* Posts by Peter2

2941 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The d in £sd

half a dinarii for my life story….

Technically speaking, you'd give two farthings, as half a penny/dinarii. A farthing of course is derived from a fēorðing, which is old English for "fourthling", or possibly "four thing" or "quarter" in modern english. The same coin was known as a "quadrans" to the romans (depending on the era)

NASA selects 'full force' for probe into UFOs

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Is it neccesary?

"If there was something to be seen, it would be on video by now."

And if there are videos or photos, how many are elaborate pranks?

http://www.openminds.tv/virgins-ufo-prank-frightens-police-april-fools-day-1989/26742

Deluge of of entries to Spamhaus blocklists includes 'various household names'

Peter2 Silver badge

I get why server admins use Spamhaus, but they must miss A LOT of genuine communication by doing so. Seems more trouble than it's worth to be honest.

As with everything, it depends on how you use it. My anti spam filtering solution gives messages a score, and predefined things happen with certain score ranges. (eg, deliver to mailbox, quarantine, delete outright)

Personally I do use Spamhaus, but the score imparted is just over that of quarantining just on the basis of being listed.

However, you also get points deducted for using certain words, so a legitimate email containing words commonly used in our industry would get it through the spam filter despite being listed. An email not containing such words, and containing spammy words such as "unsubscribe", "viagra", etc etc etc would remain in quarantine, unless it pushed the score up to the point that it's deleted outright.

Russian military uses Chinese drones and bots in combat, over manufacturers' protests

Peter2 Silver badge

You did I take it read where I suggested that such a drone (or micro tankette, really) would be useful for "urban combat"?

ie; inside towns or cities, where fields are conspicuous by their absence.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: There's a reason for the statement

There's a reason for the statement

Because China is doing it's best to avoid being seen as supplying Russia and ending up sanctioned to the same extent as Russia is?

Peter2 Silver badge

Only because Russian designers are morons. If you actually wanted a usable vehicle along these lines then i'd start with a mobility scooter and add a half inch of armour, enough that it's bullet proof. Then add a small turret on top with your choice of weapon.

Then in urban combat the only thing capable of dealing with it is an anti tank weapon; which have minimum arming distances for their warheads to avoid taking out people that fire them too close. Something which would be quite unfortunate if you ran into one in a building; since you couldn't damage it with gunfire and an anti tank missile worth more than the thing wouldn't explode if it hit it.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: This is something that needs paying attention

"Fighter jets" are designed to gain control of the sky by shooting down opposing fighters and tactical bombers.

A small drone with a pistol or hand grenade glued to them can't take on a fighter jet. My prediction is that eventually you'll just get a new hierarchy of drones.

Small drones for surveillance/artillery spotting with just a camera.

Slightly larger drones with a laser designator for laser guidance of artillery shells.

Larger drones than this, armed with small bombs or similar.

Larger drones than this, equipped with sensors to detect drones and armed with a handful of anti drone weapons.

The anti drone weapons will probably be short range (ie; a < 1 mile range going at speeds only marginally faster than the drone can fly with a small warhead suitable to down a small drone.

When this happens then inevitably over time scope creep will kick in, and eventually the larger drones will end up humping around larger and larger weapons until they are able to damage attack helicopters, which will probably be the new top end of the "drone" hierarchy..

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: This is something that needs paying attention

Yes and no.

Yes, it opens up new tactics. However, if the devices are small then they also carry a limited payload. Non military versions also tend to offer no way of hiding from radio location, which means that a functioning army with radio location equipment can tell the artillery people where the operator is to drop a 155mm artillery shell on them.

If you deploy a million of them then this causes quite serious problems with charging, reloading and supplying them. Personally, if I was the opposition i'd simply wait until you'd deployed the lot, and then promptly blow away the local power infrastructure your using for charging, retreat a hundred miles and blow the bridges on roads between the drone force and it's resupply to complicate you resupplying. At the point you run out of either juice to charge with or munitions then they become effectively useless, and you could advance back over the top of your collection of useless drones. The military tend to say amateurs study tactics; professionals study logistics" etc.

Logistics is always the biggest headache of any advancing army; see the utter chaos the Russian army in Ukraine caused by a simple strategy of "blow up ammunition depots".

However the issue of large numbers of cheapish things winning against a small number of expensive things is well known; in the early 19th century the "Jeune École" school of thought was that explosive shells would doom [wooden] battleships. Then swarms of fast torpedo boats would doom battleships. It only actually happened a good century later when swarms of torpedo carrying aircraft did it; fundamentally economic power expressed by building a large number of cheap, reliable and deployable weapons that are effective against expensive stuff wins wars.

