* Posts by MachDiamond

8717 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Root Cause

"If the board's bonuses are related to the share price then all the board cares about is share price, to the extent that it's better for them to use profit to buy the company's own shares and drive the price up instead of using it to fund R&D to make the company better"

There are times when it makes sense for a company to buy back shares. It's not necessarily better to shovel money into R&D if, for example, you are a car company and the CEO wants to build humanoid robots. Spending money to bring new models to market or develop technology so the company can build better cars faster and cheaper, sure.

There's a certain management cost for every share of stock issued. If it looks like the company would have fewer or the same number of shareholders after a buyback, that could mean savings on administration. The price per share should go up if the company's market cap remains the same and that might reduce the number of small shareholders.

It's not a universal that stock buybacks are bad.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Root Cause

"Why do they still have power after that phase?"

It's because the IPO is a good way for investors to be given a big payday AND still hold a fair amount of ownership in the company. If the company doesn't seem like it's going to last that long, the venture capitalists and pump it up and garner big return as they run for the hills. It's also a carrot to get people to work unholy hours sacrificing their health and family life for a possible big pay off down the road.

There's still the times when going public is useful for ramping up quickly to earn money while a patent is still valid or before the competition with more money can make a copy for less and capitalize on the work of developing an idea into a product. That sort of thing happens a bunch with crowd funding. A company, often in China, will see a good product being pitched on a crowd funding site and will have that item in production and shipping by the container load before the funding drive closes.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Bog Zech?????

"The responsibility for the railway mess can't be laid solely at the door of the Tories. They planned it and started the process, but Labour had it in their maifesto to reverse it if elected. Of course, as soon as they were elected they promptly abandoned that pledge."

The only difference between any of them is their blazer badge and who pays them off with briefcases full of cash.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Bog Zech?????

"no chance of risking a couple of pints the night before a shift as blood alcohol fail levels really low,

That would depend on the job. If you are a heavy equipment operator or a surgeon, being slightly impaired can be a big problem. If you are a MD at a company, being half out of your skull might not make any noticeable difference in job performance one way or the other in many cases. I expect there are plenty of people that can put cabbages in a crate to send off to a store after a serious bender the night before or even after a small indulgence back in their car during morning break. The person driving the crates of cabbages around the facility with the forklift, not so much.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Bog Zech?????

"until someone demands that someone (usually government) must Do Something."

The politicians then have some debates on what to do and how to do it that's high on rhetoric and low on useful discussion. When/if some legislation comes out, the miscreants that were the real target wind up with carve outs that make them exempt from whatever is passed. This is also ignoring that laws had already existed that would apply but they haven't been used for ages and over time, they were just ignored. The goal for the politicians was to be SEEN doing something, they did something so they can point to it and say something has been done, please donate to my reelection campaign.

I would like to see term limits and politician pages on Rotten Tomatoes with how well they did during the stint feeding at the public trough. Maybe some peer pressure would come into doing well enough during the short time you were allowed to hold office so your record doesn't live on portraying you as a useless shit forever and ever.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Deliberation

"You really want to screw Google up its easy - just make it a government department. Job done!"

In a Utopian world, I could see a Department of Search that is taxpayer supported, doesn't accept advertising, money for boosted ranking and where gaming the system becomes an offense that unleashes the full weight of government upon the person attempting the fraud, as a good thing. I don't think a private company could pull off a subscription based service that didn't start devolving into a scheme that puts its focus on maximizing value for the shareholders.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Or more like Yahoo killed Altavista, Google killed Yahoo?

"(anyone remember X10)"

The home control stuff? I've got a bunch. It's easy to put in, doesn't connect to the internet and it's fun to write scripts to automate some things if you are brave enough to construct your own power line interface. It's nice to be able to put switches for things wherever they are convenient.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Deliberation

"Remember their super clean interface, just as the rest started cluttering things up."

And as the dog returneth to his vomit, so does the search page to it's clutter. I stopped using Google when the entire first page of results was pure spam. How deep does one need to dig now to get to the first useful result, if any? Even using regular expressions to try and clean up the mess stopped working.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Deliberation

"run by Google, collecting metrics on everything from location to weather to traffic to music played, to passengers carried etc, etc, etc. Now that's a lot of data."

