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Comment Re:not a shock (Score 1) 20

Yeah, that was a big goof, thanks for understanding.

Apple is capable of hiring talented people and creating a useful product. They just don't seem to be capable of being user-friendly in the ways that matter to me. TBH they were never great at it, and MUGs did the heavy lifting in the customer relations department for them for free. Anyway I'm totally capable of believing their performance claims, to a reasonable point, especially when the results aren't putting them first.

I wish they were friendlier, because their hardware is reasonably impressive. I'm also just not in their target demographic apparently because I'd rather have a slightly thicker device with better cooling and battery capacity.

Comment Re:Your tax dollars hard at work (Score 1) 71

That's still fixable.

All engineering problems are to an extent. In the final analysis, in 47 years, I've found that it's mostly moving the problem from one in-box to another in-box. The problem is still there, but now it's not your in-box.

Just like how most computers are air cooled and not water cooled.That's still fixable. Just like how most computers are air cooled and not water cooled. They could build a very large air cooling tower and not need water at all.

Taking your last point - time. Time is what you're seeing as a steady state. Will Microsoft still be interested in power in 20 years? Will they form a shell corporation to sign that contract, then bankrupt it once their needs are gone? So many business use this "one simple trick" to get subsidies or reduced rates, then almost inevitably leave the taxpayer with the sack to when it suits their profit model to exit their obligations.

Question: What do you use to power the air flow for that air cooling system, and how many watts would it draw to meet the same caloric (or BTU, if you prefer) cooling of using water versus air. It's a simple formula to work out the differing efficiencies of using which fluid, air or water, you'd prefer for non-forced draft cooling. It gets a bit more involved calculating the power needs for forced draft cooling. No matter what you do though, your cooling is going to consume a portion of your power output, reducing overall efficiency, and thus adding to the time to meet ROI. The reason engineers use PWR reactors is that it makes the business math work, and other methods to date do not.

Cooling from cheap to expensive:

Mercy snip
You left out several options:
1. Don't use WCR's. MHD or PBR are a thing too. (See final line)
2. Use Geothermal cooling. Not aware of anything outside of paper but as long as you have a sink cooler than your source, you're good. (hint: The rocks can only absorb so much heat before you've exceeded their ability to sink any more and thus overheat your installation.)
3. Dump waste heat into salt vats, rotate the salt vats to allow natural cooling. (Molten salt cooling).
4. Use micro reactors like Toshiba and Samsung have developed. Put the power plant where the power is needed.
But none of those are commercially feasible without forever government subsidies. Again, privatizing the profit, socializing the cost.

Comment Re: How dense can they be? (Score 1) 40

It's not impossible, but the switch would be expensive. It's probably easier and just as effective just to shield them, and tie the shield to the chassis ground.

Another option would be to switch power to the radio chip, if it's in a package which makes that convenient. This might also disable bluetooth if you do it to the infotainment system, or cause a code to be set...

Comment Re: Mom's of the world will prevent it. (Score 1) 12

Antibacterial soap doesn't use antibiotics, it uses chemicals known to destroy antibiotics directly and physically. It's usually done with compounds they can't reasonably develop resistance to. This is easier than in antibiotics because they don't have to be safe to put in your body.

Comment Re:This commentary is really depressing (Score 1) 12

The BCG vaccine has also been found to be effective against bladder cancer. One of the two manufacturers bailed out of the market about a decade ago, limiting supply for both TB and bladder cancer.

They just opened a new manufacturing facility in Durham this past Spring to make much more. Not sure if it's producing yet, but it was a four-year build.

TB affects so few Americans that you can't even get BCG for TB prevention if you want it. Hopefully high-risk folks will be able to elect to get it soon.

Comment Re:Very quick code reviews (Score 1) 36

The above was already quite long, but allow me to add a bit :-)

I spent a few minutes looking for the state of the art in C++/Rust interop for contexts that don't have a nice intermediary like binder. It turns out that the situation isn't as bad as I thought. The CXX project enables automatic generation of bi-directional definitions between Rust and C++ and is being used at scale by the Chromium project and that seems to be going pretty well.

There's also a Google-funded Rust Foundation project to define a better solution, though I don't see what, if anything, has happened since it was announced last year. Hopefully that's because there's a small group working too hard to waste a lot of time talking about it.

The reason I went to look is that my new team (I left Google a couple of months ago) might need such a thing. I've been asked to define an API that would benefit from being implemented in Rust and usable from C++ and Rust.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 213

3) The outbreak is all along the southwest border with large populations of people who lack access to regular health care.

With the republicans holding a majority in 3/3 branches of the government, what are they doing to to combat this problem?

Telling people that vaccines are bad, ensuring that any parent who wishes to refuse to vaccinate their children is fully supported in that decision, and working to make vaccines harder to get, more expensive and more painful (RFK Jr. wants to separate the MMR vaccine into three shots, each of which will still require three injections, so kids will have to get 9 shots to be fully vaccinated instead of three).

This is similar to their plan to fight inflation by imposing tariffs and forcing the Fed to lower interest rates in spite of rising inflation (note that this last part hasn't really happened yet -- the interest rate cuts have been measured, cautious and justified by economic conditions -- but Trump is working on it). Though to be fully fair, by making the tariffs arbitrary and capricious so that business leaders are completely unable to plan, Trump is also causing a contraction in US economic activity that might eventually generate significant unemployment, which actually does reduce inflation. I see no corresponding "silver lining" in the mumps plan, though.

Comment Re:Oh, Such Greatness (Score 1) 213

From an economic perspective, he was right. The Southern slave system enriched a small aristocratic elite—roughly 5% of whites—while offering poor whites very limited upward mobility.

And, ultimately, slavery was a far less efficient and effective economic system. One might think that keeping a big chunk of the populace poor is efficient, since you're not "wasting" a lot of production on providing them with unnecessary goods and services, but it's really not, at least not since the industrial revolution. I think the core reason that it's so inefficient is the same reason that Marxist communism is inefficient: From an economic perspective, both systems value the masses only for their physical labor, and fail to cultivate and take advantage of their brains, which also actually tends to reduce their labor output. Harnessing the distributed ingenuity of your workforce requires giving your workforce some reason to exercise ingenuity and some way to benefit from doing so.

It's going to be interesting (or maybe terrifying, or maybe just sad) to see what happens when we fully automate ingenuity, too, which will mean that the system no longer depends on or benefits from distributed ingenuity because the machines are smarter and think faster, just as the machines are already stronger and indefatigable.

Comment Re:Trump Mania (Score 1) 213

Is it more likely that the Mennonite population found some measles lying around, or that the immigrant/refugee population of Alberta might have brought it from somewhere else?

It does not matter even slightly where it comes from. It's coming in all the time. What matters is what percentage are vaccinated, which determines whether a population has effective herd immunity. The immigrants aren't moving the needle on that, but the religious are.

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