Russia's war with Ukraine is basically wiping out a significant proportion of its "men of fighting age" demographic, which has a heavy overlap with the "men breeding age" demographic, a loss that is probably already severe enough to cause serious economic and society issues in a generation or two as the population balance shifts. Now, evil thought, but if you were to see Russia as some kind of threat, and don't particular care about the toll all this is taking on Ukraine, wouldn't it be in your best interests to see that trend continue?

Also, let's face it, Russia has no clear successor to Putin that is going to be able to do the one thing he does *really* well, namely stop the military, oligarchs, and mob bosses tearing each other apart. When Putin eventually does go, however that happens, Russia is highly likely to implode in a spectacularly messy fashion, so having the country on its knees in as many ways as possible when that happens might be seen as strategically advantageous as well, and so especially regarding men of fighting age.

There is also a relatively popular third option in Russia that doesn't involve a container; "accidentally" falling of a high window.

I drove the NC500 route - and then some - around Northern Scotland several years ago, which is about as rural as you can get in the UK with some pretty large distances between refuelling locations by UK standards. While we did the drive in my friend's ICE, at the time I personally owned a PHEV and was looking to go pure EV, so was keen to see how the trip might have worked with an EV.

tl;dr, with a little planning on where to stop (which we also had to do to locate petrol pumps), and when due to the longer refill times, it would have been a doddle with an EV. There were plenty of charge points available and in working order that could easily have been aligned with our meals, overnights, or visiting some of the locations we spent time at. As said, that was several years ago, so availability has presumably improved since and it's also a LOT easier to find available charge points with the current generation of Apps.

Needless to say, my daily driver is now an EV and charging it is no problem at all, even with the occasional drive of 300miles or more. Most of my charging is at home, at ~8p/kWh, less whatever is in the home battery system from the solar panels, with the longer drives covered by a couple of EV charging loyalty schemes to keep the costs down. Frankly, if you're driving that kind of distance you should be taking a break anyway, so you just need to find a suitable charge point and grab a coffee; plan ahead and you can avoid the ridiculous rates on the motorway by driving a few extra miles and have a better standard of food as well. (Although if you're going up the M6, it's hard to argue with the food quality at the Tebay Farmshop services!)

Well it *is* the oldest profession of them all, and a honeytrap is one of the oldest tricks in the espionage game too, so there's definitely legitimate cause for concern. Especially so if it turns out Jensen's thing for leather extends beyond jackets and the MSS now has some compromising material on him.

Also, nitpick, but didn't Pussy Galore work as a personal pilot for Auric Goldfinger? In this context, there are *sooo* many more outrageously dated quips to be had with that combo, I think. Have at it Slashdot... :)

Or not. A disconnected customer isn't going to be generating any more revenue, so I'll expect this to be about as effective as everywhere else that has tried something similar; the ISPs will do the bare minimum (because to do more would cost more, duh!), wait for the take downs, and then take every possible step they can to avoid taking any action unless it becomes a slam dunk backed up with a court order. Factor in things like CGNAT, deliberately vague logfiles and short retention policies (complete and detailed customer connection logs for even a small ISP are insanely large), shared gateways, open WiFi, VPNs, sketchy residential proxies, and encrypted protocols, and the ISP has a lot of options to fairly legitimately say "we can't work out which specific user to disconnect with the information provided."

Sure, but if - as is likely given how AI is finding exploits elsewhere - this kind of heist becomes more commonplace what do you think is going to happen to the notional value of all those secure crypto wallets? Even if you take Binance at face value, then while they've either recovered, or are in the process of recovering, a significant chunk of the stolen tokens, they have still had to dip pretty deeply into cash reserves to cover the rest.

