The key point to remember about the AI footage is that these tools are creating images that are tailored to look good to the human eye. This is not an accurate representations of the actual events.

It doesn't matter if you think the video footage was on a soundstage or the real lunar surface. The additional frames and changes to the scenes are aesthetic and carefully selected for such. Anything useful of scientific value is diluted or outright removed if it doesn't meet the Hollywood blockbuster style.

As a study of film technique it is excellent. As an accurate presentation of a moon landing it is a failure. Cameras shake while carried. How they do so is useful data. Hollywood uses steady cams and processing to eliminate shake. Even blinding glare off surfaces and grainy dust is data that can be processed by a future PhD candidate into a paper that extends our knowledge just a little bit.

But make no mistake, this is bread and circuses. We are as a species very good at feeding ourselves these kinds of distractions. Fortunately the revolution is happening next door by people not glued to the latest fad.

The only thing I'm bitter about is that we spent the money on the infrastructure to make prettier Apollo footage. Instead and going forward we can invest in better launch capacity. Or we could invest in revolutionary launch methods that make launch cheap enough to do vacations on the moon. Were it so that taking real cameras there and shooting real, new, better raw footage will be cheaper we'd be one step closer to a multi-planetary species.

And throwing unqualified people at the problem just makes it worse, because they create new problems

But my Indian contract firm assured me they only hire the most experienced candidates. How else am I supposed to get people with 30 years or Ruby experience when the language has only been around 21 years? HR would be furious if I couldn't put in a number they could filter on.

In order to ensure uniqueness (so the same person can't vote multiple times), there has to be a unique id (such as a token, username&password, or even voter id number, ssn, etc.) that is linked to a single human being.

Nonsense. This is easily handled. Most of the 'keep black people from voting' systems used in southern US states already handle this case.

You only permit access to the voting terminal based on an existing ID. You only let the voting terminal process one voting form per session. You don't send the votes immediately and directly, such as batching them or relaying them through a batch system like email. At that point you only need to count the pool of votes. Verify that the number of submissions matches the number of voters expected. With the 'voting booth restrictions' you know that only the correct people voted once but you don't know which vote was for which specific person.

Only have one astronaut? Assign random people on the ground to use the ground copy of the test systems. You should probably be doing this anyway to increase the pool. And to test the system.

Mixing in the pool creates plausible anonymity. Restricting access based on existing ID and verifying account provides plausible uniqueness.

At that point it's up to preventing ID fraud. Short of whole body biometrics that's an unsolvable problem. ID cards can be stolen and faked. Tokens can be stolen. Passwords are just one crowbar to the knees away, Anything that uses a camera can be fooled by a photo or model or man-in-the-middle attacked on any unprotected data path.

Universities - with the capital U and the capital price - are trade schools for professors. The end product, or terminal degree, is the PhD. This is a researcher: someone qualified to apply for grant money from the government for the school or someone able to work for someone doing the same. This is not necessarily someone with practical skills in their field. This is not someone who can talk reasonably about political matters, economics, biology or history at large. At the best, it's someone who can stand up in a room and deliver a speech on a random topic in their field with some preparation. Or grade papers.

Universities and the 4-year college education is touted as 'rounding' and 'filling.' As if forcing art and business majors to take calculus and mechanical engineers to take art history magically grants wider understanding of the world. If you want people to spell better and count faster there are courses for that. If you want people to know their history and biology good luck (it's a political mess in the USA.) Focus on skill and knowledge retention instead of standardized testing is what the best certification courses offer. The test is just an excuse to learn. Far too many University courses are just an excuse to find people to drink with after class.

What's the difference from an audio book series listened to on the drive to work? You have to connect the subjects back to the core curriculum so the students are motivated to remember and use them. That takes a lot of effort at the classroom level. I've never seen it done at the 'not for majors' courses just because of the sheer diversity of the students packed into each room.

As University schooling focuses on producing research papers, writing grant proposals and doing research it is good at producing people skilled at that. And taking tests. Lots and lots of tests. But any other benefit you get is a side product of the easily replicated social environment, not the core curriculum.

And the costs for that social environment have become outrageous.

To quote the handyman's motto: "Every tool is a hammer, except chisels, which are screwdrivers."

You will use in order:

1. 1. What you know
2. 2. What you have
3. 3. What you are told
4. 4. What you ought to use

Which is why coding, scripting and hacking look nothing like what traditionally has been called engineering.

Instead of searching for that unbalanced brace or accidental Greek question mark, in Python you are forced to write English-style white-space delimited psuedocode that executes. This uncomfortable closeness to documentation is probably why Python is so popular with academics. These people tend to know a lot. Generally they are told to to whatever they want. Although they are given no funding to have things to work on. It's no surprise they did a lot of what they ought to do in a many cases. So Python ended up with a community of useful F/OSS batteries-included features.

There's something to be said for both knowing a noun-focused-compiled language like Java or C and a verb-focused language like Python or Haskell. Sometimes you need a hammer and nouns. Sometimes you need a specific-magic screwdriver and verbs. But don't forget you can close paint can lids just as easily with the butt of a chisel as with a proper flat head single sided hammer.

