Posts by Malcolm Weir

Re: and it was

Well, "white male entitlement" doesn't go on all over the world by people of all colours, because WME is different from, say, BFE!

However, if you'd prefer, I'll rephrase that as "the sort of entitlement of people in the dominant socio-economic demographic expect", which is the actual point, and the fact is that in most of the "western world" that means white, middle-or-better class and male.

(Of course, there are many many individuals who exhibit the whole "but I'm rich/beautiful/not-like-them" thing, but I'm gonna hazard a guess that if Assange had been black, he'd have received less support for his refusal to answer charges...)

Re: and it was

You're not up on what actually happened, are you, @DevOpsTimothyC?

His residency was denied in October 2010, but was already in the UK, as he'd fled there in September. As an Australian without a criminal conviction (#insert joke here) he didn't need a visa for the UK, and indeed may have had some preferential rights (e.g. if a grandparent was British, etc etc).

He could, of course, have returned to Australia via Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, etc. etc. etc, not to mention via Ecuador(!)

His mistake was in not thinking that the Swedish prosecution would apply for a European Arrest Warrant; once that was issued, the whole point of the justice system throughout the "civilized" world (UK, Europe, Australia, USA, Canada, etc. etc.) is that you _have_ to face the process... even if you're 100% innocent and can prove it. That's the point: the system depends on a court aquitting you or a prosecution being dropped or a conviction. There's no "I don't wanna do that" option!

Based on what happened to the case in the Sweden, I rather strongly suspect that had he been more cooperative, and a bit less of an Ass-ange, they'd have dropped the charges with a caution or whatever the Swedish equivalent of that is. It seems clear that they would have had a hard time obtaining a rape conviction without some involvement of the women, and they appear to have been unenthusiastic at the prospect. And from the beginning, all they said they wanted was an STI test...

Re: He's stuffed

If you want to fly from the UK to Australia, you don't go through the USA. The non-stop distance LHR-SYD is about 10,500 miles; stopping in Bangkok adds about 50 miles, or going through the USA adds about 2,400. Heathrow to Perth is a whisper over 9,000 miles, if all you want is to get your feet dry in Australia!

Re: Not only that

Excellent. So you're saying that the witness can be impeached in court, the case will collapse, and Assange will be acquitted?

Of course, all the weasel has to do is show up...

@Zolko...

As a general rule, you should have a clue before spewing gibberish:

Appeal to Svea Court of Appeal: Lost

Appeal to Swedish Supreme Court: Cert Denied

Extradition Hearing, Westminster, February 2011: Lost

Appeal to High Court, Decided November 2011: Lost

Leave to Appeal to Supreme Court: Denied by High Court

Appeal to Supreme Court (once granted by that court), decided May 2012: Lost

All those are about the sexual allegations. You'll see your bud Julian didn't do so well.

Now: Conviction for breach of bail, obviously, was another "L".

So, @Zolko, which part of "Lost. Repeatedly" are you disagreeing with?

Now, it is true that the extradition-to-the-USA hearing (as opposed to extradition to Sweden hearings, which he lost consistently) is one in which he hasn't lost, yet.

But the point of the article is that the reasons given for him not losing have (possibly) been addressed, so he can continue his losing streak!

Re: Pick your poison?

Manning was persecuted particularly because she was (a) transitioning -- a not-easy time for anyone -- and (b) in a military prison where the establishment (i.e. the military) were the ones whose lives were made harder -- and possibly shorter -- by her actions.

Neither of those things _should_ have resulted in worse treatment, and it's disgraceful that they did.

But Assange isn't facing those consequences. Kinda by his own definition, he probably doesn't have any secrets left, so there's no need to segregate him in case he "tells all". He's told all (well, except for his dealings with Russia, etc, which we'd all _love_ to hear about...)

Re: and it was

Aye. This is the sort of white male entitlement we saw with John McAfee and Michael Avenatti, to name just two from recent news: do something admirable _once_, and then expect a free pass from thereon out.

When looking at public disclosures of otherwise confidential information, there seems to me to be two ways to do it: first is like with the Panama Papers or the Snowden releases, where a small group of journalists acted to protect those irrelevantly swept up in the documents and then releases the core. The other is Wikileaks, which just dumps everything out with no thought to the people whose lives they might be endangering for no good reason (e.g. the names of people who worked with the US in Iraq).