Yes, but the cars where you find it installed are often the more expensive models. While it's a lot of data to parse, it's data on people of means, celeb, politicians and VIP's of all sorts. Couple the data that companies hold about shopping, annual income, legal wrangling and everything else, there's not much left about those people that isn't known and for sale. Any vehicle I might be looking to purchase would get an instant nix for having Google or another giant data hoovering company software package installed. Even if I'm guilty as sin, I don't want my fate sealed with one subpoena for the data sent out by my car. A car that likely cost me tens of thousands to buy and thousands in interest costs.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Deliberation

"The answer is for someone to come along and do to Google what Google did to Altavista."

Since that time, Google has been able to write laws that keep that from happening to them. Anybody that tries will be guilty of a few Federal (US) felonies and subject to prison time that they might be able to plead down to a ban on using a computer for 5 years, can't have a mobe and can't publish anything about the case. This is one of the big problems that Cory points out.

Amazon Ring sounds death knell for surveillance as a service

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: meet a 'need'

"Having to cross town to go to the post office is a right royal PITA."

I find the inconvenience better than having something expensive being left on the porch that goes missing due to my being out in the field on a call out. The post office is a mile away and near to the local market, pharmacy and auto parts store. I don't go every day. I know when the different bills show up and I have tracking numbers for shipments so I know when they arrive. If nothing is coming in that excites me (new toys), I might only visit the post office once a week. When I worked in the next town over, I had my box there as I drove by the post office 2-4 times each day. If you get all of your post and shipments going to a PO Box and move a couple of times, you break a fair amount of Big Data tracking. Companies such as UPS and FedEx sell their lists and "share data with their partners" (same thing) so it's important to not have anything delivered to your home if you want to keep that tracking broken.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Copyright?

I'd never own a Ring so I don't have the 87 page "privacy policy/terms of use" documents, but I have to wonder if Amazon could be in violation of copyright law by releasing video to the police when the legal copyright might be vested in the owner of the camera. I'm not sure if CCTV would be considered covered under copyright. My big question is if Amazon has something buried in their terms that gives themselves the right to publish any of the footage that goes through their system and can legally hand it over to the plod if they wish. If Amazon does have that and willingly hands that footage over, no warrant would be necessary. I recommend steering clear of all that self-installed spy gear just on principle. Cloudy IoT stuff gets by back fur up (figuratively).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: meet a 'need'

"Being able to speak to whoever is at the door while not being physically present is genuinely useful sometimes."

Many can be convinced that it's useful, but I'm old enough to remember a time when there were no such devices. Hell, I'm old enough to remember when there was no internet. I have a sign on my door that tells people not to knock (no bell) and visitors are only by appointment. Casual visitors are not appreciated and my friends and family know that my schedule is quite erratic so just dropping by isn't a good thing so they should call in advance to make sure I'm in and have time to be social. Such is the life of somebody that does field service and is infrequently dressed to receive unexpected visitors when home.

I have CCTV around the house mainly to be able to see out rather than poke my head outside if I hear something. All deliveries go to the post office (in the US, if you have a PO Box and fill out a permission form, they can accept packages from anybody for you). I really don't want any camera inside as that's just evidence that could be used against me in most cases.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Correction for UK readers

"In the UK it's a piece of paper that gets rubber stamped without reading. "

That happens often enough in the US too and I expect everywhere else. There should be some repercussions on the judges when they sign off on a defective warrant. There are stories often enough in the news when the police get a warrant to raid the wrong house or a residence the person they are looking for moved from months in the past. I can recall one instance of a no-knock raid where a woman was shot and killed since the police crushed into the house in the wee hours with everybody screaming and torches beaming. If you are violently awoken from sleep with that going on, it's no different than a home invasion robbery. The lady's boyfriend shot at the police and was hit, but he survived where she didn't. The really stupid thing was the severity of the crime being investigated wasn't violent and as she worked as an EMT, she could have been arrested or detained for questioning with little fuss. The judge should be on the hook for her death for approving the warrant/raid. It didn't seem to have been proper for it to go down the way it did.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Do Police need a warrant to do door-to-door enquiries?

I support the concept of Police not being able to have access directly to footage without a warrant, but not sure this is the case here?

Can someone cleverer than me verify exactly what the issue is?"

