Posts by Cuddles 2337 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Nov 2011
On the one hand, no. Extortion and fraud are different things; if you're entirely up front and honest about your extortion, there's nothing fraudulent about it. On the other hand, you're mixing up the two separate events reported in the article. The second one, from which that quote comes, appears to just be a ransomware attack, hence the comment that they don't have any evidence that anyone's tried to do anything with the data other than holding it for ransom.
"Specifically, those 'flagship' ones that can now suck down over a kW on their own."
The maximum power draw of any GPU currently available for purchase is under 500 W.
"They're the ones that miners are using"
Miners are certainly not all running RTX 3090 Ti. Miners use GPUs with the best cost/performance ratio. An RTX 3070 costs four times less than a 3090 Ti, gets better than half the performance while using less than half the power. Guess which one people interested in actually making money will choose. This is why normal people have had trouble getting hold of GPUs for the last few years - miners want exactly the same GPUs as everyone else. If they only wanted the high-end cards no-one would have noticed, because no-one else actually wants to buy them. Complaining about high-end GPUs is like complaining about expensive sports cars; there's absolutely no point worrying about one person buying a Bugatti Veyron while ignoring the millions of people driving Ford Focuses.
"no one needs to play games... Entire consoles consume less and can be hard locked to limit gaming to a socially... responsible number of hours per week."
You're an idiot.
The really weird part is that, at least in the UK, one of the most vocal groups opposed to ending DST is farmers, who are also one of the few groups who still overwhelmingly work to a daylight schedule (or at least to the needs of animals and crops, which amounts to the same thing) and not the clock.
"Google and Apple both had 94.8 percent channel adoption among major app store advertisers (defined as spending more than $100k/month on paid media) using their service in Q2 2022"
Can anyone explain what this actually means, and how it's relevant to anything? It almost sounds as though it's talking about something along the lines of "Out of companies that spend at least $100k on advertising, 94.8% of them spend some of that money on Google". But the last part says it's among companies using their service, so that should mean it's 100% by definition. So I have absolutely no idea what this article is talking about. Some percentage of somethings are doing something related to advertising. Apple's number has gone up, and that means Apple is now one of the big advertisers. But later on it's said that Apple's actual advertising income is still at best maybe 1% that of Google and Facebook which doesn't make them sound particularly comparable, even if they are a little bit bigger than before.
"100F was body temperature"
Close. 96F was body temperature. The fixed points were chosen to be 0, 32 and 96, so that you could mark the scale by simply bisecting the gap a few times. Quite a common phenomenon with old units of measurement - the numbers look weird and difficult to work with when taken in isolation, but they were often developed because they made things simpler when working with the technology of the time. Celsius is much easier to work with mentally, but much more difficult to mark instruments accurately when all you have is a ruler and pencil.
svn commit: WebKit migrates to GitHub
Aside from the issue noted above with lakes having a habit of drying up, dilution. Things like power stations use rivers and the sea, rather than lakes, for cooling because you need flowing water or a large enough heat sink, otherwise said heat sink heats up too much and stops being a sink. And even then they need to be careful not to heat the local environment up too fast for the flow to disperse so they don't kill everything trying to live in the local water. A shallow cooling pool is not going to cut it for cooling a 1 MW heat source. Put a few of them together, and even a decent size lake is going to end up being completely sterilised of all life more complex than algae.
On the other hand, lifting things out of the sea isn't all that complicated. It mostly causes issues when the thing being lifted wasn't supposed to sink in the first place. A shipping container deliberately put in place with lifting hoops just needs a fairly small boat with a couple of chains with hooks on the end. Slightly more complicated than having it on land, but as long as the savings in cooling are more than the extra cost, what's the problem? More difficult to get to on short notice as well I guess, but that's why it's being aimed at big cloudy types and not people looking to site a single server.
"I assumed they meant it orbited 300km below GSO."
The linked article says it will orbit 300km above GSO, so close enough. "Just below" the graveyard orbit apparently. I guess they go with that direction so it doesn't get in the way of satellites using the lower orbit to reposition themselves, and if something goes wrong with the refuelling then you're already in the right place. It appears to be a mistake by the author here at El Reg that puts the orbit 300km from Earth.
