* Posts by fajensen

1360 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2008

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

fajensen

Re: They have, and they do

Or one can combine the best of both options - in THORP: Use billions to reprocess nuclear waste, then have the plant spring a leak and leave a nice puddle in the basement that nobody can clean up for ??? years because it is indeed highly readioactive :).

Reg scribe spends week being watched by government Bluetooth wristband, emerges to more surveillance

fajensen
Pint

Re: "All ... data ... can only be accessed by authorised government officials for investigation."

Singapore is not the same situation. It is well advertised that Singapore is not the place to be involved in any dodgy stuff, and what's considered dodgy is also well known in advance, well advertised and reinforced by examples.

The Problem here in "Liberal Democracy (LaLa)Land" is that the digital record is permanent, what goes into our permanent record is evolving and what's dodgy changes over time.

This is also well advertised, we have different groups disagree over what's dodgy all over the place. Without stability in dodgy-ness or memory loss in the digital records, everybody here amongst "the free" are going to get caught out and nailed eventually.

Stability and Predictability is why Singapore surveillance is benign and our version is not!

fajensen
Terminator

Re: I'll be tracked almost everywhere I go...

They are selfish, independent, indiviudlistic, libertarian, whatever, right up until the point that they need society to step in an help them

They are also morons and they are being deliberately targeted by an information campaign designed exactly for their kind of Moron.

They seem to follow a pattern of aggressively spouting similar memes on SoMe, then go to the hospital, then calling for "Prayer Warriors", and then there is the GoFundme for the funeral and medical expenses.

The Algorithms have placed a solid bullseye right on their goateed faces, and I feel sorry for them in that sense, however, this is balanced out by their bellicosity in following their assigned programming.

fajensen

Re: I'll be tracked almost everywhere I go...

Once all the antivaxxers are dead or crippled that won't be a problem any more.

US nuclear submarine bumps into unidentified underwater object in South China Sea

fajensen

Re: Other scenarios

An why my package from Wish is late!

Facebook rendered spineless by buggy audit code that missed catastrophic network config error

fajensen
Terminator

Re: locked out by their own system

This being FaceBook, I'd imagine a security bypass being wave after wave on interns driven forward until the sentry guns overheat or run out of ammo ...

fajensen

Re: Who me?

Anyone done 'Reload' on a CISCO router only to find out that the live configuration was never stored despite the thing running for years?

fajensen

Re: Out of band management?

Except the disk drive with that host file was virtualised, it's physical location recorded in the EAM system - also virtualised?

ProtonMail deletes 'we don't log your IP' boast from website after French climate activist reportedly arrested

fajensen
Pint

Re: NSA *cough* Google *cough*

Both groups are on the same side, targeting global trade and the general public.

No, they are not. Government demands Growth. It's sponsors demand Growth. If we do not have Growth, especially at the leverage levels we have now, the entire global finance system will blow up. With the usual 1920's fallout, maybe even some literal fallout since abandoned nuclear facilites does not age well.

Governments may have restricted things along the lines of what some climate activists wants, but, governments also compensated quite adequately for the lost demand to keep Growth going, despite the Corona restrictions.

Climate activists are Anti-growth. The current model of infinite exponential growth and it's sidekick of infinite consumption of ressources based on a fixed volume planet will of course collapse in a dire way but that happens Later.

When people are given several bad options they will usually pick the one that is less immediately bad, therefore, government naturally sees anti-growth activites, especially sucessfull ones, as being Worse than terrorism (After all, there is Growth potential in protecting us against terrorism, meaning that terror is aligned with the Growth objective).

Brit says sorry after waving around nonce patent and leaning on sites to cough up

fajensen

Re: If it was a valid patent

He could get lucky in that they don't bother with the inconvenience of courts and just do a settlement.

Adding AI to everything won't make sense until we can use it for anything

fajensen
Terminator

Re: 25 years in IT has made me increasingly cynical about AI ...

Phillip K. Dicks intelligent robot cars are always bitching and moaning - programmed to let off steam gradually as a way to keep it from coming out suddenly and all at once in a robot apocalypse

UK promises big data law shake-up... while also keeping the EU happy, of course. What could go wrong?

fajensen

No purpose really, they simply need another bitch-fight with Brussels to keep the Brexiteers stoked.

Maybe also bung some billions off to tory-cronies businesses, with all that dust eating media bandwith.

fajensen

Re: More "Red Tape"

The way the UK sees the world, treaties protects the UK's interests, but does not bind it.

US offers Julian Assange time in Australian prison instead of American supermax if he loses London extradition fight

fajensen

Re: and it was

Live there. For too long,

fajensen

Re: and it was

Doesn't matter - what he did fell under criminal law, so the state took over.

