* Posts by Throatwarbler Mangrove

1879 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Oct 2015

Italy, Japan, UK to jointly launch sixth-gen fighter jet by 2035

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Trollface

Yay!

Up with the military industrial complex! MOAR PORK!

Let's not think too hard about how we could gainfully apply this kind of funding to, for example, combating global warming or funding schools.

Europe's USB-C deadline: Lightning must be struck from iPhone by December, 2024

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Meh

I won't downvote you, but here are just a few reasons I can think of why wireless charging doesn't make sense:

1. It's wasteful, so it will not be a good look for Apple to switch to a less-efficient charging standard while everyone else is trying to burnish their green credentials.

2. It requires wireless charging hardware inside the phone, which increases device size and expense while decreasing reliability.

3. It requires the user to also buy a wireless charger, which adds expense and waste as well as bulk while traveling, and the charger itself will still have to use USB-C.

The only reason for Apple to go wireless-only would be to flip off the EU, which seems pointless and out of character. I can kind of envision Meta or Google doing something like that, but not Apple.

Theranos' Sunny Balwani gets longer sentence than Elizabeth Holmes

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Pint

Re: Another lesson

"Or your racist assumption that ethnic minority males don't face any discrimination in the legal system compared to pretty blonde women ?"

Fair enough, I see your point. Have one on me.

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Re: Another lesson

Or doubling down with additional bigotry, the way what I assume was the original AC did!

Imagine being such a coward that you would make a comment like that without even being willing to put a pseudonym to it. Posting it as AC is a clear indication that the AC knew it was a garbage comment and was not even willing to stand provisionally behind it.

Energy being expensive and trickier to source is good news ... for renewables

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Re: In before . . .

Bingo!

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In before . . .

. . . the usual suspects appear with their long-winded froth-mouthed rants about the "Greens," how global warming is a Communist liberal hoax manufactured by *cough* "globalists," and how renewable energy is unsustainable, with a side helping of jabs at "Greta."

We get it, guys, give it a rest.

Women sue Apple claiming AirTags helped their stalkers

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Facepalm

"You have a choice. You can educate people or you can be a dick."

New to the Internet are we?

Microsoft reportedly mulls a does-everything 'super app' to expand mobile search

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Holmes

Re: I actually ...

This is like when Arthur Dent told the Vogon captain that he enjoyed the poetry reading, isn't it?

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Facepalm

Augh

Look, I'm not a Microsoft hater. I like Teams and Outlook, and I run Windows 11 voluntarily (quiet, you at the back). I also run Firefox and use DDG as my primary search engine, and I have a very low tolerance for advertising, especially advertising where it's not expected such as in my office productivity tools, which is why I run multi-layered ad-blocking. Just leave it alone, Microsoft . . . if people aren't using Bing, maybe the problem isn't that they don't know about it, maybe it's because Bing sucks.

SpaceX chases government cash with Starshield satellites

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Alien

Re: So those Jewish space lasers will exist after all?

We're Jews out in space

Flying around defending the Hebrew race

Presumably doing battle with

Pigs

In

SPAAAAAAAACE!

‘Mother of Internet’ Radia Perlman argues for centralized infrastructure

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Holmes

The CIA. Duh.

Musk says spat with Apple over App Store ejection threat for Twitter was 'misunderstanding'

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Happy

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but the reality is that Apple makes actual products which people pay for. Twitter does not. In a financial cage match between Tim Apple and Twitter Me Elmo, I have no doubt that the latter would get slapped around like Pee Wee Herman in a biker bar.

Microsoft 365 faces more GDPR headwinds as Germany bans it in schools

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Re: Too big to fail

Except, as you will note, the DPK has forbidden the use of M365 in schools and government offices, which means those entities will need to find an alternate solution and Microsoft will lose their business, which suggests that regulation is happening effectively.

Study suggests AI cruise control could kill traffic jams by cutting out the 'intuition' factor

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Holmes

FTA: "Last week's test added some new technology that made it into what Bayen described as a game changer: the vehicles coordinated actions between themselves, allowing them to react to conditions further ahead and coordinate their traffic influence network accordingly.

The AI-powered vehicles also incorporate information about local traffic conditions from the I-24 MOTION corridor where the test was performed, which is a section of highway equipped with 300 4K sensors for traffic monitoring."

In short, the autonomous vehicles are acting cooperatively and with greater information about traffic conditions, as opposed to humans, who generally act selfishly and with more limited information. Identifying similarities between this situation and other parts of the human condition is an exercise left to the reader.

Aviation regulators push for more automation so flights can be run by a single pilot

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Happy

Re: Single point of failure

As so aptly demonstrated in the seminal disaster documentary Airplane!.

US offshore oil and gas installation at 'increasing' risk of cyberattack

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Facepalm

It's a shame . . .

. . . that the oil and gas industry is struggling so greatly in these trying times, otherwise they could afford to implement more rigorous security protocols and procedures.