The laws will vary according to where you live. In the US, a warrant is required for a LEO to search a non-public area or to seize evidence. If a cop knocks on the door and a person opens it and the cop sees a table loaded with drugs and zip-lock baggies, they don't need a warrant as a crime is happening in plain view. The person could have talked with the officer through a closed door or just cracked it open enough to be heard. If the officer pushed the door open that was only opened a couple of cm, that would be a problem. If the officer can look over a fence and see naughty things happening, that one thing. If they have to bring a stool or a ladder to see over, that might cross a line. Using a drone to see over the fence could be a problem where taking photos from an aircraft might not.

The police do not need a warrant to knock on a door and talk with whoever answers it. If they ask for CCTV footage and the owner of the cameras hands it over without any coercion, no warrant is needed. If the police want to require a copy or make any sort of threat, they need a signed warrant and making threats is always a problem as a judge may toss out the evidence and anything that might have been generated from it.

John Deere tractors get connectivity boost with Starlink deal

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Who does this benefit ?

"Not sure how disabling his tractor stops a striking farmer from striking, but yes."

A farmer on strike isn't going to sacrifice a whole crop to make a point, but he could hold back on delivery depending on what it is. A disabled tractor will certainly mean if he doesn't fall in line that whole crop will be a goner. It would also mean that said farmers aren't going to be heading into town and blocking roads with those tractors.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "Great for Farmers"

"My uncle isn't less skilled for having GPS guidance on his tractor. When you're on your 9th hour in the cab, the GPS glosses over those brief drifts of attention and avoids double-seeding, saving seed and money. When you know how much seed costs per tonne, these are tangible savings."

Yes, I do agree that GPS guidance is a good thing to avoid costly mistakes, but I should have been more clear that it was the other data that JD tractors will infer based on drive dynamics of the tractor. The skills I was thinking about are more to do with moisture levels, fertilizer, etc. A seasoned farmer can go out in the fields and tell what's going on with watering and soil nutrients, etc. If you package all of that up into a farm vehicle painted green that will do all of those things for you by subscription and apply some people that don't speak the language (to imply a lack of citizenship and very low pay expectations), any fault in that machinery won't have any back up. Those factory mechanics get really backed up at key points on the calendar when everybody needs their machines right F'ing now.

JAXA releases photo of SLIM lander in lunar faceplant

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Japan deserves a little more credit

"A design bioinspired by the wild haggis IIRC."

Wee Free Men reference for the win!

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Japan deserves a little more credit

"Not only managed a soft touchdown, but is within 55metres of the target site, which is impressive in itself."

yeah, but if you F one sheep.......... (Expeditionary Force reference).

The whole design of it coming to rest tipped on its side was really weird. Landing on a slope was really bad luck.

'Return to Office' declared dead

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Of course

"why should I work in an office when I can do the entire job remotely from home?"

Because when Elon starts thinking about SOME people being able to work from home, he starts crying. We can't have that, can we?

Missed expectations, zero guidance: Tesla's 'great year' was anything but

MachDiamond Silver badge

"because customers who lose the use of their car for a month while waiting for a simple part to arrive will remember that when choosing the brand of their next car."

Or truck. If you look at the front end of the Semi you notice that it's very different from other brands in that it doesn't have a proper bumper. In fact, it looks a lot like a front end accident would transmit into that huge windscreen taking it out, as well as a whole bunch of fiberglass. An expensive truck like that waiting for parts and a Tesla factory technician, if they won't release service information, is many credits per hour of down time.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"I suppose now he's actually made the Model 3, Tesla can revisit that and figure out what parts can be stripped out or sold on subscription plan to make it cheaper."

The CFO wrote on the handout for the last earnings call that the Model 3 is hitting the natural lowest price possible as it currently stands. Regardless of whether they can get people into a subscription, the hardware has to be installed. If it's a purely software product, if it isn't a new thing, people will get really pissed if what used to be standard is now behind a paywall.

The "Next Gen" Tesla will have to be paired to the bone and even then a $25k MSRP is hard to believe. If they delete 2 doors and all of the driver assistance hardware, that might shave enough weight to allow a smaller battery pack for a range comparable to the M3. 250 to 300 miles for the US market is de rigueur. Any less and it will be derided as a 'city' car. More than that means a bigger battery pack which is the biggest cost of an EV.

