* Posts by MachDiamond

8662 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012

BOFH: I get locked out, but I get in again

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: ChatGPT

"I asked Gemini to write me a long story about the BOFH and got this"

The best new use for AI that I've seen, a prank generator. Even if it doesn't come up with new and novel pranks, it might suggest a few that are heretofore unknown to most. I'd have to say that the ones I had a part in were mainly variations on previous themes. Since we were engineering students, there had to be a solid engineering aspect to them to (unofficially) avoid repercussions. They also couldn't cause too much damage or injury. I expect it's harder these days with CCTV aimed at everything. We had to make sure we didn't leave behind any incriminating evidence.

Apple's had it with Epic's app store shenanigans, terminates dev account

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Thou Shalt Bend Over For Thine Lord Apple, Or Be Evicted! Be Warned! Ooooooooooo......"

If you rent a flat with no pets allowed and get a dog, should the courts rule for you that since so many have dogs, you should be allowed as well? You signed a lease that stated that pets were not allowed. You might have talked with the landlord about an allowance for a particular size/breed, paid a deposit and agreed to inspections to make sure the dog wasn't allowed to soil the flat. Most rental agreements also have clauses about creating a nuisance and complying with a set of rules and being found in violation of any of them could result in an eviction. Are those clauses also something to take to a court for dispute if you have blatantly violated them?

If you want to play in Apple's realm, you have to accept their terms. Once you do, you aren't given the option of changing them on your own to suit your own desires.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: the average Apple user spends more than four times as much

"OK, maybe you think Apple makes enough off iPhone sales and doesn't deserve a cent post sale."

There's still the cost of running the app store, building APIs for iStuff, banking costs to handle loads of small payments, etc. 30% doesn't sound like a big slice of pie, but it can depend an awful lot on the size of the transaction. For a in-app buy of a couple of bucks, the payment processing cost could be as high 25% so Apple demanding 30% doesn't net them all that much. 25% could be on the high side, but it's going to vary from country to country for the banking as well as Apple being required to hold and process taxes of various sorts related to the purchases.

I've felt that Epic was going about this in the wrong way. Instead of breaking terms of the contract with Apple, they should have bargained as the renewal date approached to reduce Apple's take with higher price brackets. While it could be 30% for small in-app purchases, it could be less for totals over ~$15-$20 where the hard costs become a smaller part of the transaction. The out for Epic is to pull their titles from Apple iOS and put more emphasis on Android and desktop. If that becomes common with other publishers, Apple will need to sit down and bargain in good faith so they aren't just left with lots of tiny devs that don't earn them very much.

Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Too bad they couldn't strap a couple small thrusters on the puppy and aim it at the sun."

Too bad they can't strap it to a prototype lunar lander and try to set it down on the moon. The more refined materials there are on the moon, the easier it will be to do things. It would be interesting to design something like an ore processor/smelter for the moon and send parts for it up as parts of other things destined for the lunar surface. If lunar landers that won't be used again were made like something from a Mechano/Erector set, there would be more and more uniform bits and pieces that could be turned into something else once there. ISRU is great, but the first steps towards that are the most difficult.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: On every level: no

"Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey."

There's some interesting science to be done in micro-G, but millions? I don't see it. It would be far cheaper to make things in the moon that to support a million people in space. We already know that us meatsacks do very poorly spending extended periods of time in space. What isn't well known is how much better we do in fractional G. The moon could be healthier for humans and even with that, a million is not going to be sustainable.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: On every level: no

"he will stay in the space business until Kuiper crushes Starlink."

Neither will be around that long. Gwynne has already admitted that the life expectancy of the Starlink satellites is 5 years. Elon has said the fully deployed constellation will be 42,000. Going from memory, after build out, it will take around 70 replacement sats being launched every 3 days, forever, to keep the slots full. For two services to be doing that is insane. Even having one is criminal.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: The Master of understatement

" but those are 1 in a million chances"

Wait, a 1 in a million chance is almost a dead certainty. Right, Nobby?

Trump, who tried kicking TikTok out of the US, says boo to latest ban effort

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Biden may be in trouble.

"A friend's daughter has worked at it and now gets most of her orders on it. It would bankrupt her business if it was shut down."