Philippines orders fraud probe after paying MacBook prices for slow Celeron laptops

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: I would expect that even Apple would knock a buck or two of MSRP

Normally, yes. You have a lot of stock, and shifting a large amount is worth knocking a bit off the price.

During the pandemic nobody had anything in stock, so why bother to offer a discount when you can probably sell it for 20% more than the RRP if you actually had it available then and there?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Availability

Just before the pandemic lockdown period I was on the phone to a supplier after some laptops as it was obvious that things were going sideways and we needed laptops for staff who ordinarily didn't leave the office.

He was sitting there refreshing the stock levels every few seconds and entire stock ranges were going out of stock while we were on the phone. I ended up with a load of Levano laptops that ordinarily I wouldn't have bought simply because they were in stock at an acceptable price for an acceptable spec at the time. Another few hours and i'd have probably been buying those Celerons.

Also: Our paperwork for the order is technically correct, but it followed the path of ordering what was in stock via phone with the supplier, then confirming the order via email and then filling in the authorisation paperwork afterwards which might look "interesting" from the point of view of somebody investigating if the proper procedure had been followed.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Microtransactions?

AUDI: Amazingly Unsafe Driver Inside?

Businesses should dump Windows for the Linux desktop

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: preaching the gospel

Office is not as serious an issue as it once was. Ironically, mostly due to Microsoft rather than any competition!

Switching away from Windows used to be outright impossible. Almost everything required office installed to generate documents via API's, and you really needed Outlook/Exchange for anybody working in a team as there were no workable alternatives. Exchange needed Windows Server, and Outlook tied you to the Windows desktop.

Microsoft has voluntarily moved exchange out of the local server infrastructure to the cloud, which means that with no (local) exchange requirement you don't have a windows server requirement.

That you can now run Outlook Web Access and have the same performance as in the desktop version pretty much removes the requirement for the Windows desktop. That leaves the only obstacle being that pretty all of the productivity software is written for Windows, although a few these days are delivered via web browser and so don't really care which platform your using.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: No shit, Sherlock

Anyway, any kind of reactor that needs extensive cooling is going to need water at some point and this is becoming a bigger risk as sources of plentiful water become scarcer.

Nuclear reactors use seawater for cooling, and there appears to be no potential shortage of seawater.

For that matter, if you had enough energy then you could run desalination plants and create fresh water by stripping the salt out of seawater.

US car industry leads the world in production cuts over chip shortages

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: how did we ever survive with cable actuated HVAC controls

On top of that, modern cars offer much better rides, better interior quality, and more comfort features, on top of better fuel economy and vastly improved safety.

There were some really great cars back in the day but no way I would exchange my modern car for any of them as a daily driver.

Just to note; a Morris Minor from like 1960 can do ~45mpg on a petrol engine, relative to (marketing figures of ) around 55 MPG on a modern car.

A diesel car from ~2000 will have the same fuel efficiency as a car from today and will (depending on spec) still have ABS, cruise control, heated seats, reverse parking sensors as well as equivalent ride comfort etc. Missing features are lane keeping cruise control and similar things, which you may or may not miss!

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

Peter2 Silver badge

This suggests that he's right:-

Research from road safety charity Brake found that despite 17 to 19-year-olds only making up 1.5% of driving licence holders, they are involved in 9% of all fatal and serious crashes in the UK. It is for this reason that new driver insurance premiums are extremely expensive.

At ALA we conducted some of our own research into the issue of young and new driver accidents, considered reasons behind the phenomenon and looked at how new all drivers can protect themselves.

New Driver Accident Rates

From our research we found that just over one in five (21.6%) new drivers had been involved in an accident during their first year of driving. 26.12% of new drivers aged between 18 and 24 admitted to having an accident in their first year.

(https://www.ala.co.uk/connect/tackling-young-driver-accidents/)

Which to be fair is intuitively right; people with less experience make more mistakes.

On the other hand, the mistakes that younger drivers make are rarely fatal, especially with improved vehicle designs; young drivers tend to end up in rear end shunts or accidents pulling out of junctions having checked they were safe left, then checking right, pausing too long and then pulling out into the path of a vehicle that had come along since they decided that left was clear. The more fatal accidents are more generally connected to driving under the influence of drink or drugs, or racing to impress their mates.

