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Comment Re:Sailing the high seas (Score 1) 52

Is there anything worth pirating? I've rediscovered an old hobby... reading. I'm down to just Prime now because it has the most older British detective shows and period dramas (a bit of a favorite with my partner right now). If it was left to me, I'd simply cancel it all. My last Disney+ subscription went unused for a couple of months, save for my daughter and I watching watching Alien Romulus (what a sad waste that was).

So far as I'm concerned they can raise it to a million dollars a month.

Comment Re:No 1st amendment (Score 1) 153

This is no different than requiring the manufacturer to include a warning about the stove tipping over if there is no anti-tipping bracket installed. Consumers are being warned of the issue.

If they're going to whine about this, might as well whine about every other warning they are required to provide with their product.

Ah, my favorite among such is the warning from a hair drier I bought some years ago. It said: "do not use while sleeping."

Comment Re:Legal/illegal bikes (Score 2) 146

Don't see too many cars on walking paths and sidewalks. The number of e-bikes on walking paths and sidewalks has skyrocketed. It's almost as if someone decided being a pedestrian is a sinful activity, and that every walkway must now be infested with morons on wheels.

Then let me get started on mobility scooters.

Comment Re:Legal/illegal bikes (Score 5, Insightful) 146

I'd just like them banned from walking paths. At least once a day I'm getting some crazy asshole ringing his bell as he comes flying up behind me. I'm not a fan of any kind of bike on walking paths, but at least the people on regular bikes have more control. The worst are probably older riders who often seem like they're barely in control. And the three wheeled ones take up outrageous amounts of space on smaller paths, regularly forcing other users on some of the narrower paths I frequent to get to the side of the road.

It's hard to imagine, short of motor vehicles, anything more hazardous to a pedestrian than some stupid prick on an e-bike.

Comment Re:Meanwhile... (Score 4, Informative) 40

If it is already paid for, why would it need further funding?

I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or not, so I'll err on the side of naivete. The construction and operational validation has been paid for, which is the largest part of the cost. The ongoing costs are things like salaries, materials and supplies for subsequent operation, maintenance, and improvements, which are far smaller.

There is no scientist I have ever met who thought LIGO was, in the end, a poor choice of investment of national research funds. There were plenty prior to its stunning first detection (myself included) who thought they were chasing ghosts, but all of those doubters have been converted. The important thing to understand is that LIGO's contributions weren't just detection of a black hole merger (in itself, a hugely important event because it demonstrated the hypothesized existence of gravitational waves), but the establishment of a new field of astronomy based on gravitation, an entirely new means to observe the universe that provides information previously completely unobtainable. Our eyes have been opened where we were previously blind, and the ongoing results are, and continue to be, astounding.

There's a nice fact sheet summary at: https://www.ligo.caltech.edu/s...

Comment Re:I'm surprised! (Score 3, Interesting) 60

I've been using it to write grant applications, and I share your opinion. It frequently makes mistakes (and 5 is worse in many ways than 4o). While it can certainly be used to create a rough draft of a document, the result is similar to what you would expect from a junior associate, with the same kinds of mistakes that create an, "OMG, no," response in the reader when it starts to make things up.

There was a lot of talk about how rapidly it would accelerate in performance. That progress seems to have stalled this year. I have a hard time thinking that we've started to see the ultimate asymptote of performance, but it seems like we've hit a region where the easy, early gains have all been made.

Comment Re:Locked in (Score 5, Insightful) 80

A pretty significant proportion of the world's IT infrastructure runs on single source products; from Microsoft to Broadcom to Oracle. Believe me, I'm trying to move our office over to open source where I can, but it's no mean feat.

The real lesson, unless the courts start holding licensors accountable, is that a perpetual license may actually be meaningless, no matter what you paid for it.

Comment Re:Have yourself the economy you voted for (Score 2) 201

Too bad. Your shitty political system, with its impotent checks and balances and imperial powers handed over the to the President, made this possible. Your all frogs boiling in the Framers' failed experiment.

I have zero sympathy at this point. Supposedly the Framers put in a really top tier solution to tyranny, but instead it's mainly being used to take out schoolchildren. Everything about your country has become repulsive and self-destructive. I just hope my country can hang on.

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