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Comment Re:I thought we were saving the planet? (Score 2) 182

If you are driving a thing with wheels, presumably you want roads on which to do it.

And unless you and rather a lot of your friends are volunteering to work on road crews out of love of the smell of hot asphalt, those need to be paid for.

Personally, I like targeted consumption taxes like this. You don't drive? Then you don't pay for roads you don't use. (You still pay the pass through on physical goods that need transported, but that's also as it should be.)

Comment Re:As stupid as this is (Score 1) 68

A lot of times that sort of thing was corruption, not stupidity. (Although I'm sure there were plenty of suckers, too.)

A pension fund would buy some old man's stamp collection as an "investment". Just so happened the old man was a relative of the fund manager.

Sounds almost quaint compared to Kushner selling the country to Mr. Bone Saw.

Comment Somewhere in Redmond (Score 3, Funny) 98

Fluorescent lights burn bright over a windowless basement cubefarm. It is 1:24 AM, and Bill Alberts, 48, is living his best life.

Due to an org chart mishap, he has been given exclusive control over a neglected application shipped in the base install of Windows, and he is having going nuts, adding every feature he ever dreamed of.

He knows his time is short; soon enough some auditor will notice. He reviews his (HIS!) feature roadmap with a combination of anxiety and glee.

Comment Re:It doesn't work at scale (Score 1) 37

though of course you need a volcano to make it work.

Which explains Khosla's interest. If this ends up not working out as a retail power play, it can pivot to the supervillain volcanic lair market.

Although Zuckerberg has already probably had to solve power for Koolau Ranch.

Comment Band-aids for burn victims. (Score 1) 116

So, we could use the renewable/carbon neutral (or negative) path .... OR .... not, but with lots of extra steps and no guarantee of success?

  "And then there's the problem of trying to stop. Because an abrupt end to geoengineering, with all the carbon still in the atmosphere, would cause the temperature to soar suddenly upward with unknown, but likely disastrous, effects... "

Just have an end to fossil-fuel use, you fucking idiots! That's a tractable challenge. That's something we have decades of experience with. Play to your strengths, humanity. Don't listen to fucking morons!!!

Comment This is all so embarrassing (Score 3, Insightful) 33

What happened to a sense of professionalism? Hell, of wanting people to not laugh at your work? They expect people to pay money for this junk?

I have to imagine the C-suite at a lot of places feels intense pressure to have "an AI roadmap".

Fine. That doesn't mean you ship not even half-baked bullshit.

This isn't about jerking off to robot porn, it is about performance monitoring - the only thing that functionally matters is the accuracy.

It amazes me that so much simply non-functional junk is passed off as wizzbang magic technology.

Comment Any opportunity to fuck things up (Score 4, Insightful) 45

I swear that's Microsoft's unofficial motto.

The Copy-Paste mechanism has been a well-defined, widely-understood basic action for personal computers since at least 1984, arguably before.

The defining characteristics are either duplicating or moving one or more digital objects to a new position in a document.

Notice those verbs. Nothing about rewriting/translating/making different. The closest the mechanism gets to that is, for inter-application transfer, there can be content negotiation to deal with format issues.

Just waiting for the first time this "fixes" something in a mortgage or a sentencing memo...

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