I never understood NFT's. Nothing about them made any sense. You pay a lot of money for a digital cert of sorts that has absolutely no tangible association with anything.

So I buy this NFT of an APE. Do I own the copyright on the pic. Nope. I buy the NFT of the first Tweet. What do I have well nothing. Not like you can control how the tweet is used.

I can apparently sell nothing for a lot of money as well.

But holy cow did none technical people scoop them up. I personally know a number of people that lost a LOT of money on them.

I have simple position.

Reactors take upwards of 30 years to be commissioned in the western world. These are timelines are so long that it's impossible to build in the capacity supply from the reactor into Energy capacity planning.

A 30 year commissioning period is a massive commitment in capital $$ with absolutely no return. In fact this is typically funded by debt which literally multiples the debt by 10x or more. This is irresponsible to even consider any more.

SMR is a new tech. All of the controls and safety aspects of the mega reactors must still all be present in smaller reactors. This has to be exhaustively tested and evaluate before general acceptance and willingness to adopt the technology can occur. This could add decades more to the delivery puzzle.

Nuclear reactors of any kind need water. LOTS of fresh water. With water becoming increasingly a critical resource it makes the potential regions of deployment of a SMR dwindle dramatically.

Nuclear reactors like to be built where people like to live. A nuclear reactor effectively needs to be built on high value land that is high sought after for housing. Now once a reactor is built in a location that land can effectively never be used again for any purpose. It becomes inaccessible wild land at best.

Nuclear reactors need land that is effectively free of risk of natural disasters. As we have seen in recent years land that was once considered safe has experience significant impact from nature. Fire, flood, storms, etc are all intensifying. Japan proves that this is something we can no longer overlook.

No one wants nuclear waste. In Australia it has gotten so bad that there are industrial areas in the middle of nowhere where nuclear waste is being stored in rusting steal drums out in the open exposed to the elements. Increasingly the transport of nuclear material through areas is being outlawed. How can the restriction of movement and storage of nuclear material support the deployment of several SMR's? Just how many ports will even allow nuclear material to move via them?

Nuclear Power is a waste of effort. Just why even bother. If the money needed to be sunk into the development of an SMR went instead to storage technology we would be far further ahead in a far sooner timeframe. Renewables have already demonstrated that they can scale up and down to meet the needs. With almost zero additional investment and development. Renewables generate $$ far sooner than traditional power systems. Renewables can be decommissioned and the land returned with almost zero land remediation needing to be done. You can build a solar plant and in 15 years move it when someone decides that land is better used for something else. Can't do that with nuclear.

( My grammar is garbage I know that. no need to point it out. )

A fully digital currency will result in a shadow economy running parallel. The shadow economy will likely be far more efficient and decentralised with anonymous transactions. Once one country has a shadow economy currency system it will quickly spread around the world.

It won't be bitcoin. As bitcoin is a value store not a currency. It take far to long to process a transaction. Also it is now essentially no long anonymous. To many data correlations are putting names to wallet's.

Yes Australia had a 12 hour outage it affected 1/3 of the population, public services, banking and emergency responders.

The point is critical governments services were impacted either partially or completely. Central banks would need to invent a decentralised digital currency that enabled transactions outside of the network in order to avoid this significant issue.

Yes,

It is up to the bank that issues the terminal whether it will be supported for a merchant. The merchant can also so no. As the merchant is liable for any fraud of the system.

Some banks around the world even have this built into their phone apps that take payments.

This is exactly how pay terminals in planes work. They aren't on the network. Only very recently have planes got a reasonably reliable internet service. But those terminals only sync once they are back on the ground. ( For the most part. I'm sure new outfitted planes may be different. )

As someone who works a lot at the Enterprise level the answer is a lot of things could have taken everything down at once.

There is a lot of interconnected dependencies with any large Telco provider. Telcos are a lot more than just "networks". There are lots of layers of capabilities that MUST be operating for the whole to keep working. Examples:

Internal DNS,
Corporate PKI infra,
Base BGP routing.
Identity management systems.

