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Comment Re: Yes and no. (Score 1) 24

The penalty isn't really a penalty unless you are trying to game the tax system. Basically, if you buy a share today, sell it tomorrow, then buy it back within 30 days of the sale, it's a non-taxable event. If you wait 31 days, you can claim the loss or gain from the sale, and when you eventually re-sell the stock the sale 32 days from today is the "basis value" for your next gain or loss.

I think Gravis Zero is looking for some actual penalty.

Back in the old days before cheap trading and penny-increment price changes, rapid trading was much more expensive.

Comment Re:Well on this cold November evening... (Score 1) 83

>The sort of people who think base load generation wont be required in the future are deluded

Base-load generation can be provided by storing power. For hours-long scales we can do that with batteries, heat storage, and things like flywheels. The technology isn't feasible everywhere and it's not without its down-sides, but it is worth considering when you are looking at how to build a power grid.

The problem of longer-term energy storage needs more research.

Comment Re:However (Score 1) 83

>The Brits continue paying electricity prices on par with the price of gold
What are you comparing? The average annual household electricity bill to the average annual household expenditure on gold? Yeah, the electicity bill is probably higher, but only because the gold expenditure is quite low even if you include the few cents worth in that new tv/computer/phone/gizmo the household just bought.

If you are comparing "monthy average household power bill to the price of X amount of gold" then what is "X"? A gram? A troy ounce? Some other standard measurement? The new unit called the HouseholdElectricBillGoldGramEquivalent20251121 (defined as the amount of gold having a value of the average British household's monthly electric bill at the close of trading in London on 2025-11-21)?

Comment Re:The water cycle is a closed system. (Score 1) 108

>Jesus will give them more water
>He's done it before...

You may be thinking of wine.

Or you may be thinking of Moses. According to the holy texts, he was involved in several water miracles.

Then there was Noah. While he didn't find the water or create the water, he was very involved in Genesis's biggest water story. "You want rain, just wait a bit, you'll be drowning in it."

Comment Re: XAML and TSWIPM (Score 1) 98

What if the engineers who implemented the flawed design said "take this job and shove it", knowing they had a strong inflation-proofed basic income to fall back on and program better things they actually wanted to use?

Or, what if the engineers who implemented the flawed design all contacted recruiters, got similar-or-better-paying jobs elsewhere, then say "take this job and shove it."*

* I assume being a Windows programmer at Microsoft still has enough cachet that you won't have any problems finding work elsewhere as long as you do it before you resign.

Submission + - Putin's most feared missile downed with a song (telegraph.co.uk)

fahrbot-bot writes: The Telegraph is reporting that Ukraine forces are jamming signals for Russia's ‘invincible’ Kinzhal hyper-sonic missile with a song satirizing Russian propaganda.

Night Watch, the group operating the technology, claims to have brought down 19 Kinzhal missiles – described by Putin as “invincible” – in the past two weeks.

The team told technology website 404 Media that it is using a song and a redirection order to knock the “next-generation” missiles, which carry a 480kg payload and cost around £7.7m each, out of the sky.

Kinzhals and other guided munitions rely on the GLONASS system – Russia’s GPS-style navigation network using satellites – to find their targets. Night Watch developed its own “Lima” jamming system that replaces the missiles’ satellite navigation signals with the Ukrainian song “Our Father is Bandera”.

When the song begins, the Lima system feeds the incoming missiles a false navigation signal, tricking them into believing that they are flying over Lima, in Peru, so that they attempt to change their trajectory. Traveling at a speed of more than 4,000 miles per hour, however, the missiles become destabilized by the abrupt and unexpected change of course.

Night Watch said they developed the system after discovering that the Kinzhals used a controlled reception pattern antenna (CRPA), an antiquated type of technology for resisting, jamming and spoofing. The team told 404: “They had the same type of receivers as old Soviet missiles used to have.