What might be a winner is a bare bones 2-door built for fleet service. That would include fleet management software and things like being able to use employee ident cards to access vehicles to get rid of a lot of physical key management. The system would also need to track distance driven and be able to fix costs to departments/projects. With a fleet charging system, cars reserved for longer trips could be prioritized for charging overnight. There could also be cars with smaller batteries for local driving at a lower purchase price. Paint them green and they can be used on a military base.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Right

"You make concern for the environment sound like a bad thing."

The 'concern' isn't the problem. It's how they've gone about making sure pollution and waste is reduced or eliminated and that has been by over-regulating to the point where compliance becomes more expensive than what it cost to cut down on environmentally bad things. Too many politicians do stupid things with the intent of doing good, but have no clue about the sorts of things they are passing laws to regulate.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: This was a 101 how not to do a conference call

"his yes men and we've got things like the Semi"

I cringed when the Semi was unveiled (officially). It's a fleet vehicle but Elon was going on about the development being centered around the driver when it should have considered the needs and wants of a fleet manager or a vice president of logistics. Those are the people that would be placing the orders and they don't care much about the comfort of the drivers and how many amenities there are for them in the truck. What's the cost/mile? What's the dry weight? What's the range at max weight, mid weight and empty? What are the maintenance items and cost? Serviceability? Repair costs for common accidents? and what's the out-the-door price? The Semi falls down all over the place from a fleet manager's perspective.

I can see where electric HGV's can be a very good fit that gets better when charging is provided at the dock and in the yard for the most amount of uptime. It's a niche market and isn't likely to be a good fit for owner/operators that take loads via brokers. As large as Semi is, it's a day cab not something that will work for driving teams. A 500 mile range is ~8 hours of driving @ 60mph with a bit of margin. That means that it's good for one shift and then needs time to charge so shifts will precess if time is allocated for charging (2 hours to full?). Drivers on regular shift work want the same start and stop times each day so more trucks (tractors in 'Merican parlance) are needed so there are enough for more than one shift per day.

A sleeper cab that can go 8 hours and recharge in 2 might work for some teams. The 2 hour charge stop allows both to do personal tasks and it's not as much of a problem if start and stop times precess rather than remain the same all of the time. The regular runs will be the low hanging fruit. Jobs that require lots of waiting such as at ports and railheads can be electrified in many cases.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"It may not be legally mandated, but there is GAAP, which most companies follow for a reason. When you start fucking with the numbers, people get rightly suspicious."

GAAP is proper for the entirety of the financials, but when you break out things such as gross margins for a product of line of products there's industry norms, but it would be hard to call those "Generally Accepted". Do you include average warranty costs in a gross margin calculation or nothing but Labor and Materials? There are many costs that could be considered as part of the gross margin, but there are no legal requirements. It can get very weird when you see things such as "free cash flow" and it's more money than the company has shown for net profit over the life of the company or has in cash/cash equivalents. I thought I'd go back to Uni and get an MBA, but I can't think of somebody that has one that I like. It would be handy to see where the wool is being stretched very tautly.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: FSD on old Hardware

"and we will get a couple hundred miles of free supercharging."

Not me, I won't even get in a Tesla vehicle, much less own or drive one.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Renewing your model line up is even more challenging."

Elon has never even tried. The 3 and Y are so similar that they have to be seen side by side to tell the difference. The silhouette they teased as being the low-priced model really looks like the Model 3 yet again. While the S has had some facelifts, it's grossly the same as it's ever been and the X needs loads of work starting with abandoning the problematic gull-wing doors. This may all be moot if the production space those models occupy would earn the company more money if it were used for that long promised Roadster 2.0.

Yet another sedan no matter the price will still only appeal to certain buyers. A coupe could bring in a few new buyers, but something like a wagon (estate) or a fleet-optimized model could gain the company more new customers and those that need to move from a sedan(ish) conveyance to something better for a family or carting the dogs around. A fleet vehicle would be a perfect government lash up for Elon that he should pursue before he's found out and politicians stop taking his calls.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Right

"You may be right about colonization and such but we need to protect our industries and prosperity at all costs."

There's a book I want to read on Quitting. The blurb seems to address what your comment made me think of. There are industries and businesses that a first world company can and should let go of. Not always completely, but mostly.

