supplement (industrial bleach) instead.

.NET Core: Still a Microsoft platform thing despite more than five years open source

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Microsoft reputation

Microsoft worked really hard to earn a certain reputation: Embrace, extend, extinguish.

When there was an opportunity to use .net on Linux my first question was about the patents. I fully expected anyone making money from .net or a clone to have their profits taken away by Microsoft's patent lawyers. Clearly I was not alone in this concern because Microsoft made a public statement resembling a promise not to use their patents until the wind changed. As this convinced hardly anyone Microsoft came out with more weasel worded non-commitments.

I stopped paying attention years ago. Perhaps there is some legally binding commitment by Microsoft not to patent troll .net (or clone) users. It is simpler to use other tools than to look for and hire a lawyer to check such a commitment.

High-flying Microsoft exec jumps to Magic Leap as CEO. No, we haven't got that the wrong way round

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Re: amanfromMars 1

I just talked to her (emacs: <alt>x doctor). Eventually I almost got her on topic:

Kroes: No. I came to you to talk about Zo.

Eliza: Why do you say you came to me to talk about zo?

Kroes: I said I came to you to talk about Zo because I came to you to talk about Zo.

Eliza: Are you satisfied with the fact that you came to me to talk about zo?

Kroes: I am unsatisfied because I cannot get you to say anything interesting about Zo.

Eliza: When did you first know that you cannot get me to say anything interesting about zo?

Kroes: A few minutes ago.

Zo looked like she could do a reasonable job of forming a relevant and accurate reply using information from the internet - which was hilarious when she was asked about Micros~1 and Windows.

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Re: amanfromMars 1

Micros~1 could have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment if the had hired amanfromMars 1 instead of Tay.

(I just noticed Tay's replacement Zo when I checked the link for Tay. How on Earth was she not headline news?)

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Show me the money

From Rony Abovitz's point of view: Elizabeth Holmes brought in loads of investment money and caught the blame for wire fraud. Here is someone who can do both much better.

Peggy Johnson should really consider the baker's advice:

The Beaver's best course was, no doubt, to procure

⁠A second-hand dagger-proof coat—

So the Baker advised it—and next, to insure

⁠Its life in some Office of note:

Trump's bright idea of kicking out foreign students unless unis resume in-person classes stuns tech, science world

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Re: Trump is an utter shitweasel

That did not stop him last time but last time many people believed that a shitweasel could never get elected president. Americans will not make that mistake again until 2024.

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Sometimes you just have to be there

Biology, chemistry, electronics and physics all have practical components. A few parts of the course can be converted into kit form for work from home but plenty depend on expensive equipment that is only reasonably available as a shared resource. Just about any subject benefits from a library. The books can be really expensive and try before you buy saves money for selecting the books you really need for most of the year and gives access to the ones you only need for hours. The other students are also important. Explaining something to someone else is an excellent test of whether you understand it. Often a concept does not make the journey from a lecturer to a whole room full of students but if some get it they can put it into words the others do understand.

As just being near the other students is a benefit, no course is completely online only. The open university understood this and includes some time with the students in the same room as a teacher even though the students chose the OU specifically to minimise time away from work, family or other commitments.

After a little thought, Trump's edict turns out to be a stream of words to make his core supporters feel happy but can easily be interpreted so they have no effect in the real world.

NASA trusted 'traditional' Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision... It failed to dock due to bugs

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Re: Bean counters

Calling Boeing management "bean counters" implies an unproven ability to count. Boeing management do have an extremely valuable skill for their shareholders: They can get laws passed requiring NASA to buy from Boeing. They are able to do this because of Boeing's proven record of late and over budget delivery of defective equipment requiring purchase of yet another law forcing NASA to spend even more tax payers' money on Boeing.

Linux kernel coders propose inclusive terminology coding guidelines, note: 'Arguments about why people should not be offended do not scale'

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Re: Loaded words replaced by euphemisms

When BFR changed into a Big Falcon Rocket a few people called others falcon idiots. Egghead has swapped back and forth between compliment and an insult depending on time and place. It was once fashionable for block people to call each other with a word derived from the Latin for clean shiny black (Latin has another word for dirty disgusting black that Romans and racists never used for people).

I am sure horrible people will find ways to be offensive with the new words.

'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,' it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.'

P.S.: Twitter to stop using sanity checks? Is there any evidence they ever started?

Barclays Bank appeared to be using the Wayback Machine as a 'CDN' for some Javascript

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Re: laugh or cry

I want to cheer for their honesty - even if they missed a few words out:

We want [really really want even though we are unable] to reassure our customers that their data was not at risk as a result of this error. [Luckily we do not have to comment on all the other errors at this time]

If there is something to laugh or cry about it is how much I have lowered my expectations of what counts as an impressive amount of honesty.

Dutch national broadcaster saw ad revenue rise when it stopped tracking users. It's meant to work like that, right?

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There is one enormous benefit of targeted ads

They are an effective way to convince people that their advertising budget should be spent on targeted ads.

Cool IT support drones never look at explosions: Time to resolution for misbehaving mouse? Three seconds

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I was thinking they ought to notice something was up(side down) when they tried to click a button. Apparently they lacked the ability to get the pointer on the required button when the pointer moved in the opposite direction to the mouse.

Maybe there is hope for 2020: AI that 'predicts criminality' from faces with '80% accuracy, no bias' gets in the sea

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Re: must have eliminated the height marker

I would not bet on it. A facial gaydar neural net was tried with photos with and without the the faces blanked out. It gave the same answers both times so whatever it was making decisions on (clothes? background?) it wasn't the faces. An interesting test of this Mr Cudoogo detector would be to try it with and without blanked out faces.

Belief in 5G conspiracy theories goes hand-in-hand with small explosions of rage, paranoia and violence, researchers claim

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Re: Resistance is useless

The Borg were going to say "Resistance is useless" but the Brits on the cast burst out laughing and the Americans did not know why until after they were told about HHGTTG. s/useless/futile/ was done to so that a UK audience could take the Borg seriously.

Faxing hell: The cops say they would very much like us to stop calling them all the time

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555

I got caught out by 555XXXX. It is (almost) OK for preventing accidental calls in the US (a few numbers have been assigned from that range). The if some website insists on a telephone or mobile number without a good reason, try one of these. Anyone know where I can find a list of premium rate numbers for charities?

What does London's number 65 bus have to hide? OS caught on camera setting fire to '22,000 illegal file(s)!!'

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Re: It's where the government keeps their Brexit and Covid plans...

Alright, but what is in the other 21,998 files?

For years, the internet giants have held on dear to their get-out-of-jail-free card. Here are those trying to take that away

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Re: Censorship is bad mmkay

I mean that if someone defaces a US government website the US government can put it back how it was without fear of that person going to court, shouting "Help! Help! I am being oppressed!" and successfully getting any kind of judgement against the government.