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Comment Re:bro (Score 1) 62

It's the usual issues. If you acknowledge that homeless people are actual people who have problems which can be partially or fully solved, then you need to work on the problems.

You seemed to be confused. The goal is not to solve the problems of the homeless. The goal is to solve the problems caused by the homeless.

Comment Omny is shit (Score 1) 62

You know what Metrocard could do that Omny can't? Charge my commuter benefit Visa card -- you know, the one that lets you use pre-tax money to pay for the commute? I could buy Metrocard with it. Omny won't accept it. Of course when I call them they refer me to the issuer, who refers me back to Omny. Since it worked with Metrocard and it works with other transit systems, I'm pretty sure the problem is with Omny, but they don't give a shit.

Comment License? What License (Score 1) 62

Officer, I was driving 50mph over the speed limit with my lights off at night in a stolen car with no plates, the wrong way down an Interstate highway, and as you can see by the empty bottles around me, my blood alcohol level is higher than your IQ. Why would you expect me to have a license?

Comment Re:This is a _very_ big deal! (Score 4, Informative) 63

It appears most of the high-precision users either detected or were informed that the NIST time was no longer healthy. NTP was affected, a bit more disturbing is that some other high precision users (but not GPS) were affected:

On Dec 21, 2025, at 2:30 PM, âjeff.sâ¦@nist.govâ(TM) via Internet-time-service Internet-time-service@list.nist.gov wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Utility power was recently restored to the NIST Boulder campus. Assessment and repair activity is in progress, but I want to give a brief status update regarding Internet Time Services on the NIST Boulder campus. As usual, status notes per-server will be manually updated here:

https://tf.nist.gov/tf-cgi/ser...

Clocks and time transfer services operated from the NIST WWV/Ft. Collins and Gaithersburg, MD campuses are independent and were unaffected throughout.

Soon after the last notice, NIST facilities staff stationed on-site started a diesel generator held in reserve and activated a power transfer switch positioned to supply âoesecond backupâ power to the affected laboratory. The period without ac power (due to automatic âoefirst backupâ generator failure after 2 days of continuous operation) was about 2 hours. However, large battery banks kept all clocks and most measurement and distribution chains powered throughout. Additional quick action by NIST facility staff secured temperature control for the most sensitive clocks. We regained some monitoring ability showing that the disseminated UTC(NIST) signal likely did not deviate by more than 5 us (five millionths of a second) and appeared stable. Knowing this, I decided to keep the Boulder Internet Time Servers active until we lost monitoring or some other event caused the time scale deviation to increase significantly.

To put a deviation of a few microseconds in context, the NIST time scale usually performs about five thousand times better than this at the nanosecond scale by composing a special statistical average of many clocks. Such precision is important for scientific applications, telecommunications, critical infrastructure, and integrity monitoring of positioning systems. But this precision is not achievable with time transfer over the public Internet; uncertainties on the order of 1 millisecond (one thousandth of one second) are more typical due to asymmetry and fluctuations in packet delay.

NIST provides high-precision time transfer by other service arrangements; some direct fiber-optic links were affected and users will be contacted separately. However, the most popular method based on common-view time transfer using GPS satellites as âoetransfer standardsâ seamlessly transitioned to using the clocks at NISTâ(TM)s WWV/Ft. Collins campus as a reference standard. This design feature mitigated the impact to many users of the high-precision time signal.

Best wishes,

-Jeff Sherman

Comment Re:SATs for grads (Score 3, Insightful) 113

If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your test is, the more likely its relevance will be challenged. And the more widely your test is given, even if it passes CRA muster, the more pressure there will be to water it down to reduce racial and gender differences -- and also reduce useful signal.

Comment Yes, an export tax is unconstitutional (Score 1) 95

But an export ban is not. And it's often said that the power to tax is the power to destroy... it turns out that works both ways. If you can ban exports, you can accept a fee in exchange for not banning them, which is effectively a tax. Not sure if it would hold up in court, but it turns out that nobody willing to challenge it will have standing.

Comment Yes, Chad (Score 1) 95

Cryptocurrency is specifically intended for the use of people who don't want Xi, Putin, Trump, Modi or God-help-you von der Leyen deciding how and where they put and use their money. If govenments couldn't resist using the monetary system for spying on and controlling their citizens, crypto wouldn't have much of a draw.

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