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Comment Re:Bullshit! (Score 1) 32

There's a huge difference:

Our governments, at least in theory, are controlled by us, the people. Ok, the 1% who make the major campaign contributions. But that's still a lot of people.

The number of SpaceX or Amazon shareholders who have enough shares to have a say in these matters is single-digits. So power is concentrated in much fewer hands.

Comment Re:Of course it does (Score 1) 32

Given dynamic battlefield, I don't think that is as easily done as you think, and the moment SpaceX makes a mistake and knocks out a Ukrainian drone on a mission, they'll be guilty for everything. There's not really a winning position for them here.

Russia isn't hiding that it targets civilian infrastructure. They still wage war the way everyone did it in 1939-1945. US and UK bombers essentially just opened the doors above German cities and let the unguided bombs fall wherever. We're not doing that anymore because most of the world learned that despite all this, they didn't exactly surrender. So it's a huge waste of resources. Russia, on the other hand, still thinks that Ukrainians will agree to becoming Russians due to a few cold and dark winters.

Comment Re:Color me curious.... (Score 1) 36

What possible legal use does a "mixing service" provide?

Hiding money flow from public view. It is trivial to automatically trace all transfers on the blockchain. And the same way I don't post my banking history to the Internet, I have a reasonable need to not have all of my Bitcoin transactions fully transparent to everyone in the world.

So tl;dr: The legal use is: Protect my privacy.

That doesn't mean I am doing anything illegal. I might be doing something perfectly legal but socially controversial - maybe I make campaign contributions to the communist party, or consume an unhealthy amount of furry porn. It might also be legal but I have a need to hide my finances from someone specific - maybe an abusive spouse, maybe overly controlling parent, maybe a stalker.

For the moment, Bitcoin is still a bit of a niche thing, but the more it moves into mainstream, the more people will have the interest and the capabilities to use Bitcoin to breach people's privacy when they use Bitcoins to pay for something.

Comment Re:Kind of cool, but... (Score 2) 35

When folded, the Z-flip is also about twice as thick as a non-folding Galaxy phone, but it's actually more comfortable in a front pants pocket if you climb stairs often enough.

I've experimented with this. It's because the tradeoff lets the folded phone slide around more freely (compared with a larger phone), and that's the key to comfort.

By the same argument, the Z-fold design combines the worst of both the regular, non-folding phones (namely their height is comparable to a pants pocket) and the extra thickness of the Z-flip.

Comment Re:Just give it time (Score 1) 33

And if that doesn't work, we'll appeal to an even higher authority.

It's already in the works.

The Pope is technically infallible.

He has a direct wifi connection to the Invisible One In The Sky.

So when he gets put to the question, it will take a day, two tops, and he'll relay the Big Boy's exact wishes to the old girls.

Two and a half, if saturday's barbecue party in the Vatican's garden is particularly bangin'

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 42

You cannot bypass solving the Navier-Stokes equations with transformers. You will, of course, get some predicted flows with a black box model, and you can, if you choose, claim that prediction accuracy is close enough for 85% of the random samples from your test data, but that will not get you new propulsion physics.

There's a serious danger today that a lot of the science which relies on simulated outcomes is subtly wrong in a way that cannot be rejected outright in peer review, but will take many years to discover later.

Comment I'll tell you what will happen (Score 2) 223

What always happens when you try to block kids from doing anything: they find a way to do it anyway.

We older folks too were "blocked" from doing stuff as kids, pre- and post-internet, and we too did it anyway. And it actually made us smarter, as we had to devise ways around the obstacle.

Kids are smart. This will just make them smarter.

Comment p-value hacking (Score 1) 63

Sometimes, social scientists who are under pressure to publish, anything, no matter what, to increase their publication count, will propose stupid experiments, that don't cost much to do, do not measure any intrinsic behaviour of humanity, and can be modified trivially to generate alternative papers. The trick is to brainstorm and try out a lot of these, until the p-value finally fits.

Comment Re:Wrong question. (Score 1) 189

Investment is a tricky one.

I'd say that learning how to learn is probably the single-most valuable part of any degree, and anything that has any business calling itself a degree will make this a key aspect. And that, alone, makes a degree a good investment, as most people simply don't know how. They don't know where to look, how to look, how to tell what's useful, how to connect disparate research into something that could be used in a specific application, etc.

The actual specifics tend to be less important, as degree courses are well-behind the cutting edge and are necessarily grossly simplified because it's still really only crude foundational knowledge at this point. Students at undergraduate level simply don't know enough to know the truly interesting stuff.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because an undergraduate 4-year degree is aimed at producing thinkers. Those who want to do just the truly depressingly stupid stuff can get away with the 2 year courses. You do 4 years if you are actually serious about understanding. And, in all honesty, very few companies want entry-level who are competent at the craft, they want people who are fast and mindless. Nobody puts in four years of network theory or (Valhalla forbid) statistics for the purpose of being mindless. Not unless the stats destroyed their brain - which, to be honest, does happen.

Humanities does not make things easier. There would be a LOT of benefit in technical documentation to be written by folk who had some sort of command of the language they were using. Half the time, I'd accept stuff written by people who are merely passing acquaintances of the language. Vague awareness of there being a language would sometimes be an improvement. But that requires that people take a 2x4 to the usual cultural bias that you cannot be good at STEM and arts at the same time. (It's a particularly odd cultural bias, too, given how much Leonardo is held in high esteem and how neoclassical universities are either top or near-top in every country.)

So, yes, I'll agree a lot of degrees are useless for gaining employment and a lot of degrees for actually doing the work, but the overlap between these two is vague at times.

Comment Re:Directly monitored switches? (Score 1) 54

There is a possibility of a short-circuit causing an engine shutdown. Apparently, there is a known fault whereby a short can result in the FADEC "fail-safing" to engine shutdown, and this is one of the competing theories as the wiring apparently runs near a number of points in the aircraft with water (which is a really odd design choice).

Now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that (a) the wiring actually runs there (the wiring block diagrams are easy to find, but block diagrams don't show actual wiring paths), (b) that there is anything to indicate that water could reach such wiring in a way that could cause a short, or (c) that it actually did so. I don't have that kind of information.

All I can tell you, at this point, is that aviation experts are saying that a short at such a location would cause an engine shutdown and that Boeing was aware of this risk.

I will leave it to the experts to debate why they're using electrical signalling (it's slower than fibre, heavier than fibre, can corrode, and can short) and whether the FADEC fail-safes are all that safe or just plain stupid. For a start, they get paid to shout at each other, and they actually know what specifics to shout at each other about.

But, if the claims are remotely accurate, then there were a number of well-known flaws in the design and I'm sure Boeing will just love to answer questions on why these weren't addressed. The problem being, of course, is that none of us know which of said claims are indeed remotely accurate, and that makes it easy for air crash investigators to go easy on manufacturers.

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