Which, assuming "the state" being the state apparatus of Sweden, basically never does in any other rape case! There is some rationality to the Swedish feminists being so radicalised as they are: "The State" being absolutely lethargic in regards to enforcement on crimes against women ... Assange is a very noteworthy exception to the norm.

America world’s sole cyber superpower, ten years ahead of China, says Brit think tank

fajensen
Facepalm

- China can make sure that the talent will work for pittance

But, why would it? China doesn't have to follow western principles of meanness and penny pinching!

China has it's own currency, it has it's own central bank, huge industrial base, lots of hot men and wimmen with fewer principles, and, China is not infested with Chicago School of Economics brain-rotting neoliberalism demanding that all wages other than CEO's and stockholders dividens must go to Zero or we will all Die Screaming in the Flames of Gehenna - or something.

China can reward it's talent very well indeed, for very little real costs, maybe even throw an imported German car on top of the pile of "internal goods & services" available for a clever and motivated person that knows where the lines are. There is nothing that anyone can do about it. Except have the Murdoch press write angry articles about how China is juuust about to collapse aaany day now.

Serco bags £322m contract extension for Test and Trace, is still struggling to share data with local authorities

fajensen
Flame

Whatever. Labour would have done worse /s

Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it

fajensen
Pint

Re: Doubt they'll enjoy themselves

Look at whatever the rich are doing for inspiration and find the packaged solution that best matches your desired new lifestyle :)

fajensen

Re: Yay money laundering!

If you do that, you lose whatever perceived benefits crypto might have.

Crypto *has no benefits*, other than buying illegal stuff online and getting put in a database over it.

The only reason to "invest" in crypto is to match the hype and meet Volatility targets for ones portfolio.

SAXO Bank (of course) offers CFD's (Contracts for Difference) wich strips away all of the crypto bullshit hassle and leaves pure Volatility, that stuff that one actually wanted to have. Totally legit and easy to do.

fajensen
Pint

Re: How untraceable, exactly?

The pro way is the legal way - run it through a couple of LLP's.

Someone lobbied to have the "Limited Liability Partnership", a specific company structure where one does not have to publicly establish the controlling interest. A letterstuck behind the drawers of some lawyer acting on behalf of the LLP is good enough.

I would assume the people lobbying for and crafting this legislation knew what they were doing and why, much better than the coin-bro's.

fajensen
Pint

Re: How untraceable, exactly?

I'm assuming that a mixed & tumbled bitcoin is 100% untraceable, technologically speaking.

It is safer to assume that someone like the NSA or Chinese Intelligence can easily "unwind" those permanent, unalterable, transaction records, sitting right on the Internet, using only a fraction of their ressources. The "untraceability" of Bitcoin lies, IMO, in the fact that the TLA's mostly doesn't care*.

However, 4 Billion is a big incentive. Some people one definitively does not want to meet up with can probably also do it!?

*) I think some TLA designed bitcoin in order to get a "mapping" of criminals, their money flows, and their contacts / conduits to the "normal world", and then use some of them for whatever TLA's need people for.

The old pictures of a "bit of tart on the side" doesn't work, being gay is nothing, and so on, so a new recruitment method was neeeded. Bitcoin is the prototype.

fajensen

Re: Surprised?

Stupidity is uniformly distributed in any population, no matter how one slices it.

Meaning, the percentage of genuinely stupid people in the "high wealth individual"-population will be quite similar to that of the "florida man"-population.

fajensen

Re: Surprised?

Trump is specially gifted.

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

fajensen
Pint

I remember worked at a place with an ancient SUN server that nobody knew what was. One day a mail from Corporate IT went out that the server would be decommissioned in one week.

Very shortly after the network flatlines with 'rsync' and 'torrent' traffic: It was the corporate off-colour backup server, that is, the global repository for Warez, Pr0n, ripped dvd's, ....)

Want to keep working in shorts and flipflops way after this is all over? It could be time to rethink your career moves

fajensen

Re: Not only Brits!

Italy does have 1 euro houses, some parts of Spain similar,

Some terms and conditions may be applicable :)

There are a lot of people out there who'd like to fire Jeff Bezos into space – but he's doing the honours himself

fajensen
Pint

Kickstarter??

I think it would be fun to buy seats for Boris Johnson and Dominick Cummings on exactly that flight.

Military infosec SNAFUs: What WhatsApp and bears in the woods can teach us

fajensen

Re: Why, yes it does!

Nah. For the sake of efficiency, we want everything to be posted in PowerPoint to "battlespace.org" with just one click. How else can our superb generals inject the glorious progress of the operations into the 24/7 news cycle??