Honestly? The worst human drivers are considerably better and safer than an unsupervised Fully Self Driving Car. Which we know; which is why they aren't allowed to drive without a human driver in the seat. My issue is that the car can put you in an inescapable position and then throw control at you. It's fundamentally unsafe.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Cats and Dogs?

And a printed copy of one of those "your speed "X" MPH" signs, with a fixed value of something like 34MPH just up the road from it, as I recall.

Peter2 Silver badge

HGV's are probably limited to 60MPH for two reasons. First is safety; they don't want huge HGV's playing racing drivers.

Second is obviously going to be fuel efficiency; if I gain somewhere over 20% fuel efficiency (on flat[ish] roads) by going 10MPH slower then that's going to be as a result of reduced air resistance. My car is relatively pointy and therefore one assumes reasonably aerodynamic; an HGV is as aerodynamic as a breezeblock and so would probably suffer considerably worse fuel consumption at higher speeds.

Peter2 Silver badge

Provided you're aware of the system's limitations, and are *always* supervising it, it's a good way to reduce driver fatigue (your brain is no longer running the complex "regulate-speed-and-distance" algorithm, instead you're just "stay in lane, watch out for weird ACC stuff") which brings more safety benefits than the disbenefits of the system.

I have a 20 year old car that has cruise control. On long motorway drives, it takes little intelligence to realise that the fuel efficiency on a diesel engine is really, really good at ~60 MPH. As in, something like 8 minutes per hour slower nets me a (fuel) cost saving of >20%.

Hence you find an HGV doing 60MPH, sit a few hundred yards behind it, set the cruise control and then as you note your brain is no longer running the complex "regulate-speed-and-distance" algorithm, and nobody pulls in close behind an HGV (or in front of you) so you can just cruise onwards basically avoiding driving off the road.

So what's the improvement in the super lane keeping cruise control to this ye old fashioned version? Personally i'm happy with limiting my problems to "avoiding other idiotic drivers trying to kill me"; adding my own car trying to kill me is not the sort of progress that I personally want.

GitHub courts controversy by suspending Tornado Cash developers and reneging on cookie commitments

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: What a confusing country...

Writing code that could be used as part of an illegal money laundering operation is not illegal. If you think that money laundering just involves running some code you found on the internet you are not going to last long as a money launderer :-)

Traditionally, no. However, traditionally cryptocurrency didn't exist.

With respect to your point 2; I would suggest that if it was only used for money laundering then a court might well decide that what you consider to be "just code" could mean that you were an accomplice or accessory to a crime, and creation of software used to commit an offense can be criminal; possession of certain "hacking" tools is a criminal offense in the UK in the same way possessing lockpicking tools without reasonable excuse is.

Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper'

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: 111

Another point of view is simply that there is a finite amount of money available. The NHS now costs ~7.5% of GDP a year and it has long passed the point that you can keep increasing the amount available to it every year by percentage points of GDP every year is sustainable.

What the NHS is willing to do depends on how much money it has, and so if you continue to increase the amount of money then they will continue to find things to spend the money upon and it has passed the point that this is sustainable.

Personally, I feel that the NHS needs at least 3 distinct budgets. One for reactive maintenance (A&E?) one for long term maintenance (quality of life issues such as hip replacements) and another for what amounts to end of life care so you don't end up with one part of the NHS draining all of the funds from the other parts of the organisation.

Nomad to crypto thieves: Please give us back 90%, keep 10% as a reward. Deal?

Peter2 Silver badge

I don't know about the US, but this is a copy and paste of section 1 of the Theft Act 1968

Basic definition of theft.

(1)A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it; and “thief” and “steal” shall be construed accordingly.

(2)It is immaterial whether the appropriation is made with a view to gain, or is made for the thief’s own benefit.

Therefore dishonestly appropriating crypo coins is stealing and the person doing it is a thief by British legal definitions so they could be done as a common thief.

Since basically the entire US legal system (including large chunks of their constitution and bill of rights) are largely a copy and paste of the British legal system as it stood in the law books they had in 1776 it would be surprising if their acts regarding theft are massively divergent from that.

Nancy Pelosi ties Chinese cyber-attacks to need for Taiwan visit

Peter2 Silver badge

I.. see. So your 'reliable' source is a Ukrainian propaganda channel?

My "reliable source" is a video of somebody doing it, which is good enough for most people.

I give it till the end of the month.

I take it you don't mean the end of August. August 2022? Just to be sure that we're on the same page.

Given that Russian forces occupy half the territory they did in February i'm not particularly convinced that they are going to steamroller to victory in the next three weeks, but we'll see in 3 weeks time.

