Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Banned. (Score 1) 52

Meh, this kind of crap is what peer review is for. As long as he learns his lesson I'd be fine with letting him keep going. I mean he's still going to MIT so he's not an idiot.

I mean we all act like he got away with this but he was caught during the initial process of peer review. The system really does work.

We all like to complain about how there's thousands and thousands of papers that are just garbage but here's the thing so what? If the papers aren't doing any harm and they're just sitting out there then it's not a big deal. It's not like we are spending all that much money on any of this crap. I'm sure you can come up with a number that sounds big because we have a 33 trillion dollar economy so yeah you could find somebody who maybe got a grant and did some bad research for a few hundred thousand. But in the grand scheme of things it's not a big deal

I mean think about how much money we waste on other crap. Human beings are just wasteful creatures. And we kind of need to be to keep our civilization and economy going anyway.

Comment Re:Uhg... (Score 1) 22

It would be kind of neat to see the algorithms for AI hand it off to a GPU or one of the fancy cores on a modern CPU.

But I can't see that really happening because machine learning algorithms requires so much processing power and modern graphics do the same so you just don't have a lot of head room.

Comment Re: Legacy Media BEFORE the war. "Ukraine are Nazi (Score 1) 137

"Remember, Na-Zi means National SOCIALIST, and that's that fascism is."

Remember, the Nazis literally called themselves socialists to fool stupid people, and you also don't know what either socialism or fascism is if you think one is a type of the other.

History lesson Children.

First things first, the Nazis never called themselves Nazis... We did that. I mean the German exiles in Britain and the British press were very happy to run with it. The Nazis just called themselves "Germans".

Secondly, one of the core tenants of Fascism is the transformation and rebirth of language, the idea was that you could control the way people thought if you controlled the language they used (which as history has shown was bass-ackwards, language evolves to reflect what people think and not the other way around). Hitler tried to purge the German language of anything he felt was foreign, in particular the French words in pre Nazi German. Socialism was one of these words he wanted to change the meaning of. he, and I quote "wanted to take the meaning of Socialism back from the Bolsheviks". Hitler defined socialism as more a form of civic pride, patriotism border-lining on jingoism. Obviously this didn't work as we kept using the Bolshevik definition of socialism (I.E. collective ownership) and keep using that definition to this day.

Drinky is quite right however, only complete idiots try to claim the Nazis were in any way socialist (as we describe socialism).

Comment Re:Why the rush? (Score 1) 203

Why does everyone need to be in such a hurry all the time?

Make a road trip. Stop and visit some charming places along the way. Take the backroads. Stay off the interstate.

Bonus: take a motorcycle and enjoy the smells you encounter along the way, in addition to the fresh air.

Because you might make the trip once a year, some people make these journeys several times a month, if not several times a week.

Smelling the roses gets old fast. So does smelling the cow shit too (for context, a Californian friend once described the I-5 as "smells like cow shit and that's the highlight" but it's the fastest way to drive from SF to LA, I'd already took the PCH up there and had to drop the car off).

Comment Re:just squeeze more juice from your customers (Score 1, Flamebait) 45

Comment Re:just squeeze more juice from your customers (Score 2) 45

Sooner or later, we'll end up at the point where trying to maintain the ways of the past is a fruitless fight. Teachers' jobs are no longer going to be "to teach" - that that's inevitably getting taken over by AI (for economic reasons, but also because it's a one-on-one interaction with the student, with them having no fear of asking questions, and that at least at a pre-university level, it probably knows the material a lot better than the average teacher, who these days is often an ignorant gym coach or whatnot). Their jobs will be *to evaluate frequently* (how well does the student know things when they don't have access to AI tools?). The future of teachers - nostalgia aside - is as daily exam administrators, to make sure that students are actually doing their studies. Even if said exams were written by and will be graded by AI.

Comment Everything goes over budget (Score 2) 203

That's just what human beings do. It's not really even that's going over budget it's that whenever these things are pitched they are under budgeted.