I'm with Mark on this. It's not just a problem is TikTok were shut down/banned, but if they change their Terms of Service and her activities became against the rules. I've never had an issue by not having an InstaPintaTwitFace account. The hours and hours of times spent I already know doesn't equal the business I'd bring in. I know some people that have done well using Social Media to drive people to their websites, but know many more that have wasted their time when they could have been doing something else to make money. If you just want to be entertained or need lots of likes and thumbs-up for your self worth, fine, but don't think that they are good places to house a real business.

Amazon has crushed marketplace sellers that based their business on using the platform. The sellers had a nice little operation going when they suddenly received a notice that their account was closed. That left them with a garage full of merchandise, the loss of their music, videos and other digital assets that go away when an account is closed. I'm not sure how often that happens, but it does and should be a cautionary tale for people. To pick on Amazon some more, if they see somebody getting too successful with a product, they might have the same thing made in China themselves in quantity at a much lower cost (and quality) and even shunt searches to the Amazon item leaving the original seller in the lurch. Amazon is using the marketplace sellers to spot new products and trends without having to do much more than some automated data mining.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: US politics is basically

"Unfortunately, the average IQ of the voting population seems to be on par with a shoelace, so we keep getting clowns elected."

And the "machine" keeps putting forward clones so there's little hope for change.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: US politics is basically

"Neither Trump nor Bien are fit for anything more than a cage in a 3rd rate circus."

The bigger worry is the uncounted power brokers behind the scenes that are making those two the front runners! The alternate parties (Green, Libertarian, Peace & Freedom) are not even in left field, they aren't even in the car park outside the stadium. Out of all of the politicians that represent me at various levels, I've only met two and being able to chat with them has made a big difference in my opinion of them. I'm not sure if the in-person charm is covering up any warts or if the sort of politicians that make it a priority to mingle in their districts are the best ones. Too often I go to the polls to vote against things/people.

Cops visit school of 'wrong person's child,' mix up victims and suspects in epic data fail

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Unique IDs

I got a new number this year, my IPN (International Performer Number). Now I can be properly credited for banging on some drums on a recording. Just another identifier to add to a list that keeps getting longer. I doubt I'll memorize my IPN as it gets transferred via my mobile when I sign into a session or play a live gig that is being recorded (not massively frequent happenings).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Thats ok then

"When did you last sign something?"

I wind up having to sign things often enough. I have a couple of businesses so there's always paperwork that requires a signature. I'm a real weirdo too. I don't digitally sign anything. When there is a need for me to sign something, I do it with a blue pen. "Wet" signature on paper. If I have to print something out and send it in, I do that. I could honestly stand up in front of a judge and claim never to have used a digital signature which might be a good thing in future and save boat loads of money, a lost house, etc.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Oliver Dowden has the solution - NOT

"2. So, why do we need to put in the info into a database?"

So it can be shared. It can take years for a police officer to learn all of that info. Somebody new will get up to speed faster if they can look those sorts of things up and judges could use that information to make correct decisions about bail or releasing somebody on a personal recognizance bond. I've seen a few shows where some petty criminal who gets arrested at least once a month is on the catch/release program due to prosecutors never bothering to prosecute them. A judge might see a long arrest record with only a couple of minor convictions and believe a defense attorney that the person just gets picked on when in reality, the person is a career criminal and should be locked up. A load of unsolved cases might not happen in future while that person is banged up since it would be unlikely that they were being arrested for every crime they commit.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Does any organization ever have any rules in place for differentiating between two people who share the same first, middle and last name as well as date of birth?"

Yes, the new modern serial number for people is their telephone number. Now that people have mobs and keep they numbers for years and years, it's not that dissimilar to the numbers tattooed on concentration camp prisoners in WWII. People will happily fill in their phone number on a form handed to them on a clipboard.

It's not just the same full name, but here has to be a rule if names are shortened in any way such as first initial, last name. At that point Paul Cook becomes P. Cook which would be the same for Patty, Patrick, Penny, etc. Names seem to run in cycles too so for a few years Kimberly might be popular so there will loads of Kim's. One doesn't see girls being named Myrtle these days, but it could come back and when it does, there will be a bunch. The thing is there won't be any of them with the same phone number with so many people having their own phone number rather than using a single line for an entire household.

MachDiamond Silver badge

" went to school with identical twins who both had the same first initial and no middle names."

