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Comment Re:I'd love to see it (Score 1) 105

Musk didn't attack Trump. Instead, he attacked Peter Navarro (Trump's economic advisor and tariffs architect) for being a "moron" and "dumber than a sack of bricks". Trump's Whitehouse spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt responded to their spat by saying "Boys will be boys, and we will let their public sparring continue."

I *wish* I made those quotes up or they were from The Onion. No, those are truly their quotes!

Comment Microsoft Word spellcheck (Score 1) 92

Who owns the output of 1990s word processors with spell and grammar auto-correction?

Who owns the output of photos made in photoshop using advanced distort filters and other algorithmic manipulations?

Who owns the music that have gone through auto-tune?

In none of these cases was it "oh, the folks who made the software own the output!"

In none of these cases was it "oh, the folks who run the hardware in the cloud own the output!"

In all of the cases, it was "the folks using the software were the creative ones. The software is, on its own, inert."

Comment Re:Er⦠AMD, not Intel (Score 1) 44

Yeah, I run a Ryzen 7840HS on my main pc, and a Ryzen 7840U on my handheld (ROG Ally), so I chuckled immediately when I read "Intel 7840HS". It's quite clear that editors just slap "Intel" on any x86-64 architecture cpu. The funny thing is that x86 used to be Intel, and all other x86 cpus were "Intel-compatible". But x86-64 is AMD (Linux even calls it AMD64 architecture), so all other x86-64 cpus are "AMD-compatible" now.

Comment Re:Anti-consumer behaviour (Score 4, Informative) 58

Most likely fake revenue. I have a friend in a related industry. If company A wants to sell a piece of junk for $1 to company B, then B will most likely refuse. But, if company A offers that piece of junk for $1 plus an exchange of $20,000,000 in both directions (no real cash is moved because it nets out to zero), then company B will love it. Both company A and company B can post that $20,000,000 as "revenue". Revenue is among the easiest things to fake. They say money doesn't grow on trees, and that's true for profits because profits is real money. But revenue is fake money. Revenue and fake money /do/ grow on trees. And companies get into deals with other companies for just sloshing fake money around between each other to drive up their revenue. It's a big scam since the 1980s when the issue of "transfer-asset-pricing" came on the radar. But no one knows how to fix it. So companies routinely get into such deals. That's why Warren Buffet ignores revenue and just looks at profits when assessing companies. But many other investors care about revenue, which means companies love to get into shenanigans to print insane revenue.

The alternative, which is also possible, is bribery. If the insurance company knows it's worth millions, rather than paying millions, they can just find a paper pushing VP at the car company, throw him a $300,000 of "gifts" on the down-low, plus a token $26,000 to the car company, and get a contract signed and save themselves from having to spend millions! So long as it's relatively hush-hush and not many in the car company know they got jipped with a $26,000 contract that should be worth millions, it'll fly under the radar.

Both are terrible. But the former is legal and widespread, while the latter is illegal but unfortunately all too common.

Comment neo-cortex (Score 1) 45

Wasn't the mammalian neo-cortex well known to be able to do that? The neo-cortex was supposed to allow mammals to envision scenarios in their heads and make predictions for things that were not immediately in front of them. As well as enter R.E.M. sleep.

Any pet owner will tell you their dog has dreams and is chasing squirrels in their R.E.M. state of sleep. Their paws move slightly in a running fashion, and they let out little quelps, like they're chasing something in the field.

Of course, there's a risk of anthropomorphizing behavior, but a brain scan of a sleeping dog can help put that to rest. And pet dogs are not an exception, any mammal should be able to achieve the same, and likely corvids and marsupials as well.

Comment Re:I have a crazy idea (Score 1) 111

You are describing the era before clean emissions standards. Olden emissions was large in "soot". Black smoggy clouds of carbon-based ashen particles that were heavy and settled to the ground within minutes, leaving a sticky tar-like coating that built up like plaque over industrialized cities. When it rained, and you wore a white shirt, any runoff from rooftops would pick up all the soot and leave dribbles of soot on your white shirt.

Then clean emissions standards can into force, which means you have to combust cleanly (that is, all the carbon in the fossil fuel must combust with the O2 leading to CO2 rather than be partially-combusted and generate lots of other carbon-based molecules). So, now with clean emissions standards, our lungs no longer cough up in cities breathing smog and smoke filled air with all the carbon pollution we used to have. CO2 is not considered pollution since it is non-hazardous to human health (by contrast, CO (carbon monoxide) is hazardous, and soot and tar and other ashen particles are carcinogenic). CO2 was considered "clean" emissions. Easy on human lungs, great for plant food. But it, unfortunately, exacerbates global warming.

Comment Re:Mass hysteria from social media (Score 1) 86

Would you feel the same way when your lawyer bills you for 30 hours but only worked 3 hours? Would you feel the same way if Uber billed you for a 3 hour trip when it was only a 20 minute trip? The company costs (especially payroll costs) are passed on to customers. If payroll is inflated through fake working hours due to "work from home" situations where many are really not working, that gets passed on to the customers.

Comment Re:This is kinda what scares me (Score 1) 100

It depends on the strain as well. If your county was mostly infected by the Alpha strain, then they're in better shape than if they were mostly infected by the Delta strain. And those who caught the relatively milder Alpha strain would then be fairly immune against catching the Delta strain.

Comment Re:Maybe it has something to do with the 4 day wai (Score 4, Interesting) 461

Coins are not lost if the transaction isn't processed. The sender still owns the coins until the public distributed ledger says otherwise, which it won't until the transaction is confirmed and included in the block chain. The protocol has a "replace-by-fee" (RBF) where you can just re-create a new transaction with a higher fee than the old unconfirmed transaction and the new transaction, once confirmed, becomes the fate of the sender's coin, and the old transaction, if it ever gets processed, will be rejected as that coin has already been spent.

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