Comment burning books (Score 2) 114
Funny twist on the Fahrenheit novel. AI Capitalism buys books to burn them.
Comment Re:Kent Walker (Score 1) 51
That is something you just made up. In fact you can only have an antitrust ruling based on law and the current news is that the European Court of Justice dismissed a legal complaint from Alphabet against a prior ruling. So we are not anymore on a level where one could make a political argument. The disrespectful remarks of Mr. Walker are unprecedented. You don't attack courts.
Submission + - European Cyber Resiliance Act getting into force (gesmer.com)
Elektroschock writes: Andy Updegrove warns: September 11, 2026. Actively exploited vulnerabilities and severe incidents must be reported to the designated national incident response team and the EU cybersecurity agency through a single EU reporting platform, on a 24-hour / 72-hour / final-report timeline.
Comment Re:Can I pay him not to post? (Score 2) 215
Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"
We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.
I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.
Comment Re:Just a matter of time (Score 1) 75
This is not voted on by Parliament but Parliament could object to it. Under Article 290 TFEU, delegated acts may supplement or amend non-essential elements of a legislative act. The original legislation must define the objectives, scope, content and duration of the delegation. Parliament and the Council retain control: they may revoke the delegation or object to an individual delegated act. Here we have the Commission using a delegated act, an administrative measure, to amend the European law, without meeting the prerequisites:
"Such delegated acts shall be adopted only on account of market developments and technical and scientific progress, and provided that there are scientifically grounded concerns over the safety of end-users removing or replacing the portable battery, or in cases where there is a risk that the removal or the replacement of the battery by end-users would be in violation of any product safety requirements provided for by applicable Union law."
This is a shady legal base for the current action, so this would blow up if scrutinised by Parliament or Council. Furthermore, there is really no point of communicating to trading partners in the way that it has been done, which casts a very bad light.
Comment Kent Walker (Score 0) 51
Kent Walker does not appear to know how to speak to European Commission authorities. This is so rude and disrespectful.
Comment EU (Score 2) 54
I wish the European Union would take similar action. Mario Draghi claimed he wanted to solve the issue 20 years ago. Time to revisit it.
Comment Re:Autocad (Score 1) 244
Anyway, the task would be to make AutoCad obsolete and this requires substantial investment.
Comment Just a matter of time (Score 1) 75
It looks more like a temporary issue, better work on compliance before the law comes back. After all the commission does not decide things:
Here is the legal base:
"The Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 89 to amend paragraph 2 of this Article by adding further products to be exempted from the removability and replaceability requirements laid down in paragraph 1 of this Article. Such delegated acts shall be adopted only on account of market developments and technical and scientific progress, and provided that there are scientifically grounded concerns over the safety of end-users removing or replacing the portable battery, or in cases where there is a risk that the removal or the replacement of the battery by end-users would be in violation of any product safety requirements provided for by applicable Union law."
I don't think this condition for the delegated act is met.
It is also offensive that the EC informs the WTO TBT but not the European Parliament.
Submission + - Where to start with the best OSS Strategy? (suse.com)
Elektroschock writes: The new European Union Open Source Strategy, presented last month, is the best in the world, says Suse. Yet it was time for chop-chop.
We say this not as a courtesy before criticism, and because the quality of the foundation is what makes the remaining work worth doing.
Comment copilot (Score 1) 2
So how do we clean Copilot from windows computers and gemini from our android phone?
Comment Re:Solar fricken roadways all over again (Score 1) 120
It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.
Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.
If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.
Comment Autocad (Score 1) 244
Autocad comes to my mind.
Comment Injust (Score 1) 88
Companies violate antitrust law and then can sit it out in court. Only the lawyers win.
Submission + - What is a quantum computer good for? Absolutely nothing — yet (theverge.com)
joshuark writes: The Verge has an article about the "absolute nothing" of quantum computers. We have yet to see a quantum computer conclusively perform a single useful task. Existing machines are simply too small and error-ridden to solve commercially relevant problems.
