* Posts by Cuddles

2337 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2011

Google Nest server outage leaves US, European smart homes acting dumb

Cuddles

Re: There are Some Use Cases

What makes you think the actual door is any more secure? If someone with the proper motivation and skills wants to get into your home, they can do so. Consumer-grade security consists of making it difficult enough to require a dedicated effort to do so - you can still be burgled, but a random person walking past can't just wander into your house on a whim. Having a lockbox with a key inside does nothing to change that. It's still enough of a block to put off casual, spur of the moment efforts, and unless you think there is a significant pool of potential burglars able to break into a lockbox but unable to think of any other way to get in your house, it does nothing to make you less secure.

Bio-boffins devise potentially fast COVID-19 virus test kit out of a silicon wafer and machine-learning code

Cuddles

Re: "Tiny holes 300nm across are drilled into the metal"

"Can a virus get bigger than that ?"

Yes, but it's fairly unusual to be bigger than that in more than one dimension. The largest ones are aroun 400nm, and there are only a few know that are over 300nm. They're unusual enough that the first really big one to be found wasn't even recognised as a virus at first. None of the big ones appear to be relevant to humans; they're pretty much all water-borne and infect amoeba.

On the other hand, there are viruses that are long and thin, that can get to over 1um long. They'd fit through the holes lengthwise, but I don't know how this method would cope with long strings flapping about the place instead of neat little blobs that block holes up. That includes fun things like ebola and related viruses, so potentially quite relevant to humans.

Ticketmaster cops £1.25m ICO fine for 2018 Magecart breach, blames someone else and vows to appeal

Cuddles

Easy rules to remember

"in breach of all rules and guidance on JS and payments pages"

Rules and guidance on JS and payments pages:

1) Don't.

2) There is no 2.

Wondering what to do over the holiday season? How about aiming a laser at commercial aircraft and then spending years of your life in prison?

Cuddles

Re: Polarizing filter

"Have they tried polarizing the window glass? Lasers will be coherent, but sun light and man made light isn't. Surely a polarizing filter would negate the laser without blocking much real-world light?"

Since no-one else is really explaining why you have all the downvotes, the problem is that polarisation and coherency are not the same thing. Polarisation describes how the oscillations in a wave are aligned - with light, if the electric field has peaks oscillating between left and right (the magnetic field is at 90 degrees to this), it is horizontally polarised. Coherency describes how well aligned those peaks are longitundinally. Importantly, the two are entirely uncorrelated. Light can be 100% horizontally polarised, but even though the peaks are all nicely flat in the horizontal plane, they can be randomly all over the place along the direction of travel. With a perfect laser with 100& coherency, the peaks can still be all over the place transversely and have 0% polarisation. You can sort of think of coherency as the longitudinal equivalent of polarisation, but there are enough important differences that it's not usually particularly useful to do so (as is the case with all too many physics analogies).

So no, polarised filters will do absolutely nothing to block laser light. Unfortunately, there is no such thing as anti-coherent filters, so there is simply no way to block only lasers.

"Or you could do something more complex, track the pilots gaze, put a liquid crystal filter layer over the glass and an outside camera, then track and block bright lights by darking the correct part of the window relative to the pilots gaze."

The problem there is that it's not the pilot looking directly into the laser that is the only problem. As noted in the article and by other comments, the issue is that the light scatters off imperfections in the window, as well as reflecting off all kinds of surfaces in the cockpit. Even if the pilot doesn't look straight at the source, the whole cockpit can be filled with extremely bright reflections that are just as bad.

In any case, it's not just "a bit" faffy and complex, you're requiring sophisticated materials combined with numerous sensors and extra computing power. Even assuming such a system could work, this is not the sort of thing that could reasonably be expected to be retrofitted even to large planes that can be decades old, let alone things like privately owned light aircraft (which are also affected, it's not just large passenger jets, as noted in the article).