I see military uniforms in the US that are made overseas and I find that disturbing. It's taxpayer money leaving the country and it would seem that whomever thought that outsourcing anything used in the military was a good idea needs to be sent North for re-education. It can be fine if a domestic supplier bids a higher prices since their employees are going to pay all sorts of taxes and the company will pay taxes on their earnings so a chunk of the purchase price goes back into government coffers and relieves said government of supplying benefits to those people when they can't find jobs. There was the Toothpaste Issue where the US government awarded a foreign supplier a contract to supply toothpaste for institutional distribution (prisons, military, etc). Not only was it money being sent out of the country, the toothpaste was bulked up with melamine and caused a lot of health problems. It didn't get a lot of headlines since there's not much sympathy for convicted criminals and the military can just make up whatever story they want.

To keep an industry, a government has to come to grips with why it's not profitable for a company to build a certain product in the country and work to solve those issues. Wishing will not do the job and banning imports or applying a big tariff are negative solutions where a positive solution is much more preferable.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Right

""Made with Chinese slave labor""

Consumer electronics aren't a good example. Most of those are made mostly by robots so labor isn't a huge cost component. The wages in China have been competitive for some time in that industry as well. The bigger issue is do-good politicians that find the production of electronic devices to cause pollution, so they impose bans on certain processes or regulations administered by 4 or 5 different agencies that all have different reporting and compliance requirements. What that leads to is a very effective ban. It might only make a few components far too expensive or impossible to make in country, but when supply chains are broken it makes more sense for companies to locate to places where the supply chains for their product is contiguous. It's the environmental and regulatory policies that make manufacturing in China more cost effective. It's not the price of labor for your example.

People are also saying that China let Tesla in to steal Tesla's IP, but that's not true either. Some of the first Model 3's sold to the public when straight into a shipping container and off to Asia. For a comparatively paltry sum of money, one can buy a full tear down report from Munro and Associates. The report not only shows every nut and bolt, but the suppliers where known and analysis of where savings can be had and where the engineering looks very weedy. Roush has similar service and I'm sure there are plenty more. Anybody that's followed Scotty on Strange Parts may remember some of his visits to places that can X-ray IC's to determine their make and model or carefully peel back the layers and stick them in an electron microscope. Armed with that information, it could be possible to extract any programming. Of course, the most value is seeing how a competitor solved a design issue more than being able to make an exact duplicate. There are no durable secrets.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Right

"I hate to say this, but Musk is basically right about Chinese car manufacturers eventually crushing Western ones if we don't impose trade restrictions on them."

Attention has to be paid to dumping and unfair trading practices, but if the Big Two in the US don't get off their backsides and do some work, I don't have a problem with those backsides being handed to them. There's nothing intrinsically hard about building an electric vehicle. A company such as Ford has masses of experience building 90% of the vehicle already and what's left is "yet another" drive train option. They are only as hard as the companies want to make them. That's why the top of my EV list is a Bolt. It's not perfect, but the older ones aren't weighed down with useless features. I like simple. I like a car that isn't one single point of failure after another. I also like knobs and switches. I can reach out with muscle memory in my current petrol car to adjust the HVAC, radio, etc. I can feel the controls as opposed to a touch screen that takes vision and a smooth road.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Musk vs. the investor class

"Yes, just wait till you find out where your pension was invested..."

I'm ok. I'm living in a large portion of my pension. Owned outright (except for taxes). I'm too much of a control freak to let somebody else manage my money.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: This was a 101 how not to do a conference call

"We are seeing MY2025 models on the road from other makes already."

2 years in advance is a pretty typical lead time to be seeing full prototypes being tested after mules have been used to test various things in advance. There's a giant gulf between what the artists draw and what ultimately gets made. The Curtis Brubaker sketch that appears to be the design model for the Cybertruck wouldn't work as shown. The tailgate ramp appears to cross through the rear axle and that's the sort of thing that production engineers have to get sorted out along with finding a way to be in compliance with many local regulations and also so the vehicle can be put together on an assembly line. Elon's "First Principle Design" approach doesn't seem to take much into account when it comes to designing a car for mass production. Of course, Elon has no qualifications in engineering. The closet he has is an Arts degree in physics. I'd cut more slack if it was a physics degree from the college's school of Science. I'd also give him props for being self-taught if it wasn't for what comes out of his mouth on engineering being complete shite.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"The numbers show a halving of the margins that were a key selling point of the stock. "

Tesla calculates their gross margins differently than the rest of the industry so the figures have never been directly comparable. There's no legal requirement over what's put in and what's left out so if those details aren't listed, the numbers are meaningless and industry journalists have often said they were formulated to be overstated so a big drop is even worse.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"The amount of time he seems to spend actually doing what might be considered work appears to get smaller every day."