So Kiev's been busily trying to poke holes in a bridge designed to withstand a nuclear war using it's 88kg wunderwaffe, which would have been a lot more useful countering anti-Kiev advances in the east.. Which is what MLRS was designed for, ie area attack/denial. It's the grid-square removal service.

Grid Square Removal System was the British army joke name for the MLRS based on the development programme being called the General Support Rocket System. The thing is, it never stopped being developed. Western countries have long since developed it from being an indiscriminate bombardment system such as the Grad system that you lot have to something that tosses 6 guided missiles per launch cell.

And this looks very much like it's done the job quite successfully; I wouldn't want to be running trains over this bridge.

https://twitter.com/OAlexanderDK/status/1553357749676900355

But such is politics. I feel very sorry for the Ukrainians, who've been lead down this path by the West and Ukraine's oligarchs. Nearly 1/4 of Ukraine's population has been displaced or killed, and there's been collosal damage to infrastructure and property. And for what?

I feel very sorry for the Ukranians. I think the main Reason for Putin invading was to eliminate the threat from Russians looking over the border at Ukraine and seeing their much better quality of life. I think the main reason they are fighting so hard is to keep their quality of life and not have to live under the Russian system of governance, if you can call "might makes right" a system of governance.

Peter2 Silver badge

Pics or it didn't happen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HE0379-GxKQ

heavily defended front-line places like Pisky are falling, and once DPR/LPR/Russian forces have broken through all the fortifications around the old Donbas contact line, it'll have a clearer run to take everything east of the Dnieper River.

So 6 months on, Ukraine will still fall in 3 days time?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: ... the likes of TSMC turned Taiwan into a vital source of technology

The ones that would have been destroyed in the cultural revolution by the communists along with the rest of China's heritage if they'd have left them behind?

Peter2 Silver badge

Russia Stronk! F3ar teh might of rUssiA11!11

Alternately, the Ruble is worth so little that people empty large bags of Ruble notes into the air in shopping centres in Russia and nobody bothers picking them up because they aren't even useful as toilet paper, let alone currency.

The Russian economy is utterly screwed, having broken contracts and confiscated anything within arms reach. This has been followed up by threatening to nuke their trading partners twice a week for the last 6 months, and you lot can't figure out why nobody thinks it's worthwhile trading with the Russians anymore, even including the Chinese?

About the most than can be hoped for is that the Chinese will snap up bankrupt Russian businesses when your economy totally collapses.

The formerly feared Russian military has proven to have better social media than soldiering skills, which is why they are 6 months into a 3 day "special operation" to institute a puppet government, and are relatively in a worse position than on day one.

And yet we are supposed to fear Russia, or think that we are somehow as badly off as Russia is? No thinking person is going to believe that, no matter how much propaganda you pump out.

Peter2 Silver badge

That's strange. It's almost as if the original poster has created another account to reply with to make it appear as if they are in something less of a minority. ;)

Peter2 Silver badge

China impose sanctions on the west?

Excuse me while I try and avoid laughing. China has a export focused economy based on selling to the west. If they decide to stop selling to us then it's going to destroy them economically, and while a lack of cheap tat will be an issue for some while as soon as factories are set up to produce replacements then nobody is going to go back to buying from China again.

It would be the biggest mistake of the century should China try that, so they won't unless they want to utterly ruin their economy. That would only make sense unless they were ready to invade Taiwan, but looking at Ukraine and the relative effectiveness of Russian vs Western military equipment in practically untrained hands will have shelved invasion plans for at least as long as it takes to replace Russian equipment with something that might stand some prospect of working, should they invade.

Also; Russia's has committed economic suicide over gas and confiscating industries in Russia under foreign ownership; even once sanctions are released banks and companies bitten once aren't going to want to spend on building infrastructure in Russia again. And after Russia deciding to weaponise gas supplies after countries have been forced to diversify their suppliers to deal with that whom do you think is going to put themselves in a position where Russia might screw them over again by buying their gas again afterwards?

Peter2 Silver badge

Did you realise that you are parroting the same propaganda attack lines as used in Ukraine when Russian supporters attack the US for supplying weapons requested by the Ukrainian Government who want to resist being invaded by a bunch of totalitarian despots?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Call China’s bluff without quarter

Did you study history in China, or merely at a western university sponsored by China?

The guy who stood in front of the tank was not hurt by the tank; he has never been traced. Which in China most probably means "executed".

And are we denying that troops and tanks fired into crowds at Tianemen square? Seriously? If it never happened, why do the Chinese need to censor it?

