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Comment Re: Met all safety requirements? (Score 5, Insightful) 19

Not a Musk fan, but that article you linked is definitely a hit piece. It states "over 600" unreported injuries since 2014, then goes on to list among those injuries multitudes that are not actually reportable, thereby inflating the numbers. It would be far more useful for then to actually list reportable injuries that were not reported. But I suspect that they're incapable of doing that, and besides then they wouldn't have any scary large numbers to whine about.

Comment Re: The blocks can stay there for a thousand years (Score 3, Interesting) 200

Why are you focusing on mature trees? Just take a look at any plant matter. Every single carbon atom that makes up that plant came directly from atmospheric carbon dioxide. What should be looked at isn't what the mature plant or tree takes up, but instead what plant produces the maximum mass of growth over time. Then pyrolyze the resulting organic material, collecting the outgassed substances and the sequester the left over carbon.

Comment Re: why white? (Score 4, Informative) 121

Rigid airships 101. The gas cells are not pressurized. The outer envelope you see is to provide streamlining, while the multiple internal gas cells are limp unpressurized bags full of the lifting gas. So, yes heating that gas would increase lift. But as others have mentioned, that would add undesirable uncontrolled variables.
Frankly, what originally killed the airships was the lack of reliable weather prediction, which is no longer a problem. And the Hindenburg was a disaster waiting to happen. It was designed to to helium as its primarily lifting gas. And since helium was also expensive back then, its gas cells were made as double cells. A small gas cell filled with hydrogen, completely encapsulated by a larger cell filled with helium. The intent was that if gas needed to be vented, they would vent the easily replaced hydrogen while keeping the helium. But since the United States wouldn't sell helium to Germany due to Hitler, they instead filled the Hindenburg using only hydrogen.

Comment Reflections on Trusting Trust (Score 2) 21

That fab is going to have a lot of designs made by computers. And hence software. Frankly, it's impossible or near impossible to manually verify that there's no back doors built-in to the chips by the design software they're using unless they develop everything from the ground up from scratch. Anything short of that brings up the spectre explained in the paper "Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson back in 1984.

Comment Have every machine use TAI (Score 1) 53

Screw internal use of UTC in machines. Just use TAI for everything in the network. All internal timestamps. Everything. And as for UTC, just restrict it to human readable displays. And of course, never do a bidirectional conversion between TAI & UTC for data exchange between computers.

Comment Re: Any day now ... (Score 1) 45

AES ought to be safe. The real issue is with key exchanging. That's what asymmetrical encryption is used for. After the key exchange is performed, then that key is used for a symmetric encryption that's far more efficient to transmit the bulk of the data. It's the relatively small encryption keys that present the real issue and is the focus for a post quantum era.

Comment Re: I'm from the government (Score 1) 45

As regards the anti-vaccine crowd, you don't need to blame Reagan. That brand of insanity has been with us far longer. When Edward Jenner invented the smallpox vaccine, there were anti-vaxers back in 1796. And prior to Jenner's development of the vaccine, they used inoculation which used the scabs of smallpox victims to give mild cases of smallpox to prevent later major cases. Inoculation was fairly successful, so of course there were idiots protesting that as well ... back in 1721.

Comment Re: The solution to a problem no one had (Score 1) 99

The root issue is that some idiots/administrators (yes I know that's redundant) wanted to both let the customers see what's behind the doors and advertise related products elsewhere within the store. Actually fairly reasonable assuming they can do it at a cost less than any extra products they can sell by doing that. But obviously, that isn't the case.

Comment Spotting the losers. (Score 1) 347

Sounds to me that he wants every culture to immediately have one more of the seven signs of a failed culture as defined in the paper by Ralph Peters "Spotting the Losers: Seven Signs of Non-Competitive States", namely the inability to accept responsibility for individual or collective failure. After all, if we don't have free will, we're not responsible for anything, including our failures. Add in the other factors he mentioned back in 1998 and things are looking grim. Such as restricting the flow of information, not valuing education. Looks like we're almost halfway to universally having half the indicators already.

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