The only ones scammed were Right Wing Aussie Trumpers who chewed the Murdoch Bait... and worked as engineers with full access to the inner workings of major power production sites. Or who had access to confidential government documents. Disagree with someone's political views all you like, but there are people from every part of the political spectrum working in sensitive jobs that you probably don't want to be hacked by a hostile adversary.
Dismissing the victim because it's their own fault and they're the only one who suffered is questionable ethically, but otherwise not necessarily a big problem. Doing so when their compromise can lead to serious consequences for many other people is just plain stupid.
"this did teach me that determining such things will be way beyond what an AI with some photos and a database of coordinates can be sure of"
That's not really important though, because the machine analysis is only the starting point. Sending out tax assessors, or whoever, to scour the entire surface of a country looking for problems is not particularly reasonable or cost efficient. So you feed satellite photos into some sort of image analysis software and it highlights a bunch of things it thinks look like buildings or pools or whatever that aren't supposed to be there. Now instead of having to look literally everywhere, you have maybe a few thousand specific locations to look at. And most of them can probably be checked by having a human look at the same images the software did first without needing to actually visit them in person.
It's not necessary for the software to be perfect, it just needs to be good enough to be useful as a first pass to point people in the right direction. Figuring out all the paperwork and loopholes is still going to be a job for the lawyers, all the software does is make it a bit easier to find places that might need to have that paperwork checked.
"WhatsApp will happily ensure that end-to-end encryption works properly."
Sure. The trick is in remembering exactly where those ends are. For those not paying attention, the ends are Whatsapp. They have full access to everything you say and do on their app. End-to-end encryption means third parties can't spy on your messages while in transit, it doesn't mean no-one else ever has access to them.
"the lengths to which Apple goes to protect its autonomous car dev work, including among other things, that only 2 percent – 2,700 out of 135,000 – of Apple's full-time employees had access to the secure databases hosting the autonomous car tech"
Does this really demonstrate the lengths to which Apple goes? This is a tiny side-venture for Apple; the vast majority of their employees have no reason to even know that the car thing exists at all, and certainly you would not expect all the people working on iPhones and PCs to have access to this stuff, let alone their shop assistants. Having nearly 3000 people with full access to their top secret secure database doesn't sound like they're going to any great lengths to keep it actually secure, it sounds much more as though it's open to anyone with a tangential connection or maybe a very occasional need to look at one or two small parts of it.
I don't even work on anything with particular security needs, but I've still had to sign NDAs to get access to engineering drawings that only two or three people in the whole company are able to see (generally for third-party stuff where they don't want proposed designs getting to their competitors rather than our own stuff). Far from going to great lengths, Apple barely seem to have considered security at all. Thousands of people have access to everything, to the point of being able to take home not just documents, but even parts and servers without anyone noticing.
Also, what happens if the coke was actually in a glass? Or, given that the interpreted command is "find a coke can, what happens if there is more than one can in the vicinity? This is being sold as being more flexible than standard robots which can only respond to specific commands, but it's still limited to a small set of specific commands that can only be interpreted when part of a very specific, highly constrained scenario.
Note that the complaints here aren't about "water companies", they're specifically about Thames Water. Yes, leaks are difficult to find and fix. That does not explain why Thames Water finds it so much more difficult to find and fix them than any other water company in the country. And it doesn't explain why they're able to pay out millions in bonuses and dividends while being repeatedly fined for not fixing leaks and for continuously dumping raw sewerage into the environment. There are water companies that haven't been fined for incompetence at all; with Thames Water, the only question is how big the annual fine will be compared to the CEO's bonus.
I'm not sure Modi especially likes Putin, rather he doesn't dislike him because there is little to no historic or current hostility between India and Russia. China, on the other hand, remains effectively at war with India. They've mostly managed to limit things to the occasional brutal murder with pointy sticks rather than kicking off an all-out shooting war, but the two countries are very firmly not friends. Pakistan may be thought of as their more traditional enemy, but China is considered by far the greater strategic threat. So while Modi may not go out of his way to antagonise Putin when there's no benefit to himself, there's pretty much nothing Putin could say or do that would magically make India forget their arguments with China and suddenly become best pals instead. If things kick off in any way around China, India is far more likely to try to take advantage of it than to join in on their side.