There's a reason why he went after the Xidiot that was Xitting the flights of his Gulfstream jet. The list of Mr. Green's private jet trips looked especially hypocritical on the eco front. It also laid bare how often he's not in the Tesla offices.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"He had the money to start his first X company, which ultimately became PayPal because he didn't have to worry about silly things like rent or other basic necessities."

It's a bit more tedious than that. Cofinity bought X and Elon insisted on the CEO position as well as stock and cash. When Elon headed down under on a honeymoon, the board sacked him and he found this out when he landed and turned right back around which did him no good as he had no friends in the company. Cofinity had a service called Paypal and the company renamed to PayPal before selling it off to eBay, but Elon was long gone before that, but still held stock. TL:DR, Elon really didn't have anything to do with what became Paypal otha than owning stock.

The big payday from the Paypal stock let him insert himself into Tesla by making a big investment on the initial funding round and then booting out the founders to claim all of the credit for inventing the electric car. JB Straubel had an even more dubious claim to being a Tesla founder, but there was a judge found cheap enough to rule that the two of them could call themselves founders regardless of the true story.

Now, don't get me started on how much money Elon's ventures have garnered from government grants and sweetheart loans. Every Elon company has a government aspect to it. SpaceX has been paid ~$2bn on the ~$3bn option A contract to provide a lander for the return to the moon. Boom.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: FSD on old Hardware

"but the older hardware without them will likely perform far worse."

From the onset of autonomous driving promises by Elon, I knew that Tesla fitting every car with hardware was going to mean a load of cars with expensive and useless hardware added long before the software was done. I've worked on complex systems that were a combination of software and very dedicated hardware when I worked on rocket landers. As the head of avionics, I worked very closely with the Guidance, Navigation and Control software engineer(s) and was constantly modifying the electronics as projects progressed. By the time we arrived at the point where we were building vehicles or new test stands, the initial designs were fossils buried in sandstone. It was so nice to be working with one/two off vehicles rather than having to support an installed base of legacy hardware. There would have been little chance of fitting the newest avionics in the earliest vehicles the company had built without total rebuilds. One of the biggest challenges we had was making management realize that making the software back-compatible would cost more money than just retiring the old prototypes and building new rockets. Small company, small team and rapid progress when not held back by business people that knew very little about what we were doing.

Dems and Repubs agree on something – a law to tackle unauthorized NSFW deepfakes

MachDiamond Silver badge

More laws that will be ignored

This is how politicians waste time so they look like they are doing something. The easiest thing to do is add "moral rights" to copyright so using somebody's likeness in any form (pron or not) can be illegal. I say "can" as there is always that chance that even random AI generated actors could wind up looking like somebody and it would be a waste of court time to hear endless cases on the subject. There has to be a test to show that the virtual persona is based on a known person. Obviously, somebody well known should be recognizable to the producers of the content if their AI gets too close. It will be important that producers show their virtual actors were randomly generated and not based on anybody in particular.

It all gets weirder when you look at photos of somebody when they have an unposed expression on their face. I have a photo of James May that my friends say looks like me when I show it to them. We don't look similar in other photos. It was just a strange combination of things such as hair, lighting, angle, expression and I have a very similar jumper to the one he was wearing. Some aspects of copyright come down to an "everyman" test. The two items are compared side by side and if most people find them the same or nearly so, the later version violates the copyright of the first.

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Required edits:

"2 amendments if I may: 'British marque's' -> 'German marque's' & 'manufactured ... at the assembly plant ... in the UK' -> 'manufactured in Germany, final assembly in the UK'."