Police chopper chasing a crim near an airport? Ideal time to use my laser pointer, says Texas idiot now behind bars

Cuddles

Re: hopefully prosecutions elsewhere too

"You're welcome to join me in condemning that, against policemen or anybody else."

There's a rather large difference in condemning a particular behaviour, and following that condemnation up with "...and therefore it's entirely justified to summarily execute them all on the spot". I don't see anyone here saying that deliberately attempting to blind people, police or otherwise, is at all justified. But saying that doing so is one of the few things that would justify the police gunning down protesters is just insane, and it's hardly surprising that few appear to agree with you on that.

Halt don't catch fire: Amazon recalls hundreds of thousands of Ring doorbells over exploding battery fears

Cuddles

Re: Shows people don't read the instructions

This is precisely why the concept of "fail safe" exists. It's all very well to say people should read the instructions, but in the real world you know perfectly well that a significant number of people won't. Given that unavoidable fact, good practice is to come up with a design that won't explode and injure people if they make a mistake, especially if it's such an obvious mistake as "there are two kinds of screws and someone might mix them up".

For something like this, the best design would ensure that such mistakes can't even be made at all - ideally by just using the same screws everywhere, but if that can't be done then something like using different sizes so the wrong screw physically can't fit. But if you can't manage that, the absolute minimum would be making sure that using the wrong screw doesn't take someone's arm off and burn their house down. That might be a failure on a part of the customer for not following the instructions properly, but it's a much bigger failure on the part of the whole design and QA process in releasing a product that can do that in the first place.

Radio Frequency fingerprinting of aircraft ADS-B transmitters? Boffins reckon they've cracked it

Cuddles

Re: Are they saying the transmitter can be fingerprinted?

"And the fingerprint is unique to a single transmitter - somehow. Components in the radio set itself? Combination with aerial tuning?"

All of the above, presumably. The idea doesn't sound particularly surprising really. Nothing is perfect, so every transmitter is going to have slightly different characteristics in terms of noise and so on. The only question is how practical it is to distinguish them in a real world with weak signals and all kinds of other noise around.

"You'd still need a history database of squawks vs fingerprints"

This seems to be the main problem with the idea. Assuming you can get a good enough signal for the fingerprinting to work, it doesn't actually tell you what is transmitting, it only allows you to identify unique transmitters. So unless you've previously identified what the transmitter is attached to and suddenly it starts claiming to be something else, you don't gain anything much of use.

It also ties in to the above point. Since the fingerprint is characteristic of the whole transmitting system, it would be trivial to change it. You don't need to do things like swapping transponders between different planes as others have suggested, simply changing the length of a single wire would likely be enough to produce a completely new fingerprint. Swap a card, alter a voltage slightly, knock the antenna with a hammer... almost anything is going to change how noise and other factors vary.

So it's kind of a neat idea, and relatively impressive if it can actually be made to work at all in the real world. But it seems to be of fairly little use in pratical terms, and likely trivial to work around if it actually did start being used.

Amazon makes big bet on New Zealand to crack Indian market

Cuddles

Re: Was free. Now only on prime.

But always remember there's no such thing as a free cricket. As the article notes, this is really no different from other deals in which broadcasters have paid hundreds of millions for the broadcast rights. The customer still ultimately pays for it, the only difference is in how obvious that payment is.

Of course, this being Amazon they'll be selling all your personal data to advertisers in addition to taking payment directly, so maybe it's not such a good deal in this specific case. But at least in principle, putting content behind a paywall is usually a lot more honest than pretending it's free while trying to extract money in less obvious ways behind the scenes,

Laptop mega-manufacturer Compal hit by DoppelPaymer ransomware – same one that hit German hospital

Cuddles

Something about stable doors

"Compal staff say they arrived at work on Monday to be told of the outbreak, and that they needed to back up their files."

I'd make some snarky comment about better late than never, but given that they're backing up potentially infected files in the middle of an active attack, never may well be the best choice at this point.

