2.5km2 is not a small fire. In fact, ALL of the fires involved in 2020's post Labor-day inferno were easily detected when they were much smaller than that.

Ideally you want a system that can detect fire starts when three dudes in a brush truck can easily put them out.

In practice, I think the sweet spot for IoT sensors in this problem is to provide actionable warning to homes and communities of an approaching wildfire, especially at night. And also detecting human-caused fires along roads and power lines -- and detecting such fires when they are extremely small.

Fun fact: nearly all catastrophic wildfire events are correlated with a high wind event. Wildfires not backed by strong winds don't move that fast and are generally easily avoided by humans, and rarely burn hot enough to threaten structures.

Agreed, but in context with his earlier dismissal of Linux and the later attempt to get it called LiGNUx it was pretty damned obvious that this was 99% obnoxious arrogance (or arrogant obnoxiousness) and about 1% giving credit where credit was due.

I freely admit that my own personal dealings with Stallman, as limited as they were (and I doubt he even remembers me) color my view of him. But at least my views are based on some (limited) first-hand experience and not projection -- which I think the vast majority advocating for both sides of this fight are doing.

No, I don't.

In the real world people get fired all the time for cumulative bad conduct and cumulative screwups. You seem to be arguing that decision processing on someone's employment status should somehow be stateless and that not doing so is wrong.

If you've ever employed people for any length of time you've certainly had a situation with a problematic employee where one day some new information comes to your attention and that employee has to go from "problematic" to "fired". That's part of having people work for you.

Being a board member in a not-for-profit, at least in theory, requires that your personal conduct be held to a very high standard. Like it or not your actions will be interpreted as representing the larger organization. Any decent not-for-profit will be awfully fussy about the actions of their board members for that very reason.

I personally think that Stallman, left to his own devices, would have destroyed the whole concept of Free Software decades ago. It was only in spite of him and because of the heroic efforts of many others (Torvalds, Perens, and Raymond were notable) that we are where we are today. In spite of his undoubted technical brilliance and moral insights, he has been more of an obstacle to progress than an actual constructive force for literally decades.

In the very early period of Linux he was actively attacking the whole concept as necessary, as the Hurd was technically superior and right around the corner. Later on he made his cheesy attempt to co-opt the efforts of others, first by branding "Linux" as "Lignux" and then advocating for "GNU/Linux". To me this was nothing more than a lame attempt to take credit for the considerable efforts of others, in particular when they had accomplished something (building a totally free and working operating system kernel) that he most obviously could not.

Personal story: in the early 90's (pre-linux) I offered to contribute on GCC. This involved tedious weeks of missed phone calls and voice mails, and I flew at my own expense from Seattle to Boston to meet with the Great Man.

He blew off the meeting.

A few years later I reached out again, and in a phone conference call where he finally bothered to show up he shut down the whole idea hard in the first three minutes. Keep in mind that I was offering to contribute to GCC without pay and under the terms of the GPL.

By that time, I could make whatever contributions to Linux I wanted, Linus and Alan Cox would answer emails, and as opposed to Stallman they seemed genuinely interested in the contributions of others and in fact encouraged them. In Stallman's vision only fully vetted coders who met his high standards would be permitted to contribute.

Maybe it isn't fair for me to judge him so harshly on his piss-poor behavior over 25 years ago, but he established to me that he is a High Artist of Assholery and is ill-suited for any kind of leadership position in any organization, and especially so in an organization that needs to encourage people to contribute their time and ideas in the furtherance of a cause, however noble. I think the more recent Epstein/Minsky crap and his well-known history of creeping on women are just more bricks in a pretty considerable wall.

I'd argue that there have been large-scale test cases which seem to show that masks do lower transmissibility. Those tests were conducted in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan. The United States was the control group.

What you see from the numbers is that those countries had far lower covid rates than the United States and also were countries where inexpensive surgical masks are widely available in mini-marts and people willingly wear them as well. In addition, all of those countries are very crowded and you'd think they would have higher transmission rates.

One might argue that there are confounding factors. Although if you look more closely at the data once somebody is infected with covid in any of those countries the incidence of severe illness and death is approximately the same, so I find it hard to argue that there is some kind of genetic factor or difference in their health care system that is producing this difference.

My own suspicion is that there are a lot of things going on here that we need to unpack. One possibility is that since masks are uncomfortable, people avoid situations where they feel the need to wear them -- in that case, the "effectiveness" of a mask is a function of how uncomfortable it is, not how effective it is in keeping blobs of spit and snot from being passed around. The other possibility is that even a partially effective mask can reduce the r-value of the disease, and even small changes in the r-value can produce huge differences in the number of cases.

