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Comment Brexit will be a long-term good (Score 0) 170

Instead of the UK's racism continuing to simmer, they got a good lesson in the fact that they're not really better than anyone else and they made a damn stupid decision.

When they rejoin (which long term seems like a pretty reasonable assumption), they're going to have to rejoin as equal partners which means not with the special rights they had last time. Which is good for the EU (including, ultimately, a rejoined UK).

Without Brexit the UK would have continued in its privileged position which is objectively unfair and probably would have helped some unfortunate attitudes thrive longer.

Comment Re:Silly. (Score 2) 73

Even if battery energy density started getting close to that of liquid hydrocarbons, and thats a looong way off still, youd still need more batteries than you would fuel because batteries dont get lighter as they discharge like burned fuel does, rocket equation stuff. A 747 carries ~150k kilograms of fuel, if that didnt burn off thats an extra 37k kg the first quarter of the flight, an extra 75k kg the first half of the flight and so on...

Battery planes may never make widespread sense, if we ever start generating enough carbon free energy cheaply enough and even if all ground transport goes battery electric or whatever, at some point it might still be worth it to just make carbon neutral jet fuel with air fuel synthesis. That seems closer on the horizon than the battery tech needed for large planes to be feasible, hard to beat jet turbines for that application.

Comment Consider this: (Score 1) 48

What is more likely, that we're seeing a mix of domestic and foreign surveillance tech, rare weather phenomena, camera artifacts, and outright fakes... or that aliens invested the incredible amounts of time and resources to travel tens of light years to mutilate cows, rectally probe repressed homosexual hicks, and buzz secret facilities and then never follow up with an open visit?

Comment Re: Global UBI? (Score 1) 29

Everyone born today is in debt for hundreds of thousands of dollars because the people before them would t balance a budget and the government decided to print print print. They either work and pay that money off or they die in complete poverty. Thatâ(TM)s slavery. Itâ(TM)s debtors prison minus the walls holding them in. We are all cattle in this economy and they will either milk us or slaughter us at their whim. If you believe otherwise I feel sorry for you. Itâ(TM)s the economic version of the Matrix. Wake up

Comment Re:Global UBI? (Score 1) 29

To be fair the government believes this too. Why else would they just print money whenever the fuck they feel like it? That of course begs the question, why do I pay taxes if they just print money whenever the fuck they want to? It's all completely fake and made to enslave people. This hasn't been a capitalist country in decades, not since leaving the gold standard.

Comment Conflicting issues (Score 2) 155

A) We don't want teens getting pregnant as a general rule.

B) We don't want adults to be socially inept.

Smartphones are not an amusing solution to A when they develop into a problem with B. Beyond that, the kids aren't as happy as they used to be either.

So teen fertility rates are perhaps a useful proxy for socialization at the moment, but we need to work to divorce the two things so that "happy, social teens" aren't "at risk of pregnancy teens".

Comment Re:Windows is crumbling (Score 1) 35

OSX is based on FreeBSD. They did not do a reimplementation, they just added the easy parts. And basing things on FreeBSD is also the thing that allows Apple to switch CPU architecture. Because they get that almost for free. And that is why they could do it so fast. Sure, theoretically MS could do the same, but they are not organizationally capable of even thinking that they may have screwed up enough to make that step the only way out.

Also refer to countless large-scale software projects that have failed or are in a bad state but cannot be fixed.

Why are you arguing? Your post just proved my whole point. Also it's not based on FreeBSD, it utilized the FreeBSD user space while doing their own kernel, Darwin. You keep stating "can't be fixed" as if it's some fact, while simultaneously acknowledging others have, in fact, fixed these issues in the past. Let it go.

Comment Re:Windows is crumbling (Score 1) 35

I disagree. Apple went from OS9 to OSX, a completely new codebase by creating new frameworks for devs and a translation layer for old apps (Remember Cocoa, Rosetta, Carbon?). They then phased the old out while providing documentation and tools for devs to move. It's perfectly doable with very clear cases of it being done. Microsoft simply refuses to do it.

Apple's even done this while switching from PPC to Intel and then to ARM. There is no technological barrier here, it's all organizational and cultural at MS.

Comment Re:Windows is crumbling (Score 1) 35

It can be fixed, they just won't do it. Microsoft has fought internally over various technologies for decades, between win32 and .Net and all the shit in-between. They never standardized like Apple did which left them entrenched in technical debt. They could, today, start a standardization process, build out a new and modern tech stack, advise their devs to migrate to that, then set a date with the cut off. Apple's success at this is a model for anyone to follow. They just won't due to internal fighting.

Everyone else sheds the old stuff, even Linux drops code from time to time. Microsoft does this to themselves.

Comment GPS Interference (Score 4, Interesting) 155

First, GPS signals are relatively weak. Second, they come from 'up' - if you really want to avoid terrestrial jamming, then a bit of shielding that only exposes your receiver to the sky will help a lot.

The solution for creating interference is relaying legitimate signals from space, if you can't crack the encryption. By messing with timing carefully, you can severely degrade the position accuracy or cause it to drift to where you want it.

I find it interesting that GPS, Galileo and BeiDou share 2/3 of their base frequencies, but GLONASS doesn't - its overlap is additional frequencies. I'm not a comms guy, but I do wonder if that means Russia can interfere with GPS, Galileo and BeiDou simultaneously without affecting their own gear significantly.

It means less and less when it comes to military use though, since the military expects jamming and spoofing and has multiple methods of position fixing of various degrees of accuracy.

Comment Re:Destroy Them (Score 1) 67

When I was implementing ALPR almost 2 decades ago, the projects were funded by insurance companies as long as the ALPR scans were linked to a database of expired insurance.

The cops couldn't keep up with the hits the system generated.

While I am not happy with the inevitable authoritarian creep of the system, I'm fine with my role in what happened to every uninsured driver who was pulled over.

Good came out of them... just not net good.

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