Post-quantum crypto cracked in an hour with one core of an ancient Xeon

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Ancient?

I did think "hah, a Xeon E2650" for a moment.

I then remembered that our company still has those running in a 2012R2 server, and the only likely change is switching the OS to server 2019 before it goes EOL in october 2023. The hardware is perfectly adequate for testing and BCM so there's no point in paying to dispose of it.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Reactor disposal

There weren't at Oklo; which has a 1.8 billion year track record of safe geological disposal. :)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: @Dr Syntax - "more radioactive"

Nuclear costs £92.50 per megawatt hour and was therefore decried as being a dreadful and unaffordable deal by the green critics. (eg https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/dec/21/hinkley-point-c-dreadful-deal-behind-worlds-most-expensive-power-plant)

Do you realise how cheap and quick wind and solar is now? The nuke cartels are no longer opponents. The oil cartels have just shot their load.

Yes. We are currently paying 214.46p per MWh, which people with a keen sense of detail will notice is well over double the dreadful and unaffordable cost of nuclear power, precisely because of wind and solar don't actually producing anything like their supposed rated outputs even in the hottest (and brightest and therefore the most favourable conditions for Solar) summer we've had for decades.

By the end of July 2022, the UK had 11,104 wind turbines with a total installed capacity of over 24.6 gigawatts. The actual delivered output over the last week has been under a fifth of that, gusting to around a third of that output today. The shortfall between what green schemes are supposed to produce and what they actually produce is made up by gas turbines, and the faith that Wind and Solar would actually deliver the rated output (which has never been achieved) let to a decision to run down North Sea gas fields and import our gas from abroad since "obviously" we wouldn't need much gas.

The current electricity prices are entirely attributable to the green crowd pushing for solutions that cannot work, while sabotaging any solutions that do work and so reducing electricity supply as old power plants are closed. To make matters worse, you then demand additional electricity (for electric cooking, electric heating, electric vehicles) while still sabotaging any new generating capacity from being built. Demand rising above supply results in the price increasing which is why it's so bloody expensive.

Now you can try and deflect from your myopic incompetence all you want by screaming "biG oil11!!11!!" but this is a situation you campaigned for and sold to the public as deliverable. It wasn't, and isn't. You ignored concerns raised from people like me about sales brochures never bearing any resemblance to reality, about concerns about energy security and people concerned at importing everything were derided as being old fashioned dinosaurs that didn't understand the brotherhood of goodwill that exists between people in other nations who would never weaponize food or energy supplies against us.

My view is that you now own the consequences of our fears becoming a reality, having not taken any steps to safeguard against that possibility which before the lunatics took over the asylum used to be a basic required competence in statecraft and politics. These consequences are going to include severe and extreme economic damage as people stop spending money on anything other than subsistence which is going to cripple most companies and therefore economies as people stop spending and inevitably people who can't afford subsistence (especially the elderly) are going to freeze to death as a result of policies that you campaigned for.

Now you could actually do the grown up thing and rapidly pivot to some workable solutions while there is still time, or you could try and deflect blame and continue with unworkable solutions until the current situation looks like "the good old days" we fondly wish we could return to.

Feds put $10m bounty on Putin pal accused of bankrolling US election troll farm

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: This has been going on for a long time

I seem to recall a BBC show where they got a bunch of "climate change deniers" and were surprised to discover that almost everybody agrees that climate change exists, but people disagree about the best way of dealing with it.

Personally I favour building enough nuclear plants to eliminate coal & gas entirely, at which point you can use the excess power to decarbonise heating and cooking by eliminating gas at home in favour of electricity, after which you can do the same thing with transport. Everything required is available now, and we can continue one of humanities golden ages through nothing more than a moderate scale building project of a new nuclear plant laid down a year for the next few decades, and replacing existing fossil fuel burning furnaces with induction furnaces.

The alternative is to chase technology that hasn't been developed yet and will never be deployable either in time to make a difference, or at a price we can afford, crash said golden age with absurd energy prices, and fail to meet the objectives we set for ourselves, but enrich a small minority at everybody elses expense.

That, and mitigation measures. With the current British foreign aid budget we could afford to build a nuclear plant and then a dozen desalination plants in Africa each year and have a good go at turning the Africa into a garden via an artificial River Nile. And that'd still only spend half the existing yearly aid budget.

VMware’s subscriptions start at 16 cores, prices won't be made public

Peter2 Silver badge

If you have to ask, you can't afford it.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Peter2 Silver badge

Doesn't everybody just remove that dictionary entirely as a self preservation measure on new installs?

