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Comment Re:ok? (Score 1) 46

So why does that mean that the licenses need to be uploaded into a central database? It's not enough for the clerk to just LOOK at the license?

Hertz was founded in 1918. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they didn't have central databases of driver license images back in 1918, and yet somehow Hertz seemed to operate just fine. I'd go so far as to say Hertz was operating in the 21st century without a third party central database of driver licenses.

From my experience over the decades, it wasn't enough for them to just look. They had to take your license, hold it up near their face and squint at it, then set it at the top of the keyboard of their mainframe terminal and peck in a few characters. Then they had to pick it up again, squint and peck some more, then repeat this cycle for at least a couple of minutes.

This was of course followed by scrawling a dozen circles on the reams of fine print for you to put your initials in, topped off by a long argument about declining the collision damage waiver. Finally, after several more minutes of bureaucracy, they handed you the keys to your Dodge Stratus.

Comment Re:I know its not an original idea (Score 2) 25

The fact that it makes a big cloud around a galaxy or cluster rather than collapsing puts a lot of constraints on what it can do.

For more info, you'll have to go to someone who knows more about it than what I've read on science-news websites.

Dark energy is a real puzzle. As I understand it, it's too weak by a factor of 10^30 or 10^60 in comparison from what we should expect the known vacuum energy would cause. You see this mentioned very occasionally, but most treatments of DE that a layman runs across just ignore it in favor of wringing their hands over some issue that is trivial in comparison.

Comment Re:I know its not an original idea (Score 1) 25

Some boffin cam up with that idea, but they rule it out because DM apparently doesn't interact with itself (very much) other than by gravity, so it can't clump up tight like a star or a planet or a living thing. (Something to do with shedding energy, IIRC.)

But it's a cool idea. If I were a novelist I'd run with it.

Comment Lines of code (Score 3, Insightful) 126

There have been times in the past where goofing around on my own projects or experiments, I've cranked out many hundreds of lines of code in a day. It's possible that I've exceeded 1000 lines in one day. It usually computed the task at hand at least once, but it wasn't commented, documented, code reviewed, fitted with unit tests, run through any kind of QA process, etc.

On the other hand, I would estimate that when working for a salary and writing code that ran on mission-critical systems, over the course of a project I probably averaged about 10 lines per day. Time spent actually writing the code was dwarfed by time spent negotiating architecture tradeoffs in meetings before even starting, testing the code, documenting it, writing test procedures, debugging issues generated by the test engineers, going through the revision and deployment workflow, reviewing other peoples' code, etc.

Which kind of code is being cranked out from a couple of chatbot prompts? My bet is that it is mostly like the first case I described, and it also probably works at least once.

Comment Re:It's simple (Score 1) 72

Regarding EVs, they have the same electronics ICE vehicles do, plus a battery.

The fire risk is hence greater with EVs. Any talk about the "vast majority" of recalls being ICE vehicles should instead calculate the ratio of recalls per category

Electronics are not necessarily required. You're discounting the many recalls for ICE vehicles that resulted from leaked fuel or other flammable liquids combined with hot exhaust manifolds or other ignition sources.

Comment Re:As expected (Score 4, Informative) 33

Alcohol is federally regulated. It is also subject to state and local regulation.

While your general argument has merit, alcohol is a bad example because states' control over that particular substance is explicitly granted in the constitutional amendment that repealed prohibition.

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