Yeah that is a load of rubbish. Both the UK and the Soviet Union invaded Persia in WWII, to secure supply routes essential to defeating the Nazi's. Want to blame anyone for that then blame the Germans. After WWII, the Soviets in typically Russian fashion spent a lot of time interfering in Persia to install a communist regime (they did the same thing in Afghanistan). The USA intervened to prevent that happening. If you think the Shahs regime was remotely as bad as the current one you are an imbecile. The total number of people killed or disappeared during the 38 years of the Shahs rule is less than 3000. Contrast that to just the recent protests this year where more than double that are known to have been killed and it is likely more than ten times by the current regime.

If you think ISIS have the same agenda as radical Christians in the USA then you are a idiot. For starters they are not into slavery, which ISIS very much were/are.

Except I can buy a Dell workstation that is *WAY* more expensive than the most expensive Mac. Need more than 192GB of RAM and with Apple you are stuffed with current gen models. Even ignoring the current bubble in RAM prices you can easily spec a PC workstation with 512GB of RAM, making it way more expensive than any Mac.

Noting that 12 hours a day for six days a week is against Federal law. However, if your drop off points have charging points, the shorter range truck is probably practical.

12+ hours driving in a day is flat out dangerous for other road users and against federal law, which requires a mandatory 30 minute break after 8 hours of driving.

Basically, adding fast charging at your mandatory rest break and a 500-mile range is exceedingly difficult to break legally.

From a European perspective, the US working time limits for truckers are downright dangerous. Don't give me the USA is big, Europe is too. It's ~2500 miles from my house to Athens. I see HGVs on the road in Scotland that have come from all over Europe all the time.

Except trucker forums have posts about EV big rigs not having the range for what they do. Noting that a 500 mile range is more than you can legally drive in a day.

First thing I would note is that American trucks are decades behind European ones. That is what 40 years of protectionism will do to an industry. Check out Bruce Wilson's YouTube channel to get the idea.

The second thing is that an EV big rig does not have to be suitable for 100% of use cases to be succesful. A great example would be from distribution warehouses to stores. The range is more than adequate, especially if you use rapid charging at the store so you can charge while unloading. That is a significant fraction of freight gone EV.

Final thing from a safety perspective: with a network of rapid chargers, EV big rigs will enforce taking breaks, making the roads safer for other users.

It's a university in the UK, so that's in GBP, not USD, making it even worse. So in 2025, pricing for 425k GBP, I could buy 16 Dell 7725's dual 64 cores (from a HPC perspective, more cores and memory bandwidth becomes an issue, might be different for virtualisation workloads) with disk all up the front, new 100Gbps switches, split them across two sites (we have two data centres), and *still* have change.

That is a redundant 1024 cores for VM workloads, which is frankly a way more than a university is likely to need. For sure, other projects get put on a back burner to do the migration, but at 425k GBP per annum, it is bye-bye VMware because there is literally no budget for that sort of nonsense.

That said, a 425k GBP per annum license fee hike concentrates the mind, and schemes to move off VMware on the same hardware with some judicious modifications all of a sudden become viable. Remember, we are a university, not a bank, so tolerance for risk is different.

For example, for the HPC, I was able to fit a cut-down working service on a single machine while the hardware for the VSphere cluster was reconfigured, Proxmox was installed, and the VMs were migrated back. During those three days, we were exposed to a failure on the single machine. Though for the critical VMs, it was less than 48 hours before they were on the Proxmox cluster.

Would I have ordinarily considered such a scheme, not on your life. The available budget meant it was the *ONLY* viable option.

When your licensing costs go from 75k to 500k per annum, you have no choice but to get off. That was what faced central IT. I am pretty sure there is no VMWare left at my University. It all went Proxmox as far as I am aware. I did the slightly craziest in-place switch from Essentials Plus with shared SAS SSD storage to Proxmox, all on the same hardware for the HPC. Though it did require some hardware "upgrades" to the nodes. Things like SAS backplanes and HBA's so I could move the SSD's up the front of the servers, ConnectX4 cards for the CEPH networking and bigger M.2 boot drives.

Image classification for tracking and terminal guidance is at least 40 years old, and I can personally attest to that. Specifics are, however, covered by the Official Secrets Act. The field of AI covers more than just neural networks.

In the context of the story, Employment Tribunals in the United Kingdom, the Judge will instantly spot any dodgy citations. Basically, all the useful citations are known to the judges already, so anything they don't recognise they will look up. Of course, they have access to a computerised database of all the cases, so looking things up takes mere seconds.

How do I know this? My brother is, in fact, an Employment Tribunal Judge in the UK, and he told me at Christmas that he had already seen a legal firm doing that. Referenced a case he didn't recognise, looked it up because, of course, he was curious to find it didn't exist.

In January 1995, the £16.3 million jackpot for the UK lottery was won by 133 tickets. Lots of winning tickets are already a thing.

If you think having the RAM market supplied by 10 manufacturers rather than 3 would make the slightest bit of difference to the current price hikes, I have a bridge to sell you.

Clearly failed Economics 101. The same market forces pushing manufacturers to supply AI data centres would still exist, and RAM manufacturers would likely make the same choices they are making now.

More likely, they are a litigant in person because lawyers are expensive. Filling out an ET1 is not easy if you are not a lawyer, so people resort to using AI. If you are on a zero-hours contract and your last employer didn't pay you your last paycheck for say £400, you are not hiring a lawyer, but that £400 quid is actually going to make a big difference to your finances.

That said, my brother (an actual Employment Tribunal Judge in the UK) tells me he has caught legal firms using AI in their submission to the tribunal. Basically, there was a precedent cited that he had never heard of before, unsurprisingly, as the case didn't exist.

The real problem is that ~10 years ago, a report said the complexity of Employment Tribunal work was on a par with that of County Court Judges, and that salaries needed to be raised to match. Nothing was done. Last year, they attempted to recruit ~60 extra full-time Employment Tribunal Judges in England and Wales. They only got 12 suitable candidates.

Better yet, rather than locate it just outside London, move it to Scotland, where, if your servers are direct liquid-cooled, you can use free air cooling 365 days a year with a healthy margin against the hottest temperature ever recorded. Outside London, that is simply not possible, as the hottest day on record exceeds the maximum air temperature at which you can use free air cooling. You are now into evaporative or compressive cooling, which is not green.

On that front, basically all the electrons in Scotland are low-carbon. About 3% of the electrons come from burning North Sea flare gas; the rest is nuclear, wind, hydro, or solar.