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Comment Re:All copper is "oxygen-free" (Score 1) 68

The only thing stopping you from calling the water pipes in your house "copper-phosphorus pipes" is laziness and poor attention to detail.

Have you ever heard a single person, including plumbing professionals, call them "copper-phosphorus pipes"?

No. Because that's not how the English language works. You're the one who is too lazy and ignorant to figure out how people actually communicate in society.

Hint: The systematization your mind wants to apply to everything is not absolute. You need to figure out when to relax the formal logic rules when they start to result in absurd outcomes.

Comment Why we don't polygraph people anymore (Score 2) 116

I can think of a few things leading to Voight-Kampff-style polygraph tests being phased out in this timeline

1. Several U.S. states have banned reliance on polygraph test results by employers. "Polygraph" on Wikipedia lists Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Delaware and Iowa. In addition, the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act 1998 generally bans polygraphing by employers outside the rent-a-cop industry.
2. Autism advocacy organizations raised a stink about false positive results on autistic or otherwise neurodivergent human beings.
3. The LLM training set probably picked up answers from someone's cheat sheet, such as "The turtle was dragging its hind leg, and I was waiting for it to stop squirming so I could see if it needed to go to the vet."

Comment Re: Potential dangers (Score 1) 92

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

Comment Free apps are more likely to use protocols (Score 1) 68

you have your itinerary saved in a note taking app that isn't on the appstore

If an app meets F-Droid's licensing policy then it is more likely to follow the principle that protocols are better than platforms. This means there are probably other apps, probably including apps on Google Play Store, that can reach the document repository where you saved your itinerary.

Comment Apple was beaten to Tivoization by decades (Score 1) 68

insane market (started by Apple) of personal devices that you buy that you literally don't have admin access on

That was 1985 with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 7800 ProSystem, the first popular home computing devices to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized software. Between that and the iPhone was the TiVo DVR, the first popular home computing device to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized derivatives of copylefted software.

Comment Re:Smartphone failed. Smartphone with bad AI won't (Score 1) 46

At least they should take this opportunity to think of better branding for their phone. "Fire Phone" is a terrible name for any product that contains lithium ion batteries.

However, I don't see how "all AI" is going to work out. Computers were invented because they made predictable, repeatable calculations. That's important for things like safety and security. People aren't going to be happy if their phone hallucinates a custom map giving them driving directions onto the runway of their local airport, or takes the initiative to wire all the money out of their bank account to the link in an incoming scam email.

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