Hyundai announces its own OS for Nvidia-powered smart-ish cars

Cuddles

Re: " relevant services"

"An opt out would be nice."

An opt in would be even nicer.

Snap-crappy: 183 Brit local authorities operate 80,000 CCTV cams between them, says surveillance watchdog

Cuddles

Surveillance cameras

Very few of them are actually closed circuit. I'm sure some will argue that the term CCTV has lost all meaning and now just refers to any and all cameras, but I think it's useful to be clear what we're actually talking about. A closed system that can only be used by a small number of people with the correct authority may still not be great in terms of privacy, but would be a hell of a lot better than a bunch of insecure webcams that can potentially be viewed by pretty much anyone with an internet connection.

FYI: Someone wants to launch mobile broadband satellites into space used by scientific craft – and NASA's not happy

Cuddles

Re: Just out of interest...

The FCC has nothing to do with space. It does, however, govern radio signals used in US territory. If you plan on offering radio links to the US, it's therefore a good idea to check that your very expensive satellites will actually be allowed to operate first. Obviously a company that has no intention of broadcasting to US territory has no need to clear things with the FCC first, but since it's one of the biggest markets available and most of these companies are based in the US themselves, it's quite common to want permission to operate there.

Cuddles

Not a problem

AST & Science have raised $120 million in funding, with which they plan to launch 243 satellites which would be among the largest in orbit. They have no experience in actually building anything at all, but somehow propose to go from nothing to hundreds of horrifically complicated unfolding antennae on the back of some pocket change an investor found down the back of the sofa.

It's a scam. Either an outright funding scam, or just an attempt to look like a tempting buy to some established company that might want some pre-approved satellite licenses.

After Cummings' Barnard Castle trip, cheeky Britons started using the word 'vision' in their passwords

Cuddles

"And which site was it - some years ago - where it was discovered that it allowed you to set a password of almost any length, but it only actually stored and checked the first eight characters?"

Not just some years ago, I've had the same problem recently. It's quite confusing when using a password manager and so are pretty damn sure you're not typing in the password wrong. Eventually discovered that there was a character limit when entering or resetting the password, but not during account creation.

H2? Oh! New water-splitting technique pushes progress of green hydrogen

Cuddles

"Not quite. Hydrogen gas only has a molecular weight of 2. It's practically the smallest thing that exists naturally. Think about how tough it is to reliably store helium (atomic weight 4) because of its tendency to seep through even the tiniest holes; hydrogen is even worse than that."

Not even close to true. Atomic weight is almost entirely irrelevant to size. Helium, containing a full shell of electrons, is the smallest atom that exists. And that's before you remember that H2 is a molecule that contains more than one atom and is therefore significantly larger again. Hydrogen does indeed have issues with storage, but there's no need to exaggerate things with such silly claims.

Vivo pushes out X51 5G: Chipper whippersnapper, quite a battery-sapper, but at least the wrapper's dapper

Cuddles

ROM?

"The X51 5G comes with 8GB RAM and 256GB ROM"

That doesn't sound very useful. Wouldn't it be better if it came with storage you could actually write to?

Just cough into your phone, please... MIT lab thinks it can diagnose COVID-19 from the way you expectorate

Cuddles

Re: "98.5% accuracy"

I think it means testing every single person whom the test track and trace system has identified as potentially infected.

No. As I said, the goal is to find all cases. In the absence of any other information, that means testing everyone. A track and trace system is simply one way to try to filter the number of people who need testing. Early on it may have been pretty much the only option, but that doesn't mean it's the best, or the most effective use of limited resources.

Cuddles

Re: "98.5% accuracy"

While true, I think that's looking at it a bit backwards. The goal is to test the minimum number of people to ensure all cases are found. In the absence of any pre-testing, that means testing every single person. So a pre-test with a 17% false positive rate isn't bad because it makes you test 12 million people without an infection, it's good because it means you haven't had to test the other 58 million. Obviously it would be nice if it was even better, but as a first pass requiring viritually zero resources it's really very promising.