If we got upset every time anything went over budget we wouldn't have a country. We never would have made it out of the Northeast.

You need to build in extra lines and stops because there's a lot of in California people want to go. We aren't at the point yet where we are going to be building expressways. That kind of infrastructure comes later after you have a larger amount of rail installed. It isn't anything we can't or wouldn't do though in the absence of large car companies and airlines screwing everything up for the sake of their own profit.

There is absolutely nothing stupider than having an entire transportation system built around 3,000 lb+ personal vehicles that we all have to be personally responsible for both on and off the road. How many extra hours do we work to pay for these damn things? And if you're okay with that fine but fuck you for dragging me into it so that I have to pay for it too. I'm fucking sick and tired of paying for gearhead's fucking hobby.

Comment I googled the Spain outage (Score 3, Interesting) 103

It had nothing to do with renewables they had a voltage surge and the hadn't prepared for it. They could have been running their entire grade off nuclear and they still would have had the outage.

It's a classic case of not spending the money to keep infrastructure of to date in order to prevent disasters. The basic problem is that nobody ever gets a pat on the back for stopping a disaster they get it for the cleanup afterwards...

Put another way nobody likes spending money on preventative maintenance.

Comment Wind and solar have been doing base power (Score 2) 103

For something like 15 years now. There are plenty of dirt cheap battery solutions like those crazy sand batteries. You don't have to use rare Earth minerals to store energy there's plenty of other ways.

There really is no economic case to be made for nuclear power in America. The only reason we may see any new nuclear energy come online is people bringing up old plants that got shut down because AI has so much money right now.

Which isn't a good thing. I mean we're combining a weak regulatory environment with an old plant that was shut down because the cost of keeping it open was too high with a bubble economy heavily incentivized for low costs.

But even ignoring all that you're not going to see any new nuclear power come online.

I would be curious to get an honest answer from people why they are so obsessed with it. I really do think it's just that it was the cool thing when we were kids. Honestly solar punk isn't really all that cool.

Comment I'm no nuclear engineer (Score 5, Insightful) 103

But the cost of building this installation sounds like it would be prohibitive unless you're using slave labor and letting a lot of those slaves die.

Even then I don't know if you could pull something like this off. This sounds like a scam.

Keep in mind if you are in North America then nuclear is basically a scam right now anyway unless you're restarting an old reactor. That's because the investment cost for wind and solar even with the current administration interfering with your deployment is substantially cheaper than any nuclear reactor you could possibly build, again even with the administration looking the other way on safety.

Japan might have a reason to fire up their nuclear reactors because they have so little viable land. But the one thing America has a fuckload of is land. So it just doesn't make economic sense to build a nuclear reactor in America.

I'm not quite sure why so many people over 50 though are so hung up on nuclear. I guess it was the future when you were a kid and it's a future that never happened so I think a lot of old farts are obsessed with it. Libertarian types seem to be really really into nuclear too and I don't understand why. Maybe the small footprint size of the reactors seems more individualistic? I don't know but it's all kind of pointless when we can just build out solar or wind installations.

Comment No. (Score 4, Informative) 203

Because there is no way car companies and airlines would ever allow it.

California tried and Elon Musk came in with a bucket of money and discredited transportation ideas and shut it all down. In fairness he also had help from airline CEO.

Like most things transportation problems are social problems in disguise.

Comment These plans aren't really meant to go anywhere (Score 2) 111

They exist to present to the public as a viable alternative to renewables and transitioning to renewable energy resources in general.

It lets you tell the public that the scientists will figure it all out so they don't need to make any changes to the way we do things today.

It's the exact same scam plastic recycling turned out to be and for the exact same reason.

Comment Qualified immunity is a bitch (Score 1) 50

One of the things I've been noticing lately is that the kind of people who didn't use to get hassled by the cops are now getting hassled by the cops...

Crime keeps going down but we keep putting more cops on the street. People expect them to arrest people. So they're looking for guys they can hassle like yourself.

Slashdot Top Deals

What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind. -- Thomas Hewitt Key, 1799-1875

Working...