SoylentNews

Comcast gave false map data to FCC—and didn’t admit it until Ars got involved from the Oops I did it again dept.

        Matthew Hillier can't get Comcast service at his home in Arvada, Colorado. But that didn't stop Comcast from claiming it serves his house when it submitted data for the Federal Communications Commission's new broadband map.

        Comcast eventually admitted to the FCC that it doesn't serve the address—but only after Ars got involved. Comcast will have to correct its submission for Hillier's house, and a bigger correction might be needed because it appears Comcast doesn't serve dozens of other nearby homes that it claimed as part of its coverage area.
        [...]
        It's striking that Comcast "chose to contest the challenge before doing a serious investigation into the validity of the challenge," Harold Feld, a longtime telecom attorney and senior VP of consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Ars. "Anyone can make a mistake, but to opt to defend that mistake rather than correct it is a deliberate choice that flows from the fact that there is everything to gain and nothing to lose from sticking by an inflated claim."
        [...]
        The FCC has a shaky record with cracking down on carriers who submit false data, as seen in our 2019 article about the FCC deciding not to punish Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular for exaggerating their 4G coverage. The US Government Accountability Office issued a report the same year saying the FCC wasn't doing enough to detect and stop fraud.

Related:
ISP Admits Lying to FCC About Size of Network to Block Funding to Rivals
Cable Company’s Accidental Email to Rival Discusses Plan to Block Competition

As I mentioned in the last journal entry I'd ordered a bunch of FPGA boards from Chinese suppliers. The Spartan-6 board I at first tried to order failed delivery: it had come in during the Chinese New Year week and the online market [Lazada] that I used to buy timed it out, and all the other sellers there seemed totally unresponsive. So I wound up getting a couple of different boards. First was an even more powerful Xilinx Zynq 7010-based board, an EBAZ4205. The thing however has proved to be a little more complicated to program for: I now need to download Xilinx's new Vivado suite which is even bigger than ISE had been (16 gigabyte download), and I apparently need to swap a couple of very tiny surface mount resistors to get the thing to boot from the SD card or receive programming from the JTAG pins rather than using the onboard NAND flash. Looks like I'll have to figure out how to wire a switch into that circuit so that I don't have to desolder the tiny 0402 resistor every time, so this is going to take work to get the board into a state that's usable for development. It was originally designed as the controller for a Bitcoin mining rig, which after the bottom seems to have fallen out of that, the boards are now going for very cheap. I got mine for about $30 including shipping. Apparently on Taobao you can even get them for around $5, though I'm wary about trying to buy from there, and most likely shipping to me may cost even more than $25, what I've seen it's usually closer to $50. There are other annoyances with the board, most notably the pin headers are at 2 mm instead of the far more standard 2.54 mm, meaning I'm going to have to jump through some hoops to get I/O out to the board.

I also managed to get a Sipeed Tang Nano 9k, which is a Chinese FPGA. With only 8640 LUTs it's fairly small (the Zynq has 28k LUTs by comparison and the Spartan-6 I planned to buy had 14,576) but what's interesting about it is that you don't have to use Sipeed's official development tools (which have annoying requirements even worse than Xilinx's confusing rigmarole when I downloaded ISE): there is an open toolchain for it. I got them and got as far as the blinky LEDs that are the canonical hardware hello world. Seems like I'm going to get started by experimenting with this little board first. It seems to be powerful enough to do some interesting things though and it was also VERY cheap (slightly less than $20 including shipping).

It's irritating that the major players in the FPGA scene, AMD's Xilinx and Intel's Altera, are both stuck to using their proprietary development tools. It's as though GCC didn't have support for the x86 architecture, and you had to use only their proprietary compilers to program for them. The open dev tools that support the Tang Nano only seem to support the Lattice FPGAs as well. There's also a board available for those, the Colorlight, which was originally intended as a controller for large LED video panels. They're a bit more pricey though, at something like $60, maybe I'll invest in those next time.

In other news I'd also built a flash EEPROM burner hat for the Arduino Mega, but it's only marginally faster than the original one I made based on the Pro Mini and three shift registers. I think that the issue is now more software, as the overhead of the rather simplistic code I use to drive the buses, and the inefficient serial communications which send every byte written back to the system along with an acknowledgement is part of the reason. I'll probably fork the code and change things slightly so that instead of acknowledging every byte it should compute the CRC of every 4k flash sector and send that one back instead. I don't want to have to wait half an hour or so to burn every small change I make to my projects' firmware. It may be worth investing in a real honest to goodness TL866 programmer if it can be substantially faster than my hacked together burner.

I had an idea for a story I don't think anyone has written, although I'm probably wrong, as it seems obvious. I had Mars, ho!, and a voyage to Earth, and I thought, "it's time we left this solar system." I mean, I'd spent a lot of time on Mars and several of the larger asteroids, what's next?