You might want to look Huawei now: Smartphone market returns to growth as Chinese giant's shipments plunge

Cuddles

Fun with analysts

"IDC attributed this to... its strong performance in the low-end $250 price segment. This was further bolstered by the release of two high-profile flagships... Samsung also released a cheaper version of the Galaxy S20"

So Samsung did well because of its strong performance in the low-end segment, it's strong performance in the high-end segment, and it's strong performance in the mid-range segment. Almost as though they just generally did well without any specific segment being responsible. I guess analysts get paid by the word?

"Xiaomi also performed well, clinching third place from Apple"

I assume that's actually Xiaomi in fourth and Apple in fifth. And quite possible Samsung and Huawei in second and third, although Samsung might still be top. I don't understand why BBK is always split into separate brand names in these reports.

Amazon blasts past estimates, triples profits to $6.2bn but says COVID will cost it $4bn over the next quarter

Cuddles

Re: Comparison

"As the article only covers all Amazon's products and services, and doesn't breakout AWS"

From the article:

"AWS revenue reached $11.6bn, up 29 per cent from $9bn in Q3 2019."

Watch as UK government magically makes value of £500m framework contract swell to four times the size

Cuddles

Final cost

"There is no guarantee that £2bn will be handed to suppliers during the four-year deal"

Well obviously. They should be able to get it up to at least £8bn by then.

Oculus owners told not only to get Facebook accounts, purchases will be wiped if they ever leave social network

Cuddles

Re: Not really.

Just because such a clause is written down, that does not make it legally valid or enforceable. Most EULAs are already void simply because it's not reasonable to expect people to have actually read hundreds of pages of legalese - that's been given as an actual court ruling. So the fact that many of them also contain illegal clauses making them even more void is just icing on the cake. EULAs aren't intended as legal contracts, they're just an intimindation tactic that rely on the average person not knowing any better and not having the resources to take it to court.

Microsoft drives users to the Edge: Internet Explorer to redirect to Chromium-based browser in November

Cuddles

"What configuration options are missing from edge?"

I assume what was meant was that you can't configure which browser it forces you into. If you try to open certain sites in IE, it instead opens them in Edge, end of story - you can't configure it to instead open them in Firefox or any other browser. The problem isn't with the options that may be available in the browser you're forced to use, but simply with the fact that it forces you into that specific browser.

Why is IoT locked in 'proof-of-concept hell'? Stakeholders don't talk to each other, and return on investment is hazy

Cuddles

Concept proved, point missing.

"Many IoT projects have "failed to get beyond the proof-of-concept stage," Ball said, but the reasons for this are due to "internal politics"."

Not really. Many of them get to the proof of concept stage and the run head first into the reality that they're not actually useful. There absolutely are some interesting uses for IoT-style systems, and those are the ones that actually get used. But there are far too many things along the lines of internet connected fridges and internet connected chocolate teapots, and no-one actually wants any of those. It's nothing to do with internal politics or any nonsense like that, it's just people coming up with ideas that they think sound cool, building a proof of concept, and then getting a bunch of blank stares when they actually show it to someone. In fact, he goes on to say almost exactly that, if you read between the lines:

"We see successful IoT projects focus on clearly showing improvements in productivity, customer experience, compliance, and safety, as well as enabling new revenue streams."

Successful IoT projects focus on actually doing something useful, unsuccessful ones, by implication, don't. That's not a cultural or communication problem, it's the system for once actually working as intended.

What's that, Lt Lassie? Three terrorists have fallen down a well? Strap on these AR goggles and we'll find 'em

Cuddles

Re: A dog sight is worse than a human

"Dogs need to be close to get visual cues"

And the goggles are close. That's the whole point. Visual instructions appear in the dog's vision via the goggles (just simple things like following a dot), and so the handler can give orders such as showing which way to walk or what to investigate without an actual person needing to be nearby.