So the parents were civil servants? No rocket engineer would fail to give identical twins middle names and different ones at that.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Thats ok then

"Most organisations lack facilities or procedures to make someone "undead" causing considerable suffering to those affected while the bureaucrats just keep repeating "the computer says No"."

The challenge is finding a way to turn all of that into a positive. Since your signature won't change, create and back date a Will leaving all of your worldly possessions to your new persona, who lives out of the country, spend some time debt free in a sunny location and apply for residency/citizenship to move home with a fresh set of papers. If you've been driving for some time, it shouldn't be too difficult to get your test again and pass with flying colors. Create a new and much better resume mostly with jobs in another country that would be hard to check and get a new job with higher pay. Yes, there's some things I glossed over, but..........

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Oliver Dowden has the solution - NOT

"More worryingly, perhaps, is Dowden’s idea of crime-prevention algorithms that could "direct police to where they are most needed" and "spot patterns of criminality to discover culprits quicker than ever."""

The thing is that the police on the street already know all of this. Talk with any copper that's been on the beat for a few years and they'll know most of the local F-ups by full name, their parents names, where they live, who they've fathered children on and what social diseases they have. They also know which local female of relaxed standards they've hooked up with when they see him driving her car. The trick is getting all of that knowledge into a database in a way that won't get banned.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

"One of the databases I use at work does something weird/similar. You enter the device number and if it's not in the database it shows the nearest one instead of a Nor Found error. "

That's sounds mad. Instead of returning a not found error, the system is compounding problems and not giving feedback that some dorf just fat-fingered an entry.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Similar mistakes not limited to public sector

"so maybe Boots are just a bit rubbish."

They're trying to "leverage their customer database potential" to bring in more business.

When that sort of thing happens to me, I let them know they just lost my business, forever. I find that sort of thing creepy which is why I never give a store any information such as an email address or use the code on my receipt to enter a giveaway contest for a prize I'll never win. The receipt thing is really bad. Not only do they have the details of that transaction, they get to fill in the blanks they don't get if you've used plastic to make the purchase.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: "thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent"

" "thankfully these data errors are incredibly infrequent"

Yes. I'm sure that is quite reassuring for the people who do become victims of such errors."

Especially those that get an oh dark thirty bang on the door and a half dozen shouting morons crushing into their house (and a year of trying to get reimbursed for the damage).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Plus ça change

"I was once detained because of a similar address and name to a suspect. Despite being a teenager and not 'in his late 50s'. "

Not too long ago there was a woman that was identified through facial recognition robbing a store (or similar crime). The issue was that the woman the plod arrested was 8 months gone and the woman they were actually looking for was much slimmer. Not JUST arrested but banged up in the slammer, full processing and held for a couple of days. It was bizarre that the name the facial recognition spit out (with known issues correctly identifying people with dark skin) was taken as gospel with so much other exonerating evidence. I expect the pay out for that one will cost a local PD a pile of money. It should also cost a judge their cushy job for signing a warrant on such flimsy evidence.

Meta kills Facebook News in the US and Australia

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: copy/paste an entire article to their page

"Often just waffling partisan opinion of a some semi-literate hack or some prurient beat up of some private embarassment or a tabloid fabrication having no conceivable basis in any reality."

What I often see is copy/paste of Xits chosen to convey a position being passed off as news.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: “You Must Carry Our Content ... And You Must Pay Us”

"Indeed. They could just prevent people posting links where it's included on a blocklist of domains."

If users of a social media site are posting links to a news article, that's not a problem. If they copy/paste an entire article to their page, that's infringement in the same way as posting a song or a TV show. It's the SM sites posting so much of an article or a detailed enough summary that's damaging. If InstaPintaTwitFace wants to do that, they should pay for it. Perhaps they have become so used to getting users to give them loads of content for free that paying for some is foreign to them now.

Elon and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad legal week

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: A bad week for Elon

"Is a good week for the rest of us."

Maybe, maybe not. I don't know where my mother's pension funds are invested. If they been guzzling the KoolAid, I have to be concerned. Thank goodness our family trust holds no stock in anything tainted with a strong musky smell. I'm hoping I'm not going to be called on to support mother and rather hope there will be something left in her estate when her number is called.

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Just look at how pale and male the average board of directors is for Fortune 500 companies."

