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Comment Re:"inventor"?! (Score 4, Insightful) 41

Inventor?!

Is there absolutely any evidence to back this technique up as successful? Injecting something hazardous to kill cancer isn't new; but you actually need real studies to see if it succeeds.

Succeeds, or causes a different morbidity to the patient, or worse.

I mean, you can inject tuberculin toxin into a tumor too, or radioactive thallium, or any of the vast suite of toxic concoctions, but it might not work out so well for the rest of the patient. Especially if you call yourself an inventor, instead of a medical scientist, with the level of training and knowledge expected for each.

Comment Re:Display (Score 3, Interesting) 187

Presumably the DoD is specifically who they are interested in. For anybody else, paying a 20% premium over Apple would be idiotic, especially as you go up in specifications. They you get beyond the hardware and have to ask what software is actually going to run on it and would that meet the same "security" guidelines.

Personally I am all for the US improving their ability to source full supply chains for critical goods domestically, although it would be much more efficient to look at it with allies, and could also improve redundancy. But you really need seed customers that are willing to pay a premium to make it happen and tariffs aren't the right tool for it.

Comment Re:EMP (Score 1) 117

What I would do: Have the race sponsors dole out randomly selected identical bikes to each competitor just before the race. They could even use crappy Huffy bikes as long as they're all the same.

That would kill two birds with one stone: Making sure that there's no cheating, and eliminating the ridiculous obsession the cycling world has with trying to create bikes that weigh only a few grams. As a bonus, the best *athlete* would probably win.

Comment Was in a few hotels without AC past week... (Score 1) 180

Not having air conditioning in hospitals is idiotic. It really doesn't have t be much-- cooling the hallways and creating airflow is likely enough to make it comfortable for sleeping.

I was in twogenerally cold climate hotels though this past week, and boy without air conditioning it was rough. There is no air circulation, and since it is designed for a heating dominated climate it does a very good job of holding onto the heat at night.

Just focus on efficient ways of adding air conditioning-- not the portable coolers that require a window to be open in the room being cooled, not US-style window air conditioners.

Comment Re:I don't like the phrase 'Conspiracy Theory' (Score 1) 147

Nope, conspiracies don't ever happen.

The 9/11 hijackers did not plan their actions in advance. Just by sheer coincidence, 19 people just happened to be taking those four plane flights. And by coincidence (no coordination) they all got the same spontaneous idea at the same time, an idea they had never spoken about before: let's hijack the plane and crash it.

Crazy people babble on about "evidence" like people taking flight lessons, sharing vehicles, etc. but we know those things cannot possibly be true, because conspiracies are not real.

If you have a hypothesis of x and then find lots of supporting evidence for x and it becomes the prevailing explanation, that creates a theory of x, but there's one exception: when x is a conspiracy. Conspiracies are a special case, because they don't really happen.

Comment Re:I turned off notifications long ago (Score 1) 60

I don't know why anyone would allow notifications on their phone (or their computer).

My time is not available to be interrupted for marketing outreach or other drivel. If it were, there would be a substantial payment required, because of the interference. When I want to know if there is a message to be read, I'll have a look at an appropriate time of my choosing.

Anyone who allows themselves to be bombarded by New! On Sale! Hi! Remember Us! OMG! messages in any medium does not value their time.

Comment Hard to believe anything would change (Score 4, Interesting) 198

To make an effective western grid more transmission lines are needed. Yes, wholesale feed-in rates might go down due to the mechanics of pricing (oversimplifying: last MW committed determines the price everyone is paid, and you would have more generation competing for that last MW). The problem is that the transmission charges would make it difficult for energy to flow from point A to point B. You see this today in California's grid where some transmission lines and nodes have a negative marginal cost while others are quite high.

Really the best solution is microgrids where regions purchase/sell power to the grid but the grid doesn't control the majority of energy flow. The microgrids need multiple sources of storage and generation, but when things don't get averaged out over a larger area there is less opportunity to game things. I'd also personally like to see separate day-ahead and hour-ahead forecast rates, along with realtime rates for any delta. That creates an opportunity to better balance systems and keep high-cost energy off the grid and increasing the costs.

Comment Re:Is it that time of the year? (Score 4, Informative) 40

The peer-review process is so unpredictable and irregular that it effectively decouples the time-of-year for the discovery from the time-of-year for the publication of said discovery.

So, the answer to your question is, "no," on that grounds.

But, also, if there *were* any push for results, it would be aligned with the end-of-budgetary-year for a given grant, which is three times per year, and doesn't necessarily align with the Federal fiscal cycle.

So, again, the answer is, "no."

Comment Bad news first (Score 5, Funny) 88

The bad news: Hackers have gained access to thousands of SharePoint servers.

The good news: It will be of no use to them, because just like the befuddled employees who are stuck using SharePoint, the hackers won't be able to find any relevant information in the byzantine hierarchy of pseudo folders packed with stale artifacts.

Comment Re:Ban stock BuyBacks (Score 2) 79

It isn't the buybacks themselves, it is the management focus on increasing stock price without strategic reinvestment. Sometimes that is actually ok-- companies do actually run a course and sometimes it is time for them to down-size and maybe go away. A buyback can help reduce the market capitalization of the company and wind down (more) gracefully.

Comment Eye-Candy instead of Performance? (Score 1, Informative) 49

How about just working on making KDE smaller and faster, instead?

Pretty please?

With the last Plasma update, the time to intialize my desktop went from acceptable-but-could-be-better, to (not kidding) 60+ seconds. No changes on my side.

(And to the folks over at Mozilla, you've completely dropped the ball for rapidly getting Firefox to a usable state.)

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