One year after server hackers left NordVPN red-faced, firm's first colocated setup is online

Cuddles

Personally identifiable

"device type, location, and user information including gender, age, height, heart rate and weight. It could also access calendar information," said Breen... "While this doesn't include PII profile data"

In what way are location, gender, age, and so on not personally identifiable information? Even if they're somehow trying to distinguish "profile data" from other data, everything except location is part of the user profile, so it seems to be an outright lie that it doesn't include PII profile data.

Google contractor HCL America accused of retaliating against unionized techies by shifting US jobs to Poland

Cuddles

Re: Uh ?

"More than one of the stewards at Natsopa (print union in the '70s) would have made Stalin look like a moderate but in general, union membership was a good thing"

Indeed, it's the balance that is the tricky bit. Workers need to be able to group together and work collectively, since otherwise companies have far too much power compared to each individual. But once they get above a certain size, you end up with career unionists whose only job is running the union, and it all too often ends up as an organisation working solely for its own benefit rather than that of the members (charities often have the same problem, as does government for that matter). Once that happens, people become disillusioned with unions and stop joining, since what's the point when the only people benefiting are the ones running it? And of course, once unions start losing their power, companies jump on the opportunity to start abusing their employees again, making people remember why they wanted unions in the first place and driving membership back up again. And so the cycle continues...

Or to put it more concisely, four legs good, two legs better.

Selling hardware on a pay-per-use or subscription model is a 'lie' created by marketing bods

Cuddles

Follow the money

Vendors want to sell subcriptions because they think it will make them more money. It follows that everyone else should avoid them as much as possible because the entire point is that it will cost you more money.

Yes, it's down again: Microsoft's Office 365 takes yet another mid-week tumble, Azure also unwell

Cuddles

Obligatory xkcd

"DownDetector.com's map showing where people are complaining about Office 365 et al being down"

Population maps - https://xkcd.com/1138/

It really is your last chance to see anything at Cineworld for quite some time, and this big-screen bork speaks volumes

Cuddles

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

Which is exactly my point. Cinemas are shit because you're expected to sit in silence for several hours, then actual enjoy yourself somewhere else later. Which is precisely why they're dying, because it's far preferable to just have some friends over to your house instead and watch a film in an actual enjoyable setting.

Obiously I'll get more downvotes for talking about downvotes, but I can only assume that all the downvoters didn't bother actually reading my previous post and decided I must be advocating talking at the cinema, when actually I was just pointing out that cinemas are shit precisely because you shouldn't do that and it would therefore be difficult to come up with a worse way of socialising. People historically went to cinemas because that was the only way to see many films. That's no longer the case, so it's not surprising that most people prefer to see films elsewhere instead.

Cuddles

Re: Cinemas in their current form are an artefact of the limited availability of reels of film

"People talking between themselves at normal volume during the film."

And of course the other side of that one is that if you're not a complete knob, you can't talk during the film. There's very little appeal in having an evening out with friends in which you spend 3 hours not actually able to talk or even look at each other.

After ten years, the Google vs Oracle API copyright mega-battle finally hit the Supreme Court – and we listened in

Cuddles

Re: Status quo?

"Good question. It's the status quo for the stated reasons: the courts have decided in Oracle's favor (which is why it's at the Supremes now, brought here by Google) and it's the position of the US government."

I'm not sure that's really a good way of defining the status quo. In legal terms, sure, the Supremes might favour not overturning a lower court's decision, so in a sense it's the legal status quo. But in terms of actual software development, which is the relevant point given that's what the case is about, there really doesn't seem to be a status quo at all. No matter which way the SCOTUS rules, it's going to set a definitive rule for how things must be done where no such rule previously existed.

Nominet refuses to consider complaint about its own behaviour, claims CEO didn’t mean what he said on camera

Cuddles

Re: At what point do you pull the plug?

"At what point does the government freeze the personal assetts of all the C-level execs, issue warrants for their arrests, & haul them in on charges of criminal acts?"

