Posts by fpx

Not Without Your Consent

Ah, the old excuse. Of course your consent is buried on page 42 of a 100+ page document in legalese that you have to click through. The statement is just as nonsensical as "we take your privacy seriously."

In Other News ...

Using made-in-USA technology might help Washington snoop on the world.

Like using Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Tesla. Washington reserves the right to gain access to data collected by American companies worldwide or businesses operating in the greatestest nation in the inner solar system.

Sure, the difference is what you are doing with the data. I don't mind the data being used to solve crimes, but I'd prefer them to go in with a warrant based on probable cause, not to blame guilt based on association, rumor or what US citizens would refer to as free speech.

Credit where Credit is Due

Give Bransom some credit for getting this venture off the ground. He has no obligation to fund this business indefinitely.

There's no ticket price for going to orbit yet, and once there is, it will be at least 100x as expensive. There's a significant slice of population who can afford a $500k joyride, but not a $50M one.

I'm not part of either slice, and even though Branson says that he doesn't have the deepest pockets anymore, I'd still be happy to trade him for mine.

The commenters above appear to misunderstand the nature of these trades. It's about detecting minuscule price differences between trades. I.e., if you see an offer for stock of company A at $10.01, and a purchase order for the same stock at $10.05, these traders will step in and buy the stock from the first trade and sell them to the second trade.It's a guaranteed profit, you just have to be a few microseconds faster than the competition. This guaranteed profit is sucked from the other market participants, since of course the fair thing would have been to let the two trades settle directly at $10.03.

No Layovers

LHR was already on my list of airports never to layover in. The threat of missing my connection is way too high. Also on the list are PHL and ORD in wintertime, and all of the greater NYC area airports any time of the year.

Having dangerously limited knowledge of the subject, I wonder why you would use hydrogen instead of, say, liquid nitrogen. Wouldn't that be easier to handle and more efficient, given its higher mass?

With specs like that, the plane would be ideal for island hopping, like Heathrow to the channel islands.

I'll take those 200 km all-electric range with a grain of salt, though. And going from prototype to passenger flights in two years is completely preposterous.

Break Even

Must mean that there is an even chance of it breaking completely.

> "The binary firmware and update files are encrypted with a custom 1kB block encryption [...]

This sounds very much like, "I have implemented this perfect encryption that nobody can crack because I am the only genius who understands it."

A statement that has been proven wrong again and again.

Licensing questions aside, it was very unprofessional of ORQA to purchase a software module without documentation.

> "leading to development of a theory that Saturn's gravity [...] attracts matter from its rings"

Have they also concluded yet that Saturn isn't flat?

I keep putting off updates because every update also includes new content that I do not want, features that I do not need, obnoxious new "assistants" that must be disabled, new "privacy" settings that must be turned off, and new annoying click-through messages to achieve what I want.

> Despite offering a wealth of privacy toggles

See, that's the issue right here.

Edge is going to spy on you unless you manually go in, find every one of them, and turn them off.

Of course new privacy toggles are introduced with every update, and existing ones are modified, reverting to "yes of course I allow Microsoft to spy on every web page I visit."

It's a game of whack-a-mole that those of us with finite time can not win.

Microsoft's own free viewer for Visio only runs in Internet Explorer. There's a long how-to to get this plugin running in Edge using its "IE mode", requiring a full page of registry edits.

Prepping for the coming zombie apocalypse, can I get one of them for my underground volcano island lair?

The problem is that tickets are sold at artificially deflated prices. If tickets were sold at market value, i.e., where demand meets supply, all problems with bots and scalpers will disappear.

Keeping supply constant means rising prices. Sure, artists would look like even more greedy bastards if their tickets were $1000 instead of $100.

Keeping prices constant means rising supply, i.e., making 100 tour stops instead of 10, or doing three concerts a day for weeks at a time, you know, like theaters or musicals do.