/sarc

FTX collapse prompts other cryptocurrency firms to suspend withdrawals

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An appropriate meme

"Now this may strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die." -- Norm MacDonald, Saturday Night Live

Tesla recalls 40k cars over patch that broke power steering

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WTF?

Re: Maybe the roads will last longer

[citation needed]

All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing

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Devil

Re: Hung parliament

Sorry, boss, we held a binding referendum on Amerexit, and it's impossible for that to ever change.

Can confidential computing stop the next crypto heist?

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Angel

Also . . .

. . . who cares? Everyone who participates in cryptocurrencies appears to deserve the losses that they suffer. What a shame that your get-rich-quick scheme wound up in you getting swindled. No one could have seen that coming!

Version 252 of systemd, as expected, locks down the Linux boot process

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Holmes

Re: Dual-boot, anybody?

The most pressing reason to dual-boot is that the user wants to use the full bare-metal capabilities of the hardware. At a previous job, I dual-booted my work laptop because I wanted a OS running on my system which was for personal use and unconstrained by corporate IT, and said constraints were restrictive to virtual machine usage. Some people might be driver developers who need access to the hardware for testing their code. Etc. Those are just some use cases which spring immediately to mind; I'm sure other commentards can suggest others.

Big brands urged to pause Twitter ads until Elon's learned how this all works

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Alien

Re: Good.

Based on the observed bot ratio here, it's more likely the bots who upvoted you.

I'm rooting for the death of Twitter for multiple reasons:

1. Twitter and its ilk have undermined public discourse in ways amply documented in El Reg and elsewhere.

2. By removing billions of dollars of "wealth" from the economic system via Twitter's stock crashing, perhaps inflation will decrease.

3. Schadenfreude.

New measurement alert: Liz Truss inspires new Register standard

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Happy

Re: Decimal?

Maybe he does, maybe he doesn't . . . but does he also back up?

YouTube loves recommending conservative vids regardless of your beliefs

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FAIL

Re: Worth noting the dates

Yes, it's true. Seattle and Portland are nothing but smoking rubble.

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Re: Who decides what is left and right ?

Or like any Democrat is labeled as a socialist/Communist (because conservatives don't know the difference) even when most Democrats are center-right.

Scottish space upstart's rocket crashes into the drink

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Pint

For some reason ...

... I expected the rocket to have crashed into a whisky distillery.

Water pipes hold flood of untapped electricity potential

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Holmes

Re: Read it?

Are you kidding? This is the Internet! Of course people are going to pop off with half-informed opinions, especially regarding how a new technology is completely infeasible, without reading the source paper!

FIX OLD! NO NEW!

How do you protect your online systems? Cultivate an insider threat

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Re: you clicked a phishing link!

You sound like this (mandatory) xkcd:

https://xkcd.com/651/

When are we gonna stop calling it ransomware? It's just data kidnapping now

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Meh

> We're talking ransomware here, not people.

Yes and no. I mention kidnapping because the guidance of the US Government is for US citizens not to pay foreign kidnappers (in fact, I believe it's illegal) for precisely the reason you cite for not paying ransomware scum, which is that paying off one set of kidnapper encourages others. That aside, people are impacted by ransomware. For example, there was a recent article in this very organ which highlighted a hospital being afflicted by a ransomware outbreak. In such a case, people's lives are being very directly impacted!

It's all well and good to point the finger sanctimoniously at organizations impacted by ransomware, but it's worth remembering that perfect security is an illusion. You personally might think you have sufficient protection, and maybe you've done sufficient testing to be sure. For many organizations, however, there is a combination of complexity, legacy configurations, inadequate budget, and lack of security focus in, it must be remembered, a rapidly evolving threat landscape which makes it very difficult to be certain that one's IT environment is sufficiently protected. And those factors, of course, exclude the widespread burnout in IT professionals.

One thing I note in the mindset of many Register commentards is a distinct lack of understanding and imagination with regard to managing any environment besides their own, resulting in a concomitant simple-mindedness with regard to solutions. Any problem you don't adequately understand is easy to solve, after all!

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Victim blaming! Drink!

I expect they pay it for the same reason that people pay kidnappers, despite government orders to the contrary: they're not willing to lose what was taken. It's all well and good for people with no skin in the game to tut judgementally, but if it were your business or beloved person at risk, you might be talking out the other side of your mouth.

Huge nonprofit hospital network suffers IT meltdown after 'security incident'

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Holmes

Re: Is it time?

I want to see the sort of person who distributes ransomware to hospitals sent via extraordinary rendition to countries with extremely dubious human rights records, where said individuals will be tortured to death. Does that clear things up?

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Flame

Re: Bingo!

Victim blaming! Drink!

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Unhappy

Is it time?

Can we call ransomware scumbags terrorists now?

Block this: Using satellites to plaster ads over our skies could work, say boffins

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Alien

Bah!

Kessler Syndrome will bring sweet release.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

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Joke

My brilliant idea

Why not just slow down the explosion of a hydrogen bomb enough that we can usefully capture the energy? I'll leave the implementation details up to others, I'm more of an idea man.