When the brown envelopes stop arriving.

Pack your bags! Astroboffins spot 24 'superhabitable' exoplanets better than Earth at supporting complex life

Cuddles

"how the heck do they measure that so accurately from so far away anyway?"

They don't. From the paper:

"Current technology simply does not allow us, for example, to measure global temperatures on extrasolar planets anywhere close to the accuracy needed."

The temperatures are actually little more than guesses based on several entirely unsupported assumptions about what the planets might possibly be like. For example, the one quoted as having the "most Earth-like temperature" comes from this paper https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201936929 which says:

"We find that the stellar radiative energy flux of the new transit candidate would be times the insolation atthe top of the Earth’s atmosphere. An Earth-like Bond albedo of 0.3 would result in a globally averaged surface temperature of about K... hese calculations neglect the additional heating of the greenhouse effect, for instance, from water vapor (H2 O), carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), ozone (O3), and other greenhouse gases. On Earth, the greenhouse effect amounts to about + 33 °C. If the transit candidate signal belongs to a genuine planet and if this planet has an atmosphere that provides an Earth-like greenhouse effect, then the globally averaged surface temperature is around + 5 °C."

In other words, if the surface is very similar to Earth's, and if the atmosphere is very similar to Earth's, and if the radiation received from its star has been calculated correctly, and if there's actually a planet there at all, then the temperature will fall somewhere in the estimated range. The actual detection method used, looking at variation in the star's brightness due to possible transiting planets, cannot provide any of this information, it's all pure guesswork about what things could be like given the best possible assumptions for life. Which is why it's a very minor part of that paper, it's actually about the detection of the planets and speculation about their possible properties is just a small side note.

As for the original paper, the headline of this article is extremely misleading. Astroboffins haven't spotted anything. The paper is simply an analysis of already known planets, trying to assess their potential for habitability using criteria decided by the authors. It doesn't add any new information, it's really just saying something along the lines of "Here's a way of looking at the information we already have in a way that might be interesting, and here's the additional information we would need in order for it to actually be useful". There's no new discovery, or even anything particularly interesting going on, just some ideas about what we might like to know once we have better technology and techniques for looking at things.

Bill Gates lays out a three-point plan to rid the world of COVID-19 – and anti-vaxxer cranks aren't gonna like it

Cuddles

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/

As of 1601 on 01/10/20, there have been 42,202 deaths from 460,178 cases. That's a fatality rate of 9.2%, down a bit from a month or so ago when it was around 9.7% (which you'll still see quoted on Wikipedia).

Cuddles

"We tolerate 10-20k people dying each winter from the flu in the UK."

Yes, flu usually kills around 10-20k people each year in the UK. That's with no efforts to control the spread at all, and a limited vaccination program targeting only the most vulnerable. Covid-19 has so far killed over 40k in 7 months, despite the extreme measures being taken to try to stop it spreading.

So I really don't understand why idiots keep repeating this argument as if it's supposed to mean anything. If we had just left covid to run rampant as we do with the flu, it would have killed hundreds of thousands of people in the UK by now. Even with a lockdown, masks, social distancing and everything, it's still killed significantly more people than the flu does in significantly less time. Oddly enough, saying we don't worry as much about a much less dangerous disease isn't going to do much to convince anyone that covid will just magically go away if we stop thinking about it.

As a final point, lying about the fatality rate probably won't help your case either. In the UK, it's only just under 10%. The real rate may well be a less than that since not all cases are tested, but it's certainly nowhere near 0.1% - that would mean over 42 million people had already been infected, which is obviously nonsense.

Burning down the house! Consumer champ Which? probes smart plugs to find a bunch of insecure fire-risk tat

Cuddles

Re: Not just smart plugs!

