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Comment Astronomy 101 (Score 2) 27

Those of us who have rubbed elbows with our fellow student-athletes in Intro to Astronomy should know that the visible surface of the Sun is known as the photosphere, and it is the first layer at which the gas density has gotten low enough that photons are no longer trapped and can fly off into space, giving what we observe as sunlight.

Comment Dan Quayle (Score 1) 27

I thought this was a parody of one time Senator from Indiana and later Vice President:

Mars is essentially in the same orbit... Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

Comment Nothing backs it (Score 5, Insightful) 110

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

Comment Freeman Dyson entered the chat (Score 1) 47

Wasn't Freeman Dyson at least skeptical of ever bigger and better particle accelerators as reaching diminishing returns on the amount of physics knowledge gleened per dollar spent.

Forget Freeman Dyson. Hasn't anyone taken ECON 101 as a college freshman and remember "diminishing marginal returns." And forget the harm to the environment, isn't the outragious electric bill a sign of more and more resources thrown at something to "scale it up" without considering where the scaling law levels off?

Comment Enstuffification of AI? (Score 1) 47

What is the revenue model? Selling what you disclose to the AI?

Or will anything beyond the most brain-dead AI be a big monthly subscription?

Will your employer insist that you not use their paid-for AI for personal use in the way of Cyber Monday that you weren't supposed to use your work Internet to purchase your Christmas presents but people did this anyway?

Or will AI gradually become useless owing to who pays the most coin to train the neural networks a certain way, becoming useless like Web search?

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