Philippines logs on to Starlink for remote area internet services

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Last paragraph

Note the "if".

However, if it's working rather well in Ukraine despite Russian jamming etc then it'll probably do at least as well elseware.

Browsers could face two regimes in Europe as UK law set to diverge from EU

Peter2 Silver badge

It is largely settled; the German court made a legal ruling that the EU can't break the German constitution and basically described the legal opinions coming out of the EU's supreme court as being gibberish without any foundation in law and exceeding their legal power to rule on. ("Ultra Vires") The EU courts threatened to sue Germany for this ruling which threatens the principle of the EU's ever closer union, and the German government promised:-

Controversially, the Commission also noted that "the German government ... commits to use all the means at its disposal to avoid, in the future, a repetition of an ‘ultra vires' finding, and take an active role in that regard."

So the German government has committed to try and interfere with an independent court system to prevent it from finding that EU entities are doing things that are ‘ultra vires' which is a latin legal term basically meaning "You have exceeded your authority". The obvious issue here is that the German government is itself acting "Ultra Vires"; they can't legally commit to interfering with an independent court system under their own constitution; and especially not one which decides on what their constitution means.

So it's sort of temporarily over, but it won't end here. It's also worth noting simply because it's not just a handful of people in the UK that have problems with the EU overreaching; many people on the continent have these issues but until Britain left the EU were quite content letting Britain take the flack in saying "uh, no". Now Britain has left the EU other people have to stick their necks out; even in Germany which is one of the few beneficiaries of the current arrangements.

Peter2 Silver badge

Let me draw your attention to the fact that the Idiot Tendency in UK politics were concerned by the fact that Parliament and courts really were constrained by the EU council and didn't like it.

Let me draw your attention to the fact that even Germany's constitutional court has had problems with The EU violating the German Constitution by EU bodies doing things that they aren't authorised to do via treaty or law.

Peter2 Silver badge

This is where we get into the difference between "in theory" and "in fact". In theory, there is no difference between theory and fact. In fact, there is a difference.

Likewise, in theory when the EU parliament makes a regulation (as opposed to a directive) then it automatically takes effect across the entire EU.

In actual fact, most countries have their own parliaments and their own courts who feel that they, and not the EU council run their countries, and they don't implement things that don't meet the requirement of their laws.

Slovenia, as one of the countries who "enjoyed" the Russian secret services vanishing people guaranteed privacy as part of their constitution, and I think they feel that key parts of things directly attached to their constitution get written by them. The end result is that they have gone through several drafts, but the GDPR is still not enforceable in Slovenia.

So they don't in fact have the GDPR.

Is Microsoft going back to the future on release cadences?

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Stability is something that has been missing from the Windows world for some time.

Nobody wants almost any programs that come with Windows.

To be frank, the only thing most users want from Windows as an Operating System is to Operate Systems. ie; to get from the Windows UI to their program of choice to either do work, play games, read their emails or whatever.

The last improvement that I personally noticed in Windows was from XP to Win7 when hovering over a music player on the taskbar gave options for last track, pause or next track without having to bring the program into focus.

If we take "minimum time, effort and annoyance required to do a job" then the actual usability of Windows 10 if judged by this metric has gone backwards from Win95(SP4, the crashes in the earlier versions were more than slightly annoying) going by the amount of time spent in the Windows shell because the Win10 start menu and UI generally is an unmitigated disaster. It's trying to force smartphone norms for a 7" touchscreen onto a often 24"+ non touchscreen device which originally was to try and persuade all of us to go out and buy a Microsoft Phone.

But now that they killed off the Microsoft phone it would be nice if they'd kill the off interface too, or just offer a classic mode with the Win7 GUI.

Russia fines Google $374 million for letting the truth about Ukraine be told

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

Well, since [citation needed] is a Wikipedia thing, let's see what they have to say about your favourite site.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

Described as a conspiratorial website,[10][11] MintPress News publishes disinformation and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, according to researchers at Rutgers University and others.[12][13] MintPress News was a major media domain that spread disinformation about the White Helmets, a Syrian volunteer organization.[14]

The site has been accused of regularly publishing pro-Russian propaganda.[13] A report from New Knowledge includes MintPress News as part of the "Russian web of disinformation,"[15][16] and the site has published fake authors attributed to the GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency.[17]

The source of MintPress News's funding remains unknown.[7]

I'd have thought that at some point you'd stop digging.

