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Comment Re:How much is really delayed maintenance? (Score 1) 95

I'm no longer a fan of electric cars after I learned that they don't really solve the smog problem

That's stupid. EVs might not be a 100% perfect fix, but they will dramatically improve air quality. (Including a reduction in o3, a major component of smog). That's a good thing.

EVs are an essential and important step towards a cleaner future. Walkable cities and high-speed rail are ultimately better, but we're not going to see that in the US in our lifetime.

Comment Re:But ... (Score 1) 74

is seeing and describing is akin to raising a young child.

Try to resist the impulse to anthropomorphism these things. They are not independent entities that learn and grow on their own. Neither are they capable of things like consideration, reason, or analysis. This isn't speculation. These are simple facts, things we know with absolute certainty.

One of the differences that Hinton points out:

Is also nonsense, which he should know. He's lost his mind. Neural networks do not have "experiences" in any meaningful way. That's insane. Try this link. That should dispel any absurd notions you might have picked up.

it doesn't mean we automatically understand everything there is to know about it.

This is just 'god of the gaps'. I don't know what it is you think we don't understand, but I can assure you that it's a lot less than you think. We design and build these things, after all. We don't just do random things and hope it works.

Comment Real problem (Score 4, Insightful) 125

Despite his history as a true computer scientist with actual academic credentials, Raghavan chose to bulldoze actual workers and replace them with toadies

People who don't play office politics lose to people who do. Having "toadies" helps you win the game of Survivor. It works because the CEO doesn't recognize actual skill.

Comment Re: It's called work (Score 0) 225

If there is any place in the world where the Jews can have a state of their own, it is in The Land of Israel.

That's one thing, illegally settling lands that they were not handed by the US through the UN is another.

The history of the Jews, as well as the history of the Jewish statehood, began before 1948.

And yet THOUSANDS OF YEARS after the region we're discussing was settled by others.

Comment Re: It's called work (Score 0) 225

I am simplifying the situation just as much as is called for.

Publicly held corporations exist specifically to separate the people profiting from a corporation's actions from responsibility for those actions. They have no other purpose as literally everything else a public corporation does can be done by some other type of entity.

Comment Re:ISA (Score 1) 42

Yep. For all its drawbacks the PC was an amazing platform for its day.

When it came out, nothing could beat the Amiga for versatility, though. It was even better at having all kinds of stuff on its bus at once than the PC was. The bus wasn't any faster than 16 bit ISA in the real world, but it was at least a dozen times more convenient.

Comment Re:tax dollars at work (Score 2) 209

yes but, the fares won't cover the cost, we end up paying for it.

Sure, but roads are the same in that regard — we pay for them, too. But they are a lot less efficient and they lead to a lot more pollution, and arguably just as importantly they just get clogged up with more cars in short order and then we've essentially spent that money to hasten our own destruction and make more people sit in traffic longer.

Comment For the original PC? (Score 2) 42

That's a pretty decent amount of game to be able to run in 64kB.

I did have a memory expansion on the ISA bus of my IBM 5150. The additional 384kB brought it up to 448kB, which was enough to run most but not all DOS software that would run on an XT (which could be expanded to 640kB onboard.)

I probably should have piggybacked the system memory, I could have gotten it up to 512kB which really would have run almost everything. But instead I got a 286-6 with 1MB and ran Xenix on it.

Comment Re: Where is the killer app? (Score 1) 129

Not unless you want your Glasses physically tethered to a powerful computer with a substantial cable, rather than something you can freely roam around with for at least a few hours.

There's no reason it needs any more than a USB-C cable to carry power and compressed video. When I think "substantial" cable I think something like a VGA cable, where even the narrowest ones are quite a bit bigger than that (and also absolute smeg quality.) By the same token, there's no reason it needs to be driven by a computer any larger than a typical power bank, which will fit comfortably in pocket or purse. Your average decent phone has enough processing power to drive such a device, unless you have high expectations for graphics. What it doesn't have is enough battery power to last very long, but if you're eliminating the screen and making it thicker you can solve that problem easily enough.

All of the real problems relate to the hardware on your head. Making it smaller and lighter and at least equally importantly solving the focal depth problem are the real issues.

Comment Re:Bare minimum in EU (Score 1) 209

Most visitors are going to the strip, which has the monorail, or the football stadium.

The monorail was placed off the strip for the benefit of the MGM Grand and Ballyâ(TM)s. It was designed to be worthless to everyone else, bypassing other properties. Then it was extended to go to the Flamingo and near Harrahâ(TM)s and Imperial Palace. From everywhere else it's a substantial distance away. By the time you've gotten to it, you could have walked most of the way to your destination, unless you're going from one end to the other. If they had put it over the strip, it would have really been something.

Comment Re:tax dollars at work (Score 1) 209

It's tax dollars at work to support not needing to build a wider highway, not just now but also in the future. Traffic on the route from LA to LV can literally double the time it takes to get there, while in the very best case it takes about 3 hours.

This is the same argument for the stalled California HSR project. It is a good and reasonable argument. We equate the ability to travel with freedom. Making travel more possible while also reducing transportation-related pollution is a good use of tax money. Unfortunately, we should have built a new rail corridor decades ago when it would have been more legally feasible, and a lot cheaper. It wouldn't have been HSR at the time, but it would have avoided a whole lot of senseless freeway expansion that only ever provided momentary relief.

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