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Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 2) 48

It turns out that if kids figure out they're being made to ride an extra half hour on the bus while it winds around its route and back the other way just so they don't have to cross the street, they'll start fibbing about the side they live on, or just getting off. And the driver won't always stop them.

Comment this (Score 1) 40

That worked so well for Loki (do you remember them?). What Valve is doing is bringing Windows APIs to Linux

This is entirely the thing. Loki games can or at least could be coaxed to work on Linux with Loki_Compat libraries, but last time I tried to run Alpha Centauri for Linux even that wouldn't work — and I'm even still using X. But add to that, the Linux versions of games are frequently inferior. The Loki games are included in that, for example in AlphaC for Linux you cannot ctrl-shift-a automate formers only near their supporting base. Fast forward to a more modern game like Civ VI, and there's a huge slew of features and even leaders you can't get access to with the Linux version. Meanwhile, the Windows version runs better on Linux than it does on Windows.

I haven't heard the OS/2 thing, what's that about? I figure it failed because Microsoft was already doing "good enough" with Windows, plus NT had relatively meaningful security and OS/2 didn't.

Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 124

I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

I'm in the US, and I remember news articles about this idea. They passed quickly. If you wound up with a textbook with such ideas in it presented as anything other than a possibility which had been or could be researched, that is unfortunate, but it is not indicative of anything widespread.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past.

Nobody is denying that at all. Nobody is even denying that there was a global cooling article fad. What was different about the global cooling scare from AGW's broad scientific consensus is that it didn't have broad scientific consensus.

Comment Re:Here we go (Score 1) 26

The M.E. has a way of driving everyone crazy; you are damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Put HAZMAT tape around the area and warn everybody away. Leave them on their own, giving them no food nor weapons; if they bonk each other to oblivion, it's their problem, not ours. I think it's God's Insane Asylum.

Non-nuts have migrated somewhere quieter, leaving mostly nuts in place, a Sanity Filter. I'm just the messenger.

Comment Re:Major privacy concerns (Score 1) 61

The escape of medical information is truly well under way already, independent of AI.

In the UK, most medical information will be classified as sensitive personal data, which means it has significant extra protections under our regular data protection law, in addition to the medical ethics implications of breaching patient confidentiality. Letting it escape is a big deal and potentially a serious threat to the business/career of any medical professional who does it. Fortunately the days of people sending that kind of data around over insecure email are finally giving way to more appropriate methods of communication as the technology improves. It's usually governments seeing pound signs and/or businesses who aren't providing direct care to the patients that are pushing for wider distribution (and also those organisations who act as if impossible claims about sanitising the data effectively before releasing it are true).

Comment Re:Pretend to be a customer for a new Subaru (Score 1) 139

I'm serious. I don't fucking pay for ads. Ever.

Good for you! Unfortunately, for a lot of people, having no car isn't really an option, so the answer to what happens next with your strategy is really that all of those people get an inferior product because there's no effective competition or regulation in the market to prevent that, while people like you don't get any product at all.

What should happen is that governments recognise a failure of the market to maintain adequate standards for customers and introduce regulation to enforce minimum acceptable standards accordingly. Whether that actually happens obviously depends on whether your government is more interested in looking out for the people or the businesses.

Comment Re:We are so fucked! (Score 1) 124

If we're very lucky, we will only see linear increases in temperature. Far more likely, the ocean has been easing us into our dooms. Far more likely, immense amounts of carbon are going to come out of the world's permafrost, and increasing wildfires will add even more. Then we will see logarithmic growth in global temperatures.

Emphasis mine. LOL. You know that logarithmic is LESS than linear, right?

Comment Re:Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbait (Score 1) 124

As far as I can tell, the "current serious effects" are always handwavy

Your lack of perception is irrelevant.

'look at all the people that die from heat!' (invariably after a hot week in summer; again routinely and repeatedly debunked by statistics that show 6-10x more people die from cold than heat

And now we see what it stems from, a total lack of logic. Run along now.

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