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Comment Re:on the one hand (Score 2) 77

Anyone with a brain, having just invented a deliberately anonymous cryptocurrency that starts to take off, would NOT EVER touch the seed coins, especially once it became obvious that everyone was watching their movement.

The second that stuff moves, Bitcoin value tanks AND the ultimate destination of all those coins becomes international news. Hardly anonymous.

No, whoever they were, and for literally whatever reason they started the project, they would have created other additional accounts later on, capitalised on those, had no connection to the original accounts, and still be a billionaire now. But just one of hundreds / thousands of others that are all untraceable and not really being watched.

And when Bitcoin mixing services came out, they'd have been all over it - just to preserve anonymity if nothing else.

We know precisely one thing about Satoshi - and that's that they don't want to identify themselves. Maybe there is $138bn sitting in an account they could in theory get access to. But it would immediately reveal information about themselves that may well work against them - taxation authorities would be all over it, press, public, every penny would be traced to its final destinations, etc.

So even if they only had, say, a couple of million in another account... they'd use that. Not everyone wants to be a stupendous billionaire in the public eye. You have to be a bit of a sociopath to be a billionaire at all. And then think of things like security, press, public scrutiny, etc.

Maybe they've got enough to live a life of luxury, that they've properly declared, never have to work again and, ultimately... still stay absolutely anonymous.

The one thing we know is that they understand anonymity. Why on earth would we ever expect them to do the most stupid thing ever and reveal themselves, rather than just hide amongst a large crowd and enjoy the rest of their life?

Comment Re:Not impressive, a Pre-ML 1990s PC doable proble (Score 1) 39

You're conflating concerns. Most government systems are required to log the hell out of their inputs and outputs. Making decisions to destroy something based on ephemeral data could happen just as easily on the ground as it could in orbit -- it has nothing to do with what kind of system (large neural network, traditional ML, human decision, or something else) makes the decision or where the decision happens.

Comment Re:So, they invented... (Score 3, Insightful) 252

I'm not sure what you mean. Do your eyes count as "long range sensors"? Mine can see stars that are many light-years away, and eyes are not a new invention.

They claim to have realized (invented) a better quantum magnetometer and a way to process the data to do a pretty amazing kind of detection. That's one very specific kind of long range sensor, with improvements over previous long range sensors but also limitations of its own. It's presumably not a magic device that Pareto dominates other long range sensors.

Comment Re:bent pipe (Score 1) 39

What's the differential latency of running a strong model for several turns (or the equivalent) on a spacecraft's power budget compared to a data center's power budget, especially once you factor in redundancy to manage single-event upsets in the huge RAM array needed for that model?

I use Claude rather than a local model because I don't want to wait all afternoon for the quality of results I can fit into 128 GB RAM.

Comment Re:Electric Company (Score 3, Interesting) 27

Make illegal phone calls (e.g. fraud, harassment, unsolicited commercial spam, etc.) and they'll cut your telephone off.

Far closer in terms of analogy and technology. And extremely viable.

The electricity company are not directly facilitating or have knowledge or would have reasonable knowledge of your Internet activites.

But your phone number is actively facilitating your phone service, the same way your ISP Is actively facilitating your Internet service. And you would get cut off by your ISP if you were sending spam, or hacking people, etc.

Either the ISP has NO business doing that (and thus they couldn't cut you off for sending spam) or they are monitoring and able to cut you off (in which case they could cut you off for piracy).

Comment Re:A million notices? (Score 1) 27

If you kept sending spam email, your email account would be terminated. If you used your ISP connection to do it, they would start terminating your connection. Whether that was personal, business, paid or free.

How is that different to keeping using your ISP connection to download illegal stuff, once the ISP has been notified of that?

Are we saying that unsolicited commercial email is somehow significantly more damaging to people and incurring a greater commercial cost than pirating movies?

Comment Sigh (Score 1) 74

Everything needs to be branded or monetised.

It's why I want large commercial organisations as far away from my data, computers and workflow as possible.

I do not care about you, I don't want to be reminded you even exist, and I certainly don't want to give you money. Go away.

I want to turn on my computer, load up the browser of my choice, and that's it. I don't need to see a single brand, no "notifications", no messages of your choosing, nothing. My boot screen is a spinner. My desktop is a flat, blank, plain colour. I have my browser pinned as a single recognisable icon (doesn't even have the name).

That is what an OS should be. That is what most services should be. We shouldn't be spending our life subject to the whims of a corporation trying to wheedle money out of us or "foster brand engagement" or whatever nonsense they class it as.

Comment Re:Finally (again) (Score 1) 118

The one good thing about hitting limits on CPU clock speed, memory shortages, etc. is that they might finally have to start actually making programmes vaguely efficient again.

There's also yet-another reason that I don't use Windows, and that's that everything seems to want an app running on startup to cache what it needs to to present these shitty web UIs with any semblance of performance, to do the most worthless things.

There are far too many programmes that just don't function correctly if you have a software firewall other than Windows Defender and you deny them web access, for instance. Windows Defender just lets it all through, but if you have a "ZoneAlarm-type" firewall, you see that EVERYTHING wants to talk-home or connect to a local web service and, when denied, it hangs up and falls over itself rather than deals with it gracefully.

Not what you want to see in critical services, for example.

Comment Re:Farm pasture versus concrete buildings? (Score 2) 71

I understood the question to be whether the study controlled for other changes in land use in the surrounding area. For example, northern Virginia has built a ton of new data centers close together over the last decade -- in many cases, replacing pastures. Attributing the results of the whole set to individual data centers would be a methodological error.

Comment Re:The cart before the horse (Score 1) 73

They have working software: OCX is intended to replace the current ground system, Operational Control System (OCS). They have launched a lot more than 30 satellites -- in fact, most of them have been decommissioned, although the currently operational set have mostly outlived their design lifetimes by a lot. The oldest active satellites are Block IIR satellites, with a design life of 7.5 years ... and launched between 1997 and 2004 (so the youngest of them would be old enough to drink alcohol in the US).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Protect the children form stupid laws! (Score 1) 118

Tell me how you're ever going to implement this on any open-source operating system ever?

Because people will just patch it out.

It's not like it's even a boot-time requirement (thus necessitating it being in the kernel/initrd, etc.). It's an account requirement. Which means that it can be patched out in no time at all.

As far as I know, not one single open-source OS has actually implemented this requirement (they put a field that would be useful for it into systemd, but nobody's actually using it).

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