If it publishes Russian propaganda almost exclusively from Russian government sources then going by Occums Razor; what is the most likely funding source?

By the by, British troops aren't engaged in Ukraine. Only Ukrainian and Russian troops. I do like how desperate Russians are to stop us supplying equipment to Ukraine though; given how for years the Pro Russian lot have been claiming their Wunderwaffe are so superior to anything we have deployed then fighting Russians with our overly expensive stuff that doesn't work properly would be a death sentence for our troops. I take the utter desperation about "PLEASE, PLEASE STOP SENDING UKRAINE WEAPONS" means that they are working rather better than you lot are comfortable with.

We will of course stop supplying the Ukraine; probably the day when Russian troops get out of Ukraine. And yeah, that deflection about all Ukrainians being Nazi's is well below pitiful. Only one side is shooting unarmed people on sight in the streets, and it sure ain't the Ukrainians.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

I'm good at skim reading. It didn't take more than the first two pages in this case.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

Roughly speaking what has happened in Ukraine in English terms is as follows.

Russia invaded in 2014, and created large numbers of people who hate them. Those people fought them, and the Russians started losing to them.

Russia then declared anybody fighting them to be Nazi's and invaded to "Denazify" Ukraine, which in plain English means "kill everybody who doesn't love Russia", which by now is what, 96% of the population, hence why they have no problems with indiscriminately shelling Ukrainian cities, demonstrating a novel approach to winning hearts and minds.

Mintpress is a Russian funded disinformation website designed to peddle conspiracy theories and any information from it needs to be taken with several shiploads of salt.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

Ok.

Your first link says that Ukraine has a Nazi problem and is going for political power. A year after that, have another link; "The Far Right Just Got Humiliated in Ukraine’s Election" The extreme right is no more a problem in Ukraine than in Germany. The bigger problem is actually the far left, who decided that Putin was a man of his word and they could close down every energy source but buying gas from Mr Putin.

"We shouldn't be arming them" is what Russia wants; because at the moment their army, airforce and navy have been losing all of their equipment and men to a country that most people couldn't have found on a map six months ago, which unlike Russia does not have a huge stockpile of weapons and ammunition.

The only Russian hope of victory is that the west forces Ukraine into signing a peace deal favourable to Russia for ongoing cheap gas which Germany in particular would like to do because if this drags on their economy will be crippled.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The court also claimed some material promoted extremism and/or terrorism

. . .

Ofcom launched a separate investigation to determine whether ANO TV Novosti is fit and proper to retain its licence to broadcast and took into account several factors including that RT is is funded by the Russian state and new laws in Russia which criminalize any independent journalism that departs from the Russian state’s own news narrative, in particular in relation to the invasion of Ukraine.

We consider that given these constraints it appears impossible for RT to comply with the due impartiality rules of our Broadcasting Code in the circumstances,” Ofcom stated.

So broadcasters have requirements; you fail to comply with them and you lose the license.

I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and think that you might think that your going to a great degree of effort in reading "alternative news" to try and come to truth being supressed in our media by reading the Russian point of view.

"The Russian strategy, both at home and abroad, is to say there is no such thing as truth," he says.

"I mean, you know, 'The Americans are bad, we're bad, and everyone's bad, so what's the big deal about us being a bit corrupt? You know our democracy's a sham, their democracy's a sham.'

"It's a sort of cynicism that actually resonates very powerfully in the West nowadays with this lack of self-confidence after the Iraq War, after the financial crash - and that's what the Russians are hoping for, just to take that cynicism and then use that in a military environment."

You might find this interesting:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b050674y

It might also be worth reviewing the concepts of "the grey fallacy" and "false equivalence".

Or you might be a Russian troll on the FSB payroll and deliberately wasting my time, but even if so that might get read by somebody who's accidentally being a useful idiot, so it's hardly wasted time. ;)

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: The court also claimed some material promoted extremism and/or terrorism

We don't do it deliberately, and if people are found to have murdered unarmed civilians then it's investigated and the people responsible end up in court charged with murder.

The Russians deliberately commit genocide and the units responsible are awarded high Russian commendations (eg Guards status) for executing both their orders and unarmed civilians.

If you can't see the difference then I would suggest that your moral compass is defective.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Gosh, really ?

But trolls are so tasty. For those interested in things more closely approximating truth than the garbage the MSM hands out, have a read of this-

Ok, I read it just out of curiosity.