I was watching a number of different family-friendly streamers like the Hermitcraft players.

Then one of them did a stream on a little odd game called "Ark: Survival Evolved" that was running a free edition for Windows users who willing download the Epic store app.

Unfortunately this game as a native Linux version on Steam. Normally I use this barrier to entry to preserve my free time and sanity. And it supports single player offline mode.

Now I'm filling my "spare" time playing the Jurassic Park equivalent of pokemon for lewed adults with anger issues.

Five years old and with enough of a decent (non-PVP) community means you can vegetate to plenty of youtube content about it if you really want.

I really do need to get back to my projects. There are RPMs to build and code to document. But man, that one dino I just found looks so cool in 4k ultrawide on my Linux desktop...

The activists have an agenda, to force these fictional people we call businesses to do something they normally would not, But it's at least one that is not a step above criminal intent to defraud their customers. In my opinion that's an agenda that a rational customer should support.

The definition of 'worked' is different before Net Neutrality, during and after.

That is the point of the telecom lobby buying the chairman of the FCC: change the meaning of words to suit the marketing department's needs.

Yes, 5mbps is 'high speed Internet' in America. Just like it was in 1997. Last century.

IPv6, BGP security, last mile in urban areas and gigabit downlinks are all costs that you can sweep under the rug if you can define 'worked' to mean 'what ever I am willing to give you for your dollars.'

Unless we forget that at in the Twentieth Century, the Bell Telephone company required you to buy an expensive telephone from them to use the network they built through the common access areas on roads, sometimes with taxpayer money. If you let them graze their sheep on your land, you need to make sure they aren't charging you for it on top of the wool. Or they have really pulled that wool over your eyes.

Google built major facility nearby where I was renting for a while and ran 1Gbps fibre to the neighborhoods. It took almost no time, in government speed, for the regional phone company ISP to pay for laws restricting who can use it. They are actually so anti-competitive that if they sold bottled water, American telephone companies would seek to have your house plumbing outlawed because that water doesn't run through their pipes.

Also I wrote a song called Caves of Steel.

https://soundcloud.com/pudgene...

Hey! I was thinking about you but had no way to get in touch. Ping me somehow!

1. Guarantee privacy. This is something that Google et. al have been trying to wean the public away from-- wanting privacy. So many people simply don't think to ask for it any more. You can't do it just for those who ask for that to work. You have to do it for everyone.

2. Provide hard anonymity. One of the things that made email super useful and that we don't have any more is the ability to be reasonably anonymous. Law Enforcement or 'Public Firewall' officials world-wide have clamped down on the ability to use or reach the anonymous remailers we *used* to have. It's not just LEOs who will fight this tooth and claw, but also the 'think of the children!' types.

3. Enforce non-commercial communication at the user's request. Spam filters have gotten pretty good. Most businesses that want to contact you have to jump through hoops to get your okay. However, once you establish that one 'business' relationship, you're fair game. Buy one toilet seat on Amazon, suddenly you're deluged with 'Today's hot toilet seat deals!' and the like. You've got to dig through their website to find the 'unsubscribe me!' button, and a lot of the time it doesn't do what it says. The user needs to be able to turn commercial email on and off with a switch, and every 'rejected' email needs to get bounced back to sender at the mail exchange level.

One new webmail client or novel server configuration is unlikely to solve these problems. I do think that all of them are solvable, though, even though they'll require a great deal of re-architecting email.

Unfortunately, unless you can somehow invent a magic bullet that will keep world governments, law enforcement, and marketing types from ever being able to touch such a service, it won't stay usable long.

Excepting some games like beat saber, video gaming is a passive sport. To keep top performance these teams will require teaching their gamers to learn the value of taking frequent breaks and physical training. Yes, competitive video gamers have to hit the gym, too. It's really hard to hit those Actions-Per-Minute numbers if you keep sliding into a diabetic coma.

eSports has the potential to publicize healthy ways to handling gaming as a hobby or interest. And that applies to desk work in general. American, in particular, has an obesity problem. One study showed a 67% obesity rate (2012 Washington University School of Medicine). Some of this is due to poor food choices. Some of this is due to the sedentary lifestyle of office work.

But I suspect this potential lesson about healthy gaming will be lost in money from sugary drink and soft chair endorsements.

I thought wireless connections were established via a handshake...

With 5G all network connections will be established with a credit card number and a credit check.

We cannot forget the slashdot staple of using a closed Google project as a sign that a market is dying.

The best part of this style of 'journalism' is that no matter what industry you are researching you can probably find something Google tried, found out wasn't as profitable as selling ADs and eyeballs, then shut down.

Sorry I’ll do better next time my bad

I don’t know if she did, and don’t care. She was great and we were sad to see her go.

I left because the company was bought, and the new owners laid off some of its more expensive long-tenured employees, since they were putting the site effectively into maintenance mode, trying to sell if off. They just wanted to keep ThinkGeek and didn’t care to improve the other properties. I was forced out, but I was there a long time, and it was good for me to move on when I did.