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Comment Soham Parekh? (Score 1) 31

How common of a name is Soham Parekh in India?

At one time I was in a tech group with three Mike Johnsons. Assuredly different people, though slightly confusing.

But I don't really feel sorry for these startups going for global minimum wage and getting burned.

Hire an American named Steve from Akron and you'll be less likely to be scammed.

Comment Re:OMG! What are the chances...? (Score 0) 58

Probably depends on its characteristics.

He had quite an amusing series of papers popping the bubbles of all the 'debunkers'.

He never proved what it was but he sure proved many things that it wasn't, as claimed by ThE eXpErTs.

Midwit scientists abhor an unknown and run to bad ideas like a safety blanket.

FWIW his grad student at the time had the better ideas, involving relative motion of solar systems within the Galactic Plane. His models were the best fit for the available data.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 2) 91

CD players were standard until 2019, when luxury brands started to phase them out.

The last manufacturer to have them standard was Subaru, through 2023.

You must be a lessee?

My truck never had a CD player. I replaced the head unit with a cassette player with a $30 Walmart bluetooth unit a few years ago, and it's legit the fastest bluetooth connection I own. About a second after it gets power it's linked to the phone.

It's good to own multiple paid-for vehicles.

ThriftBooks has great deals on DVD's and CD's.

Comment Re:How would you exfiltrate data? (Score 2) 36

The way they used the "Crowdstrike Outage" to hide crimes was to reboot into a WinPE environment and 'do recovery' while wiping evidence.

I haven't used a Mac in a while but it used to be booting from external media was easy.

I can imagine ways to require keys from secure boot and hardware to decrypt the main drive but I haven't seen those deployed myself.

So, reboot from external, copy data, reboot normally.

Somebody can tell me if Apple already provides a way to avoid this.

Comment Re:Trump (Score 3, Insightful) 149

We don't have Patriots or THAAD near most US cities.

Our role, per DC, is to pay for the defense of other countries, not our own.

If Trump were worried about China he wouldn't have renewed the visas of 300,000 Chinese students in the past week or so.

China hardly has the money, population, or inclination to go to war. They do have the "excess male problem" but their population crash due to OCPF is so large they need them all to keep the economy running.

But the hypersonics are a good deterrent to war-mad nations where the legislators are all bought off by their military industry.

Comment Re:Turns out legislation works! (Score 2) 38

Not really.

"Stifling Innovation" is a dog whistle for "Stifles Shareholder Return".

Google is the progenitor of the panopticon, and its current leader is Palantir, who wants you, and everything about you, so that you can be manipulated and sold.

The EU has actual cojones to take on Google where the current extreme laissez faire 47 Gov tries to suck every puddle of cash available from crypto to Bibles to phones.

The answer is to stop being the product. EU thinking understands this. The rest of us are for sale. Hope you like your new master.

Comment Ask about locales (Score 2) 56

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

Comment Re:Cold war motivation (Score 1) 161

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

Comment Damn (Score 1) 61

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

Comment Re:Older students (Score 1) 36

Most of the colleges used to have pubs on campus before the drinking age was raised to 21.

Beer and wine only. Students and faculty frequently had fraternity and lively debates.

Now states take federal highway dollars in exchange for enforcing the 21 age so most drinking occurs in fraternity basements and dorm rooms and it"s often the hardest cheapest booze available leading to alcohol poisoning and death.

So, yeah, states knowingly trade student lives for asphalt subsidies. It's horrendous and that's even if you ignore the absurdity of having an adult with lesser legal rights.

They won't raise everything to 25 because they want what would otherwise be called child soldiers. So they make mental abstractions and kids die. It's crazy.

Comment Re: Older students (Score 1) 36

The research is actually pretty good but that's now "biohacking" and 95% of physicians will refuse to engage in it because it's bad for the business model and they're afraid of lawsuits if they use their own judgment. "Standard of Care" is the new medical tyranny.

Maximum effort should be placed on upsetting that business model so that the research can flourish and get out to clinic.

Part of this is that retirees who die quickly help extend the inevitable collapse of the Social Security system.

I was surprised but high Medicare expenses for a few years is cheaper than long-lived healthy seniors.

It's morally abhorrent but the government people don't seem to have problems with this kind of strategy.

To be fair, you can't work from 22-62 and then live on the dole on the golf course from 62-120 and expect that system to still exist.

Something's gotta give.

Comment Models Wrong but Actually Right (Score 1, Informative) 206

> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change

Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:

Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?

Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.

I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total devastation.

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