Basically all of the above are trust systems. Building layers in different areas. I trust you, I know you, I'm allowed to talk to you etc. If all of a sudden the trust is broken it all is broken.

When core networks go down it becomes even harder. Since now you have to send someone into these building to directly interact with systems. Since they no longer "trust" or "know" about other parts of the network. And this is at first to just get a sense of what's wrong. Since you can't actually tell what's wrong because you can no longer see it remotely. This is the hard part. Getting the right people in the right locations is no longer a simple task.

Take Melbourne for example: The staff presumably is on Optus mobile network. The staff is now complete offline. Everything. no phones, no internet. The smart ones will go into default mode of heading to the office. Ah but there's a problem. The trains are down. So it's bus, or car most likely. ( Distances a large in most cases. ) This takes time. You will miss a lot of people in this as well. Now you need to come up with a game plan. First phase is discovery. What happened and how bad is it. Next phase is triage. Create a set of priorities and get people on it. Next is remediation. How the heck do we bring back up the essentials as quickly as possible whilst creating as little collateral damage as possible. Noting that efforts to repair things often lead to creating more issues. Second note, it's actually very likely that the whole thing coming down was the result of someone trying to remediate another problem in the middle of the night. And the first "fix" actually took out everything. Lastly the long slow process of bringing everything back to an operating state. And this does take time. As a customer everything may appear fine. But behind the scenes Optus will be embarking on a LONG process of full recovery.

But in order to do all this you need to get people in the right places first. And the tools you use to do just that are impacted as well. So it makes for a LONG day.

How about making sure you actually carry a credit card as well. Moving all your cards to phone apps and then never carrying a card strikes me as very dumb.

Oh my phone died and now you can't get home or eat. I've heard this way to many times from young people. The drama could be all avoided by simply carrying 1 card at all times.

Well not so secret secret is that in most countries the financial institutions allow for automatic approvals of cash transactions under a certain amount via the bank terminals in the stores when the network is unavailable.

Example: In Australia at some stores an automatic $100 approval is granted for transactions under that limit. The actual transactions is cached and completed at a later time if the network is unavailable. Now this doesn't work in all shops. As each bank sets it's criteria on how a shop can qualify. Example bars and gambling generally are not allowed to do this.

So no need to write a card number down and process it by hand in most cases.

I'm being serious here.

Didn't these things devalue to effectively zero?

I'm genuinely shocked that there is enough interest to even generate a conference. Let alone a conference that has enough cash to fund a large light show.

When google merged music into the video experience it set back the whole audio experience.

How people consume audio is not the same as how they consume video. No pod casts I lop into the audio experience.

Now because there is a difference in experiences the integrations with devices is also different. An audio experience needs a particular serialised style interface for cars, headphones etc. Where as a video experience is an organic experience where interaction is much more important. By merging with youtube google has mangled both podcasts and music.

I've stopped many years ago consuming audio from a google property. Simply because it just was convenient or enjoyable anymore.

I work fully remote.

For a lot of reasons.
1. My cost of living is a fraction of what it would need to be if I needed to live nearish an office. Rent is 1/3 of inner city costs here. And have you tired renting a place now in the city of any major world city? Forget that.
2. No commute. This is giving me back 2-3.5 hours a DAY.
3. My home office is better in every way than any open plan nightmare.
4. I'm in meetings constantly. If I was in the office I would be spending all my time in tiny call cubicles working off a tiny laptop screen with horrible audio.
5. My clients aren't even in my home city. And they haven't been for over 8 years.
6. I can count on 2 finger the number of times I've been ill with covid/flu/cold what ever in the past 3 years.
7. My quality of life is so much better than pre-covid.

The only down side is that I'm no longer mentoring the new hires as much as I used too. This is literally the only downside for the company.

To work in a inner city office again would set me back at least $40K a year. Yeah that much.