Exactly, I really don't understand the issue here. A computer is just a tool, and a computer running machine learning software is no different from one running FEA software, or Matlab, or whatever else. If an engineer designs a new kind of widget using a CAD program, they don't immediately suffer an existential crisis wondering whether it's actually PTC Creo that should be handed a patent.
In particular, note that there is no requirement that the person credited with a patent actually understand how they came up with it. As long as someone skilled in the art can reproduce the final product, the development process is irrelevant. Even if all you did is click the "start" button on black box and then waited for the result to pop out, you're the one who used the tool so you're the one who gets the credit.
"France has had to give a *massive* subsidy to EDF in order to keep it from going bankrupt from the price cap.
If you want the government to give the energy companies massive cheques then why not say so?"
That's exactly what they already are doing. Setting a higher price cap and then sending everyone a cheque with which to pay the bill is functionally identical to having a lower cap and giving the subsidy directly to the energy companies. The only difference is that the way they've chosen has a much higher bureaucratic overhead and more opportunity for fraud.
"Yeah, I think that the nerds at Tesla chose the name Autopilot because its functions and limitations are very similar to that of an autopilot on an aircraft."
The thing about Autopilot is that it's possible to have these arguments about exactly what it means and what it's reasonable to expect the general public to think about it. Full Self Driving is a little less ambiguous, and no amount of small print or claims about being in beta is going to change the message that name gives to the average person.
"Unlike the workstation market which is huge and makes up... oh wait, the workstation market is tiny in comparison to the consumer market."
You may want to double-check your numbers. Conveniently, Nvidia has just posted theirs - $2 billion from consumers, $4 billion from data centres. https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/08/nvidia_banks_132bn_charge/
"It seems highly unlikely that "Eastern European countries" and "Ukraine" would allowing Russian anti-virus software on their networks"
Have another read of the article. Those "Eastern European countries" include Belarus, Afghanistan* and Russia. Not countries likely to have many problems doing business with Russian companies. It's also noted that these attacks were detected in January, when plenty of people were still happy doing business with Russia and sanctions related to the current invasion were not in place.
* That's the author's mistake. Kaspersky actually said "several East European countries (Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine), as well as Afghanistan", it's only The Register that puts Afghanistan in Europe.
See all the comments above about having mobile cameras continuously mapping and monitoring your entire house. iRobot is not worth anywhere near $1.7B as a hoover company; as the article notes they appear to be at the brink of collapse financially. Amazon has not bought a hoover company, they've bought an autonomous robot spy company.
"Nuking your next-door-neighbour is the international-politics version of shitting on your own doorstep."
It's worse than that. As far as Korea (both of them) is concerned, it's not a next-door neighbour involved but rather a part of their own country. Nuclear annihilation is probably not a great way to implement reunification. I mean, war in general isn't the greatest either, but at least the winner tends to be left with a bit more than just an uninhabitable radioactive wasteland at the end.
The part you've missed is that there isn't any requirement for hydrogen. From the article:
"Inside the reactor, temperatures reach approximately 1,500°C (2,732°F), which is hot enough to split captured carbon dioxide and atmospheric water vapor to form syngas."
The whole point is that it takes carbon dioxide and water from the air, splits them to get carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and then combines those into useable fuel. There are no inputs other than air and energy.
"Why you'd wander about your home wearing an electrified headband to control lights and appliances when smartphones already allow voice command is not explained."
Why you'd wander about your home shouting at your phone to control lights and appliances when they already allow simple switch controls is not explained.
The vast majority of protein structures are recorded in the Worldwide Protein Data Bank - http://www.wwpdb.org/
They're freely available for anyone to download and do any research they want. Even if the paper initially describing a protein structure is behind a paywall at a journal, the structure itself will almost always be deposited in the protein data bank. Other similar resources include the European (not EU, it's based in the UK) UniProt database, although there will be a lot of overlap between them. I don't know the details of where all AlphaFold's training data came from, but it was almost certainly from one or more of the publicly accessible databases which exist specifically to enable this kind of research.
"Everyone who lives in a house with a garage or a private driveway either does, or would after they schedule a visit from an electrician."
Yes, that's exactly the point. Home charging is great for the minority of people who have private parking, but the majority of people in the UK are lucky if they're even able to park on the same street as their house.