The second mission has concluded that international human rights law (IHRL) has been extensively violated in the conflict in Ukraine. Some of the most serious violations include targeted killing of civilians, including journalists, human rights defenders, or local mayors; unlawful detentions, abductions and enforced disappearances of such persons; large-scale deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia; various forms of mistreatment, including torture,inflicted on detained civilians and prisoners of war; the failure to respect fair trial guarantees; and the imposition of the death penalty. Most, albeit not all, violations have been committed in the territories under the effective control of the Russian Federation, including the territories of the so-called Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, and are largely attributable to the Russian Federation

My emphasis. Your own link just cluster bombed, if not nuked your argument.

And go on, just point out that ill trained Ukrainian conscripts who counter attack and take back their town and find huge numbers of dead bodies of their friends and families lying rotting in the streets occasionally shoot the people responsible when they capture them.

Yes, this is a violation of the laws and customs of warfare, but it's also unsurprising; people can only be pushed so far and if you walk back through your own town with your neighbours, friends and family lying dead in the streets because Russians are more concerned with looting, murdering and genocide than gathering their victims for burial then even an saint is going to consider offing the people responsible instead of sending them to a POW camp where they might end up back in Russia alive as part of a prisoner exchange.

While I suppose it shouldn't happen, It wouldn't happen at all if the Russians weren't being genocidal maniacs in the first place.

I would suggest with the greatest of respect that you have your moral compass serviced; it's defective.

UK chemicals multinational to build hydrogen 'gigafactory'

Peter2 Silver badge

Of course, we could just use naturally occurring low CO2 gas which is mostly hydrogen at the moment; CH4 is one carbon atom bonded to 4 hydrogen atoms.

It's commonly known as "natural gas", which is our majority power generation at the moment, as well as home cooking and home heating so there is a plentiful supply of it, and burning hydrogen atoms isin't going to be any cleaner if we have to separate salt from sea water and then crack the water to hydrogen as it's quite energy intensive.

Peter2 Silver badge

Re: Bet

Either on or offshore wind is ineffective.

Look at the existing output.https://gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ You can see the past years worth of demand and generation in the bottom left corner.

We have over 25GW worth of wind turbines installed, and wind turbines have generate perhaps half that at their peak and have month long troughs where they generate <5GW.

As a strategy Wind turbines simply means that we rely upon gas as primary generation, with wind used as a load reduction measure when the wind is blowing. Even if you increased the number of wind turbines by a factor of ten at a ruinous cost to the people actually paying for the electricity then this is not going to change that, and any fool with a calculator can easily figure out the requirement for energy storage and do a rough ballpark as to the costs based on a UPS and come to the conclusion that grid scale battery storage would cost around 100 billion quid to be able to output 1GW for 24 hours; where the actual requirement is at least ten times that; ie ~2 trillion quid.

Battery storage is around a thousand times more expensive than it needs to be to be economically viable; and if we plan on meeting targets then we need to be deploying things that exist now, not hoping for magical technology that doesn't even work in the lab will save us.

Wind turbines only exist as power generation because they get ~£9 billion quid a year subsidies and if these subsidies ceased so would the wind generation industry in the UK.

Engineers on the brink of extinction threaten entire tech ecosystems

Peter2 Silver badge

By the time Blair and Co took over for the Labour government most Reg readers remember there was bugger all in the kitty to work with -- to quote the great lady "There Is No Alternative".

Really?

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1997/jan/21/economy.uk

Gambling that the political appeal of his tax pledge to floating middle-class voters the Opposition is targeting will outweigh criticism, Mr Brown promised that the basic rate of tax would not rise from 23p in the pound and the top rate would remain at 40p.

Mr Brown's promise, combined with a commitment to stick by the Conservative Party's public spending plans for the first two years...

Resulting in one of the two budget surpluses in the last fifty years, the other being Thatchers.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06167

You can't therefore fairly claim that there was no money in the kitty; This was the point just prior to when Blair and Brown proceeded to spend like it was going out of fashion. They just didn't do it to save the Labour dominated industries, which could have easily been done simply by a policy of British government spending doing to these companies, for instance Rover could have been saved simply by buying Police and Government cars from them instead of from BMW etc. Personally I think the decisions not to do so are fair enough; it's just not fair or reasonable to then try and blame the demise of those industries on Thatcher after she'd been out of office for like 15 years, the latter half of which when most of the industries went down had Labour in office.

Of course, politically Labour can't say "yeah, those industries were producing crap and deserved to die" without losing all of their working class supporters so they have to blame it on the conservatives despite the actual facts of the matter being rather at odds with their rhetoric.