I was an election judge. On Halloween, I was assigned as the greeter (because I was the only one who showed up in costume), and my primary duty seemed to be telling people to turn off their phones as âcommunication devicesâ(TM) are illegal inside polling places.

There were quite a few people who had no idea how to turn off their phones, and a couple that went through complex menus trying to do it. (If it took them longer than a minute or so, Iâ(TM)d have them put it in airplane mode)

And then there were other times when people were sitting waiting for the electronic ballot marking devices⦠and using their phones. One of those times, I told the guy âthey should have told you to turn off you phone when you got hereâ(TM) and he replied âoh, they didâ(TM). Sigh.

Because slashdot predates Unicode support, and doesnâ(TM)t bother to convert character sets, but I think it claims everything is isoLatin1

See https://www.joelonsoftware.com...

(And as Iâ(TM)m posting from an iPhone, I suspect this will be garbled, too; and I donâ(TM)t have developer tools enabled, so I canâ(TM)t view the source to verify what charset Slashdot claims to be using)

Years ago, there was a report about how much it was going to cost to clean the exhaust from power plants ... and as expected, you can do a half-assed job relatively cheaply, or pay more for a better job.

And I thought 'it might be cheaper to just give away the half-assed technology to other countries'

So how much would it cost to improve all of the power plants in China or India so they're at a similar standard to existing US ones? It might not help the people immediately near the US pollution sources, but maybe we can at least stop some from getting here.

I'd argue that once a month might not be enough.

After all, what if the app is running slowly, or has some sort of weird intermittent issue?

But really -- if someone's making $400k/year, they can probably pay someone off to use their phone once a month and run deliveries for them.

We'll need them to launch satellites ... because they're putting so much low-orbit highly reflective crap in space that they're screwing up ground based observatories:

https://www.wbur.org/hereandno...

It's not the costs that were the problem, it was that it was reliant on too many low TRL components.

They should've funded smaller projects to test the unknown design elements before committing funding to a large project that used them.

Heliophysics put a lot of money into SDO, but it wasn't built around unproven stuff. Hell, they even replaced one of the PI teams a year after the award, because they weren't hitting their deadlines.

(The original telescope package was supposed to be built by NRL, who was also working on STEREO and had run behind ... so it got re-awarded to LMSAL ... which is why LMSAL decided to piggyback with SHA for the data system rather than building their own, so they could concentrate on their telescopes)

It was SHA's data system that was the unproven part, and a royal PITA ... but the spacecraft itself was fine.

Qwikster?

I was going to ask if it supported CableCARD, in case you moved and ended up with some other company ... but it seems that the FCC quietly killed that rule last year:

https://thedesk.net/2020/09/fc...

I know a few people with Tivos that use them ... gonna suck if they change companies when their discount period ends.

Nice try, Eliza.

You're still not going to pass the Turing test.

This doesn't quite parse as an English sentence.

Does this mean that we've got AI trying to post articles about itself? If so, should we be proud or worried?

Theyâ(TM)re being fed food they didnâ(TM)t originally live on. They donâ(TM)t survive off of grasses. Corn comes from a grass, but itâ(TM)s higher in sugars.

And then thereâ(TM)s all of the weird stuff we feed them (processed food from factories that got damaged or didnâ(TM)t meet standards, so gummi bears and such)

And there are way more of them than would survive on their own without human intervention

But people are saying that itâ(TM)s the belches, and the pee isnâ(TM)t a big deal. It actually is a big deal if we can extract nitrogen or ammonia from the pee at low cost. Ammonia is one of the primary sources of nitrogen used in making fertilizer, and itâ(TM)s energy intensive to make. It requires large facilities to make it efficiently (using the Haberâ"Bosch process), so there are relatively few manufacturing sites and itâ(TM)s shipped long distances.

Cow pee could be a local source of nitrogen that could be processed (sterilized?) and fed back into local farmland, reducing the need for chemical fertilizers

A few years back, there was actually a scientist who was collecting human pee and testing what had to be done to use it as fertilizer. (They were collecting first pee of the day, which is more concentrated, and then leaving it a greenhouse for days to sterilize it). There seem to be a lot of articles about âpeecyclingâ(TM) around 2014: https://www.nationalgeographic...

There was a guy selling mining rigs a while back who had a video where he basically said that the only way to actually make money on it was to steal electricity.

(he was grabbing power at a coffee shop)

So it only makes them money if they're in an area where electricity is cheap, it doesn't cause other maintenance headaches (like taxing the air handlers), and the price of bitcoin increases.

At least back in the 90s/early 2000, sysadmins who got fired for abuse of company resources were being altruistic. (for installing Folding@Home screen savers and similar stuff on company machines)

"with a computer" isn't the issue here. That can be struck down for not being novel.

The issue is that the laws were changed a few years ago so it's first-to-file, not first-to-invent.

So the companies that have the money and knowledge to file patents for everything that they think they can get to stick do ... and there's no 'prior art' that can get it taken away from them.

But the little guy inventor who doesn't have some team that can write up patents for him? He's the one getting screwed, when someone else notices that he did something novel, and then patents it out from under him.

And of course, the country in general, as it shifted the balance of power to certain classes of companies, with no way for the average citizen to provide a check against their abuse (by being able to show something was known/existed before they patented it)

What I hate is that every time I visit a damned website, I have to go through the same crap to tell them that I don't want their cookies.

I mostly care about tracking cookies, but I also don't want third party stuff loaded that might allow *them* to track me.

But I'd be okay with allowing them to set one cookie, saying that I don't want their cookies, so they don't pop up with the question over and over again.

(which oddly, I'm pretty sure they know, as so many are already pre-populated with everything off that you can turn off)

It's probable that Bezos is doing this for a purely financial reason -- but this might be a good thing.

Most people don't have money to stand up against Elon Musk ... and he's willing to flout regulations and/or societal norms. Like his "not a flamethrower" or calling high end cruise control "autopilot" when can't actually do what people think of as being an autopilot.

But Starlink has been quite a bit of a dick move on his part, because of how many and how shiny they are. And how low they are while they're being tested before they move to their final orbit: https://skyandtelescope.org/as...

There have been attempts at coatings to make the satellites darker, but it only works at some wavelengths (and makes others worse): https://physicsworld.com/a/dar...

I'm not working in astronomy anymore, but I'd *really* like to see some better mitigation before Starlink launches thousands of satellites and screws over ground based observatories.