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Comment Does it matter? (Score 4, Insightful) 43

Regardless of whatever budget Congress sets, the majority party has already been clear that they have no intent to enforce it. If the president uses the NASA money for something else, or even just puts it into his own personal pocket, we can be confident that he won't be impeached, and if impeached, he won't be convicted.

The only thing that matters is the total budget. The president is free to spend that total however he wishes. This isn't the law as written, but it's the law defacto. If voters have a problem with that (do they?) they can choose a different party to be the majority.

Comment Re:mRNA based flu shots were already tested in 201 (Score 2) 228

One of the interesting features of mRNA technology is that new vaccines can be made on the existing production lines with minimal changes. So, the cost of ramping up a new mRNA vaccine is minimal since the existing factory can be used to produce the new vaccine, unlike with other pharmaceuticals.

Comment These CEOs don't understand basic economics (Score 1) 93

The drive to the bottom line (see what I did there?) is a slippery slope. A good CEO will balance profitability with employee satisfaction. Why? Because a company's employees should be their best customers. If you have "half" as many customers right out of the gate, the company is going to do worse as a result. People who talk about AI eliminating jobs forget that their business model relies on a base of customers willing to spend their money on the product. If people are out of work, they aren't going to buy a shiny new car.

Comment Re:U2 album fiasco all over again (Score 2) 78

Last I heard, Apple sales haven't plummeted and thrown them into bankruptcy, so it sounds like they learned the lesson just fine: it's fine to show people ads. People might complain a little bit, but they won't stop buying. Cost is $0 and ad revenue is presumably more than $0.

If someone is stuck with your proprietary software and you aren't showing them ads, then you're leaving money on the table. What're they gonna do, fork it out?

Comment Black hole maximum rotation speed (Score 1) 41

the outer edge of the mass exceeding the speed of light

That intuitively makes sense, but I thought part of the black hole cheat is that it doesn't have an edge. I thought they were literally singularities, with a circumference of zero. Apparently not the case?

How a thing with a circumference of zero could meaningfully "rotate" is beyond me, but I thought this (and many other suspected properties of rotating black holes) was supposed to be beyond my ignorant layman understanding!

Comment Choose protocol before choosing implementation (Score 2) 30

An adversary can coerce a proprietary software producer to compromise the code. That's what we're going to see here.

An adversary cannot time-travel to when a protocol was invented, and compromise the protocol. (Though I guess the NSA can come kind of close to that, by "helping" as it's being developed, w/out the time-travel part.) That's what we're not going to see here.

Ergo, proprietary apps will remain unable to provide secure messaging, but secure messaging will remain available to people who want it.

Comment Re:You're half right, Identity doesn't matter. (Score 2) 183

Bigoted asshole or not, he's got a point. You've both got points. Corporations adopted DEI policies across all industries starting about 2018. The problem is that it wasn't enough to push diversity in casting. The industry also pushed diversity in the writer's room. Companies brought in writers that primarily ticked boxes with a goal toward racial, sex, and sexual orientation variety. Writing skill and experience was a distant, secondary concern. As a result, we've all seen a marked decrease in writing quality across the board. Audiences have noticed too and have reacted by doing things like cutting back on theater attendance.

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One of the chief duties of the mathematician in acting as an advisor... is to discourage... from expecting too much from mathematics. -- N. Wiener

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