Those boards are the end of a very long chain. Some of that chain has, indeed, been comprised of exclusions. It shouldn't be expected that even over the course of a decade things at the top will change that radically. There are changes and it's not impossible to find women and people with a complexion darker than than of a pale blue Scottish person sitting on corporate boards of publicly traded companies. For most, that's the culmination of a decades long career. There's also still cultural roadblocks that some communities impose on themselves when it comes to education and career decisions where in others, an emphasis is put on aiming towards upper level management positions and high paying professions.

MachDiamond Silver badge

$258bn smackers

No mention of the $258bn Dodgecoin lawsuit. That should be kicking off fairly shortly too. All of Elon.com is named in that one (Tesla, SpaceX, Elon, etc).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Even worse

"It suggests a job being rushed,"

As slow as the job is going? A real tunneling company would have installed and finished a much larger tunnel ages ago.

Las Vegas is trying to one-up Dubai on silly projects. LV has a monorail for Pete's sake. They could have taken money to extend that so it made a whole loop through the area rather than the somewhat incomplete state that it's in. So now they pay PT Mush to make sewer pipe size tunnels to drive Tesla vehicles in? Bonkers. The convention center loop, which was silly to start with, could have done better with slidewalks. They try to pump it up as being useful, but I've never had a great need to get from one side of LVCC to the other in one go. I start at one end and pace the aisles at the shows to wind up back at my starting point when I've done the whole route. If I have an appointment, I think it would be faster to walk and there's always the chance of meeting somebody I know with an after hours party ticket to hand me. Next week I'll be there for a photography conference, but this is their first year back and it's really small so it will only be in one hall. I may go to another show in April (I think) that should use up the whole facility, but that remains to be seen if it will be that large. Those shows plus going to watch the dragon swallow the sun in Texas will mean 3 big trips in the first half of this year. Good grief.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: What is it with these hard-right muppets?

"They're as different from each other as the rest of us."

They do share a lack of morals.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"I blame it for the VR trend as well; science fiction is replete with VR and AR technology, but most authors actually considered what it would do, or at least made the technology conceivably useful by writing around the technical challenges."

Most SF is that way. At least the good stuff is. Everything works except for one or two things that seem a bit out there. It's a bit of handwavium and some of that has come to fruition over the years. I love "A Logic Named Joe" that was written ages ago but describes the internet and modern computers very well with a dash of AI. It makes me wonder if the nerds that were reading these stories used the author's ideas after becoming an engineer as a basis for much of the tech we have now. Are we going to have a Quantum HOLMES IV in the moon that becomes self-aware? The rest of "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" is engineering, not science or fantasy. The Handwavium element is Mike.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"Every single one of "his" ideas is something I read about old mid-20th-century adventure comic annuals I bought in 2nd-hand fayres in the 80s."

The Cybertruck was a concept drawing by Curtis Brubaker that was printed in a 1978 Penthouse magazine. A wee bit different than a comic, but entertaining none the less.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Odd, isn't it?

"There were pictures a while ago of lots of robots stacked outside a factory after this failure."

When every other car maker on the planet would also like to get rid of the pesky meatsacks and combined have thousands of years of experience making cars, it was a bit cheeky of Elon to come along and claim he was going to build an automated car plant. That it didn't turn out very well and came within a whisker of killing off the company should have been a big slice of humble pie. But, Nope, he never learns. After struggling to get the Model X to the market, Elon said he insisted on too many features that bogged down the design process and he learned his lesson. Every subsequent vehicle has been through the same bloat. For the believers that think he will finally have exercised all of those demons now and can finally rein in his fantasies to make a low priced EV, good luck with that. The unpolished Cybertruck just barely wasn't held back to make it amphibious as well as ugly.

An engine that can conjure thrust from thin air? We speak to the designer

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: So much missing info!

"The *funding agency* is DARPA. This is a military program in disguise. "

There's not even a disguise. DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the sorts of things they fund are those that have direct military usage. Occasionally, they will fund some science if it might lead to engineering they can use. A low altitude satellite they can move around would be very useful if it was small, low mass and had lots of Delta V. Low cost and quick deployment from a very basic launch site would also be handy.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Loretta wants a word...

"There are different human definitions for the start of space. 50 miles and 100km are both popular."

The internationally recognized beginning of space is 100km. Virgin Galactic uses 50 miles since they have a problem going higher with Space Ship 2 and advertising rides "almost" to space isn't as enticing.