You left out who the distributor is. In the US, what laughingly gets called "government" wants to require people selling things on eBay, Amazon, etc to state the country of origin of the thing. Like I have any clue where it came from when I've bought it at an estate or jumble sale. I was looking at a box of Cheerios yesterday morning and IT didn't state where the cereal was made, only that it was distributed by General Mills. Since the packaging was in English and Mexican, I expect the cereal could have been made in Mexico and imported. Not that I'd find that information in the box.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "It should be pretty quick"

"This is probably ignoring the fact that there is almost certainly a ton of stuff in the way which requires half of the front end to be removed just to get to the bolt and takes a total of 18 hours to do."

The first 16 hours are spent trying to find where to insert the spudger and pry to get the cosmetic cover off that hides the bolts you need to remove, to remove the part that allows you to get to the bolt you need to remove and inspect. What is this unholy fascination of making sure nary a single fastener is seen on a product? When I make something, I feature the screws and bolts! No safety Torx in my house!

Raspberry Pi on IPO plans: 'We want to be ready when the markets are ready'

MachDiamond Silver badge

Reasons for an IPO

Going public is usually a signal that top investors and others with lots of private stock want to cash out. Second on the list is when a company has a product they need to ramp faster than they have the budget to do and Vulture Capital money is too dear. Beyond that, the reasons get nebulous such as needing a lot more distance between the C-Level and product liability lawsuits such as if you want to supply aspirin to hospitals. The cost to the company to be publicly traded is huge. It's a whole full time office of people that just do the required paperwork and file the required forms at the proper time.

I'm not hopeful that good things will happen with RP being publicly traded. Maximizing value for the share holder and adding parasitic cost to the product will only make room for the next product to take its place for half the price and twice the community support.

Cruise being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the road

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: +1 for Carlin

"We, as fleshbags, are not allowed to, or at least ethically, should not copy/plagiarise other peoples' work"

To a certain extent. That the content was in the realm of the sort of comedy that George wrote isn't protected in the same way that rock music can't be protected. Using recordings of George Carlin's performances to train an AI could be a copyright violation. There isn't much in the way of case law at the moment since this sort of use is so new and the legal system being so slow. In general, if you purchase a license for an album/performance, when you read the fine print it says you have purchased the rights to enjoy the performance in a private setting. If you want to play the album on the radio or stream it on the internet, you must have paid for a license that allows that. Broadcast rights are not included with the CD, Album, Digital Download, etc.

I'm hoping a judge hearing a case like this will set the correct precedent that material used to train an AI must be licensed for such use.

As to using George's likeness and voice/mannerisms, that's beyond the Pale. He was an amazing comedian and another comedian that wants to fill his shoes will need to be at least as good and at least as hard working.

I met George fortyish years ago and made his lunch when I worked at a dive bar in the US that he'd visit every so often.

Samsung pins hopes on AI to return to growth this year

MachDiamond Silver badge

Oh joy, more AI

I spent the day being productive. Thinking about all of the things I worked on, AI wouldn't have made any difference. It would have taken me longer to set up the problem than to just do the work. If I were doing things that would be repeated over and over, perhaps AI could help, but I'm finding that the money is going to be in bespoke solutions to problems that affect people. An AI can't ask itself if what it comes up with holds value for a human based on a lived life.

Users now keep cellphones for 40+ months and it's hurting the secondhand market

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

"I admit it is pretty cool to carry around a terabyte of storage in a pocket."

I already hear about plenty of people that have lost all of their digital stuff when their phone goes titsup or missing. If they only had a limited amount of storage, they would have moved things off to a laptop or desktop (or even somebody else's machine(cloud)). Instead, all of the photos they took of Jr. growing up vanish when the phone takes a swim in the loo.

From a security standpoint, 1Tb of data you have amassed is going to be a huge liability. Are you certain you want to hand all of that over to the filth to have a good rummage through?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

" I want the idle, unambitious bastards who specify phones to pull their fingers out and give me a one week battery life in a package that's not unduly big or thick, doesn't give up on the features I now take for granted, nor hobble the performance to achieve said battery life."

Are you sure a better name wouldn't be "Veruca Salt"?

I don't my phone to be wafer thin so a bigger battery is preferable over a thin phone. It's also going to be more robust if it isn't too thin. Since I don't live neck deep in my phone all day long, I only charge a couple of times each week unless I have been using it a lot and then is a third day that week.