But that's also the difference between journalism and, I don't know, being a source. There is stuff that really shouldn't be public (from the mundane, like individual's medical records, to the dramatic, like the identity of intelligence agents embedded in our adversary's hierarchy). A responsible human should make a decision as to whether disclosure is in the (legitimate, if not legal) public interest... and if you don't trust _a_ journalist, do what Snowden did: release to several different ones that can disagree with each other.

But "responsible" is not Assange. Entitled twat, sure. But that's not the same thing.

All of the cases in the COURTS are not based on denigrating him personally.

He lost. Repeatedly.

Re: and it was

This is revisionist nonsense.

Sweden issued a European Arrest Warrant for him because they wanted to question him, and he was declining to cooperate (and had left the country). Assange appealed and lost, and appealed to the Swedish Supreme Court and lost. The UK responded to the European Arrest Warrant by arresting him.

At this point, Assange suddenly starts worrying that if extradited to Sweden he'd be extradited to the USA. This is total nonsense, because that's not how extradition works: if the USA wanted him, they'd apply to the UK (as they eventually did) and win an extradition order there.

And if you wanted a country with an actual track record of not extraditing people to the USA, you'd start with SWEDEN (just ask Edward Lee Howard, who was wanted by the USA for espionage, and was not extradited because Sweden won't extradite for political crimes).

And indeed Assange's appeals against the European Arrest Warrant (in the UK) also fail, at which point he weasels off to the Ecuadorian Embassy, breaching his bail conditions and committing his first (known) offence in the UK.

But the real evidence that this "fear of extradition from Sweden to the USA" is garbage is that Assange _had applied for residency in Sweden_ two days before two women complained about him (leading to the investigation/charges/etc). So the thesis is that on August 18th 2010 Sweden was where he was actively trying to live (presumably because they won't extradite to the USA on political crimes), and on 27 September he's fleeing the country to avoid being questioned by prosecutors about an accusation of rape... and suddenly we're being asked to believe that Sweden would extradite him to the USA???

Hmm.

Re: right to repair (?)

This is great spin by whoever is making it, but it is suspect from an engineering perspective. What the M1 is doing is pooling the GPU and CPU RAM (all unexciting LP-DDR4 stuff) and pretending it's a feature by suggesting that there's something inefficient by having the GPU with its own specialist memory (e.g. GDDR6) and the CPU with it's memory.

Compare with a low-end GPU like the embedded ones in an Intel processor: these GPUs manage to share the same pool of memory using "just" the DDR4 interface (so no bus to speak of), so what's the difference between this an an M1? Basically, nothing much.

Now, compared to a high-end system with a discrete GPU, having separate pools of memory (each dedicated to the task) usually makes much more sense, as (for example) the video refresh can be optimized in the GDDR in a way that it can't in regular DDR.

So what this boils down to is someone promoting the lack of a discrete GPU as some kind of benefit, rather than the reality of this being a reasonable cost-compromise.

I'm not actually trying to knock the M1; there is no "one size fits all" chip, and the M1 seems a pretty capable part for what it was intended to do. But the risk is to look at optimizations specific to the niche any given chip is designed to serve and pretend that those optimizations are generally applicable.

In this particular situation: there is no "fast RAM" / "slow RAM" in competing designs; there is only "system RAM" (low end) and "system RAM + graphics RAM" (high end). If you have a single pool, all that really means is balancing contention between the CPU and GPU vs putting the entire GPU subsystem on the other end of a PCIe interface and avoiding contention...

Incidentally, the DDR4 interface (used in the M1) is only marginally faster than a PCIe4 x16...

Re: Money laundering, sure

The core problem is the duo of high fees and prohibited alternatives, so they literally prevent competition. If the WWDC and all that jazz is _worth_ paying 30% for, then let their developers decide and vote with their feet.

The more I think about the "money laundering" point, the more it seems probable that this is a pure hypothetical designed to justify a particular rate: the notion is that launderers will tolerate 10-15% (or whatever) loss in order to get clean money... so villain A buys 1,000 in-app "things" for $10 each, and villain B collects $10K less the fees, so $8K-$9K. But we're being asked to believe that _all_ villains won't do this if the fee is 30%, which seems a stretch.

Turning around, if the villains won't accept giving up a 30%, why should the non-villain developers...?