Updates are plenty but fans are few in Windows 11 land

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Windows 11 is never getting installed

"It was pretty useless as there are no compatible drivers for my hardware."

I've had the problem and just didn't connect any hardware to that box. Once it's up and running, self-contained, you'd use it to do things and use another computer to pass things off to a printer. I've got an ancient G4 Mac whose sole job is to interface with a scanner. The scanner was top of the mark when it was new and is still awesome for scanning slides, film (up to 8x10) and fine drawings so having a computer carved from stone in comparison to a fondleslab of today is fine. I expect I can find another G4 Mac for the cost of a Starbucks coffee most days of the week. I just recalled I have a PC with ISA slots (love to get another) whose reason for living is to host a LinearX LMS (Loudspeaker Measurement System) card. They put out a "lunch box" with ISA slots and a USB (I think) interface, but they're hard to find. The developer passed away and there was nobody around that could take over the company.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

"Are you seriously saying you can't or won't manage more than one update per decade?"

You say "update" as if it implies an improvement.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: We only just got Windows 10 settled....

"MS are seriously out of touch with how Windows is used in small/medium enterprise...."

The article says how there's new add-ons for shopping. As if everybody is doing nothing with their computer but use it as a giant catalog to buy things from 4-6 mega retailers. Some do, but work has to get done somewhere along the line too. M$ should consider publishing an OS devoid of "helpful" bots, shopping extensions and ever changing UI's. My Windows box (not connected to the internet) is running W7 and does just fine for the very few applications I use it for. I use a MacBookPro for comms, a MacPro cheesegrater for media and linux for everything else (on the cheesegrater). I have another MacPro that's my media box with a Mac Mini for the accounting program. It's a bunch of computers, but I have a load of redundancy which means if any of them go down, I can fix it in short order even if I need a new drive and total reinstall of everything. Several of the computers have come for free and none cost me more than a couple of hundred. It's the plug strips that cost but thanks to estate sales, I have a large box full of them now.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Furtive Frog and Wanking Wallaby

"Well, I tried to get ChatGPT to extend the story, but even the slightest hint of innuendo or fun gets stripped out, and the results are amazingly dull and derivative."

Try a different one and you may wind up with a tale that's offensively racist (in any direction you like) and says naughty things about your mother.

White House goes to court, not Congress, to renew warrantless spy powers

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Or perhaps it's

"an even slimmer majority is pretty much completely paralyzed by a group of extreme right wingers who view any attempt to legislate as an opportunity for extortion"

Ok, politics as usual. Nothing earthshaking in those observations. What is an issue is the authorization that must be re-approved each year BY CONGRESS has a puppet President's office trying to circumvent the law as written by taking the re-authorization to a court. The courts should have no standing to make a decision to extend the act. There's nothing about the requirement that congress must reauthorize something periodically that's out of sorts with the Constitution and relevant laws for a court to rule over. Plenty of things must be reauthorized by Congress or they expire.

The US Federal government was set up in three parts with specific duties, responsibilities and limitations to instill checks and balances within. Too much has been allowed such as Executive Orders that have been applied much more broadly than intended and need to be brought back in line. If the Judicial Branch can intrude on the prerogatives of the Legislative Branch by request of the Executive Branch, only madness lies ahead.

Musk joins OpenAI lawsuit queue, says there's nothing 'open' about it

MachDiamond Silver badge

"Bear in mind who has no current interest in OpenAI so is missing out on the spoils, and is also trying to launch a rival..."

For somebody to bring a case they have to have "standing" and also have to demonstrate that they've been harmed. I don't see either of these conditions being met. I'm sure the lawyers don't care as they have already billed tens of thousands just to craft the filing. I'm sure the next hundred thousand in planned motions are already in the works. For a "genius", Elon can't help himself when it comes to paying attorneys from either side of a lawsuit. (I still can't believe he walked from the Pedo thing).

Musk 'texts' Nadella about Windows 11's demands for a Microsoft account

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: What a Grade A hypocrite ...

"What a Grade A hypocrite ..."

Nobody has ever accused Elon of being consistent.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Tesla Account

"Don't you need a Tesla account to own/drive a Tesla?"

