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Comment Re:EVs are not a solution beacuse of (Score 1) 224

Not why pick the heavier configuration of one car and compare against the lightest of another?

That sounds like you have an ace to grind and I'm sure you'd be all over it if I said the Tesla was only 5% heavier, which I could do by flipping the choices.

It's somewhere in between. Things is I didn't claim that EVs aren't heavier, but I did complain about people carefully cherry picking in order to exaggerate by how much on the whole.

Comment Re:When will sudo read email? (Score 2) 15

I can't comment on where sudo itself lives on the spectrum from aggressively solid implementation to really-dodgy-smell-around-the-edges; but it seems like its purpose is a fundamentally tricky problem even if its execution were impeccable.

The basic "user is authorized for root; but we'd prefer he be thinking and logged when he uses that authorization" is reasonably cogent use case; but it's more of a reminder than a security barrier. Then you get into the actually-interesting attempts at limited delegation and determine that you'd basically need a different userland for a lot of purposes: aside from the modest number of things(often with setuid already in place) built specifically to carefully do a very particular delegated function on your behalf and provide you with nothing else if they can help it; very little aside from garbage kiosk UIs or web or database-backed applications with user and permission structures mostly orthogonal to those of the underlying OS actually tries to constrain the user's use of the application(within whatever context that user is operating; generally having a privilege escalation is considered bad).

Half of what you run considers having an embedded shell to be a design feature; so including any of that on the sudoers list essentially means being able to chain arbitrary commands from that sudoers entry; and the other half doesn't outright intend to include a shell but would require some really brutal pruning, likely of important features, to prevent being able to chain a couple of interactions into having the ability to run whatever. And that is assuming that sudo itself is working entirely correctly.

Comment Re:Yeah right (Score 1) 21

The race is already underway, and the EU is already way behind.

You can argue that AI is going to the "bottom" (whatever that means) and it doesn't matter, but that seems rather foolish. People betting trillions of their own money obviously see things differently. LLMs are improving dramatically, and there's way more to AI than just LLMs.

By forfeiting yet another technology, the EU will sit and watch as others get there first.

Comment Re:Now Using Linux more than Windows (Score 1) 47

Cheap.

Before my employer sacked their field staff and became a software-only company, we were charging $15000 per seat per year, and enforcing the lease with a week's worth of value of cryptographic dongle.

I dread to think how they're dealing with Recall. Probably have to air gap the machines from the Internet. Because the data being processed and presented is just ever so slightly commercially valuable.

Comment Re:Egg! (Score 1) 12

All the dragons I've seen report of have had unmineralised shells.

Sorry - I take it back - Rowling had titchy dragons who were small enough to have mineralised shells.

Remember - the baby dragon (or ostrich) has got to break out through that shell. It puts a very real biomechanical limit on how thick the shell can be. The upper limit is the (extinct) Elephant Bird of Madagascar, unless someone has come up with a bigger bird. (Moas were in the same size range ; but I had to check.)

Comment Re:Not a plan every nation can emulate. (Score 1) 224

Sure, but for someone that lives and works in Hump Tulips they may make a trip to Fluffy Landings once per month

That seems rather unlikely given it's a 43 hour drive. That's how big America is: it's large enough that the size is basically irrelevant for any kind of daily considerations. No one's making that drive, electric or otherwise.

For a person in China

Cool. But for a country that invented the crime of jaywalking at the behest of big business, you don't really have much of a freedom of movement leg to stand on.

Do you buy your clothes based on the average temperature? No, you buy clothes to match the expected extremes.

Do you carry a thick winter coat in Florida because you might at some point travel to Anchorage? Do you drive a semi tractor so you can move house yourself? No.

The infrastructure is fine in the USA for people that travel by hydrocarbon burners.

It's not though you have some of the most uniquely poor infrastructure in the Western world. That's why your roads are many times now dangerous power mile, never mind per journey than my country. And on the plus side is very prone to traffic jams. Why the plus side you ask? Well I'm most countries roads for safer during COVID when traffic dropped, but in America that was not the case. You've managed to invent a scheme which is somehow expensive, dangerous and inefficient.