This analysis of various USB chargers is always worth a link. It's a bit out of date now, but gives an idea of the problems they can have. http://www.righto.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html

The OP is incorrect that such chargers are inherently dangerous simply because they're small; there's absolutely nothing wrong with the ones made competently to standards. But even genuine branded ones can be pretty terrible in terms of power quality. And no, power isn't simply power, as that article notes, sufficient noise on the input can cause problems such as having your screen completely fail to work while the charger is plugged in. The real problem is, unsurprisingly, counterfeits, which can be a serious danger. And are probably the most common things people buy because they don't understand why it would cost more for something that is "just a plug".

British Army develops AI shotgun drone with machine vision for indoor use

Cuddles

Re: ReCoilLess

"Besides it doesn't matter if this drone gets thrown back and damages itself, I'm guessing that once it fires it's primary mission is complete, send in another one."

This was my first thought, in the same way that everything is air-droppable at least once. Complications mostly only arise when you want to carry the same action out multiple times. I suppose they want some kind of discriminating targeting for hostage situations and the like, otherwise it would be a lot simpler to just duck tape a grenade to the thing.

Atari threatens to hit fourth VCS shipping deadline, provides pictures of boxes as proof of product delivery

Cuddles

Atari was put out of its misery a long time ago. The problem is that once a company is dead, there's nothing to stop someone else running a company with the same name. In this case, the name had basically no value so whoever happened to own the corpse once it stopped twitching was happy to sell it off for peanuts. The current Atari has nothing to do with the old one, it's just some random who scribbled the word "Atari" on their name badge in green felt tip.

Braking point: Tesla has had quite enough of Trump's 'unlawful' tariffs on Chinese-made parts, sues Uncle Sam

Cuddles

Re: Good luck with that.

"The judge is going to laugh them out of court. Trade tariffs and trade deals are the purview of the Executive and Legislative branches of the US Government. The courts have nothing to do with it."

Maybe I'm not getting it right, but my understanding is that the whole point of having the three separate branches of the government is that they all have the authority to overrule each other under various circumstances, in order to provide that whole checks and balances thing. The Executive can make orders relating to trade, but the Legislature could overrule them (given a big enough majority at least), while the Judiciary could overrule them both if, for example, the orders were found to be unconstitutional for some reason.

In fact, I'm fairly sure there nothing ever happens in the US that the courts have nothing do with, because whether it's related to one of the other branches of government or just some random person off the street, you can always petition the courts to consider whether something is illegal and/or unconstitutional.

China sets out world domination plan for its digital currency

Cuddles

Interesting idea

"The article therefore calls for the Digital Yuan to be usable across borders"

A large part of the reason the renminbi can't compete with the dollar on the international stage is that it's pretty much illegal to take it out of the country. It's only in the last decade that it's been allowed outside China at all, and it's still largely restricted to banks and certain businesses interacting with a limited selection of other countries. Chinese currency is worthless to most normal people outside China because you can't actually take it or use it anywhere. Obviously there are a variety of political and economic issues that might prevent it replacing the dollar if it were allowed out in the wild, but by far the biggest factor at the moment is the Chinese government actively blocking it from even attempting to do so.

If this new digital currency does succeed, it won't be because they've been first adopters breaking the way into a brave new world, it will simply be that there are enough people wanting to use Chinese currency instead of dollars that they'll all jump on it as soon as they're actually allowed to do so. Throw out the digital part and just open up the existing renminbi and you'd see exactly the same thing happen.

It's IPO week and one of Wall Street's own is raising the spectre of a stock market crash

Cuddles

Tech

"market consensus has crowned tech as the clear secular winner"

Not really. Market consensus has simply applied the word "tech" to a big pile of entirely unrelated businesses with no regard for what any of them actually do or what the work might actually mean. Just have a quick think about what some of the best known "tech" companies actually do. Apple - computer producer and software services. Tesla - car manufacturer. Google & Facebook - advertising brokers. Amazon - retail shopping, computing services. Uber - unlicensed taxi company. Airbnb - unlicensed hotels. Wework - real estate rental. Snowflake - I'm not even sure, as far as I can tell they just resell AWS, Azure and Google and don't actually do anything themselves at all.