Research for Grommler informed me that you could get to Sirius and back in a little over ten years, although a hundred years would pass on Mars during that time, so I thought "Why not Alpha Proxima?" Note: although college research prohibits using encyclopedias as sources, researching a fiction story needs no citations.

I found that the calculations I got from Wikipedia for a trip to Sirius at 1g thrust were wrong (so sue me) but at that amount of thrust you could get to Alpha Proxima in a year, so I'll make it two. Of course, it will seem a lot longer to us here, but I haven't figured out how much yet. Math guys?

Proxima B is in that star's habitable zone, but Jesus, what a shitty name for a planet! It will probably be hundreds of years before we get to the point where we can produce that much thrust for that long a time, and by then we will have had an awful lot of probes to our actually existing but poorly named planet.

Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf that rotates around A and B, which should make some really cool visuals for a movie set on that planet, and also a hint at what its name will be in a few hundred years. It Certainly won't be "B". Bee, maybe? Could life begin on a planet like that? I have my doubts, but could be wrong.

Also, the star's sisters have more "normal" star names, Rigil Kentaurus (Alpha Centauri A), and Toliman (B).

Anybody have a good name for this planet? And its poorly named star? Or should I just name it the same as Isaac Asimov did in Foundation and Earth? I've forgotten what it was, I'll have to read the book again.

I named the CEO of the Green-Osbourne Transportation Company after the guy who thought of whores in space as we were discussing Nobots in Felber's beer garden and a coven of crack whores walked down the street, and gave him an acknowledgement. If I use your planet name and you wish, I'll do the same for you.

https://assets.nationbuilder.com/firearmspolicyfoundation/pages/3970/attachments/original/1675361904/United_States_v_Rahimi_Opinion.pdf

Before Jones, Ho, and Wilson, Circuit Judges.
Cory T. Wilson, Circuit Judge:
The question presented in this case is not whether prohibiting the
possession of firearms by someone subject to a domestic violence restraining
order is a laudable policy goal. The question is whether 18 U.S.C.
§ 922(g)(8), a specific statute that does so, is constitutional under the Second
Amendment of the United States Constitution. In the light of N.Y. State Rifle
& Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022), it is not.

That paragraph sums it up pretty nicely, but I encourage you to read the entire decision.

Mr. Rahimi seems a proper scoundrel, and I hate that such a person might be made an icon for 2nd amendment rights - but he challenged an unjust law, and the court decided in his favor.

Red flag laws are hardly any different than the issue decided here. Just like a jealous ex can get a restraining order on a whim, the same jealous ex can pick up the phone and make up a story about you being suicidal, or threatening, or whatever. In short, anyone can strip you of your rights, just to be vindictive if they only get the restraining order, or cite a red flag law.

Moving forward, I expect to see more due process before people are stripped of their 2A rights. Sure, a lot of fools bargain, and surrender their rights. But, you'll still see more due process in the coming years.

We used to not have any worker safety laws. Nobody forced us to put doors on the elevators. If somebody died, so fucking what? We could foul the water so badly rivers caught fire, nobody cared what poisonous garbage we poured in it. We could spew so much poison in the air that you had to roll the windows up driving past our Monsanto plant because of the pain it caused your lungs. We could get the government to wage pointless wars so that gold would pour into our coffers, even having the government draft men to die for our filthy money.
        Then those pesky kids came along.
        They picketed, demonstrated, voted and wrote letters on paper to their elected representatives. They got the war stopped, damn them, and the draft. They got OSHA so now we have to put doors on our Purina elevators and guard rails. Guard rails, for Christ’s sake! The nerve!
        What’s worse, they got the EPA started. Damn them!
        But we’ll show ‘em. Now, we’re paying all the federal tax, and they’ve made us actually pay our full-time workers a living minimum wage. But we’ll fix their wagons. All it will take is for us to keep raising the price of the worthless junk the fools buy from us until the minimum wage won’t buy shit, and bracket creep will raise taxes so high everybody will be paying them. Then we’ll shower the dishonest fools in congress with cash and convince them to lower OUR taxes to the point only the poor will pay them.
        The best part? We’ll fuck up the education system to the point that their grandchildren in the twenty first century will be too stupid and apathetic and feel too powerless to do a damned thing about it. They’ll be so damned dumb they’ll vote against their own interests. We’ll be BILLIONAIRES!!

Charter settles with family of murder victim, says insurance will cover it

Charter Communications was once on the hook for over $7 billion in a case involving a former cable technician who murdered an elderly customer in her home. But Charter is now on the verge of settling the lawsuit for less than $262 million, an amount that will apparently be fully covered by the company's insurers.

