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Comment Re:Limit to Seven People (Score 1) 26

I recall reading that if you have a meeting with more than seven people, you are probably having an ineffective meeting. I am regularly forced to attend meetings with 20-30 people. It's always the same 3-4 people who speak, everyone else remains silent.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 105

Negligent homicide and involuntary manslaughter suffer the same problem- no mens rea for the person accused of the crime.

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule. Extending that to involuntary manslaughter when the person didn't actually pull the trigger but directly created a situation where the police did seems like not that much of a stretch to me.

Comment Re:Renewable fuels? (Score 1) 49

Some car manufacturers want to wring more out of their investments in hybrid drivetrains. They are also hoping to delay long enough to catch up to the Chinese on battery tech.

Toyota is a great example. Their solid state battery tech is always a few years away from revolutionising the industry. They tried and abandoned hydrogen.

Comment Re:Another step to nowhere (Score 1) 30

Remember all the people talking trash about Telsa failing. They only made it because they went with an expensive sports car that wasn't very high quality and begged for a lot of help and they also had a huge government infusion of cash that saved them. Aptera was exempt from that same government program because it did not have 4 wheels.

The hard problem was starting at a cheaper car; which is what everybody but Tesla did... although, without a lot of help, hype, and bending the truth Tesla wouldn't exist.

Comment Too simplistic (Score 1) 204

It is just as likely that you're seeing more of this because people who would normally be forced to drop out because they lack basic accommodations are getting those accommodations and are able to finish the program now.

We are long since past the point where life needs to be a constant battle to see who gets to have food and shelter. But we keep that system going.

Comment Re:Was it a Russian drone? (Score 1) 105

I.e., if during a robbery, some random person in the store shoots someone else trying to shoot you- you are not in legal jeopardy for murder.

To my knowledge, you are pedantically correct, but that doesn't mean you aren't in legal jeopardy for the death; you just won't face murder charges. You could still very easily be hit with civil wrongful death claims, and maybe negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter charges for creating the situation that led to that death.

Comment Re:Never buy any product that... (Score 1) 74

That's kind of my take on the story, but my wording would be more along the lines of "What are the success criteria?" Or perhaps "Would I donate to support this?" (Surely I would not donate on the basis of the description here and not even feeling motivated to learn more.)

But that's also why I wouldn't donate to support the project. You could think of it as a kind of paradox of choice. There are LOTS of things I could donate money to, but in general the success criteria are almost never clear. Whatever I donate to, it's likely that I could have had "more success" donating somewhere else.

Disclaimer needed? I was weird enough to pay for some freely distributed software. Long time ago, and usually for educational purposes for me or my students. One of the results I was hoping for was that the software would continue to exist with support and possibly even improvements, but can't recall any cases where that actually happened. Later donations often had more clear objectives, but my batting average for "wins" was so low that I mostly stopped donating...

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