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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".

Comment BInary would be so much more efficient (Score 1) 75

IIUC Linus counts minor version numbers using his fingers and toes using unary arithmetic - hence, no minor version numbers above 20. Now if he used binary - easily implemented with fingers (straight = 1, bent = 0), we could have 1024 minor versions before we'd need a major bump. That would save 98% of useless articles like this on slashdot and no doubt many other outlets.

(Note, using binary in this way impacts typing, so perhaps Linus would pull changes less often. This needs to be factored into any savings.
There's probably a research paper on the cost-benefit of 10, 9, ... 1-finger typing lurking here.)

Comment Re:Reinvented a Sterling engine (Score 1) 48

My first thought too, especially as there was a recent report somewhere, I think on the BBC but maybe not, on using Sterling engines for energy recovery.

A few years ago I saw a residential canal boat where the owner had made a small Sterling engine and just parked it on the boat's engine exhaust pipe. All it did was turn a fan, so I guess the aim was to circulate some warm air. Very little power, maybe enough to light an LED.

Comment Re:Now only a decently designed desktop for Linux (Score 1) 83

About once a month I update my laptop's Windows 11, and each time I think it looks absolutely hideous. A desktop plastered with icons that look like they were drawn by a five-year-old, most of which have a stupid arrow at the bottom to tell me they're a shortcut (like why do I care about that). The Windows desktop seems to me a cheap rip-off of KDE :-)

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