Comment The best argument against anthropomorphic global w (Score 0) 30
Is the arguments for it 10-15 years ago. Those tidings of doom which never came to pass. It is best that these cannot be found. Those truths are⦠inconvenient.
Comment climate "science"? (Score 0, Troll) 219
Why is it that every time there's serious scrutiny we find out that these computer models we're using to determine public policy are less sophisticated than an Insane Clown Posse song. You know those loser rednecks who rap?
"****ing clouds, HOW DO THEY WORK?!"
The problem is that one group is two idiots in paint. The other group are climate scientists. The old model is wrong. The new model is wrong.
I'm starting to agree with Greta. These people are ruining my childhood too.
Comment Epomaker (Score 2) 60
I'm typing this on an Epomaker EP84 at the same pricepoint.
Either subbie doesn't know anything about mechanical keyboard prices, subbie works for Logitech, or this is an advertisement.
Comment Isnâ(TM)t COVID enough? (Score 4, Funny) 12
Quit tempting weird Egyptian curses. I have seen the Mummy, and this whole thing is a hard no in 2021. Letâ(TM)s wait until we have fewer civilization ending crises to risk raising an army of the undead.
Fifty Percent of Facebook Messenger's Total Voice Traffic Comes from Cambodia. Here's Why (restofworld.org) 29
In 2018, the team at Facebook had a puzzle on their hands. Cambodian users accounted for nearly 50% of all global traffic for Messenger's voice function, but no one at the company knew why, according to documents released by whistleblower Frances Haugen. From a report: One employee suggested running a survey, according to internal documents viewed by Rest of World. Did it have to do with low literacy levels? they wondered. In 2020, a Facebook study attempted to ask users in countries with high audio use, but was only able to find a single Cambodian respondent, the same documents showed. The mystery, it seemed, stayed unsolved. The answer, surprisingly, has less to do with Facebook, and more to do with the complexity of the Khmer language, and the way users adapt for a technology that was never designed with them in mind. In Cambodia, everyone from tuk-tuk drivers to Prime Minister Hun Sen prefers to send voice notes instead of messages. Facebook's study revealed that it wasn't just Cambodians who favor voice messages -- though nowhere else was it more popular. In the study, which included 30 users from the Dominican Republic, Senegal, Benin, Ivory Coast, and that single Cambodian, 87% of respondents said that they used voice tools to send notes in a different language from the one set on their apps. This was true on WhatsApp -- the most popular platform among the survey respondents -- along with Messenger and Telegram.
One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.
One of the most common reasons? Typing was just too hard. In Cambodia's case, there has never been an easy way to type in Khmer. While Khmer Unicode was standardized fairly early, between 2006 and 2008, the keyboard itself lagged behind. The developers of the first Khmer computer keyboard had to accommodate the language's 74 characters, the most of any script in the world. It was a daunting task. Javier Sola, a Spanish-born, Phnom Penh-based computer scientist, was part of the team working on the initial KhmerOS project in 2005. "There are many, many more symbols in Khmer than in [the] Latin script," Sola, now executive director of Cambodian NGO the Open Institute, told Rest of World. On a Latin keyboard, a user could see all of the alphabet at once, making typing intuitive. But in Khmer, each key hosted two different characters, which required flipping repeatedly between two keyboard layers. Not only that, but limited fonts meant that some messages failed to appear if the recipient's computer lacked the same font as the sender's. Still, users made it work. Facebook became popular in Cambodia around 2009, just at the same time as cheap smartphones and internet access, which meant that its usage exploded. Today, it's still the country's most popular overall platform. But on a small smartphone screen, that same typing system became nearly impossible.
Comment Which meta? (Score 1) 58
Which Meta? Meta Company, or the META that Zuckerberg stole?
Comment Is Waymo for real? (Score 1) 185
There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?
Comment Remote driver != "no driver" (Score 1) 185
The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.
Comment Came from Amateur Observers first. (Score 3, Insightful) 31
I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...
Comment Re: Radioactive soil (Score 4, Informative) 180
Comment Re:Radioactive soil (Score 2, Informative) 180
It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.
Comment Re:Radiation? (Score 2) 71
While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.
Comment Re:Dystopian Nightmare (Score 1) 87
We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!
:-)
I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.
Comment Re:Dystopian Nightmare (Score 5, Insightful) 87
Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.
Comment Re:Web Pages Use Same Imaging Model (Score 1) 227
Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".