The common factor in all your failed job applications: Your CV

fajensen

Re: Blast from the past

BubbleSort is optimum on a one-word-read-write drum-memory machine, the kind of machine that runs our nukes and our tax returns (probably).

fajensen

Sure, It will work as long as it is a good story. It will work a lot better if it is something the recruiter always dreamed of doing but "never had the time" for.

fajensen
Flame

Re: The ones that really bother me. . ..

And then you find out about the ridiculous fees that the pimps charge companies that they procure for. . . . .

And then you start to wonder if you are doing it right.

I had a boss some years back, a nice and genuinely funny person, only, he never did any work, every, did not know anything in depth. He was not stupid, he just wasn't interested. His colleagues and minions did the work, which was mostly technical reports, seminars and presentations.

His actual job / career, as far as I could work out, was "project maker". The pattern is that he would set up some "stakeholder group" shadowing some corporate- or government- initiatives, get some really strange people involved, and yet (or maybe because), often attract some lush funding that he would burn through in some years with not much beyond PowerPoint ever delivered. When one ore was mined, he would sniff out another one.

There *was* real skill involved, in getting paid very well and not actually doing very much besides mingling, conferencing and entertaining. And of course luring academics in to write quite convincing case studies for "the experience". And a sprinkling of some cray-crays and misfits to show Diversity or Whatever the funding selection criteria says is double-plus gooder.

The Perfect Person to kick off a world-changing "Small, Modular, Molten Salt Reactor"-consortium.

fajensen

"Partner" ... I would take that as a veiled threat of mutual destruction: "We go down, y'all go down!" :).

fajensen
Angel

Re: CV's top tips

Hahahahaaa - To ensure the quality of the recruitment process, the Guard Droids are very well paid recruitment agencies (and actual robots) and because they are very well paid they are also:

1) Very good at what they do(*) and,

2) Signing them on is done at a high level up in the monkey-tree

3) Those higher up in the monkey-tree never makes mistakes!

Piss-ants like anyone who knows what is going on in the business and what it needs, just have no business telling great leadership what to do. All good ideas comes from "their club" but really, they don't want to know because if they know then they might have a problem and that's not how they roll, after all, all this hands-on and knowing stuff is what put Kenneth Lay in jail!!

*) Very good at getting paid very well. It is a skill, actually.

fajensen

Re: What really gets my goat...

I find that not having the entire CV and a "completed profile" on LinkedIn and just having a "branding text" with a few key attributes / skills works better: Apparently, the recruiting people gets curious and ask questions about the real CV, I don't have to maintain the profile, I get to adjust the CV the recruiter gets before they get it.

fajensen
Coat

Re: Different types don't match well

Telling outright lies on a CV/resume is a good reason to fire someone.

Except that means admitting that the recruitment failed. Management in 2021 doesn't like to know about bad things, like that something business process failed. Surprisingly often there will be a settlement: The miscreant get a nice lump sum in return for signing an NDA. Probably one could make a career of it.

The story "upwards" will be that there were some allegations made of inappropriate behaviour and the issue was closed with the help of "Legal". Nobody in the "upwards" will want to know specific details of any inappropriateness, because that could make them responsible for something, this is not what they do.

fajensen

Re: Time flies

Personnel / HR does not give a shit until there is a risk that someones behaviour might land the company in court.

fajensen
Pint

Re: The gap year

HR is, in my experience, often too concerned with gaps. I have explained to "our" HR that the person I wanted to hire was working an independent contractor and that contracts expire and when they do, she will have a gap until the next one. This is not "instability", this is life for a lot of those people we need to hire.

At the interview stage in "my" place, we mostly believe the CV and we really just want to see that the candidate is neither a dick nor a sociopath.

On gaps, I just want to hear a not-bad, not-red-flag-triggering story. If the applicant has not done much with the gaps, nobody cares, it is just common courtesy and making conversation to either tell the boring truth or make something reasonable and coherent up, a.k.a. Embellishing (A Skill they will need for the progress reporting, if they want to go anywhere near Management later).

The common sociopath usually drops out by telling stupid lies, because to "it" there is no emotional difference between lies like: "Taking a break as the CFO for the Wallenstein Group", "Leading a secret force fighting ISIS in Bosnia", and "Investing some time in renovating my home and get the ecological, raised bed / victorian, vegetable garden sorted".

Wyoming powers ahead with Bill Gates-backed sodium-cooled nuclear generation plant

fajensen

Re: Thankfully, the world is simple

For now, yes, Germany is indeed a safe-hands country, even democratic, country, populated with enlightened citizens that only loses their collective shit once in a while.