Where is the money going to come from if Binance are done again before they get to rebuild that cushion, or keep getting hit with lots of somewhat smaller heists in a death by a thousand cuts type scenario? What do you think is going to happen to market confidence, and therefore token values, if another of the major exchanges defaults/rug pulls as a result of one of these heists, which is probably just a matter of time now? The reality is that there's a whole bunch of people using crypto who are either too lazy and/or not technically adept enough to sort out their own wallet and keys, so they're going to keep using exchanges like they are banks. That makes the whole system vulnerable to token value crashes because it doesn't matter where and how securely your crypto is stored if the value of the tokens tank; everyone with a HODL position gets to be a bagholder in that scenario.

He's a photographer, so pretty good bet this is a specialist photo inkjet printing onto a suitable paper stock, rather than the run of the mill paper that comes in larger reams intended for more general use like you'd get at the local supermarket or whatever. Photo papers to be of higher quality, thickness (or even be card stock) and weight and do indeed have special coatings, finer fibres, use more cotton/silk, and so on that could explain the texture. Depending on the printer, it might not even be card or paper at all; some support various fabrics, plastic/acetate, and even metal in some fairly specialist cases. It doesn't look like a fabric, but could possibly be a sheet of white plastic/acetate.

Push it to a 420 and you won't feel the need to worry about it any more.

Well, I can't speak for the US electoral roll breakdown, but it appears you may be in the 10% that can't add up. :)

That's over simplifying things a bit, but yeah, we have fundamental infrastructure issues in the UK with any proposed mass rollout of AI DCs. While we do have surplus generating capacity, to the point that we occasionally need to pay people to use it, and more generating/storage capacity (especially local domestic, which frees up baseload capacity for industrial uses) is being added all the time, there are some other more fundamental UK issues. Firstly, the national power distribution grid is in need of some serious upgrades to support some of this. The South West in particular is on a very thin high tension thread that currently has insufficient capacity for the the planned relocation of the UK's nuclear deterrent subs to Devonport and associated growth, for instance. Secondly, and this seldom gets mentioned in the context of all these new AI DCs that are being planned or the "shouty kids/let's save water" adverts currently being run, is that we have some severe water supply pressures as a result of climate change combined with a decades long lack of investment in new reservoirs and upgrading leaky Victorian era distribution networks. Care which part of the country is currently experiencing the brunt of a "once in several decades (but is now expected to happen every few years)" severe drought event? Yup, it's the home counties, where most of the planned DCs are supposedly going to get built!

Those all have technical/construction solutions though, the third does not, and that is that the home counties in particular are notorious for the NIMBYism, although they are far from alone in that - just a few days ago a massive planned solar/storage facility in Scotland got pushed back, and possibly nixed, because of it. Sure, there are totally valid arguments against concreting over large expanses of what is currently greenbelt to some extent, even before you get to water/power shortages, pollution (including noise), additional traffic, and all the other impacts, but there have to be some limits. One solution I like for this (albeit not without some quite complex zoning issues due to suitable areas for building supply not being equal to where the supply is needed) is to make supply, or cost of supply, proportionate to acceptance of local capacity build outs. If you want your power to be generated in someone else's backyard, then you'll pay more for the privilege while they get a rebate. If you object to that proposed new local reservoir, then you don't get to complain if you need to start buying potable water in bulk during the next drought. If, as in the case of DCs, you are putting in disproportionately high demands for supply, then you either pay - up front - for a suitable proportion of the required upgrades, or commit to some other form of reimbursement with suitable early termination clauses if you want a longer timescale.

Then again, this *could* just be Microsoft wriggling off the hook because they're starting to think the AI bubble might be somewhat overinflated and therefore they might not be needing all that capacity they've been saying they are going to build afterall, but don't want to start the stampede for the exits until they're already through the door.

Damnit! UCT != CUT either, which is yet *another* standard timezone, using the same three letters. Cue oblig. XKCD on standards...

Above should have used CUT, not UCT.

It's more likely to be much ado about nothing for almost everyone apart from a few astronomers, rocket scientists, and similar groups, all of which you'd expect would have the braincells to figure it out, but will no doubt have a few in the mix that don't. Other standard timezones exist (the various UTCs are != UCT), so if your system is working fine on one of those then it will continue to do so.

