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Comment Re:Heat (Score 1) 33

The heat and the light are not physically different things. If the light is absorbed, then the object that absorbed it was heated by that amount of energy.If the heat escaped, that would mean the light was reflected, and it wouldn't be black, it would be white. (Or a mirror, depending on how consistent the angle of reflection is)

Yes and no.

Visible light carries energy, and hence, yes, absorbing visible light will heat the fabric. However, at temperatures less than a thousand degrees or so, most of the heat energy is carried in infrared light. Since the fabric is specified as being black in visible light, it may or may not be absorbing in infrared.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 1) 86

The fact you consider this as "safe" is the problem with society.

Well, yes: we live in a society in which 50-kg small humans coexist in spaces with 1000- and 2000- kilogram metal vehicles travelling at a hundred km/hour, and only the social rules keep them safe.

You've excepted a horrible band-aid for a dangerous situation covering a small minority

The entirety of our civilization's "safety" relies on our society and its rules. It's not a "small minority"-- it's all of it. Every time I drive I put myself in a situation in which I'm less than one second away from flaming death if I should make the wrong move.

Comment Re:Saved from the Ellisons, at least (Score 4, Informative) 65

So you forgot when Netflix was funding the Biden fascism machine?

Honestly, yeah, I do. When was this, and what was the pro-fascist action?

We need a right-winger billionaire to balance Soros

You've got plenty. Publicly known support from home-grown billionaires (this omits foreign actors like MBS giving billions to his family, donations to 501c3s, "partnerships", his shitcoin bribe pipeline, and any quiet bribes be haven't heard about yet):

- Richard Kurtz
- Steve Wynn
- Bernard Marcus
- Elon Musk
- Cameron Winklevoss
- Tyler Winklevoss
- Miriam Adelson
- Jimmy John Liautaud
- Geoffrey Palmer
- Don Ahern
- Roger Penske
- Robert Johnson
- Timothy Dunn
- Elizabeth Uihlein
- Richard Uihlein
- Phil Ruffin
- Linda McMahon
- Diane Hendricks
- George Bishop
- J. Joe Ricketts
- Douglas Leone
- Andrew Beal
- Larry Ellison
- Kenny Troutt
- Kelcy Warren
- Jeff Sprecher
- Kelly Loeffler
- Antonio Gracias

Comment Re:That's rather disappointing, but they had acces (Score 1) 38

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

Comment Re:Look and feel (Score 1) 117

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Comment Hired by Opexus [Re:Charge the man that hired...] (Score 4, Informative) 46

The contractor they had been hired by was a company called Opexus; they were hired as engineers working on projects for various agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, Department of Energy, Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General.

Obviously Opexus didn't do a good job at background check.

A few more sites: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
  https://arstechnica.com/inform...
  https://cyberscoop.com/muneeb-...

Comment Stoopid criminals (Score 3, Insightful) 46

Anyone who has a temper-tantrum like this over getting fired shouldn't have been allowed near systems in the first place.

Anyone working in IT who isn't at least aware of the layers of surveillance at any reasonable sized shop is terrible at their job.

And simply as a matter of competence, anyone who does something like this without a plan ("Muneeb Akhter also allegedly asked an artificial intelligence tool for instructions on clearing system logs after deleting a database") is a fucking moron.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 4, Insightful) 86

The kids should cross the street at normal crossings like everyone else, not just anywhere a huge yellow beast stops and flips out a sign.

I'd say the safest place to cross would be in front of a huge, impossible to miss bus, with a flipped-out sign reading "STOP" and with flashing lights.

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