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Comment Is this a surprise? (Score 3, Insightful) 18

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Comment Musk should thank his lucky stars for this (Score 5, Interesting) 222

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

Comment Re:"Demons and monsters"? (Score 0) 75

So, essentially, this thing was trained on a steady diet of pro-life propaganda and death metal album covers. What a combination.

Nah. It probably found instances of modern women talking about how their abortion allowed them to secure wealth and a nice career for themselves, and then correlated that with ancient practices of sacrificing children before demon-gods for wealth, power, and a good harvest, and then generated the image.

I wonder if the most influential data sources can be extracted from the system. I'll have to ask later.
Anyway, I recall that research has shown that if you limit AI to giving answers that only confirm with a particular worldview, the quality and accuracy of results goes down dramatically.

Comment Re:$10 billion (Score 3, Informative) 190

Brightline is a privately owned company. I think they actually intend for this to be a profitable venture- and hence a profitable investment- based on their experience in Florida. So 'We' who might use that money elsewhere is whoever they find as investors or lenders in this project, not any government.
One would have to do some research to be sure whether or not public funding is involved, but I haven't seen any in the linked article.

Comment Is it really a fixing anything? (Score 1) 201

That doesn't mean we should sit on our thumbs and do nothing about small things that are easy to fix.

Make sure you're actually fixing things. A 'single use' plastic bag is 5 or 6 grams of plastic and is incredibly easy to make. Reusable bags take dozens or hundreds the amount of resources to produce, and must be periodically washed, increasing the environment footprint even further.

Comment Hey folks! We're already dead (Score 0) 294

Remember back in the 90's when Al Gore said we'd all be dead from global warming in 10 years? Turned out that actually happened. Scientists were able to capture our minds and put them in a complex supercomputer that's solar powered at the last minute, and reset our memories to a few years before.

That's why simulation theory is such a hot topic these days, because the simulation is imperfect and we're beginning to see through the cracks.

But never fear, we're already dead from climate change, just as was predicted decades ago. We can't possibly die a second time. The computers are safely situated.

Happy trails! /end sarcasm.

Comment The critics are part of the DC blob... (Score 0) 223

....and they want to make sure they keep on getting invited to the right cocktail parties. So their first consideration is the acceptability of their review in their social circles, and that often depends on the movie's position on the 'upper crust's' pet social causes. The quality and entertainment value of a movie are less important than 'sending the right message.'

Comment Re:The tides have changed (Score 1) 141

The disproportionate representation of smaller states in the senate and the electoral college is the point of those systems! In a 'pure' democracy, the different needs and character of the smaller population states would be run over roughshod by a handful of cities. The republic & federal form of government ensure that states are largely governed according to the needs and desires of their residents, and that anything done on the national government level is the result of a broad consensus on those issues.

To mourn the system as 'broken' because of the design of the Senate and Electoral college is to say that you don't want those 'country people' to matter; that you just want to rule them from far-off cities.

Comment Re:In B4 "OMG SJWS!" (Score 2) 107

> How do you know that anybody is even doing that?

All the studies ? Like comparative grading of anonymous student's papers compared to papers with names, comparing hiring selection based on CVs with and without names, or orchestra auditions based on only listening to a performer play from behind a screen.

Those also suggest how the discrimination can be reduced with little or no effort.

I don't believe that the studies about 'names' controlled for perceived class; I'm not sure how those 'researchers' selected names for their study and called them 'white' and 'black' (or whatever), but if you don't control for class perception then the researchers might have been revealing their own biases and limited view. Social research is fraught with these kinds of problems and worse (like outright fabrication, or more kindly 'non-reproducibility')

As for blind orchestra auditions, some orchestras are trying to do away with those so they can get the right mixture of skin tones to fit their preferences. The folks who got into the orchestras by benefit of blind auditions are out of favor among the politically active set and must be replaced.

Comment Re:Uh, this is becoming bad and dangerous (Score 1) 102

Of the many differences between Jacobs' stunt and this planned stunt, one of the most important parts is that the planes will be going straight down towards a controlled target area, where it will be ensured that no one is in danger should a plane crash. Further, steps will be taken to protect the environment from spilled oil and avgas.

Comment Antibodies aren't everything (Score 1) 372

1) Levels of antibodies against COVID fade noticeably over a period of months.

T-cells are the body's mechanism for providing long lasting resistance, and they are significantly more difficulty to test for. Fading antibodies does not mean 'no protection'.
Here's the first article when I searched, but they've been discussed for months and I'm sure you can find plenty.

Comment Re:I'm thinking get it over with... (Score 2, Interesting) 403

I also have had lifetime allergies and 99% of the time, my nasal passages are clogged.

Pardon me if you've tried it, but consider eating a tablespoon a day of local honey for a month or two. Try to get it from a hive in your county, but anything less than 50 miles away should do. If you can find it unfiltered, so much the better.
I stumbled across that treatment when I was searching the internet to see if I could double up on Allegra safely. I did it, and my allergies greatly reduced in severity and are now controlled by normal doses of OTC medicine- if I need anything at all.
Basic theory is that the allergens are in the pollen, and when they're processed through your digestive system, your immune system becomes more familiar with them without triggering congestion. And if it doesn't work... well, you ate honey for a couple months. No harm done.

Comment Re:So, no social change then? (Score 1) 157

....the very thing which has led to the climate crisis in the first instance.

If the 'Climate Crisis' was real and not just a grab for power, the COP26 summit would have been a zoom meeting. Instead every airport within 40 miles of Glasgow was jammed with parked private jets. They could have even flown first class commercial. If the people who say it's a crisis don't act like it's a crisis, why should they be taken seriously?
That's not to say improvements shouldn't be made in emissions from a variety of sources- but cranking the rhetoric up to 'crisis' is plainly bombastic.

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