I've been volunteering at local vaccination events in my community. One thing that has changed in the last six weeks is that the people running them are being much more careful with the vaccination cards. So apparently there is some concern that people will steal them to make fake ones, and apparently there is already an industry selling fake vaccination cards :(.

This website gives highly accurate reports on avalanche risk in Washington and Oregon:

https://nwac.us/

There are also reports from people actually out in the field, sometimes with entertaining photos.

Something I think is interesting and that everyone has missed: No MacBook Pro has been sold with a HD since 2012.

You might refer to the SSD as a "Hard drive" if you didn't know that, or hadn't seen the actual hardware. Nobody who saw what an actual SSD looks like would call it a "Hard drive". I also can't imagine a computer repair person calling it a "Hard drive" either.

So either something major got lost in translation of this story (which tells you that most of the story was not from an eyewitness perspective) or the story was fabricated.

Well, yes, sort of.

In practice curating good representative training datasets and properly labeling them is an enormous challenge and an enormous amount of work. Also, if you can figure out good outside-the-box ways to do exactly that you can write your own ticket.

In the long list of things that suck massively in 2020, this probably doesn't even make the top ten.

I mean, right now it is clogged with wildfire smoke outside and there is this pandemic and stupid yahoos who won't wear masks and a possible civil war...

As long as you are breathing easy right now you should be grateful. Literally. As long as most of us are still alive we might even be able to get out of this partially intact.

How exactly is that so? Where I live there are freely available homemade cloth masks of much better quality than the cheap cotton ones sold in 7-11s throughout Asia. I've got two. I've also got a couple of cotton bandanas as well.

I'm saving the two N95 masks for when or if I have to go to the ER.

I use the cotton masks when I go to town to pick up groceries or mail, typically about four times a week. I use the bandanas for lower-risk situations like curbside pickup, pumping gas, and if I have to be outside around others.

My rule is that a mask or bandana is good for exactly one trip to town. So I end up doing laundry about twice a week. As an added (largely psychological) measure I hang the masks in the sun to dry for at least one day, preferably two.

This whole discussion is kind of silly. Masks are cheap and easy to make -- you can make perfectly suitable ones out of a t-shirt. If you go out more often than I do there isn't any reason you couldn't have more masks.

I work quite a bit with thermal imagers, especially low-cost ones. In a drunken conversation earlier this week I talked with a few friends about the feasibility of doing exactly this.

You run into a bunch of challenges:

The first is that thermal imagers ("infrared cameras") don't directly measure temperature. By their nature they are estimating the temperature from the thermal brightness they detect. In the very best cases with high-end thermal imagers you might get an accuracy of +-0.8F. Lower-cost cameras more realistically have accuracies of around +-1.9F.

At the very best, you are measuring surface body temperature, not core temperature. So you need to deal with a lot of variables, such as local ambient temperature and humidity, subject body size, subject age, subject gender, Usually you will get the best estimates if you use the thermal brightness around the eyes (which are usually the brightest part of a face when viewed with a thermal imager. People's physiologies also vary enough that without a baseline you are unlikely to do very very well at estimating core temperature.

Your results will be best if the imager is very close (e.g. less than three feet) to the subject.

This excellent paper discusses some of the challenges in much more detail:

http://www.uhlen.at/thermology...

The upshot of all this is even if you did a very good job dealing with all of the myriad challenges and used a very expensive thermal imager you would unlikely to get an accuracy of much less then +-1.5F. In practice for something that would be commercially deployable at reasonable cost +-2.5F would probably be more realistic.

Those numbers aren't likely to be good enough to be useful in any practical sense. You might be able to use such a system to detect people with extremely high fevers, but such people are unlikely to be out and about walking around.

However, the approach of directly estimating temperature from a thermal image probably isn't the only way to crack this nut. Thermal imagers are extremely sensitive to small variations in temperature in their field of view (on the order of 0.02F -- you can easily image your bare footprints on a concrete floor for several minutes). My guess is that with appropriate sample data (you'd need thermal images of the faces of tens of thousands of people, many of them sick) you could use that relative temperature data to determine if someone had a fever or not.

Some of the analysts are starting to notice.

Word on the street is that even if everything went back to normal tomorrow we'd still be looking at major supply chain disruptions. And that we'll start seeing shortages of consumer goods (the big eye-opener to me was food packaging) in about six weeks.

Actually an interesting challenge would be to find the word that, if copyrighted and if followed up with DMCA takedown notices, would Break The Internet.

This isn't even comparing apples and oranges. It is comparing plastic oranges and Apple II+'s.