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Comment Re:Subs as aircraft carriers (Score 2) 75

You look at things like the Heinkel 162 and think "yeah, if they had 10,000 of those, they could really have made a difference" -- and they did have a lot of really amazing tech.
But the thing is, so did the Allies. The Vampire and the Shooting Star would have been comparable to any of the German jet fighters, and were actively being developed and tested.
I'm no expert, but it looks to me like the only way you can say "oh, man, German tech COULD have won the war" is if everything they tried worked and nothing the Allies tried worked. Even at equal development success, the Allies could still out-tech the Axis because they had more people working on it and more resources -- the final proof of which was Hiroshima/Nagasaki. No matter how good your tech, once the other side has nukes and you don't, and there doesn't seem to be any credible information that the Axis nuclear weapons program was within even five years of developing that tech, one successful high-flying night bomber and everything's over.
That's why I think the German fetishization of tech saving them was borne of necessity, not of realism.

Comment Re:Subs as aircraft carriers (Score 5, Insightful) 75

The germans had great engineering, but between this, the Bismarck, and the Tiger tanks (with engines/transmissions that broke down frequently and couldn't handle the load), they had major failings too in the economy department of bang for your buck [reichsmark]. Leadership was mostly to blame.

As the war dragged on, Hitler became increasingly convinced that technology would turn the tide for the Germans. The V-series rockets, the ME-262, the Tiger/King Tiger, all were intended to make up for the fact that they were increasingly sending young boys and old men onto the front lines. Numerous advisors and ranking members of teh military (at least claimed to have) attempted to persuade Hitler that these programs were a waste of resources but he was adamant in his support of them. I wonder if a lot of it was due to he increasingly deteriorated mental state as the combination of stress, drugs, and mental diseases (Parkinsons and possibly syphyllis if I am not mistaken ) took their toll.

I think part of it was that winning by tech was their only option: any rational analysis said they were outgunned and outproduced, so tech was their Hail Mary. They simply had to believe in it. Conveniently, it aligned with their sense of superiority.

Comment I'm confused: aren't these common already? (Score 1) 36

Whenever I fly using ATC (in my case, flight following, unless I'm flying instrument) I'm talking to an air route traffic control center based in a town 50 km away from the nearest towered airport, and it's what everyone flying instrument from nontowered airports uses, throughout the whole state.
They don't do approach or ground control, which is done at towered fields where someone's actually looking at the airplanes in question, but they handle everything outside the class b/c/d airspace.
Obviously this is different. How?

Comment Ventilation for that 3d printer (Score 1) 167

Someone will want to print ABS and that stuff stinks. You'll need something to pull fumes from the vicinity. You could just supply PLA, but even so, ventilation would be helpful.
Consider a sewing machine.
Workbench with a vise, and several panavise-like or third-hand-like holders.

Comment We have prototypes of these, working (Score 5, Interesting) 125

I did a bunch of work recently on a headlight that automatically dims just the area around a detected oncoming car, so you can drive with your brights on all the time and it'll automatically filter out detected oncoming traffic so they don't get blinded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(Sucks to be a pedestrian in this world, though...)
It uses steering wheel position, input from a webcam, and gps and map data to determine where the beam distribution is directed. This specific implementation only works on red cars, but we have some good ideas about how to generalize this.
Current car lights are already optimized somewhat to illuminate further and higher on the outside side of the car compared to the inside, to reduce glare for oncoming drivers. Doing this automatically, over a wider area, will be a nice stopgap until autonomous vehicles render this whole focus irrelevant.

Comment Re:Mandation of vaccines is not okay (Score 5, Insightful) 616

Stop signs are great. I won't dispute that. I stop at stop signs, but I have followed a different schedule than the one recommended and I reserve the right to refuse specific stop signs (Because who really needs that stop sign in a construction area where there aren't any other cars? Crashes at stop signs are also hardly ever fatal for that matter)
It is up to drivers to decide what is right for their own car with regard to stop signs. Driving decisions are difficult and not always cut and dry. I refuse to give up the right of anyone deciding what is appropriate for their car in this regard, because bad driving decisions live with you forever.
So if a driver doesn't want to have to stop at stop signs, that's a-okay with me. I stop at stop signs, so I've done everything that I personally can do to protect myself. I can't protect everyone from everything and I don't expect other drivers to protect me either. I can only do what I can, and the rest is up to chance in the end.

Comment Re:Complexity is a feature, not a bug (Score 2) 626

How could the language be made as easy as possible to learn coming from any linguistic background? How could interest in the language be fostered in as many people as possible?

The problem is, people don't want language to work that way. It's not specifically that they want it to be hard to learn, but they want a language with nuance and ambiguity. We like puns and plays on words.

There's also an argument made by some rhetoricians that ambiguity in language (and other places) allows people to break prisoner's dilemma-type games, and we do so constantly as lubrication for our interactions. A simple example: you get a speeding ticket. You can pay the ticket, you can attempt to bribe the officer to not give you a ticket, at tremendous risk if it fails, or you can make an ambiguous statement like "is there some way I can just pay the fine right now and get on my way?" that an honest cop will answer 'no' and you end up having to pay the ticket, but there isn't sufficient information there to successfully accuse you of bribery, whereas a dishonest cop will take the offer. You reduce your risk/reward ratio through ambiguity. The same strategy when applied to relationships is even more successful because they're iterative.
Our communication is inextricably interwoven with ambiguity, so we will invent it out of need if we don't have it.

