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Comment Fully autonomous (Score 4, Insightful) 202

Just wait until these little bastards have on-board AI that visually identifies targets and kills them autonomously. That is the next step. The jamming of radio remote control has already lead to the use of fiber (they literally carry miles of fiber optic line that unspools as they fly, making them impervious to RF jamming, at the cost of reduced range). The next logical step is to allow them to function without any human input - that gives them both range and immunity from jamming.

This is not good.

Comment Re:Murder / Suicide (Score 2) 231

They have recovered the switches, and they are quite intact. As shown in this video. They will absolutely know if these had the safety mechanism or not.

Further, the fact that they were turned off 1 second apart fits the scenario that they did have the safety mechanism in place, and that the pilot had to lift up on the switch, then toggle it rearwards (cutting off the fuel), each individually, as opposed to purposefully or accidentally flipping them both off at the same time.

Comment Re:We already know what the cause (Score 5, Informative) 195

How is this upvoted? I have seen news story after news story showing when all the alerts happened, and what they were. It is extremely well documented. The alerts went out in plenty of time - the warnings went out over an before the river in that area had begun to rise, and watches and other alerts four hours before that.

The problem with biased political rants like what you're spouting is they will result in more deaths. That's because the REAL reason these girls died is not going to be addressed if you want to make Trump, or even the NOAA, the bad guys.

The failure is in the extremely localized levels - that is the local government and even the camp itself. The NOAA can't know that in the absolutely insane amount of thousands of square miles they forecast for that there would be a summer camp in particular danger. That is up to local authorities. You want to place a camp right on the banks of a river, in one of the nations most risky flood zones? Then the local authorities are the ones with emergency services, building code inspection and enforcement, on and on, who are the ones who are supposed to make sure these kinds of situations can be handled. For example the fire department will come and inspect the place for fire safety - exits, alarms, fire plans, fire drills, fire extinguishers and on. Their flooding requirements / plan was token at best, and that is why people died at the camp.

This is a wake up call for local governments to require alarm systems to trigger evacuation to higher ground. What triggers it? How do they know? Is the business responsible for the costs? The county? That is what has to be done to prevent this from happening again.

Here are all the alerts that went out, in spite of what your post says.

Comment Re:This is why (Score 4, Interesting) 67

I recently started a contract for a company that provides their own windows machines that they manage. This is relatively new for me as I have always used my own hardware, however in this case I use the laptop they provide to access their system.

Every time I would log into Outlook and other bits of Microsoft software with an authenticator (I'm using Google's) it would take me to a website pushing Microsoft Authenticator. It literally said "upsell" in the URL, and I could find no way to disable it. After a couple weeks and dozens of uses it finally seems to have gone away.

Comment Portable hardware (Score 1) 43

From what I can tell, she's talking about Microsoft's disinterest or inability to create mobile hardware, and that MS is instead potentially licensing the XBox brand / OS / software stack to other manufactures that are already making portable gaming devices. She sees this as the decline of the Xbox I guess, even though MS has already stated there will be a next gen Xbox at some point.

I'm no expert in this arena, but Xbox has always had a pretty healthy market share even though its competitors had mobile offerings (although the PS mobile devices were never compatible with the actual main PS consoles).

Comment Beneficial (Score 2, Interesting) 375

It's kind of crazy every comment to this point is so politically motivated that no one will even talk about the technical merits of wearables. I wear an Apple watch, and make a point to wear it when sleeping as well, because of the vast amounts of health data it captures. Quality of sleep, resting heart rate, heart rate recovery time, blood oxygen levels, respiratory rate, heart rate variability, etc. Heck, I even give myself an EKG from time to time.

One day I had some rare heart palpitations, so I did an EKG on the spot and caught a couple. Super useful for my doctor. The only other option in the past was to wear an expensive Holter monitor 24/7 to try and capture an event like that, but now it can be done at any time on-demand.

Sorry, but wearables are pretty amazing technology - almost like a dream come true. You may not like Trump or RFK, but to be ignorant enough to say this is an awful idea shows just how biased and politically motivated people are, especially on what is supposed to be a community that discusses technology.

This is simply a campaign to raise awareness and encourage people to use wearables in general - in whatever form factor or brand they may choose. This has nothing to do with government tracking, government control, government access to data, or anything like that. This has nothing to do with vaccines, or if a person's skin is orange, or what political party is in control.

If Obama went out and said the same thing it would be the most wonderful idea ever to the other set of individuals, while the right-leaning folks would then smash their wearables. Grow up people.

Comment Re:The Time-tanic. (Score 1) 140

Oh, you want us to know Chevy’s were on board? Let me guess. They’re Too Big To Fail. Again.

I have no idea what you are spouting off. It had Cherys on board, not Chevys. It was transporting Chinese-made and Chinese brand EVs that most of us have never heard of to Mexico, where they can be sold because of their much more lax standards in what can be sold there. Hence a very strong likelihood of why the deck of the ship carrying vehicles caught fire. If their EV batteries are anything like those Chinese scooter batteries that kept spontaneously catching fire, then there will be lots of vehicle fires in Mexico.

Comment Re:I don't know of anyone buying an EV ! (Score 3, Interesting) 172

I live in a small southern rural town, like good ol' redneck boys everywhere, 1 hour drive to the nearest mall / shopping area, 75% of votes go republican. I've seen more EVs bought here in the last year than in the last several combined. At least two cybertrucks, many Tesla cars (even seeing them at low-budget apartments now, and not just upper-middle class), plus other brands of stuff. They are totally commonplace here now. Maybe we're behind the curve and it's just now getting popular here, but EVs are definitely being sold.

Comment Re:Expensive [Re: Synthetic fuels] (Score 1) 363

in which case the 21.5 hours of sunlight will really make solar look good

Even then there are still other factors reducing solar. In Nome the sun only reaches a maximum angle in the sky of about 50 degrees at summer solstice. That means the sun travels through a lot more atmosphere, which scatters and absorbs more energy than if the sun was nearly overhead closer to the equator. So even though it gets more sun at that point in time, it's less energetic. People actually mount solar panels vertically on the sides of buildings that far north, as the sun on average is so low in the sky that is the best fixed option.

Comment Proprioception (Score 2) 147

This is a huge thing, and I learned about this decades ago in UI / UX design. It's the exact same thing between the mouse and the keyboard.

The mouse is a virtual representation of our world within the computer - the pointer on the screen represents where the mouse is in our space. This is BACKWARDS from the ideal interface, as it requires visual processing and synchronizing in our vision and mind where the virtual pointer is each time we need to use the mouse.

The keyboard is the opposite. It is an extension into our world of the computer. Each key exists in our world, and performs just a few functions. We can reach down and automatically "sync" with the keyboard (without even realize we do so) by tactile sense and touching it in certain ways to where we know exactly our hand positions relative to it. No visual distraction required.

So to this day anytime I use software, or visit some poorly constructed web page that REQUIRES mouse input, it annoys me greatly.

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