Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: You know what? (Score 2) 71

Windmills don't kill corn. Windmills don't kill clams. They might scare some fish initially due to low frequency vibrations but they will probably adapt. The bird-killing issue is a thing but they've found that they can minimize it somewhat with different paint on the blades.

Yes there are negative issues, just like any other infrastructure project, but you have to weigh them, and you can't let your own ideological alignment get in the way.

Trump hates windmills because he hates how they look near his properties. He has a particular issue and then builds an ideological theme to support it. People get roped into ideology and stop weighing the costs and risks in favor of being a *movement*.

Opposite side of the isle it's just as bad, they're terrible at seeing the benefits of nuclear on ideological growns. They hate burning fossil fuels so bury their head in the sand at plastic incineration being more efficient and overall less carbon intensive than recycling programs.

Offshore windfarms aren't any more harmful than offshore oil rigs, and in practice offshore oil rigs are beneficial for the local ecosystem by adding a habitat (excellent fishing btw).

Comment Re:I hope (Score 1) 144

It's not like we didn't have police, just not what we think of as a modern police force. We had organized law enforcement consisting of sheriffs and constables, with the power to deputize when needed.

This is much the same as we didn't have organized fire brigades, instead we had government officials with the power to organize a response to fires by recruiting more manpower from the populace to fight fires.

Asking if we need a police force because we didn't previously have one is like asking if we need a fire department because previously we only had an informal volunteer fire department. These things only worked in the past because the need was small enough that we didn't have the economy of scale to support a professional firefighting or police force, but with growth, the professionalization required necessitated the formation of these things.

Also the "cops are just slavecatchers" thing is a largely made up and exaggerated talking point by the far left that they repeat ad-nauseum. The first professional police forces in the US were formed in northern cities like Boston and were decidedly *NOT* slavecatchers, but rather organized out of groups normally deputized to enforce the law, turning them into professional employees -- in much the same way a volunteer fire department becomes a full time employer in cities that grow enough to need it.

Some early southern professional police and sheriff departments *were* constituted out of slave patrols, as these were people who were often deputized, but these were not the first police departments, nor did they constitute the majority of them, not even in the south.

Comment Re:History. . . (Score 1) 160

Why not say "School starts when the sun has been up for one hour. During these months school starts at 16:00 TAI, and in these months it starts at 17:00 TAI.

Use the time measurement consistently. Imagine "daylight saving length" where "For these months, start measuring things as one inch longer" and having to change how everything is measured..

Comment Re:Gas guzzling V8s don't seem like a good idea (Score 4, Insightful) 384

The vast, vast majority of Americans don't live in "remote areas". They live in towns with infrastructure, and don't drive long distances except for the occasional road trip (a rarer thing these days). While the typical American daily travel experience is a longer distance than in the rest of the world, this is by virtue of car-centric infrastructure, with more people in other developed countries walking or taking public transit, but among people who *do drive* in other countries, it's not a huge difference in terms of how far people drive in a typical journey.

In terms of cold temperatures, the performance differences are vastly overstated by ICE apologists. The country with the highest EV adoption in the world is Norway, a country not exactly known for its mild winters, particularly on the coastline facing the Atlantic. I've lived in a cold climate myself and know the experience well of spending much of the year with my gasoline-powered vehicle's auxiliary heater plugged into an electric socket just to keep the vehicle from freezing, but for some reason that constant energy use was never figured into the calculations. With batteries, you know your range will go down a bit, though that is being mitigated somewhat with newer battery chemistries, and you figure that into the range of the battery capacity when you buy the vehicle.

Resale value is the only point I'll concede, but that's really more a factor of how fast the tech has been developing vs the very mature ICE technology. The exact same thing happened with early gasoline automobiles. As the tech matures you'll see the market for used EVs stabilize, and this is already happening somewhat.

An EV from ten years ago is now very usable on its old battery pack. When you buy an ICE vehicle, you look at the odometer and if it has a lot of miles on it you figure the reduced reliability into the price you're willing to pay. EVs have far more mechanical reliability, so you're more figuring in the functional range on the battery pack in the price you're willing to pay rather than the remaining lifetime on the engine.

Comment Re: Even better: no cars at all (Score 4, Informative) 175

He wasn't saying "ban the car". He was saying "end car dependency." which means constructing multiple modes of transport with the same amount of priority, so that people can choose from the modes that are available, as opposed to building a massive network for cars and only token transit, if at all. People use good transit when it's available, the problem is that the US tends to build either crappy transit or none at all.

Comment Wrong assumption in the article (Score 5, Interesting) 83

I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.

Comment Re:300 years of scientific progress (Score 1) 118

The reason for the chicken pox/shingles issue is that if you contract the VZV it colonizes your nervous system and remains latent. It periodically reactivates and sort of gives you a free exposure over the years, basically a recurring booster shot.

People have been fine with this in the past but some researchers suspect that the latent infection has long term potential damage and there could be a benefit in preventing a latent infection in the first place. (Similar issues with latent herpes infection have been posited, but there's currently no herpes vaccine.)

Comment It is NOT autoconplete the way you think it is (Score 1) 211

You're confusing the task with the mechanism. Classic autoconplete uses statistical methods, often using some variant of a Bayesian algorithm. The task is to predict the next word, the method is statistics.

But if I asked *you* to predict the next word in a sentence, you would not be using a simple statistical method. Neither is the AI. It doesn't have the breadth of multi domain training data that your neutral network has, so it doesn't really think like a human does, but the way it functions is much closer to your brain than it is to a classical autoconplete.

It's hard to stress enough how profound that difference is.

Submission + - Python Software Foundation refuses $1.5 million grant with anti DEI provision. (blogspot.com) 1

Jeremy Allison - Sam writes: The PSF has withdrawn a $1.5 million proposal to US government grant program.

"We became concerned, however, when we were presented with the terms and conditions we would be required to agree to if we accepted the grant. These terms included affirming the statement that we “do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

Slashdot Top Deals

"Oh what wouldn't I give to be spat at in the face..." -- a prisoner in "Life of Brian"

Working...