Re: The usual doom and gloom FUD

Let us be generous and assume that this is true (although one would expect subsequent testimony from the people who allegedly declared that 30% is the necessary level)...

... none of this justifies the prohibition against using other purchasing channels.

(The rest of it is self-serving bullshit -- "we host a very expensive party, so you have to pay for it", "we're building nice digs that some of you will be able to use, so you all have to pay for it", etc -- which might play to a jury, but there is no jury here...)

Re: uneasy about any level of automation

Yes they are, and they are amongst the safest vehicles out there, mostly because of their low center of gravity, but also because of the assistive devices that are standard (and not really any different than those on, say, a high-end BMW, but better than that of a mid-range Ford which leads to the shocker than expensive cars have better safety systems!!).

One of the peculiarities of Tesla is that by choosing to call their assistive systems "autopilot", a bunch of idiots who don't know what an autopilot is think it's an autonomous driving system... which it isn't, any more than the autopilot on a commercial airliner is autonomous. "Autopilots" basically keep a aircraft heading in the right direction at the right altitude (sound familiar?), although of course there are those that can follow a more complex route ("Turn left at Greenland", for example) and, yes, there are other autonomous systems (like Autoland) that can do more.

But exactly like Tesla's autopilot, only a fool would trust an autopilot/autoland system not to put you on a runway just as another aircraft decided to cross (because the ATC voice traffic isn't available to it, it won't "hear" a go-around command).

Unfortunately, there are a lot of fools around, and as there are more cars than airplanes, there are more fools on the roads than in the skies.

Autopilot/cruise control/lane following/predictive braking are all great tools. But the whole point of the report is that it's a very, very long way from that ("Level 2", apparently) to "Level 5".

Now, if Tesla _did_ have something with higher capabilities (say, "Level 3"), why would they put it in a passenger car? What's the value proposition there? Yes, it's nice, but...

On the other hand, putting it in a _semi truck_ makes a lot of sense. Consider a convoy of tractor-trailers following each other nose-to-tail, with the driver in the lead vehicle driving the whole convoy, completely networked amongst each other. Yeah, there are lots of details to consider, but on the long stretches between towns, this seems like a reasonable (if not perfect) idea. Kinda like a train.,..

(It's also worth noting that Tesla has true self-driving cars in the Boring Tunnel system. Of course, this is a controlled environment with only other Teslas to worry about, and they can all be networked, but it's possible that Musk's comment had more to do with this -- public transportation using autonomous vehicles in a closed system -- than anything else).

Re: Blame the Cable

Ahem. HVD was normal. LVD was some new-fangled scheme to render one's carefully hoarded stock of Adaptec AHA-1744 cards irrelevant. Ask me why I can quote the part number of a long-obsolete peripheral that I haven't touched in twenty years... <g>

Re: Time was...

You can tell that they worked for the cleaners, because if they were employees they'd have nicked $19,000, not £5000!

(See reports of an employee in Sacramento, California, March 10, 2021...)

Re: What's the problem?

The only place where the outsourcing _might_ make sense is where the number of staff needed is small; for example, if the premises can justify only (say) 4 hours of cleaning per workday. If you can find and depend on a single part-timer, that's great, but usually it really is more cost-effective to subcontract to someone with multiple people, so they can take holidays or be otherwise unavailable, plus you can get "surge" people for the monthly re-polishing of the anti-static floor tiles or whatever.

(No disagreement with the OP for the large operation, but _sometimes_ the numbers can favor outsourcing).

@Ian Johnston.... that isn't really accurate.

Yes, the USG bought the early Falcon 1 _launches_, but those were the "per copy" costs, not the development bucks. Likewise, NASA paid to have a usable Dragon capsule in operation, but the total amount was $396.... which sounds a lot, but the price of a Falcon 9 launch is $62M, and this was while NASA was paying $56M per seat on Soyuz, so basically NASA paid SpaceX the price of 7 Soyuz seats to get the (uncrewed) Dragon. "Huge funding" isn't really accurate.

Yes, Crewed Dragon was a really significant investment by NASA ($2.6B), but again, compare it against (a) what it would have cost NASA to develop the same capability (see SLS!!!), and (b) what the actual unit costs work out at (because those numbers include a number of launches).

SpaceX also pockets large wodges of cash from the US military, but as suppliers, not development contractors. When they launch a GPS satellite for 70% of the price of the incumbent (ULA) -- which they do -- it's clear this is not the typical government-funded operation.