A Dallas County Court jury last year decided that Charter should pay the victim's family and estate $7 billion in punitive damages and $337.5 million in compensatory damages. A judge lowered the total amount to over $1.1 billion.
[...]
"On January 11, 2023, and after issuing a series of decreasing settlement demands over several months, the plaintiffs issued a new, lower settlement demand to CC, LLC and its insurers, and then on January 18, 2023, plaintiffs also filed a notice of remittitur with the court to further reduce the judgment to $262 million, comprised of $87 million in actual damages, and $175 million in punitive damages. On January 24, 2023 and upon the insistence and demand of its insurers, CC, LLC reached a tentative settlement of this lawsuit at an amount substantially less than the reduced judgment and within CC, LLC's insurance coverage."

Previously:
Judge rules Charter must pay $1.1 billion after murder of cable customer

US school runs lights 24/7/365: The smart lights have been broken since 2021

The lights at Massachusetts' Minnechaug Regional High School burn ever bright. They actually never turn off. They can't turn off. The smart lighting system for the entire building is broken, and it's stuck in the "on" position. It has apparently been this way for over a year now, and the electric bills are really starting to pile up.

“We are very much aware this is costing taxpayers a significant amount of money,” the school district's assistant superintendent of finance, Aaron Osborne, told NBC News. “And we have been doing everything we can to get this problem solved.”

The school's entire "green lighting system," some 7,000 lights, was installed over a decade ago and was supposed to save money, but according to the report, "the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021" and no one has been able to turn off the lights for the following 17 months. Teachers are adjusting by unscrewing light bulbs at the end of the day and throwing some breakers not connected to vital parts of the school. Dimming the lights to show movies or something projected on a whiteboard has also been difficult: The lights are on full brightness all the time.
[...]
The problem with new parts is that this has all been in the middle of the pandemic and a huge chip shortage, so the parts have been back-ordered and delayed several times. The process of fixing the system was originally supposed to start in February 2022, but they can't get the parts. The next missed date was October 2022, and the school isn't expecting a repair until February 2023. The lights remain on.

That looks like an excellent Case Study in how not to do something. In this case, how not to implement a "smart" lights system. In the event that your fancy new lights don't work. You need to be able to turn them off.

President Biden’s lawyers found a few classified documents last November in an office he used after he was Vice President, and he immediately informed the Archives and other authorities. Then they started searching in earnest, and found more in a box in his garage and an adjoining room, mixed with private documents.
        The “liberal” media found out about it this month and went absolutely insane, screaming “Where’s the transparency you promised us?”
        Joe Biden’s job isn’t to inform the American people of his every little fuckup, that’s the media’s job itself. He could have done what Trump would have done and shredded the documents, and nobody would have been the wiser. But being an honest man, unlike his predecessor, he went about it by the book. He didn’t hide anything.
        Someone should inform those who are charged with informing us that a window is still transparent even when nobody is looking at it.
        What the “liberal” media won’t tell you is that “liberal media” is a lie in America, told by America’s people’s true enemies, its ultra-rich, like the Sacklers, Waltons, and Kochs. The media are owned by selfish, greedy billionaires who don’t even pretend to care if you live or die. Black lives matter? To them, only rich lives matter, and no poor life, White, Black, or Asian, matters.
        There are two media, the entertainment media and the news media. The greedy, selfish, amoral 1% own almost all of both types of media, and have been trying for the last half century to combine the two; witness the network morning news shows leading off about a football game when there were dozens killed in an airplane crash and dozens more in Ukraine were murdered by the terrorist state Russia’s president with a huge missile.
        To the amoral, soulless 1% who own the networks, the football game is more important than people’s lives. After all, they own football teams, they need the media a lot more than a murderous foreign terrorist who, by the way, controls atom bombs. But tell the news of the game first, despite the fact that anybody who gave a damn already watched the game! After all, it’s the rich people who own that game, they don’t give a damn about democracy, and in fact are jealous of Russia’s authoritarian government and its easy loot for their evil oligarch class.
        The entertainment media have been liberal for decades; bread and circuses don’t matter to the owners, although entertainment media started becoming more “conservative” (meaning authoritarian) with Dirty Harry. It’s their wealth. But all of the network news shows are conservative, with some, like Fox and Sinclair, going all the way to the Fascist right.
        Their wholly owned media will say “I don’t want to hear about class warfare” while waging it against Americans. If the media were liberal, let alone transparent, they would inform you young ignorant fools that in 1965 when I was thirteen the federal minimum wage was a living wage, and America had no working poor. They wouldn’t hide the fact that when my dad was eight in 1940, the lowest taxable income rate was four times the median income. These are all facts that you can easily look up.
        There are still a few liberal newspapers; the Illinois Times is pretty liberal. Mother Jones is as liberal as Fox is conservative. But liberal papers are few and far between, and there are no liberal TV news outlets.
        Thanks to the media, the meaning of a lot of words has become rather fuzzy. To a working class conservative, he wants to conserve social norms, like marriage and heterosexuality. That’s nothing at all like a rich conservative, who may be Jeffery Epstein or some other child molester. All they want to conserve is what is theirs: their wealth, power, and privilege. Liberals didn’t kill Aunt Jeremiah, the rich conservatives who own the food company who owned her did. It’s not about Uncle Ben, it’s about the Benjamins.
        It seems to me that the only people who aren’t being transparent are the media itself. But don’t expect them to be transparent about the fact that they are owned by rich conservatives who were born rich and want to continue becoming richer and richer until everything collapses like it did in 1929. There are no patriotic billionaires and never have been.