UCT also moves backwards *and* forwards continually, mostly due to gravitational variances due to other celestial objects, changes in the Earth's spin, and all the other things that effect planetary orbits; some years Earth (and all the other things going around the sun) will orbit a little faster, others a little slower, so it's not a cumulative year on year increase to the delta, although there can be a run in one direction or the other for a while. Assuming it averages out OK, then there's a distinct possibility that by the time an adjustment really is required no one will be left around to care about it, let alone do it.

The general expectation in industry is that the number of bugs must be finite and, even though every change might introduce new ones, as the AI models find new ones and they get fixed the total number of yet to be be found bugs will come down. As with Microsoft's recent run of consecutive record breaking Patch Tuesdays, the conclusion being drawn is that sooner or later the number of bugs being found and fixed after each analysis session will start to fall and, subsequent to that, normal patching service, albeit on a hopefully much more robust codebase, will resume.

Where it gets a little more sticky is that, while finite, the number of available bugs to find and fix could still be extremely large, so the time required to regress back to previous, or even better than previous, bugfix development volumes is unknown. If your bet is that duration is quite short (less than a year, say), then why would you want to encumber your business with a raft of new full time employees all wanting things like health benefits and severance protections, when you can just bring in some contractors and dump them at will when they are no longer needed? If you're thinking it's a long game, then at least some full time employees is probably a better option because eventually they will be cheaper than using contractors, with how long that is dependant on your typical salaries for each. BoA is presumably betting on the former scenario based on what they understand of their codebase and whatever additional volume of bugs AI has found in it so far.

Using AI, especially. One thing that struck me in the last few days was in relation to comments on the story about the person who has used AI to vibe-code clones of part of the Adobe graphical tools suite and has since (within a few days!) gone on to close the core Microsoft Office apps in the same way. Apparently (I have not checked it personally) this software, albeit still in "beta", runs like a bag of spanners and while, it might superficially look like the tools it's emulating, lacks the depth of many features and some are missing entirely. The code is also impenetrable, so the "it's open source, the community can check for malware" argument is even less practicable than it usually is. It's an interesting demo of where things are currently at, but ready to go, drop in replacements, they are not.

Sure, there was the obvious flame war about the pros and cons of "AI", implications for copyright, potential to be sued, etc., but what was almost completely absent was any kind of reality check about how coding works in practice when a PHB is in charge. You know, the kind that totally sees the OpEx of some license or other going out, has read about this AI-driven vibe-coding stuff, is *totally* on board with the concept of "ship it and let the users find the bugs", joins the dots, and tasks some hapless AI-literate (that's what the CV said, anyway) intern on vibe-coding a replacement. You just know that's either going to start happening Real Soon Now, or already is, in all sorts of places that should know a LOT better than that, especially given the issues with the code shat out in the examples above.

Many of them, and quite likely many of their clients/users too, are going to get quite badly burnt, I expect.

And if a rogue AI agent actually *causes* one of those more damaging attacks, what then? "To err is human, but to really fsck things up takes a computer" and all that?

What seems to be missing here isn't just any clarity in legislation about liability for AI agents, especially labs running frontier models who seem to get free legal passes that would absolutely not be afforded to regular plebs who - potentially entirely by accident - cause an agent to hack someone else, but any serious discussion about putting those legal frameworks in place is also lacking. Seriously, WTF is up with that? How many incidents that are clearly in breach of existing computer misuse legislation do we need to get some action here, either under existing laws (including, potentially, civil law) or to start working on tweaks to existing laws to provide some specific clarity relating who is liable for any misuse of AI agents?

I get the AI labs almost certainly have a tacit "don't sue us, and we won't sue you" agreement in place for things like this to try and avoid regulation they definitely do not want because their actions are quite obviously not aligned with the regulation they are claiming they want put into place. Third parties like South Korean banks are under no such terms however, and given they are in the financial sector (or health sector in another recent example) probably have legal obligations of their own as well, so again - why are we not even hearing of any talk of legal action?