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Comment 5 handfuls of veg (Score 1) 130

AFAIR the "five a day" was about fibre, not particularly about vitamins. And the definition of a portion was "a handful", as in a handful of spinach (was that before or after cooking), or a handful of apple. On a par with walking 100,000 steps a day or drinking 8 gallons of water a day. Easy to remember, harder to justify.

Comment It's not the third option (Score 1) 50

OK, it's only a niggle, but:
"They could wait for technology to advance, abandoning hope of reading the ancient texts in their own lifetime. Or they could try to open the scrolls themselves — and risk destroying them.
In recent years, researchers have settled on a third option. Using advanced imaging and artificial intelligence, they're deciphering the scrolls without needing to unroll them at all."

Nope, "advanced imaging and artificial intelligence" is the advanced technology for which they were waiting.

Comment Re:Not really (Score 1) 347

Indeed. We've had heat-seeking missiles, proximity fuses, radar-controlled guns for ages. They all seek and destroy targets without human control. This is just a more advanced version of the same.
In fact, AI-controlled weapons could be more moral, if they were able to make some informed choice of say whether a target was advancing or retreating.

Comment Child's play (Score 1) 110

AIs may be extensively educated and trained to graduate level, but IMHO they have a mental age of about 9. Lots of knowledge, but no experience. Most sensible people would neither give a pre-teen unsupervised access to a gun or a car, nor put them in charge of software development and operation. Kids caught doing wrong have one of two responses - "It wasn't me", or for the smarter ones "I must confess, it was I who chopped down the cherry tree".

Comment So what? (Score 1) 120

Not sure I see the point of ripping off an open-source project. Said project remains, and will be significantly cheaper, probably free, compared to any commercial rip-off thereof. While you might be able to copyright the rip-off, you can't patent it, and the open-source version remains under whatever licence it has, so the rest of us can just raise a finger to the rip-off merchant.

Comment Re:Batteries? (Score 1) 151

The problem is that little word "large". Storing GWh's of electricity isn't just a question of batteries. There are lots of directions being tried (flow batteries, energy storage as heat, and other's I've not bothered to read about); one of the standard ones in use is pumped water (two big sites in the UK), but even they can't hold enough to be considered a "solution".

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