Companies drive the hype, too. In June, Microsoft announced a new quantum computing chip named Majorana 2. It claimed the chip was a hardware advancement that accelerates its timeline to a “scalable, practical quantum computer” by 2029. But independent experts swiftly criticized the announcement. “This is complete codswallop,” Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic, tells The Verge.
Legg just published a paper in Nature on June 24th criticizing Microsoft’s quantum claims from a year ago — peer review takes a long time — and pointing to what he sees as major discrepancies between Microsoft’s papers and press releases. Nature included Microsoft’s rebuttal.
Researchers have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it’s just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public’s imagination. Proponents predict that the technology will lead to discoveries in medicine, as well as advances in materials science and machine learning. Meanwhile, many national security experts frame its development as a new Cold War competition between the US and China.
Some have imagined the quantum computer as a cyberattack tool. In 1994, computer scientist Peter Shor developed a quantum computing algorithm for factoring prime numbers that should be able to break RSA encryption, a ubiquitous family of algorithms used to secure banking and email communications. So "RSA is dead" is the repeated mantra of the quantum computing hype.
Current quantum computers like Google’s Willow are individual chips too primitive to break RSA encryption or implement drug molecule simulations. But the vision is to build scaled-up machines that can.
Similar cycles have played out several times since the technology’s beginnings. Companies announce a breakthrough; independent researchers cry hype, all while investors continue to inject money into the industry. Then investors cash out and then call it a "scam" on the public.
Henry Legg is more skeptical and thinks some have underestimated the fundamental challenges of scaling. “There’s no evidence of the scalability of any platform to the level that you would need to do useful quantum computations within a decade, or probably a couple of decades,” he says.
While researchers have made progress toward building a useful quantum computer, it’s not clear what that use should be. “It’s such a nascent technology,” says Islam. “If you ask, what is a quantum computer good for, I do not know of an application which is a sure shot.”
The Trump administration wants a useful quantum computer in two years. Are we having fun yet?
Companies drive the hype, too. In June, Microsoft announced a new quantum computing chip named Majorana 2. It claimed the chip was a hardware advancement that accelerates its timeline to a “scalable, practical quantum computer” by 2029. But independent experts swiftly criticized the announcement. “This is complete codswallop,” Henry Legg, a physicist from the University of St. Andrews and a longtime Microsoft critic, tells The Verge.
Legg just published a paper in Nature on June 24th criticizing Microsoft’s quantum claims from a year ago — peer review takes a long time — and pointing to what he sees as major discrepancies between Microsoft’s papers and press releases. Nature included Microsoft’s rebuttal.
Researchers have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it’s just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public’s imagination. Proponents predict that the technology will lead to discoveries in medicine, as well as advances in materials science and machine learning. Meanwhile, many national security experts frame its development as a new Cold War competition between the US and China.
Some have imagined the quantum computer as a cyberattack tool. In 1994, computer scientist Peter Shor developed a quantum computing algorithm for factoring prime numbers that should be able to break RSA encryption, a ubiquitous family of algorithms used to secure banking and email communications. So "RSA is dead" is the repeated mantra of the quantum computing hype.
Current quantum computers like Google’s Willow are individual chips too primitive to break RSA encryption or implement drug molecule simulations. But the vision is to build scaled-up machines that can.
Similar cycles have played out several times since the technology’s beginnings. Companies announce a breakthrough; independent researchers cry hype, all while investors continue to inject money into the industry. Then investors cash out and then call it a "scam" on the public.
Henry Legg is more skeptical and thinks some have underestimated the fundamental challenges of scaling. “There’s no evidence of the scalability of any platform to the level that you would need to do useful quantum computations within a decade, or probably a couple of decades,” he says.
While researchers have made progress toward building a useful quantum computer, it’s not clear what that use should be. “It’s such a nascent technology,” says Islam. “If you ask, what is a quantum computer good for, I do not know of an application which is a sure shot.”
The Trump administration wants a useful quantum computer in two years. Are we having fun yet?