Everything else is just cope. EVs are now at 25% of worldwide sales. There is no lack for America to worry about. And other countries are way way ahead per capita (which is what matters) for charging infrastructure.

Comment Re:It's a Comet (Score 1) 67

Yes, that news came through last night.

Well, "coma". "Atmosphere" in only the most temporary of senses. The average particle won't bump into another particle before it has left the vicinity of the comet and half way across the inner solar system.

As of this lunch time, nobody was reporting a visible tail that I'd seen. It's coming fairly straight-on towards us - about 15 off-direct, I estimate, so we'll struggle to see past the head for a while. Come ... August (?), we'll have a bit of an angle to it and see the tail. Unfortunately, it'll be approaching the Sun in the sky by then.

Which is why the window of opportunity for viewing it from the space telescopes is short, and rapidly closing. A bit better for the armada around Mars, but not much better.

Comment Re:Nobody's commenting on the important part. (Score 1) 67

When did the Milky Way get a bar,

I don't recall it being mentioned in the 1970s ; don't remember it mentioned in the 1980s ; was hearing mention of it in the 1990s, and definitely in the 2000s. I'll guess it came out of IR (dust-cloud penetrating) ground and space surveys in the 1980s.

and why haven't we been invited to it yet?

The invite is on the back side of Pluto, and we're meant to take Charon as our entry ticket. I don't think they're interested in primitives who can't even travel 50,000 ly carrying a 1000km dirty snowball.

Comment Re:It needs a better name (Score 1) 67

It was assigned that name (for the telescope/ sensor/ computer system that found it) yesterday afternoon - sorry, the day before yesterday, now ; just after midnight, UT. In the same way that 2I is "Borisov" (the discoverer), and throwing 1I/`Oumuamua into contrast whose discoverers chose to give it a different name. Normal service has been resumed on the "interstellar object naming" front.

The discovery system has a name which is an acronym, and in their hundreds (thousands) of other discoveries they've maintained that capitalisation. But someone is going to try to "correct" them.

Comment Re:Relative Speed (Score 1) 67

Occasionally ephemerides are calculated in geocentric coordinates - Earth-centred ones - but normally that's kept for Earth-orbiting objects and (potential) impactors. (I was reading up on this last night, and the author of one of the tools for converting observations (two angles, a time, and a brightness) commented that he'd only rarely came across a body that needed selenographic coordinates (Moon-centred), and and they'd all been artificial satellites, never a natural body.)

Generally the calculations are done in Solar coordinates - Sun-centred - though that particular software will by default switch to Jovian coordinates if the MOID for Jupiter is low, or the semi-major axis is close to Jupiter's - becasue there are 10s of thousands of "trojan" asteroids co-orbiting with Jupiter, compared to a few dozen for Earth and mars, and a few hundred for Saturn. With that caveat, almost all the calculations are done in Solar coordinates.

(And indeed, having RTF-ephemerides, yes, the quoted figures are in Solar coordinates ; it's a default calculation.)

Comment Re:152000 mph sounds a lot (Score 1) 67

1I/`Oumuamua was at approximately "local rest" with respect to the stars in the Sun's vicinity, and we sort-of "ran into it". (The Sun and the Solar system has a significant velocity to most of the nearby stars ; you need to cast the net wider - a few hundred light years - to get a meaningful average. Corollary : the nearest star to the Solar system has changed in the last few myriads of years (10,000 yrs) and will do again repeatedly in the future.)

3I/ATLAS (named for the telescope/ computer system that detected it, which is an acronym, so capitalized) has about twice the velocity compared to 1I/`Oumuamua, and in a considerably different direction, so has a substantial velocity compared to the "local standard of rest".

That it's coming from (broadly) the direction of the centre of the Galaxy is suggestive, but not terribly informative - we already knew violent things happen in there.

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