Frankly, I agree with the sentiment that it ought to be legal to pirate content that rights holders refuse to make available. An increasing amount of content is geo-restricted. E.g., movies or TV shows made for a streaming platform that refuses sign-ups outside of their geofence. Streaming platforms should be forced to open up to the world.

Ah, to live in Antigua and Barbuda, which was officially allowed by the WTO to pirate US content, in retaliation for the US refusing to allow its citizens to engage in "free trade" (online gambling) with the country. (https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds285_e.htm)

There was an interesting article about the Artemis III mission, i.e., the sequel to the sequel, in the paywalled NYT the other day.

The gist was that Elon Musk has sold the NASA a lunar lander, that does not exist yet. The lunar lander needs a Starship, which does not exist yet, to get off the ground. However, the Starship only has enough fuel to get to earth orbit. Therefore, SpaceX must deliver a gas station to orbit, which does not exist yet. And as much as 8 launches of a tanker, which does not exist yet, are needed to fill up the gas station, using fuel transfers which have never been attempted in microgravity before.

And it does not help that the SpaceX engineers and leadership must first fix Twitter.

Translated: I sometimes feel a bit sorry for the poor souls who lost everything by trusting me. But then I take a nice walk on the beach that I purchased with the funds I funneled away and have a drink.

Just like a flying ... Helicopter

Of course there are already plenty of flying taxis for the super-rich using helicopters.

And this gadget can do everything that a helicopter can. Except for range. And speed. And payload. When they talk about four passengers, they are probably thinking four times 100lb with no luggage.

Well, helicopters are difficult to fly, and expensive to run and maintain, so maybe electric quadcopters or similar designs will offer an advantage there, opening up the flying taxi market to the slightly less affluent. I.e., not just multi-millionaires but also TikTok influencers and the like.

Small Change

Crypto (-currencies, -exchanges) come with much bigger bug bounty programs. Find a bug, write an exploit, loot the vault and walk away.

The Wrong Way Around

All current and proposed privacy regulation focuses on consent. That is the wrong way around. It implies that companies can do whatever they want with our data if they just ask nicely and are upfront about it. This model requires choice, the option to choose among different services based on their commitment to privacy. But we do not really have that. Yes, cou can choose Linux instead of Microsoft or Apple. You can choose to pay cash at Walmart instead of shopping at Amazon. You can choose to not use FaceTikWhatsSnapChatGram and invite your friends to some other social web. Use other search engines than Google. Yes, that is all possible, but it is not practical, and is becoming less practical by the day. Tech companies are entrenched and are exploiting their monopolies for sucking up data and want to keep it that way.

We need to break them up, and outlaw data sharing, period.

The article says that it cost them less than $100,000 to restore their systems and that they then faced a budget shortfall of $50,000,000.

So this is like blaming the mint for the belly explosion.

Ah, the good old days when I generated C++ code from UML models using the Basic dialect baked into [then IBM] Rational Rose.

My dad was an engineer at one of the earliest commercial nuclear power plants in Germany. He retired early in 1995 along with the plant. The plan was to return the site to its prior state, i.e., back to a "green pasture." Now, 27 years later, most of the structures are still standing (except for the cooling towers, which would have crumbled without maintenance), and engineers are still trying to figure out how to dismantle 3 meter thick concrete foundations of the strongest concrete available at the time. Some low-radiation remains are still on site, because Germany, like everywhere else, still hasn't found a place willing to accept radioactive waste. No idea what the original budget for the build-back was, but they must have exceeded it 10x by now with no end in sight.

Ah, the good old days when expenses could be approved by my immediate manager with a "be reasonable" attitude. I always was reasonable and got all expenses paid with no questions asked. Direct 2h flights when a 6h connecting flight was slightly cheaper? Check. Stay for the weekend, when the weekly car rental was about the same price as the 5 day rental? No sweat. Occasional $50 dinners? Fine, everybody did that. Oh, the flight is $200 cheaper with a saturday stay? Yeah, of course you can then expense the $150 for the weekend hotel stay.

Now, at a consulting company where expenses are bounced to the customer that might ask questions? No way.