Comment Re: Easy grammar (Score 1) 626

Irregular verbs exist for a reason... they're the verbs that get used the most, and the irregularities are how people either eliminate redundancy or add additional shades of meaning that most normal verbs can live without.

Ditto, for "silent letters" in English. They're how we disambiguate homonyms (ex: to/too/two).

If English had official "tones" like Mandarin, we could distinguish between meanings of "fuck" used as a verb in writing, to visually indicate things like sarcasm. Actually, in a way, English *does* have an informal "system" of indicating the equivalent of _tones_ -- quotation marks, underlines, italics, boldface, and wikitext markup.

Any conlang that *really* gets used by **real** people as their "real" language will quickly mutate and become as irregular as English or Spanish.

Japanese only has two irregular verbs that are used often, and another eight or so that are used rarely, and it's an _old_ language spoken by a lot of people. Likewise, Finnish and Chinese both have under five irregular verbs, and Turkish (I'm told) has zero. There are lots of other ways to increase information density per unit of written information to reduce ambiguity. I think that's important for an actual used language, but it doesn't have to be accomplished via irregular verbs. Word location and order, for instance, does a great job of displaying subject/object relationships.
I agree with your point that things like sarcasm, satire, humor, will be expressed by bending language rules, in any actual used language. I just don't think irregular verbs are a necessary emergent property of used languages.

Comment Hardware easter eggs are still common (Score 1) 290

We just finished a chip that has a coworker's picture cut into the top three metal layers, because he died suddenly and we wanted some sort of commemoration. Since it's a flipchip, if you have an unmounted chip you can actually see it without having to decap it. We regularly put stuff in the gutters that our voltage rules require for insulation between the chip and the leadframe. Why not? It takes ten minutes to put into the artwork, at the very end of tapeout, and it costs nothing since it's on useless silicon.

My dad left an easter egg in one of the function generators he designed, that played a fugue in four-part harmony. It became a sales demo that sold a lot of units, because it showed off the machine's arbitrary waveform generation capabilities so spectacularly at trade shows. A good easter egg can be a better advertisement for something than the official demos because it shows an unexpected use, and the designers can do a better job of demonstrating the system's ability than a marketing person who is setting up some demo on a piece of equipment that s/he only knows enough about to sell.

Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 1) 385

Would it help much? A rogue pilot has the advantage of surprise. They get the first punch - and with a little luck and some practice, one punch is enough. Lock door, punch unsuspecting attendant in the face, pummel them unconscious before they recover.

Or, as I've posted elsewhere, don't even bother with a physical flight. In the US, where two people are required on the flight deck, all flight personnel are automatically eligible to be Federal Flight Deck Officers, meaning that after taking some amount of training they can carry firearms on the plane with them, and other flight officers/staff are prohibited from asking or knowing that they're carrying weapons. If pilots want to crash a plane, it's not going to be difficult for them to succeed.

Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 1) 385

Much less likely, I'd be more worried about the "depressed narcissistic arsehole" overpowering the stewardess and crashing the plane anyway.

Or just pulling out a gun and shooting the other person in the cockpit, locking the door, and doing the same thing that happened here.
All flight crew members are automatically Federal Flight Deck Officers and are allowed to carry guns on the plane, and other flight officers are prohibited from knowing that their coworkers may be carrying guns.

Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 3, Insightful) 385

Would this not merely cause people to avoid psychiatric care?

In the case of pilots, there is a legal requirement for the pilot to get checked out medically on a regular basis. For US airline pilots the maximum time between medical checkouts is six months.

However, that statement is completely orthogonal to the other problem, which is that many people who could pass a psychiatric assessment kill themselves or others, and a large number of people who would come out of a psychiatric assessment with a big thick file of observed problems are perfectly reliable individuals in their daily lives and would likely be completely competent pilots.

Comment Re:They're doing it wrong. (Score 1) 447

Nooope. You have to use at least abit of it. The smaller it is, the more effective it is. Zero doesn't qualify. So, physics says 10^-26 is like zero, mathematics say 10^-26 is > zero. Homeopathy works differently if you re a math guy or a physics guy.

So let's treat it as a reciprocal. The efficacy of homeopathy is 1/amount used, so as the amount used goes to zero, the efficacy goes to infinity, and... beyond!
(Well, okay, for 'beyond' you'd have to use a negative amount, but that's what happens when you get someone else to use yours, I guess?)

Comment Re:What's wrong with GLS (Score 5, Insightful) 328

I'd be surprised if LED's are ever as cheap as incandescents, a few year back I bought a bulk pack of bulbs - I paid around 35 cents/bulb, and the 100W bulbs were the same price as the 60W bulbs.

LED's have many more components than a light bulb, and are more difficult to assemble.

One thing to consider is total cost of ownership, and over the lifetime of an LED, you would have bought somewhere between 30 and 100 incandescent bulbs.
Another thing to consider is that the one LED will use about 1/8 the power of those incandescents, so unless your power is free, you're now looking at 240-1000x the total operating cost for incandescents compared to LED's.
My next-door neighbor has very little money, so back in 2009 she bought a big SUV because it was $1200, compared to $3000 for a subcompact... and then couldn't afford the gas to get to work. People are really lousy at looking at anything other than the initial purchase price.

A third thing to consider is that as fewer people buy incandescents, the cost of maintaining tungsten-drawing machinery and other lightbulb-specific manufacturing equipment is going to rise. Vacuum tubes are hard to make well, and while we have a century of experience in doing so, silicon is dirt cheap and getting cheaper.

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