“The airframe cannot withstand the excessive stress and the missile naturally fails. When the Kinzhal tried to quickly change navigation, the fuselage of this missile was unable to handle the speed and, yeah, it was just cut into two parts. The biggest advantage of those missiles, speed, was used against them.”

Submission + - Most Revoked SSL Certificates Still Work (certkit.io)

todd3091 writes: An analysis of SSL certificate revocation reveals that the entire PKI revocation infrastructure is fundamentally broken, with browser vendors and CAs maintaining the system purely for compliance while knowing it doesn't work.

Testing shows that revoked.badssl.com, a certificate explicitly revoked for key compromise, loads successfully in Safari and Firefox while being blocked in Chrome. This happens because each browser implements its own proprietary revocation checking system with wildly different coverage. Chrome's CRLSet includes approximately 24,000 certificates out of over 2 million revoked certificates in the wild, effectively ignoring 98% of revocations.

The technical failures have been documented for years. CRLs grew to hundreds of megabytes, making them impossible to distribute efficiently. OCSP, designed to replace CRLs, suffers from median response times of 300ms and frequent timeouts, with Mozilla reporting nearly half their system failures stemming from OCSP issues. When OCSP fails, browsers default to "soft-fail" mode, allowing connections anyway. As Google's Adam Langley noted in 2012, "Soft-fail revocation checks are like a seat-belt that snaps when you crash."

OCSP stapling, meant to solve these problems, has less than 5% adoption. Even when implemented, stapled responses frequently expire without being refreshed, triggering soft-fail fallbacks.

The CA/Browser Forum's response has been to openly acknowledge defeat. In discussions about certificate lifetimes, members stated: "Given that revocation is fundamentally broken and we have no realistic path to fixing it, shorter certificate lifetimes are our only option." This led to the progressive reduction from 5+ year certificates in 2011 to the proposed 47-day certificates by 2029.

Every major browser has essentially rebuilt CRLs in proprietary, incompatible ways. Chrome uses CRLSets updated through Chrome's update mechanism. Firefox employs CRLite with Bloom filters. Apple aggregates CRLs at the OS level with an undocumented implementation. The result: whether a revoked certificate actually stops working depends entirely on which browser you use and when it last updated its proprietary list.

Full analysis: https://www.certkit.io/blog/ce...

Comment Re: Until ... (Score 1) 306

>What if a life in isolation sounds heavenly, how do I get it?

You can approximate this lifestyle by just staying a home all the time and having groceries and other necessities delivered to your doorstep. You'll probably still have to expose yourself to other people in person from time to time, but we are talking a few times a year, not a few times a day.

Comment Re: Until ... (Score 1) 306

When I said "Until ... .. the person that doesn't get vaccinated infects someone you love who can't get vaccinated for medical reasons" in my reply to zawarski, I meant if some anti-vaxxer in zawarski's locale infected and as a result killed one of zawarski's loved ones who wasn't vaccinated for medical reasons.

Other readers who share zawarski's beliefs are invited to put themselves in zawarski's place, especially if they have a loved one who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.

Your point about the anti-vaxxer possibly accepting the death of their own loved one may be true for some anti-vaxxers, but it's not relevant to what I was trying to say.

Comment Re:AI in toys isn't always risky (Score 1) 32

>by it's nature must record and send everything back to some faceless intermediate

Someday soon it will be possible to do all of the AI work on-device. The only thing stopping it now are the weight and cooling constraints imposed by the teddy-bear form-factor. If you want a low-power AI and don't mind frequently recharging the batteries, you can do it today in a teddy-bear-shaped, teddy-bear-mass cuddly form factor. You will need to handle cooling though.

Comment AI in toys isn't always risky (Score 3) 32

Connected toys that spy on you, on the other hand....

By the way, the companies that make and sell these toys are putting their stockholders at risk of a future privacy lawsuit. This is one of those times where corporate in-house lawyers should put the brakes on a product until the law is more settled. As it stands now, "will we get sued in 2030 and lose a fortune for what we are selling in 2025" is an open question.

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