Now I would be inconvenienced by a job flip. As I would have to spend more time finding one that will enable full time remote. As I would be pretty choosy.

My employer knows I would quit if they tried to force me. My clients would make a huge stink over it. It would also likely cause many other to quit as well. They want us in the office but it's not going to happen.

This is stepping over the line.

This can now be used to justify almost any level of intrusive surveillance.

Since drones are basically flying body cams everything they see will end up on some storage system somewhere.

Creating a constant level of fear in the populous that any thing they do anywhere may be held against them. Perfectly innocent actions taken out of context can and are used all the time to prosecute people. If your multiple the volume of recorded material you are multiplying opportunities for authorities to over step. Every single advancement that enables authorities to observe what the populous is doing has been abused by Government and industry.

A classic example is your medical information being sold to insurance companies to be used against you. To deny you claims. To inflate your rates. All because the gov opening sold this information to them. ( This is quite common around the world. )

Here's a scenario.

Inevitably crimes will be created around the damaging and destruction of these drones as well. Imagine the poor family that finds SWAT at their door because a drone was downed by a bird over their property. All we need is the last recorded images being some guy giving the finger and raising a broom at a drone. Of course they are going to charge the perfectly innocent dude. Even though it feel for perfectly innocent reasons.

Another scenario.

The miss use of the drones. Inevitably some idiot cop is going to use it to perv on someone or stalk a former lover etc. There are already issues with this with the various capabilities police have at their disposal.

As someone who has worked with Police, Gov and Enterprise customers I find this near impossible to believe.

Between:
- Backups,
- Redundant storage,
- Ingest systems
- FOI requests
- Court copies
- etc.
I can't honestly fathom how they lost 3 years of vid.

I can understand that they may have destroyed the chain of custody records which would effectively make any video stored junk. As you wouldn't be able to trace who has had contact with the videos. Which means you can with 100% certainty prove the video is not tampered with. So the value as evidence drops to zip. A video with zero value as evidence is effectively lost. But still this would be incredibly difficult to do.

Someone is definitely getting fired and likely charged over this. Victims of crime definitely have a case for a class action against the police.

RHEL 9.2 marks the spot on the RHEL tree where real branches sprout from. A number of distros were riding in parallel. IBM has made it abundantly clear they don't like these parasite distro's that are eating away at it's revenue stream.

There have been several announcements in recent times by these parallel distros about how they will maintain compatibility. All with the goal of grabbing market share away from IBM.

We all know that one of two thing will cause hard fork. First is compatibility. IBM will make it increasingly difficult for the clones to stay in sync. Proprietary features will ultimately lock them out. Second is market share. Once a clone grabs significant market share and starts introducing a divergent feature set in an effort to be the new standard.

It's more likely that IBM will make a few attempts to introduce lock out features. They will ultimately through some vendor partnership manage to do just that. Forcing the big branch.

Once the branch happens IBM's RHEL will likely start to fade with even more speed. With mounting costs users will simply jump ship at an ever increasing speed. The same pattern was seen with Solaris.

I remember talking about pepper in the 90's. It has never come up in a work context in the last 25 years for me. So I'm with you there.

But is it even needed? No. The overheads of managing that secret is massive overkill when it's only used for a hash. The secrets management of the pepper means you have to have a whole shared cryptography secrets capability in place. Well shared secrets that is.

But back to this train wreck on privacy claims. Again A simple hash does not protect a email address. It's just too easy to obtain a real email address from that. No brute force reverse hash needed. Simply down load a list of email addresses and hash those and compare.

I've worked on many projects and many many times I have had to step in a prevent data collection and storage. Almost every time it's. "We grab this just in case we will need it in the future. We have no sinister plans for it." And they mean it. They genuinely think it's OK. Simple because they are convinced they and the team will always use it ethically.

The fact is the data is almost always used unethically with in a very short period of time. And people don't even realise that's what they are doing.