But, it doesn't solve the physics problem: Human timescales versus Decay Times. If the Romans had built nuclear power plants, we who survived the collapse of that Roman empire and their abandoned facilites losing containment to rust and rats, we would be tending and re-potting their old waste, probably crating a religion around it to keep the processing going for a few hundred generations more.

Regarding the Molten Salt, Molten Sodium, anything Molten or Liquid, that is radioactive. Despite money, and the best brains and engineers at the time, THORP barely ran for the 30 years it was operational, now it will be a waste-dump till 2070, true to the pattern of Grandad leavin a shed full of shitty chemicals and other rubbish for the kids to dispose of!

fajensen
Pint

Re: You know what

If small, modular, molten salt, reactors actually worked outside of PowerPoints with pictures of green fields with containers on them, the millitary would not bother with their 1950's U235-burning designs!

The Good Thing about this project is that some of some squillionaires money will be going down the drain, we get to watch the show from a relatively safe distance, and nature gains another super-site.

fajensen

Re: You know what

But, going back to dud tech and finding out why it is a dud again and again is not going to do much either.

fajensen
Pint

Re: To Bad...

Telling others off while leaving brain in idle, a good Whetherstone move :)

The primary cooling circuit, according to article, is Sodium - that is, the metallic form. The energy storage is "A Sodium Salt", but, not NaCL, table SALT(bangs pub table for emphasis!), which should obvious since that bit is not in the article: The Chloride in SALT(!) corrodes everything, heat capacity is not that great, melting point is high for engineering materials, it sucks water, it sucks in general!

Instead It will be some organic salt with Sodium in it, it is of course proprietary what they will use.

fajensen

Re: 1972 was the last time

If they fucked Shell in the ass they are OK people!

fajensen

Re: location, location, location..

Maybe they are following the Tried and Tested Windscale approach and they plan to dump all the waste down those old mineshafts?

fajensen
Mushroom

Re: Missing the point

One can do all that better, because one can control the neutron rate and energy to get at those hard-to-reach isotopes, by using an Accelerator Driven System.

Some of my former colleagues are busy building a science prototype, "Myrrha" in Belgium of all places. https://myrrha.be/

fajensen

Re: You know what

... Once irradiated, both kinds will a lot of Fun to clean out of a clogged pump!

fajensen

Re: Go for it

Yeah, it's like those Free Energy machines. If they work as well as the inventor thinks, then they can just string up lots of 1000W bulbs and show it!

fajensen
Mushroom

Re: You know what

Molten salt reactors were designed at a barbecue where a Naval Nuclear Engineer was complaning about how trixy those small U235 fueled reactors used for submarines and battleships were. This was overheard by some flake who's day job is designing neutron warheads or something at Los Alamos, who got inspired and went "Hey, hold my beer"!

Grabbed the blackboard and started to rant:

"On top of all the know things with conventional reactors, lets take the "hotter" Naval kind and then add some 700C molten salt to it, just to corrode all know materials we could build this device from, then we add a chemical plant next to it, to separate the isotopes out of the radiocative and corrosive molten salt.

Yeah, Thorpe were Pussies! We can do better!!".

The last sentence was the only bit understood by the coke-infused Venture Capitalists at the barbecue, and now Modular Molten Salt Reactors are The Shiieeets, attracting billions of surplus dollars.

PS:

All UFO's are alien YouTubers, here to see how we blow ourselves up in quaint and amusing ways!

Stack Overflow acquired for $1.8bn by Prosus (no, me neither)

fajensen

Re: Hopefully they learnt from Freenode

It is a Corporate Zombie Thing, once bitten the victim is Zombiefied and is soon left without any talents!

When I worked for dumb-ass Ericsson, they were buying at least one truly innovative tech business every six month, infest it with dumb-ass Ericsson management thinking, then wonder and whine why the thing they bought can't actually do shit - which it could do before because it was not bogged down by the same dysfunction that makes companies like Ericsson resign to buying up "innovation" instead of doing it.

IBM is the same, only worse.

fajensen
Trollface

Re: So...

Most of it does not work anyway. I believe Russian and Chinese bots are voting for the wrong answers because I often see the correct answer, often ripped right out of the relevant documentation, languishing far below the "accepted answer", with maybe 5-6 upvotes in total.

But, good for Joel Spolsky. Money is nice to have.

Dominic Cummings: Health secretary's 'stupid' targets delayed building UK test and trace system to combat COVID

fajensen

Re: It's a novel experience to find myself agreeing with Cummings

How could he consider that? He is a moron himself!

fajensen

Re: What do you expect from someone like him.

while not actually leading any effective opposition.

Labour is it's own opposition, and it is very effective: 80 seats Tory majority despite them being total clowns and blatantly corrupt on a level that would embarrass Vladimir Putin!