California to phase out gas furnaces, water heaters by 2030

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Flame

Re: Are they mandating the replacement tech?

Solar, wind, nuclear. California has lots of space for solar and wind, and we should be building nuclear plants far from fault lines, e.g. in nearby Nevada.

Amazon accused of singling out, harassing union organizers

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Meh

Re: I find myself idly wondering ...

That's an awfully big accusation. I'm sure you can back it up with some references.

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Unhappy

"In other words, when the C-level PHBs give directives to 'improve' productivity and the supervisors comply with C-level demands, then the C-level PHB have someone to blame and fire when the workers try and sue the company."

Certainly one possible outcome, unfortunately. On the flip side, it gives line managers a justification for pushing back on unreasonable management demands on behalf of their staff. It also theoretically enables whistleblowers.

Shitty management will always find ways to be shitty, but letting staff and line management know what their rights and options are can at least try to reduce the shittiness.

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Holmes

As a former manager myself, I think the value is twofold:

1. Training supervisory staff in workers' rights removes the fig leaf of ignorance. Without training, the line supervisors can just point at company policy and say they were following it. With training, including the understanding that workers' legal rights trump company policy, individual supervisors can be held accountable for actions which violate employee rights, which in turn creates an incentive to respect and protect those rights.

2. This kind of training can build a sense of empathy in the supervisory staff for their workers. In theory, it should help the supervisors and managers be more aware of the human needs of their staff and thus be less likely to treat them as disposable cogs. Of course, this outcome is precisely what senior management at Amazon probably wants to avoid because it can decrease short-term efficiency by enabling workers to do things like urinate or eat. The workers will be laughing out the other sides of their faces when they're replaced by robots, let me tell you!

GNOME hits 43: Welcome To Guadalajara

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Terminator

GNOME

"Loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it." -- not Marvin the Paranoid Android

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

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Happy

... altogether?

You've heard of the cost-of-living crisis, now get ready for the cost-of-working crisis

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Alert

In many cases, "taking care of" meant cutting back on staff or refusing to backfill empty positions while expecting ever greater productivity from the employees. For my part, I was certainly grateful to remain employed during the pandemic, but it's also worth noting that my employer continued to be highly profitable during that time, so the tightening of the screws in terms of staffing and other resource availability did not sit well with me. If management or the business owners took a loss to keep people employed, that's one thing; if not, then keeping employees around was just part of staying in business.

And don't even get me started about the poor health care workers.

Internet Society recommends development of Solar-System-scale routing framework

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Re: UUCP still works quite nicely.

As used, basically, in Vernor Vinge's classic novel A Fire Upon the Deep to communicate the long way around the galaxy!

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

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Unhappy

Bummer

I was recently walking down one of the streets in my neighborhood, and some cad had flung a bunch of 3.5" floppies (dozens of them, IIRC) all over the sidewalk. Had I realized what demand there was for them, I would have collected them!

Also, in before the first commentard who insists that he never uses anything as newfangled and unnecessarily complicated as a hard drive and still mourns the death of paper tape.

Where in the world is Terraform Labs' alleged crypto-crasher Do Kwon?

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Meh

Re: "he intended not to appear for questioning"

... if they can find him. And let's be honest, this guy is not Public Enemy Number One. One could even argue he's fulfilling P.T. Barnum's dictate that it's morally wrong to give a sucker an even break.

Cisco SMB revolution: selling hardware with no subscription required

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I'm actually impressed

I would not have believed that you could get a Cisco device of that spec for $125. Hell, my Synology AP cost more than that a few years ago. On the flip side, I don't pay Synology a subscription, either, and I continue to get software/firmware updates; I wonder how long Cisco provides updates for the devices mentioned in the article.

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

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Re: Here we go...

Ladies and gentlemen ... conservative "thought."

Twitter whistleblower Zatko disses bird site as dysfunctional data dump

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"Ginger, get the popcorn!"

<EOM>

NASA picks a tailor for Artemis moonwalking suits

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Joke

Re: " ... land a woman and person of color ... "

"The US only out a man in moon"

The man in the moon is gay? Jesus, don't tell the Republicans, they'll insist that the next moon mission include a "conversion therapist."

Ad blockers struggle under Chrome's new rules

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I had not heard of Librewolf, so I will check it out. Thanks for the recommendation! That said, my experience with hipster niche browsers (e.g. Palemoon or Waterfox) is that they don't seem to offer that much of an improvement over stock Firefox, so why bother maintaining the additional browser on my PC? Looking at the Librewolf's list of enhancements, most of those are things I already do:

* Disable telemetry

* Use DDG

* uBlock Origin

* Block autoplay

Etc.

It seems like most of what they're doing is taking stock Firefox and cranking up the privacy and blocking settings, and there's nothing wrong with that. It seems like the developers could solve most of the problem by distributing a custom configuration file, though.