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Comment Re:Lines aren't frozen. (Score 3, Insightful) 213

Good point. An army that sees all others as subhuman and sees only the next death is one that has to keep fighting. It has no choice. It's the only thing it knows. It can keep conquering more territory outwards, or it can slaughter its own government inwards. History shows those are your two options.

Whether or not Russia conquers Ukraine, it will attack other countries - vast numbers of bored, underpaid soldiers would seek entertainment elsewhere if they didn't.

Comment Re:Good news bad news time (Score 1) 87

The symptoms of pneumonic plague are coughing, sneezing, a fever, and sometimes chest pain, followed by often quite rapid death. Since it's pretty communicable and the pre-death symptoms are pretty typical for lots of things that do not bring people to the hospital, particularly when they don't have health insurance, containment (proper contaiment anyway) involves more than just treating walk-in cases.

Comment Re:Two simple questions. (Score 1) 232

This is what I'm going by:

The report said that in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin based on reports from operators of model 737 planes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.

The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant an airworthiness directive – a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions.

The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB, which crashed. The report added: “As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out as the SAIB was advisory and not mandatory.”

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

Comment Two simple questions. (Score 1) 232

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

Comment Re:Another way to bankrupt Social Security (Score 1) 69

Why? Retirement ages might have to go up, but that's only a bad thing if you've somehow spent your life doing something you hate and are counting the days until you can sit on a couch for ten or fifteen years waiting to die.

The most sensible solution to both problems would seem to be ditching the gamification of maximizing career progression from ages 18 to 65. Do something you enjoy. Take a break after the first ten years if you want to have some kids. Go back and do something you enjoy afterward. Maybe switch it up again in your forties or fifties. Lots of time left.

Seems the opposite of brutal.

Comment Re:Do not do it (Score 1) 44

Plumbing doesn't have universal standards either. You said it: "Adapters between copper and PEX piping exist."

My grandparents' place had aluminum wiring. You have to be a bit careful combining that with regular copper. Adapters exist.

There's some wifi smart home stuff, and there's some old 310/433 MHz X10 stuff, but the vast majority, including zigbee and thread, are based on IEEE 802.15.4, which, if you're familiar with computer stuff, you might strongly suspect is a standard. It's not a new one either, it was written in 2003; it's older than the wifi standard you're probably using right now. That's why Ikea can just move from zigbee to thread and keep backwards compatibility: it's a software change on the network and higher layers. Anyway, there are adapters between pretty much all the systems, even the oddballs.

I'm not really sure what offends some segment of Slashdot so much about lighbulbs you can turn on and off without getting up. You guys had TV remotes didn't you? Conveniently located thermostats? Hot and cold water on tap?

Comment Re:How LARGE is England? (Score 1) 28

The population weighted density of Nevada is one of the highest in the US.

You're insisting on using population density, or for some reason, aboslute size. The denominator for population density is land area. But nobody is running fibre to every square metre. As I said (and you ignored) the important metric is population weighted density. That's the average population density each person lives in. If most people are clustered in towns and cities, this is high. So Nevada, for example, has one of the highest population weighted densities in the US despite having one of the lowest population densities. Running fibre to houses in those kind of places is fairly easy because most people live close to each other. The long city-to-city links aren't really much of a problem.

Comment Re:How LARGE is England? (Score 3, Insightful) 28

Not really. The population weighted density of the US and Europe are fairly similar, although England is on the high side, similar to California and Nevada.

Population weighted density is the correct metric, not population density. Nobody is proposing running fibre to every square metre.

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