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Comment Re:what else is new? (Score 1) 93

Spoken like a fuckup that cannot accept reality. YOU are a really bad person by trying to force your deeply flawed views on everybody.

I am well aware of what Money did. He did not think gender identity was a spectrum. He though gender identity can be manipulated and externally imposed, essentially by force. And that is wrong and not consistent with what Science says today. But gender identity is a spectrum and comes from the person in question. Denying that makes the person denying it a liar or clueless.

Comment Re:Ok but then what? (Score 1) 194

I was talking to my wife about childhood vacations on the Jersey Shore and at the boardwalks they had lots of arcades and they all had literal slot machines you could use the tokens in (maybe they still do?) and thinking back about how that probably isn't a good idea to let children just get accustomed to straight up gambling.

Comment Re:Good for Airbus (Score 1) 26

This is a masterclass in how to handle a software issue in 1998.

Airbus: Hey, lets burn CD Roms and USB thumb drives and sneaker-net the software on to 6000 planes across the planet.

This should work like Tesla firmware. Every plane has a version number on its firmware, and when an update happens the version is incremented. The planes routinely ping for updates (say every power up), and download non-critical updates when at gates with wifi. On safety critical updates, there are private networks (not to mention in-flight wifi these updates could piggyback on). Once an update is downloaded, pilots should be able to hit the update button the moment the plane is back at a gate.

The real issue is that if you have to sneaker net updates onto planes, airlines just wont update. This patch was absolutely mandated by the FAA but think of how many updates are probably not. There might be many vulnerabilities and errata bug fixes on countless libraries these softwares depend on. Device firmware, flight control computers, zero day vulnerabilities, communication packages to cross talk with other on-board systems, etc etc etc... Not to mention fixes in core components like the kernels (I wouldn't be shocked if these planes ran some flavor of Linux and X11 or Wayland for flight panel displays.

We know from other industries if updates are a manual process, people will leave what they think is *good enough* alone out of laziness or cost. So while I laude Airbus here for their seeing a problem and responding to it, I fault them for the shit way they update planes. How many aircraft are running really old software?

Submission + - Chernobyl's Radiophile Fungus (sciencealert.com)

j_f_chamblee writes: There is a black fungus thriving on the outside of the sarcophagus of Chernobyl's infamous Reactor 4. And it may be thriving because of the high radiation, not in spite of it. From the article:

"That fungus is called Cladosporium sphaerospermum, and some scientists think its dark pigment – melanin – may allow it to harness ionizing radiation through a process similar to the way plants harness light for photosynthesis. This proposed mechanism is even referred to as radiosynthesis."

Comment Re:Engineers start up, MBAs and DEIs close down (Score 2) 47

Also notice how DEI only applies to you know, the worker class. Meanwhile Intel has had 10 people in the CEO position over it's history: 8 white guys, 1 woman (who was Co-CEO for 1 year with another white guy) and currently an Asian man.

Meanwhile AMD has seen it's values rise with the Lisa Su at the helm and the OP would probably class her as a "DEI hire". The whole concept is nonsensical and thats because it's dishonest and just dog whistles.

"Please bring back the woke, my children are starving"

Submission + - UK to remove right to trial by jury for most charges (theguardian.com)

DesScorp writes: The UK Ministry of Justice will move to eliminate the right to trial by jury for all but the most serious charges in a controversial overhaul of the British court system:

Criminals will be stopped from “gaming the system” by choosing trial by jury in order to increase the chances of proceedings collapsing, the courts minister has said, promising to enact radical changes to limit jury trials by the next election. Drug dealers and career criminals were “laughing in the dock” knowing cases can take years to come to trial, Sarah Sackman said, while warning that inaction would be a road to “chaos and ruin”. Ministers will legislate to remove the right to trial by jury for thousands of cases in one of the biggest and most controversial overhauls of the justice system in England and Wales in generations – promising the changes will significantly shrink the court backlog by 2029. The Ministry of Justice is braced for a backlash from barristers and the judiciary as it presses ahead with the measures to tackle a backlog of nearly 80,000 cases, which will create a proposed new judge-only division of the crown court to hear some cases. Sackman said the “stakes are incredibly high” as she prepared to announce early next month that vast numbers of cases will now be heard by judges and magistrates rather than juries, a response to recommendations in a review by Sir Brian Leveson.


Comment I wouldn't really call it decay (Score 4, Insightful) 47

That implies rot from within but this was really just top down Intel firing anyone and everyone in order to make quarterly targets.

That was fine when AMD was struggling but AMD got their shit together in 2017. Intel kept firing people they actually need it all the way up to well, now.

The problem is that your engineers are rotting it's that you don't have them because you fired them. Worse it's not as if you got to assassinate them or anything so they went off and got jobs at your competitors.

This is why Nvidia has always been so strong they hire the hell out of engineers in order to keep them out of the hands of competitors. It's a bit problematic because it's why AMD and Intel have such a hard time competing in the GPU market space. They simply cannot afford to hire enough of the kind of engineers they need. Not with the budget the CEO gives them

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