"These problems are quite solvable. Yes, it will take a lot of time and cost a lot of money"
Again, that's exactly the point. Very few people are saying that it's impossible for electric cars to ever be practical. But there's a very big difference between "Fast chargers are readily available today" - the comment that started this topic - and "It can be solved in the future given lots of time and money".
The difference between the situation now and early cars replacing horses is that people weren't facing the prospect of a nationwide horse ban just a few years away, while car proponents insisted that the entire necessary infrastructure had already been built. Electric cars are unquestionably the future, but the future is not now. Ranges are short, charging is slow and inconvenient, the infrastructure is woefully inadequate, and most people in the UK cannot just do it themselves at home. Yes, we can fix all of these issues. But we haven't yet, so seeing people constantly insisting everything is already fine really isn't helpful.
Amazon does plenty of things wrong themselves, but that doesn't mean they're wrong to call out Microsoft's anticompetitive behaviour. Sure, they're only upset because it harms their own business, but if MS is continuing bad behaviour that's already been taken to the European Commission, it shouldn't really matter who happens to be complaining about it this time.
Plus it's also worth noting that it's not really the same company that shafts sellers. Sure, technically it's all Amazon, but there's essentially no connection between AWS and Amazon retail other than happening to both have Bezos at the top. At least as far as I'm aware, almost all the really bad behaviour comes from Amazon's retail and logistics. I doubt AWS is staffed entirely by angels, but at least they don't seem to be any worse than any other company of a similar size.
And of course, the ambiguity isn't helped by the fact that emojis aren't actually standardised. The same emoji can look completely different in different programs, or even in different versions of the same program. Some examples shown here - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Cultural_influence - with supposedly the same emoji being represented as either a deformed face with massive earings hanging from its eyes, a face with tears of joy, or a face with small blue ears. Slightly further down the same page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#Controversial_emoji - you can choose from the same emoji being a pistol, revolver, shotgun, water pistol, ray gun, supersoaker, or any number of other things. You don't need to worry about people interpreting the same picture in different ways, because much of the time you have no idea what picture they actually intended to send in the first place.
The really silly part is that while some people are going on about how emojis allow all kinds of additional nuance to communication and are evolving into their own language, what they miss is that the entire reason we moved to limited alphabets was specifically because pictograms are a terrible way to reliably convey meaning. A huge amount of art relies on the fact that different people interpret pictures in different ways. Several board games are built entirely around the problem of interpreting pictures. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but no two people agree on what those words actually are.
Depends on how big said chips are. You get around 600 10mm dies per 300mm wafer. A CPU might use multiple 14mm (200m^2) dies, so obviously you get a lot less. This fab is aimed at various less cutting-edge things so might get more. 400 million chips would probably be optimistic, 50 million might be a bit of an underestimate.
The politics of coal power revolve almost entirely around jobs, and the subsequent votes they produce. The vast majority of jobs in a coal power plant are related to handling coal, with of course even more once you factor in mining, transport, and so on. Replacing coal with geothermal would be no better in political terms than replacing it with anything else.
"What's the unit smaller than a nanometer ?"
In SI units, the picometre.
"Because, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I had already read that we are approaching the physical limits of the Universe. Just as you can't do colder than absolute zero, you can't go smaller than the size of an atom."
You're very wrong. We've been studying things smaller than atoms for well over a century now - protons were first theorised over two centuries ago. And we've been studying the structure of the things inside atoms for getting on for 60 years. Manufacturing at that scale may be a little tricky with current technology, but it's certainly nothing like a physical limit imposed by the laws of the universe.
"We don't need to get rid of guns, we need to keep a handle on nutcases."
And yet the people most in favour of guns are the same ones most opposed to any kind of competent healthcare. Texas, for example, recently implemented several even more pro-guns laws, while cutting well over $100 million from the budget for mental health care. If anyone genuinely believed that guns aren't the problem because it's really a mental health issue, you'd see the NRA and the Republican party desperately clamouring for health care reform and funding. What you actually see is the exact opposite. It makes it painfully obvious what the real motivation is.
Actually, the term comes from "language of the Franks", whose various kingdoms covered most of western Europe at different times, and it was around long before any kind of united France or French language existed. The original lingua franca was a pidgin language used around large parts of the Mediterranean for trade between people who spoke many different languages.
So it's actually the exact opposite. Not only has French never been the lingua franca, but efforts like the one in the article all but guarantee it never could be.
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