If you want a paper-thin phone that you can use all day long with the power of a Cray, all I can suggest are some courses in physics. Do you want a battery with the energy density of TNT or is it not tooo inconvenient to plug the phone in overnight?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

"And if you find a better deal from another company, chances are your current provider will match it"

And if another provider/reseller comes along with a better price, you aren't locked into your contract for another 18 months paying a premium price.

The UK and Europe can be different, but in the US there are 3 primary network operators. Where I live only 2 give coverage at my home. I've had all three and T-Mobile can blow me as not only is the coverage in my city very poor, they call going offline for 25 hours a maintenance outage. Obviously, nobody has taught the CSR staff the difference between a repair and maintenance. They also had no clue when repairs might be affected. Other times they'll tell me that the system is up and running when it's most certainly not.

These days I just get a used phone when I need a replacement and pick a VPNO with good prices and plans.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: No real surprise

"AFAIK they are only supporting Pixel devices from now on"

That's sad. I'm not that interested in a phone that originates from the underworld (or at least that's the branding on it). It just seems a bit off to me to de-google a Google branded phone.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: re: Don't make many (preferably no) long trips.

"Who plans for fuel stops in civilised countries??"

In the US, once you are off the interstate highways, gas stations get much further apart and the ones in small towns aren't open 24/7. That's why you want to plan. I don't have an EV yet, but I plan my trips with my petrol car. That there are many stations means I can make stops up on the fly much of the time, but at least I have an outline of what I want to do before I leave. I check fuel prices as well. It can make sense to stop short if going until needing to refuel puts you someplace with much higher prices. If you see that the gas stations along your route start closing around dark, you might want to make sure you stop and top up if you will still have some miles to go.

I've done road trips where a friend and I just choose a direction and go, but those had always been along major highways. These days, I really like to take the road less traveled and stop for lunch at "Mom's Diner" rather than Denny's. I also like to pour over the maps and find the really interesting places to stop and see along the way.

Musk claims that venting liquid oxygen caused Starship explosion

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Re:Musk being on the left?

"The primary reason businesses move manufacturing/etc bases isn't "cheap labour" but "automation" - it's much harder to lay of 75% of your workforce in-place than to simply up sticks and start from scratch elsewhere "

A big switch to automation also means a much different factory layout, less of a need for employee services (loos, cafeterias, etc), HVAC, lighting. It also makes sense for continuity to get a new plant up and running while the old one is still producing product so customers aren't forced to find alternatives during an interval. Getting some distance between the factory and a whole load of people getting the axe will be safer too.

AI-driven booze bouncers can ID you with face scan

MachDiamond Silver badge

I complain the opposite

I joke with the cashiers these days that they don't ask for my ID. I say it with a smile and I do get very annoyed with the local shop that makes their staff ID everybody even when it's extremely obvious, as it is in my case, that I am more than old enough to purchase anything they sell.

EFF adds Street Surveillance Hub so Americans can check who's checking on them

MachDiamond Silver badge

Amateurs

Law enforcement has been dropping the ball on basic investigative techniques for years. I'm not against the use of technology, but it's just a tool and the outputs of those tools need to make sense rather than the police slavishly believing the outputs even when they make no sense. Gunshot detectors can be a good tool if there are lots of gun crimes in an area. If a call comes in from somebody that there's been a shooting, the detectors can help narrow down where to look and possibly find where the shooting happened.

Gratuitous use of license plate readers can be an issue as it's often just mass surveillance. I know of a couple shopping centers that have them and the Los Angeles Police Department keeps extensive databases on number plates with patrol cars feeding in data 24/7. I know an LAPD officer that was in a class where they allowed him to look up his own car (the system isn't available to all officers) and he commented on how scary it was to see a listing of everywhere his personal car had been logged. He did notice one mistake as he knew that at that date/time he was a considerable distance away on a trip with his wife in his car. Facial recognition is also prone to big mistakes. I don't see a problem for a shop to use it so they know if somebody they've had issues with before returns, but again, it's a tool and there could be errors. For the police to arrest somebody based solely on a facial recognition system tagging them can be a huge problem. Often enough, it shows up the shortcomings when the wrong person is detained and it's completely obvious they are not the droid(s) the police are looking for.