Comment Learning music? (Score 1) 229
I play the piano and I will sometimes play a piece very slowly to better learn or understand it.
So if a guy outside of my window hears me doing that I'm outside of the law?
I play the piano and I will sometimes play a piece very slowly to better learn or understand it.
So if a guy outside of my window hears me doing that I'm outside of the law?
Now multiply that fifteen minutes per laptop you're testing while standing in the store(s) gathering the information you need to make your purchase.
I still wish I could walk into the local office supply store and buy a Linux computer (desktop and laptop) off the shelf.
It's always a day's work to have to take a "live distro flash drive" and try booting their demo machines to find out if they're compatible.
And places like Walmart would probably throw me out if I tried that.
It's good news that this "DRM developer" took 6 months to do what a DRM cracker did in less than 2 weeks. "DRM developer" is also one of the most openly villainous job titles I've ever run across.
Canada seems like a poster child for the failures of FPTP voting. For many decades they've had 2-3 leftist-to-centrist parties that attract voters who would all agree to put the tories well down the list of parties they'd like to have in charge (just above any far-right fringe parties that might appear, maybe also the most leftist party for some), and these parties get significant fractions of the vote, but the tories often win because they get more votes than any one of those 2-3 parties. In a ranked-choice system the tories wouldn't win just because the majority doesn't agree on their #1 choice for who they'd vastly prefer to have in power instead.
FPTP's tendency to force moderate outcomes is not an advantage even if it can seem appealing at times - it merely acts as a pressure vessel for extremism, holding it in with Kang vs. Kodos/Douche vs. Turd choices that disappoint a majority of voters across the spectrum until it explodes with the election of an anti-democratic candidate like Trump.
I agree that most people merely tolerate democracy rather than actually want it. FPTP does have a tendency to produce 2-party systems however:
You have to weigh the greening against crop losses due to less predictable/more extreme weather and reduced crop nutrition beyond 400ppm (the point where plants stop benefiting from increased CO2, which was passed many years ago). By 2030 the overall effect is expected to be signficant double-digit percentage drops in crop yields:
How about improved forms of democracy? Countries with primitive forms of democracy like first-past-the-post should upgrade to ranked-choice voting with proportional representation to break 2-party strangleholds and end strategic voting. The next step would be to move toward liquid democracy.
Binaries compiled from the same source code won't necessarily have the same checksum, even on the same computer.
For example, a malloc() will just take control of a block of ram and whatever's in that ram when you got there is what's still there unless you take steps to zero it out.
liblzma is the under-the-hood library for xz. And you can use liblzma in your own projects if you need a compression library (and a lot of programs do just that).
xz is also a library that you can link (either statically or dynamically) to your own binary.
So it could affect more than just the xz binary program itself.
Statistical significance is an arbitrary threshold anyway, especially when the textbook 5% is used as if there's some fundamental law of the universe that gives 5% a special relationship to causality, when it was actually just a default number plugged in that should set off alarm bells if it hasn't been changed.
No master encryption key for any major software company has ever leaked or been fraudulently generated.
*snark*
First we have to compare two types of flaring, just releasing the gas unburned where the methane goes directly into the atmosphere and acts as a powerful greenhouse gas (rarely done these days...intentionally, anyway), and flaring and burning it where the methane is ignited into an open flame that mostly converts it to CO2, a longer-lasting but much less powerful greenhouse gas. Previously the energy wasn't used at all, just wasted, but that was an energy waste issue rather than an emissions issue.
Burning the gas in a turbine converts it to CO2 more efficiently than an open flame, so the environmental improvement over the first scenario is obvious, compared to the second the improvement isn't as huge but still significant. I'd guess the 63% CO2-equivalent emissions is the difference between the total effective GHG output of running the gas through a turbine vs. burning it in an open flame, since some of the methane can still escape that way.
It doesn't take more energy than the fossil fuel produced to capture all of its CO2 output and more, so it's not a violation of thermodynamics any more than a catalytic converter on a car is.
This is much better for the environment than just flaring the gas but it's about the least useful thing that could be done with that energy. Training/running AIs would be somewhat better. Some even better uses I could think of:
- Putting the energy into grid storage (maybe even just local grid for the oil rig equipment)
- Running an atmospheric CCS plant, or even CCS on the exhaust of some of the nearby oil rig equipment
- Running a traditional data center (even better usefulness per watt/hour than AIs)
- Running some beneficial distributed computation work like WCG or F@H
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." - Voltaire
