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Comment profits vs. revenues (Score 1) 31

Is it just me or does it seem like the article consistently used the word "profit" when they mean "revenue"? They're confusing the whole subject by talking about how record profits are ruined by expenses, but profit is what you get after you take expenses out of revenue. Bad AI article, or an author who doesn't really understand how P&L works?

Comment plus 1 for upgradable RAM (Score 2) 53

Hopefully this will add incentive for laptop manufacturers to shift back away from soldered-on RAM and offer at least one memory upgrade socket. That way they can ship whatever is affordable now, and market permitting a user can upgrade later on if/when the memory prices are more reasonable.

If all they continue to offer is non-upgradable configurations, people are going to pass on buying new laptops and just keep using older upgradable hardware they already have or can buy refurbished. I already kind of do this myself, but when I do splurge on a new laptop I always get one with upgradable components like main storage and RAM. I'm already grumpy that almost nobody makes laptops with upgradable wifi adapters anymore, but there are still some that have easily upgraded SSDs and RAM. Those are the ones that get my money and I think they'll be more attractive to more people now.

Comment Re:Absolutely (Score 1) 46

Seen Youtube lately? I just watched a video on how to make nitroglycerin. Stuff like this has been available for over a decade.

Back in the days that home solar systems still mostly used lead-acid batteries - which in some cases of degradation could be repaired, at least partially, if you had some good strong and reasonably pure sulfuric acid - I viewed a YouTube video on how to make it. (From epsom salts by electrolysis using a flowerpot and some carbon rods from old large dry cells).

For months afterward YouTube "suggested" I'd be interested in videos from a bunch of Islamic religious leaders . (This while people were wondering how Islamic Terrorists were using the Internet to recruit among high-school out-group nerds.)

Software - AI and otherwise - often creates unintended consequences. B-)

Comment Re:Emails showing leak intentionally discredited . (Score 2) 213

We had a lab known to be unsafe. A lab known to be performing gain of function on the specific type of virus that emerged in public. We have a lab in close proximity to the market where the outbreak was traced back to.

We also had rumors that low-paid lab techs supplemented their income by selling test animals they'd been ordered to destroy to the nearby wet market.

Comment Just switch it to airplane mode. (Score 1) 87

There's also the "Detox" exercise of leaving your phone at home. and only taking it with you when it's absolutely necessary for example to work if you have to use a third factor authentication application to get into your computer)

Just switch on "airplane mode". No incoming calls, message notifications, or app push crud. (If you've got any apps, other than alarm/calendar notices for your schedule reminders which YOU set up, that poke brain-derailng messages at you, disable (or delete) them.)

Then get into the habit of not going to it for anything non-essential while in this mode.

Now you can use it for a key, or wallet, or whatever, if you must, without it constantly killing your attention span with interruptions. Yet you can always turn it back on to make a call, or in the timeslot you reserved for handling this trivia.

No incoming calls, though. (What a relief: No phone spammers!)

Comment Re:This doesn't explain (Score 1) 227

There is one scientist later on in the first part who does say they couldn't rule out someone who may have been infected at the lab visiting the market and starting the ball rolling, but they also say there is no evidence to back this up. Considering the number of people who ride that line each day, if there was a sick person from the lab spreading their infection, there should have been far more people getting sick all over the place. That didn't happen. The earliest known infections were all clustered around the market.

It doesn't have to have been an infected human. An infected experimental animal - or a pest animal that had come into contact with lab animals or materials - could have been an initial vector.

For some time stories have circulated that low-paid lab techies at the Wuhan lab had been known to supplement their income by taking experimental animals they had been ordered to kill and dispose of safely and instead sell them at the wet market.

Comment Re:Fluid dynamics (Score 1) 63

Traffic is horribly non linear.

So is fluid dynamics.

It's also very complicated and counter-intuitive, to the point that even experts had to resort to models in wind tunnels and scaling laws, until supercomputers and their algorithms could model it down to submicroscopic levels and handle the details of the positive-feedback transitions.

Comment Fluid dynamics (Score 1) 63

By leaving room between their car and the one ahead of them, drivers can absorb a wave of braking in dense traffic conditions that would otherwise be amplified into a full-blown "phantom" traffic jam with no obvious cause. "Just keeping away," he says, can help traffic flow smoothly.

Some driving techniques make traffic behave like fluids: Compressible gasses (Car ahead of you slows - you slow some but progressively more as you get closer, Car beside you jogs left two feet, you jog one foot. etc.) Liquids (cars close up and hold constant distance) Crystals (at a traffic light or full stop, cars close up into a tight ordered array.) Condensation (similar near-constant spacing but not so ordered and flows (more easily), Chrystallization, Melting, Sublimation, Evaporation (when the obstruction clears and the first cars can speed up, then later ones, ...), laminar (smooth) flow, turbulent flow, shock waves, ...

Spacing out lets you behave more like a gas - or the first of the liquid behind a bubble - rather than a liquid or solid. When a sudden speed reduction throws a shock wave at you at several times the traffic speed, you can let the gas compress or the cavitation bubble shrink, diffusing the shock wave into an acoustic wave and avoding a collision with the car ahead. It also lets you even out the flow, remaining laminar rather than starting an eddy and going turbulent.

Comment Re:Cooperative vs competitive (Score 1) 63

Maybe some of these strategies can be expressed as situational behaviors for driving that are ... indicated as desirable by easily observable local conditions ...

If that works out, then we can look into what additional driving tactics could be enabled by an infrastructure that brings in information that is NOT available by local observation, presenting it to the driver in a way that does not cause more problems by distraction that it solves. That would let drivers get some of the advantages of self-driving car network communication, too.

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