Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Blaming a single cause (Score 1) 82

They've associated changes in the civilization with the changing climate conditions, it's likely not 100% certain, but it looks like a pretty likely cause.

It's easy to think that the world is "full" now. But the reality is that only a small percentage of the earth's surface has been "modified" by humans. https://www.weforum.org/storie... If we needed to move, there are still vast untouched tracts of land that could be tamed.

That is a very weird take. The bits we modified are the best land, temperate zones, river banks, grasslands. You really want to move to some of that "untamed land" in the Sahara, Siberia, or Greenland?

And honestly, that map looks like a massive underestimate. I'm seeing big black regions in what I know to be largely unbroken crop land.

Submission + - Be nice - Batman is watching! (sciencealert.com)

Black Parrot writes: From ScienceAlert:

A new study has found that people are more likely to act kind towards others when Batman is present â" and not for the reasons you might assume.
[...]
Psychologists from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy conducted experiments on the Milan metro to see who, if anyone, might offer their seat to a pregnant passenger.
The kicker? Sometimes Batman was there â" or at least, another experimenter dressed as him. The researchers were checking if people were more likely to give up their seat in the presence of the caped crusader.
And sure enough, there did seem to be a correlation. In 138 different experiments, somebody offered their seat to an experimenter wearing a hidden prosthetic belly 67.21 percent of the time in the presence of Batman.
That's a lot more often than times the superhero wasn't around â" in those cases, a passenger offered a seat just 37.66 percent of the time.
[...]
"Interestingly, among those who left their spot in the experimental condition, nobody directly associated their gesture with the presence of Batman, and 14 (43.75 percent) reported that they did not see Batman at all."

The article goes on to speculate about what is causing people to be more generous.

Comment Re:An old familiar story (Score 2) 74

in the old it's not physics or chemistry that will doom humanity but economics, aptly called the dismal science

If you don't want Alberta to pump oil then don't buy oil.

But if you are going to pump oil then build a pipeline because shipping it by truck or rail is a horrible solution.

I want the oil industry to die because we're moving onto other energy sources, not because we're shutting down the Albertan oil industry so other producers like the US and the Middle East can make more money.

Comment Re:Maintenance? (Score 0) 113

That's because the project's value is political, not economic. Yes, generating power by digging a mile-deep hole, filling it with water, and running nuclear reactor at the bottom of it is likely to be crazy expensive and have all kinds of environmental challenges.

But what you have to understand is that the American political system is a zero-sum game and Democrats put their chips on solar, wind, and other renewables. Republicans put theirs on coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear.

Solar and Wind have proved to be the winning bet over petro-products and that has happened fast enough that a lot of voters remember Republican opposition to those power sources. No political movement tolerates being unambiguously wrong about something so the American right is desperate for an argument on the energy front that allows them to validate the arguments they've been making over the past 50 years.

Nuclear is that argument. But to do nuclear you've gotta be able to convince people that they don't need to be afraid of a nuclear plant in their community. That's a heavy lift and what this technology really provides is a new argument beyond getting the general public to trust a bunch of nuclear and civil engineers when they say it's perfectly safe. Your average voter may not understand how a modern nuclear containment unit works. But "it's buried under a mile of rock" has a simple elegance to it.

Comment Re:Amateurs (Score 1) 112

The proper way to do this is 1) fake it and 2) when queried, lie about it. I mean, this has been the traditional approach in all things AI and at least the LLM pushers know how to do it. I would have thought that Russians, off all people, understand this approach in a more general way. Apparently not. Some people will probably get an extensive "vacation" sponsored by the state now.

They did fake it. The "robot" was a guy in a robot suit, unfortunately, the guy in the robot suit got completely shitfaced.

Comment Re:Satanic Panic all over again + Fake Culture War (Score -1, Troll) 45

Honestly the issue with the story is Ken Paxton, he literally has negative credibility. I know virtually nothing about Roblox or this case, but if Paxton is the first AG to pursue it my automatic assumption is he's prosecuting them because they either failed to give him a bribe or he thought they were helping Democrats register to vote or something.

Comment Ok, but WHY? (Score 2) 11

Is the idea here that high frequency trading and self-dealing can be used to pump-and-dump a given proposition?

So, I find some low-traffic topic suggesting that Pigs Will Fly by the end of 2025 which has "yes" shares trading at $0.01. I buy a bunch of "yes" shares and then buy/sell a small chunk of them back and forth with myself, driving the price up to $0.50. Now I sit back and sell off my "yes" shares for something between $0.50 and $0.40 to anyone who shows up looking to get in on the rapidly-rising "Pigs Will Fly" proposition until a whole bunch of people have bought up the $0.01 shares for 40 times their actual value.

Or is there some other scam at play here?

Slashdot Top Deals

Can't open /usr/fortunes. Lid stuck on cookie jar.

Working...