But that would have ended with Russia not being owned by Russians.

The only thing "Russian" about the people that own Russia now is the country on their passports, which they probably don't use anyway because of the sanctions etc. from Ukraine and that many have citizenship in whichever country they have moved to. They sure as hell don't give a damn about the country, it's people, or anything else "Russia", besides their ability to keep extracting money and influence from it.

Of course, you could say that about a lot of the people that essentially own the rest of the world too.

Doubly so in this case, albeit of a slightly different nature. I keep coming across IP addresses that are managed by Cloud Innovations all the time, and almost always leased out to some sketchy ISP that is either heavily compromised by botnets, or an out and out "bullet proof" hosting provider. The latter are particularly interesting as they are presumably raking in the cash because they both covering Lu's rental fees and maintaining a business relationship because they keep cycling to new subnets as the previous ones get blocked. That implies they are not defaulting on the rental fees, and Lu is either oblivious to what that continual changing of ranges for the same customer implies or is fully aware of, and therefore supporting, this kind of activity.

10m IPs, huh. /checks blocklist. Yeah, I've got just over a third of that blocked & flagged as "Cloud Innovations" at the moment, most of which are in /16 and larger IPv4 allocations. About 7m to go, I guess... Thank $deity for IPSets...

National budgets simply do not, and cannot, work that way. Taxes go into a central pot, and then get assigned out according to the priorities of the state as interpreted by the government that currently controls the national purse strings, ideally without having to borrow any additional money although that seldom happens and is deeply unpopular when it does (see "Austerity" - governments typicallydo not live within their means, yet usually expect their publics to do just that). For the whole system to work, they have to both tax things that are easy to collect the tax on, and over tax those things to make up for the costs of things where it is not easy to tax. If you want any taxes spent to be proportionate to what they are raised from, then the outcome will be a LOT of essential services that are currently supported by the public purse seeing drastic cuts, forcing more people to go private or join a *long* waiting list, and requiring suplemental per-use fees.

For most people, sure the odometer will be fine, but some of us live in rural communities and have vehicles that are used a significant amount of time off public roads, but still need to be taxed for their on-road usage - think tractors or road-legal quad bikes, for a couple of very obvious examples. A simple "per mile driven" based on the odometer is not the perfectly fair "one size fits all" solution that it might at first seem to be if those kinds of vehicles go electric at some point, so I think a little more nuance may be required before this scheme sees the light of day. Privacy concerns aside, many of those issues could easily be addressed via GPS-based tracking of just public road usage, and could also enable more nuanced billing to try deter drivers from using busy roads at peak times, effectively turning any road that is applied to into a toll road.

It should also be noted that this is on top of existing vehicle tax, which is paid as an annual fee in the UK. People with large SUVs and commercial vehicles will still be paying more to drive those vehicles per year, but whether the plan is to shift more of that tax to the per-mile rax rates based on criteria such as the likely amount of road surface wear they will create, e.g. different per mile rates for larger vehicles, isn't yet clear, either. Overall, it's probably the fairest system for users of different types of vehicle classes and power trains to pay their share of the public highway costs, but the devil is always in the details and at this point there are scant few of those available to see where the issues people ought to be concerned about might lie.

They clearly do NOT think it is safe. From TFS, emphasis mine:

"It is important to differentiate between the highly toxic PFAS such as PFOA and PFOS for which the EPA has set drinking water standards, versus less toxic PFAS in pesticides that help maintain food security," notes Doug Van Hoewyk, a toxicologist at Maine's Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry.

Less toxic is still toxic. So, they *know* it's bad for you (and probably the environment/local ecology too), just not as bad, and yet they still expect you to be grateful for their efforts and quite literally lap it up. Good luck getting that shit on the shelves of places like the EU that have reasonable food standards, regardless of any tariffs or TACOs.

Given most people think "dams, reservoirs, and turbines" when they hear the word "hydro", it's also worth pointing out that the UK has a lot of untapped tidal potential as well; the Severn estruary in particular is one of the largest tidal bores in the world, twice a day, and its energy potential will only increase as sealevels rise. Combine that with some suitable storage system, and you'll have another clean (once set up) and predictable supply capacity to offset some more of the current carbon-based baseload.