But here's where it gets interesting: Falcon Heavy was privately funded (hence the payload: Musk's roadster), Starlink is privately funded (1,378 satellites launched and operational to date), and Starship is privately funded.

Sure, they couldn't have got this far without the government's help, but that's true of a lot of businesses (telecomms, IT, aviation, transportation); separating pure private development from development for particular customers is hard and pointless!

Re: What's the problem?

Your feeling isn't accurate. What actually happens (and it does in those far-off pre-Musk days) is that groups of people (often called a "village") get a single installation and then distribute the connectivity to a school, community center, etc. And the fee for that single link is either subsidized or paid for by government or NGOs, so the actual out-of-pocket cost to a tribesman in, say, the SaHell is zero but the benefit is achieved.

Back in the "first world", my dad, who lives in the boondocks (almost half an hour from Oxford, so you know it's rural) only got actual broadband a couple of years ago; before that he had ISDN until BT cancelled that and then GEO satellite for a few years, which worked well but had (obviously) a bit of a latency problem. Large parts of Scotland, Wales and Northern/Western England have the same issue: there aren't enough people to justify BT OpenHand or the mobile phone operators building out infrastructure.

Re: Nooks and crannies?

No, they're the colonies. They'll be the last next ones to leave the Empire.

FIFY!

Re: First Amendment - False Claims

What @Duncan Macdonald is referencing is that the First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech AND freedom of association. Twitter and Fox News are equally free to exclude whoever they want.

This is just foolish nonsense. What it actually "just proves" is nothing.

1. Why shouldn't a business be partisan? Explain your answer with particular reference to Fox News!

2. If 81 million people voted for X, and 74 million voted for Y, and you want to reach the greatest number of customers, which group would you prefer?

3. If you are concerned about truth and accuracy, would you try to limit comments from people who maliciously spreads lies and deceit?

4. Your ignorance of the legal system is stunning. As part of this suit, would the defendant be able to conduct discovery on the plaintiff? (hint: three letters, rhymes with Tess)

5. If you're facing an "investigation" by a piece of sh*t politician who has recently sued to prevent another state conducting its own elections in accordance with rulings from its own courts, and who is under indictment for securities fraud and accused by his own office of bribery and abuse of office, do you prefer the idea of a lawsuit managed under the auspices of a federal court or a partisan hatchet job conducted by the aforementioned indicted political piece of sh*t?

Re: Have their cake and eat it too

"Obviously Twitter is trying to reserve the right to ban people "just because" and "special circumstances" and the AG is calling them on it."

Yup.

Where exactly are you extracting some right to use someone else's property against their wishes?

How much do these people pay Twitter for use of the system? Or Apple, or Google, come to that? So there's no expectation of service, no warranties of availability.

The _only_ reason that Twitter publishes their policies is because they want users, and they calculate that having a fairly light touch in terms of rules.

If this entitled position was even vaguely sane, people could demand air time on Fox News (or OANN or NewsMax or...)

Bizarrely enough, "conservatives" like to pretend they're the party of small government, but they'll happily take from successful businesses on some specious argument that, apparently, someone owes them a website!

Re: First comment is obviously a sealion, figures

It's a statement of opinion based on disclosed facts using an obviously subjective rhetorical label ("far right"), and there's no evidence at all that the clearly non-defamatory statement would or could cause the business any damage.

US courts would dismiss at a motion for summary judgment phase (or earlier, depending on where any putative suit was filed), and while UK courts might actually hear a libel suit (if anyone bothered to file one), there's little chance it would survive any attempt to show damage.

The "disclosed facts" include, conveniently, Amazon's filings in Parler's attempt to sue them: numerous examples of material that contravened Amazon's TOS and which, remarkably, happened to be slanted to the right wing...

Re: RE: engine failure

This is slightly simplistic: engine (and indeed aircraft) maintenance is entirely predictable, and all airlines very carefully schedule their usage to have the aircraft/engine at the right place at the right time, and the "right place" may be a remote station (to you) rather than a home base. American Airlines, for example, have a lot of maintenance done in Tulsa, OK, even though Tulsa isn't what anyone would call a "base"; what they tend to do is fly into Dallas, and then ferry empty to Tulsa; when the overhaul is complete, guess where the check-flight ends up...?