Technically, you CAN opt out of the telematics, but you wind up with a highly crippled vehicle. At one point you couldn't use a Tesla Supercharger without the telematics, but I seem to recall that they had to change that since in the US, Tesla used a proprietary charging plug. If you say bad things about Tesla on YouTube, they won't sell you parts. Rich Benoit (Rich Rebuilds) has had this problem. He tried to order the black plastic cosmetic lug nut caps and was firmly denied. Didn't they also block his phone number at one point?

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Just bought a new PC laptop and it won't let me use it

At one point, Elon had a secretary that he could have asked to get him a new laptop and have it all built out and configured for him. When she asked for a raise, he sacked her. Not right away. He gave her a couple of weeks off and determined that he could do all of her work without her. When I read that story I thought that he must not have been delegating tasks very well. A good and trusted secretary is pure solid gold.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: First time for everything

"OTOH, Musk has such a backlog of schadenfreude and karma to work though, that I'm delighted he ran into this problem."

Let's not forget that Elon is a master programmer. Too bad he can't trot over to DDG and type in "widows without needing a microsoft ID" and read through all of the results. My Windows (7) PC is not allowed to play in the street (internet) so everything that gets put on it must not require an internet connection. I don't have the time to keep up with virus and malware updates and nuking all of the crap that gets loaded for me if I'm not watching closely. Too often I've had something start doing an update when I was under a critical time crunch and needed to get something done and back to a customer. I can't recall a single time where what ever the update did would have made life any easier.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

"You can download nothing from the App store"

If the only place I can get an application is through the Apple App Store, that developer isn't getting my business. I'm long past being a beta tester for every new thing that comes out. I think I use a half dozen to a dozen applications on a regular basis and that lets me get done what I need to get done. The rest of the time, if the weather is nice, I'd rather be out in the garden.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

"Given Apple hardware tends to run about a 15% premium over comparable PC hardware, that gives you a pretty good idea what the cost of macOS actually is. "

Apple's hardware has been pretty good so the comparison has to be made against name-brand PC hardware. I'm not saying I don't hate and despise glued-in batteries and computers with custom SSD's and soldered on RAM. It just that hardware you get from Apple with not as dodgy as a windows box built by a clan at a computer show.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: If he thinks that's bad he should try MacOS

"Sure, if you want to neuter half the bundled apps."

BONUS!

Underwater cables in Red Sea damaged months after Houthis 'threatened' to do just that

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

"Depths are obviously still a challenge, "

I don't see why. Just build an ROV with very little air space inside and it could go down as far as you like. If the intent is a one way mission, building cheap would be easy. The big expense comes with making something robust enough to last a decade and carry very expensive sensing gear. LED lighting can be awesome and can be given a spray or dip in some sealing goo just good enough to see the lights through one mission and there is no need to put them in expensive pressure tight housings. Water and electricity can mix if you only need the thing to work for a limited amount of time (low-voltage).

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: Why do they need a submarine?

"But all that is specific to the English Channel, everywhere else in the world telecommunication cables are just sitting duck to a stray anchor except when they come near the coast "

Ehhhhhh, the cables are installed in places where ships aren't expected to anchor just for the reason of the cable being damaged accidentally. If you ever wondered why cables come ashore in some odd hollow along the coast away from the ports, now you know.

I expect that it wouldn't be too hard with the proper resources to get the exact path of an undersea cable. With that information, rigging up a cable cutter that can be lowered down to snag and severe the cable won't require a sub. With a powered cutter, it wouldn't even take a very large ship to do the work. Make the dangly bit cheap and there's little value in bringing it back up to use again.

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

"I'm pretty sure that the typical weather balloons used in the US are designed to come down fairly quickly."

There is software that lets you calculate how much H2 or He to put in a balloon with a given mass carrying a payload of a given mass to either have it top out at a high altitude and cruise or make a trip up until it goes bang whereupon a parachute is deployed and the payload drifts back down to the ground. The last one I worked on some years ago did a fast trip up to about 48,000' and traveled about 80 miles downrange. I can't remember what our calcs were for but I think it was pretty close.

MachDiamond Silver badge

Re: China insisted was an errant weather balloon

"That same article makes an unverified claim that some governments may have low single-digit centimeter per pixel resolutions already. "

Any photographer knows that the more atmosphere you are trying to see through, the bigger a thing has to be to see it clearly. This is why I chuckle at the conspiracy theorists that make claims that the gubbamint can read license plates from space. On a hot day, you can't read them from a few hundred meters due to the heat shimmer coming off the road.