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Comment Re:Never let perfect be the enemy of good (Score 1) 153

I suppose it depends on whether you want a comprehensive solution.

Switching to electric without also providing external ventilation doesn't solve the problem. Adding external ventilation to a gas range does, and still allows switching to electric in the future for even further gains.

In this sense "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" doesn't tell you which of the two imperfect solutions is better -- but I'm making the claim that the proper ordering from best to worst is electric + ventilation > gas + ventilation > electric + !ventilation > gas + !ventilation.

Comment Re:For those getting pitchforks ready (Score 2) 153

What I'm saying is that a minimal safe setup anyways requires an externally-ventilated hood regardless of the cooking fuel type.

Given that this is not mandated by building codes as it is, it's silly to mandate electric over gas. Neither of them are safe without external ventilation.

Comment Not sure if this affects local fees, but maybe (Score 1) 15

At least around where I live, if a cable provider wants to offer service in a given town, they negotiate a deal with that town where the town gets a little bit of money per cable customer. That money funds things like community-access TV stations, staff and gear, studios at high schools, and so on, so you can watch the local sportsball team, or whatever boring town government meeting, and so on and so forth.

Those community-based things have taken a huge funding hit due to cord-cutting, so they (and towns) have been curious about whether something similar might be worked out for high-speed broadband on a per-customer basis. The local community-access station here has also started looking for sponsorships from local businesses and such, to make up the gap in funding.

Comment Re:HBO canceling will get aggressive (Score 3, Funny) 25

Im not a Max user, but I remember Netflix having account tiers for different amounts of streams at once or whatever.

After that, it seems simple, just use a FIFO. If youre allowed N streams, have N streams going, and another person logs in with the same credentials and starts a stream? You just disconnect whoevers been on the longest. Maybe pop up a little message saying "your account allows N streams; a new stream was started from [IP, Geolocation, sub-account profile, whatever] so youve been logged out." If the person who got booted is smart enough to log right back in, whoever connected right after them gets booted. And so on.

The problem would resolve itself very quickly, although it would temporarily result in a huge increase in the sentence "Police said the victim and their attacker were known to each other."

Follow me for more tips on family harmony.

Comment Tax Credit expires at the end of August (Score 1) 103

The $7500 tax credit implies a discount in the ballpark of 15% on a vehicle but expires at the end of the month. I'd expect that this is bringing forward a lot of sales that would happen for the rest of the year to take advantage before it goes away.

To be a real sense of the trend of sales, you'd have to average the before-tax-expiration and after-tax-expiration months to see what's up. Otherwise you're just measuring noise.

Comment Make a US-based Foxconn (Score 1) 233

If Palmer really wants to make a difference, rather than trying to copy an American company's product that is currently manufactured overseas for price reasons, he should try to copy the overseas manufacturing processes, capability, etc. I'm pretty certain CNC lathes, laser cutters, EUV lithography equipment, et cetera are all available in the US for anyone willing to spend the money. US-based flexible contract manufacturing capability, immune to tariffs and ITAR, could definitely be a thing.

Comment Re:It's About Time.... (Score 2) 118

UNESCO stands for the "United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization"
and was founded after WW2 to promote peace through international cooperation in education, science, and culture.
UNESCO sites include Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty.

Yes, this. UNESCO doesn't "do" science, it promotes international cooperation in science. About twenty years ago, when George W. Bush was President, I went to UNESCO headquarters in Paris for the "Third Global Conference on Oceans, Coasts and Islands," convened by something called the "Global Ocean Forum," led by the late Dr. Biliana Cicin-Sain. At that point in time, the Forum was hosted at the Gerard J. Mangone Center for Marine Policy at the University of Delaware.

That was an age when the US saw value in having a leadership role in global policy on things involving Education, Science and Culture, the ESC in UNESCO.

We now have a President and administration that sees Education, Science and Culture as things to be attacked. Times have changed.

Comment Re:You can buy a modern laptop for $299.00 (Score 1) 92

I've bought a "modern laptop" for $299, for my mother-in-law who didn't use computers until she was about 60.
An "HP Stream 14" or some such. CPU was something Celeron-like, 4GB RAM, Windows in "S mode" (unlocked to run the real thing easily enough)
Took far longer to do anything than the C64 my parents got back in the 1980s.

Comment Re:Is SJVN getting forgetful? (Score 1) 71

Universities here are starting to tell CS and STEM students "you are on your own" when they get Macs. Because, as it turns out, a lot of stuff is more difficult on a Mac. For example, there are massive issues to get VMs runnign reliably for the students. Yes, I had one student with a Mac in my IT security class that just used GCC and GDB for the buffer overflow analysis on the Mac commandline and while the results were a bit different, they were fine and we discussed the differences. But 4 others did not manage. And that is a serious problem. Apple is doing way too much "different for the sake of being different" and that just does not cut it in quite a few scenarios.

I'm not a CS type, but I work in STEM, and having tried numerous times to bring obscure scientific stuff over from Unix or Linux and get it to build on MacOS, I absolutely agree with what you just said above. That sort of stuff is better left to experienced developers who focus on MacOS. I do use Linux, Windows and MacOS every workday, but I don't use Windows on weekends. I'd pick a Mac laptop 10 times out of 10 for general use, presuming I had access to networked Linux systems.

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