Of course, if you're a small airline, then you care much more (than the big guys) about emergency repairs (if you have two aircraft, and one is broken, you've lost half your fleet/income. If you have 600 aircraft and one is broken, you've got a few hundred cranky customers).

Re: RE: engine failure

This is mostly false: Texas has two low-capacity interconnects to the Eastern Interconnect (i.e. the grid for the eastern states of the US), and two low-capacity interconnects to Mexico.

Since someone will quibble about the words "low-capacity":

Texas power generation capacity: ~34,000MW

Texas North DC Tie (to Eastern Grid): ~220MW

Texas East DC Tie (to Eastern Grid): ~600MW

Texas Railroad DC Tie (to Mexico): ~300MW

Texas Laredo DC Tie (to Mexico): ~100MW.

Total tie capacity (either importing or exporting): 1,220MW aka 3.6% of the state's generating capacity.

30% of the capacity was offline because of the wrong type of snow...

Re: Quick turnaround for the 777?

This is one of the "A" model B777-200s, with a (relatively) short range (basically, good for transatlantic routes, but not transpacific ones). Ranges is a little over 5,000nm, so DEN-HNL at about 3,000nm is no problem.

This particular aircraft is configured for 364 passengers, and there were 231 passengers and 10 crew on board UA328, so not exactly "lightly" loaded, but not operating at max weight by any means!

The B777-200 has a difference of 100,000lbs between max take-off and max landing weight.

UA328 did not dump fuel (total flight time was less than 5 minutes, and they basically just took off, flew in a circle, and landed).

UA328 landed some 30,000lbs overweight on a 12,000 runway (runway 26, as it happens).

This is the second time a United B777-200 has dramatically lost an engine in flight; the other time was 3 years ago, also on a flight to HNL (but from SFO, not DEN). Just like this time, that flight landed safely without further incident. The NTSB finding was that P&W needed to develop a better fan blade inspection. Maybe they need a better better inspection procedure?

Fun fact: UA382 was being operated by line number 5 (the 5th aircraft produced). The replacement that evening that took the passengers to Hawaii was line number 4, which was part of the flight test program (used for things like fuel consumption measurements), so LN 4 was actually delivered after LN 5.

And yeah, LN4 (N773UA) was the aircraft that lost an engine en route to Honolulu back in 2018...

Re: RE: engine failure

They (RR) offer "power by the hour" plans, but are happy to sell the engines, too.

Larger operators tend to buy, smaller ones lease. This is purely because of financing cost, not any technical advantages.

Re: Rather than looking for dodgy chips ...

This, this, a thousand times this!

Competent security professionals don't rely on "oh, well, we bought it from someone we like", they rely on monitoring and architecture. Don't trust anyone... its not exceptionally hard to do!

(The hard part is usually figuring out who to trust -- "trust everyone " and "trust no-one" is fairly easy.)

Re: This is so stupid

Yep... And remember the last go around had the servers in an Apple-owned data center, and the comment from the Apple IT people about how they'd have noticed traffic -- the alleged traffic -- because they don't put the IPMI/management NICs on the same network as the application NICs, and they monitor their management network.

Which sounds, you know, professional.

True story: I was overseas when I got an urgent call from our cybersecurity consultants... they'd detected traffic from our internal network heading to an Indian IP address. The FBI were alerted. Tension was rising.... until I pointed out that the IP address in question was part of a block that we'd sold a couple of years previously, and in fact this was only an ancient desktop PC trying to reach a long-decommissioned print server whose address was now allocated to an Indian telco!

(And this, people, is why NAT is your friend: using a public IP address range for an internal network is a Bad Idea. See also IPv6...)

Not at all. It's up to them to show that they had reason to believe you really ate babies. Subtle distinction, but they don't need evidence of the eating, just evidence supporting the reporting of the eating ("Reliable source Fred -- who's a spook, so we can't divulge his name -- says you ate babies").

But even worse, this isn't a case of someone accusing you of eating babies, so much as someone saying your babies are being eaten by The Bad Guys. Supermicro isn't being accused of malfeasance, China is (and Supermicro is the victim).

No. It's very hard to prove the "negative" that there _weren't_ spy chips added. And all Bloomberg has to do is say they had reason to believe that there reporting was true, and they're then off the hook even if it was false! Remember, the gist of the story is that The Bad Guys (aka "China") maliciously added the chips without Supermicro's knowledge, so where's Supermicro's beef?