"Tech" can't be a winner because it simply doesn't mean anything. It's applied to a random mix of traditional manufacturers and retailers, traditional manufacturers and retailers that happen to have an app, a big pile of mostly rather questionable startups that may or may not have anything related to some kind of technology if they ever figure out what they're actually doing, and a few companies that actually do things related to information technology.

Amazon Lex can now speak British English... or simply 'English' if you're British

Cuddles

"So British English - but common names and cities found in England. So that rules out Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland's cities and names then?"

Given how well most English people do at pronouncing anything Welsh or Gaelic, I'm actually prepared to cut Amazon some slack on that one.

Amazon gets its tax excuses in early amid rising UK profits – but leaves El Reg off the press list. Can't think why

Cuddles

Improvement

"the tax on profit stood at £6.3m, an improvement on the £1m of last year."

Is that an improvement from Amazon's point of view, or from everyone else's?

Microsoft forks out $3m in back pay settlement to make Feds' hiring discrimination probe go away

Cuddles

Implications

"the settlement does not imply wrongdoing"

Yes it does. It doesn't admit to wrongdoing, but it absolutely does imply it. That's the entire definition of implication - the evidence suggests that something might be, or probably is, the case, but doesn't rise to the appropriate level of proof or admission. The fact that they are willing to pay out compensation and agree to certain conditions very much does imply that they did something wrong and know that the punishment would end up being worse if they continued trying to fight it.

Video encoders using Huawei chips have backdoors and bad bugs – and Chinese giant says it's not to blame

Cuddles

Well there's your problem

"The security holes are present in software, whose developer is unknown"

Unknown software from unknown source turns out to be untrustworthy, or at the very least uncompetent. This is my shocked face.

That long-awaited, super-hyped Apple launch: Watches, iPads... and one more thing. Oh, actually that's it

Cuddles

Re: Something isn't making sense

It's pretty bad. Not likely to be particularly significant to individual electric bills, but having billions of devices using 30% more power than necessary is an interesting choice for a company apparently eager to tout its environmental credentials.

Up from the depths, 864 servers inside, covered in slime, it's Natick!

Cuddles

Maintenance

"Over the last two years, researchers have seen a failure rate of an eighth of that seen in a control group of servers on land, running the same workloads."

Having a lower failure rate is obviously beneficial, but it seems to come at the cost of being extremely difficult to fix or replace the parts that do fail. Would this mean moving to an SSD-style of overprovisioning, where you start off with 10%ish more servers than actually needed and bring the spares online as the used ones fail, until the capacity finally drops enough that you need to replace the whole thing?

Howdy, er, neighbor – mind if we join you? Potential sign of life spotted in Venus's atmosphere

Cuddles

Re: Life

"Absent an error in the data, Ockham's Razor suggests that life is the easiest explanation."

Not at all. Life is ultimately just a bunch of complex chemical reactions stuck together. So the alternatives presented here are either a simple unknown chemical reaction, or a big pile of more complicated unknown chemical reactions (the geological option just moves the simple reaction to a different location, so it doesn't form a third possibility). Occam's razor points very firmly at it not being life.

It's still worth popping over there to have a poke around, since that's the only way to find out for sure - Occam only suggests that the less convoluted explanation is more likely correct, it doesn't give an actual answer to any question. But jumping straight to assuming a complex living ecosystem when you find a single simple molecule in a place you didn't expect is rarely likely to be a bet that pays off.

You're all wet: Drippy chips to help slash data centre power consumption and carbon costs

Cuddles

Re: No physics again.

"So the energy saving is marginal at best"

I'm not sure where you get this from. They claim to reduce the power needed for pumping coolant by over 50 times. That's likely to be quite a signficant saving in a data centre. Just because it doesn't make the actual chips any more efficient (and no-one claimed it would, so I'm not sure why you felt the need to bring it up) doesn't mean it's not useful.