My middle child, when she was age 25-30, could easily pass for 15.

Lawsuits abound from this.

MMmmm....lemme see now...

1) A.I. is driven by fanciful notions. For example, Hi I am Sam Altman, you should be using A.I. for everything, even if it doesn't work because I want to make trillions and well, basically have it tell me how to live forever and travel the Universe with my Trillions.
2) A.I. is fundamentally anti human, anti life and little too overly SATANIC, right down to its crappy language that forces everyone to use: Python. I will never write a single line of Python. If it isn't C or Java I am not interested. Why should I be?
3) The people pushing this fancy search engine, which they constantly spend millions to convince you otherwise, lie. Not just lie or mislead, they do it on purpose. ANYTHING so that the perception of A.I. IS NOT just a fancy search engine, but yet another stock opportunity.

Liars, cheats and not too terribly bright=A.I.

So... Did you work on Microsoft Excel, the Intel Pentium, or both?

You jest, but it truly is terrible. Take this bit (if true): "(According to the report, more than 60 percent of students who took the previous version of the course couldn't divide a fraction by two." My immediate reaction to that was "WTF!?" You just need to double the denominator and simplify if possible and it's all integers no matter what, but, even if you don't simplify, 2/6 and 1/3 both answer the question "what is half of 2/3?".

That's not just a failure in maths skills, it's a failure in basic comprehension and ability to conceptualise a problem, which is far more wide-ranging and impactful than just being bad at math.

Fortunately there is a formal system for youtube to indicate exactly how public/private something is. We need not speculate. 200 and 401 are as different as .. two different numbers.

At least tea doesn't get OTA updates :)

Sure, but nothing tangible would be lost - just some notional "Market Cap" reduction which is only really meaningful to Wall Street types, although that would also impact people's pension's etc.

Where nVidia would be exposed would be is companies have bought significant quantities of their chips, but go bust when the bubble pops without settling their invoices from nVidia first. Best case that ties up nVidia's cash while the bankruptcy process happens and they get a significant slice of the outstanding financial pie. Worst case the companies in question all implode with significant debts to multiple parties, their assets (mostly nVidia's chips) get sold off to pay off those debts, but nVidia still gets next to nothing once the assets are divied up. Combined with a heavily reduced market cap, that leaves nVidia with a significant reduction in cash-in-hand and a lack of value with which to help secure loans and investment, which in any case would need to come from a financial market reeling from a multi-trillion dollar bubble pop. The reality is more likely to be somewhere in the middle, but nVidia isn't going to sail through this completely unscathed either.

People do stuff. WTF, are we supposed to have a world-wide committee meeting every time some hacker starts a random project?

Sam Altman can have his own "AI," with blackjack and hookers. If you don't want yours to have that, then write it differently. If his project is affecting yours, it's because he's on the sharp end, running into scaling issues and regulators first. Let him bear the brunt of that, so you don't have to.

The only thing that can really go wrong, is if he uses his financial influence to get a government-granted monopoly. (And you'll have my support in opposing that.) Until then, though, how much is he shaping things? You can do something other than what he is doing right now. He isn't in charge of your project, is he?

It's not just about the packages and whether they are malicious or not. These, so far at least, are not - AFAICT they don't even *claim* do anything at all that is functionally useful to a coder so they are never going to get downloaded; their sole purpose is to earn the uploader some of these TEA tokens which, when amalgamated across a few hundred thousand packages, is presumably worth something to them, or why bother? Now that the jig is up, the people that do like to peddle such malware are probably not looking too kindly on whoever pulled this off.

That's the secondary issue here ; like many similar things, whoever came up with this TEA token either didn't consider, or didn't care about, human nature. Anyone with half a clue, or the slightest care about the integrity of such a scheme, should be well aware by now that if you can earn something of value (which need not be monetary) by doing some online clicks, likes, shares, uploads, or whatever then some asshat is going to try and exploit the system so they can get all the benefits without the effort. If your system isn't baking in countermeasures against that kind of abuse, then it's a PoS that should never have left the drawing board but, all too often, human nature rears its head again and says "ship it anyway!" and the enshitification continues.