From my email. Yeah, it's a wall of text. Read it or not, your choice.

Conservative Inc And The Deal With The Daily Wire Devil

This week Steven Crowder made headlines for turning down a 50 million dollar term sheet offered by The Daily Wire. The term sheet, which would have forced Steven to sign over his email list, social media accounts, and revenue streams from his Mug Club, among other things from his life’s work, raised concerns about censorship and the gatekeeping of content creators by large conservative media companies and their owners.

The point of this article is to open your eyes to why your favorite conservative media outlets are not on our side and help you understand that they exist to keep you from discussing ideas that threaten the power of the Regime. These types of exploitative gatekeeping deals are not the outlier; they are the norm. Unlike most of the talking heads I have no gatekeeping contracts and thus can speak freely on these matters and tell you the unfortunate truth that you need to hear.

The Daily Wire is currently trying to gaslight Crowder and make this issue about money or greed when anyone paying attention knows that is not the case. This is a projection on their part because money is indeed what they care about here and in general. They can’t imagine that someone would reject that much money, and it “offends” them. They cry out in pain as they strike Crowder with a terrible one-sided deal for his soul.
It’s not about money, it’s about controlling the narrative.

Toss out the religious bits if you like, the message remains the same. The Establishment wants to censor all opposing views.

Oh - Torba supplies a link to his blog, where he wrote the same thing: https://news.gab.com/2023/01/conservative-inc-and-the-deal-with-the-daily-wire-devil/

There was an Ars Technica article about ChatGPT. I commented that ChatGPT was going to put BS artists out of work, for example, marketing people. The comment was massively downvoted, and one person replied that I obviously know nothing about marketing. Assumptions, assumptions...

My wife ran a whisky business, specializing in single cask whiskies, for more than 20 years. I helped her with a lot of marketing texts. So I asked ChatGPT: "Can you write a marketing text to sell single-cask whisky?" Here is it's response:

"Indulge in the ultimate whisky-lover's experience with our single-cask offering. Sourced from the finest distilleries and aged to perfection in a single oak cask, this rare and exclusive whisky boasts a unique flavor profile that cannot be replicated.

Each bottle is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, with its own distinct character, aroma and taste. The single-cask aging process allows the whisky to take on the nuances of the wood and the environment, creating a depth and complexity that is unmatched by blended or mass-produced whiskies.

Whether you're a collector, a connoisseur, or simply looking for a special gift, our single-cask whisky is the epitome of luxury and exclusivity. Don't settle for anything less than the best, try our single-cask whisky today."

Wow. That is better than you would get from almost any marketing agency. ChatGPT is still only a prototype, but it is the harbinger of change. Marketing, non-investigative journalism, pop-sci articles - it is already capable of generating all of those. Moreover, it writes better than most people, eliminated the need for proofreading to catch grammatical and typographical errors.

If you get into more serious topics, then it does need some help. Here's an example: "How is uranium created?" ChatGPT replied:

Uranium is created through a process called nuclear fission. Nuclear fission is a process in which the nucleus of an atom is split into two or more smaller nuclei, releasing a large amount of energy in the process. This energy is typically released in the form of heat, light, and radiation, and can be harnessed to generate electricity. The process of nuclear fission occurs naturally in certain types of radioactive materials, such as uranium and plutonium. It can also be induced in a controlled manner in nuclear reactors.

This is wrong, but probably not a lot of people know the real answer. However, ChatGPT is able to correct it's own mistakes. I told it: "That's not correct. Nuclear fission splits uranium into smaller atoms. But how is uranium created?" It replied:

I apologize for the confusion, you are correct that nuclear fission splits uranium atoms rather than creates them. Uranium is created through a process called nuclear fusion in stars, specifically through the r-process in Supernovae. Uranium is a heavy element and is not formed through the fusion of lighter elements in the way that the light elements are created in stars. The process that creates heavy elements like Uranium is called nucleosynthesis.

And that is the correct answer. So ChatGPT can handle even more difficult and advanced topics, with a bit of supervision.