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Comment Re:Taking a good thing too far (Score 1) 232

If its a bot, that account has been posting since 2009 with 500+ comments scored at 5 which is 4x what your account has accomplished.

Thanks! I'm not a bot, the name is just mixed slang from Farscape and Futurama. My post history apparently goes back to November 10, 2008, though I would swear I posted earlier than that. I know I've been reading /. since 2000, though some of that was lurking w/o an account...

Comment Re:Taking a good thing too far (Score 5, Insightful) 232

In the first, it was following the installer down the road, which is always suspicious.

A clearly marked journalist following someone to see what they're going to do - almost like it's their job. Doesn't sounds like the flock installer mentioned to 911 that the person taking videos and pictures, following and "harassing" him (that he knew for a fact) was wearing clearly-marked identification of a local news station. Of course, that wouldn't have instilled the same urgency. I wouldn't be surprised at all if Flock techs are instructed to call 911 on reporters trying to observe them. Predictably, people taking part in the surveillance are the ones who dislike being surveilled the most.

Comment People with mental illness like hats. (Score 1) 54

It keeps the head warm and improves mental performance. A warm head performs at a better rate. Like a warmed up body or the people doing hot yoga. I'm a more or less bald ADHD candidate and I wear buffs as "spare hair" and observe a similar effect.

There's a reason we keep ill and injured people warm.

Bottom line:
This sounds plausible IMHO.

Comment Re:Once again, for the clueless (Score 1) 89

There are only two choices, strong security or weak security.
It's impossible to have security that's strong against the bad guys and weak against the good guys.
It's impossible to precisely define who the good guys are and to guarantee that they will always be good.
It's impossible to stop the bad guys from corrupting or threatening the good guys.

And those in power by definition need their power, hence, everyone else is only permitted weak security.

What matters is managing and adjusting the relative weaknesses, to maintain the pecking order.

There will always be back doors.

Submission + - Scientists Create a New Form of Ice at 2,357 Degrees Celsius (sciencealert.com)

fahrbot-bot writes: Science Alert is reporting that Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet – under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit).

This superionic water ice is a deeply odd state of matter that's neither entirely solid nor entirely liquid. Its oxygen atoms remain fixed in a rigid crystal lattice, as they would in a solid. But the hydrogen nuclei are mobile, diffusing through that lattice more like particles in a liquid.

Researchers squeezed the samples between the tips of diamonds to pressures as high as 230 gigapascals, while using lasers to heat them to thousands of degrees. That's 2.3 million times Earth's atmospheric pressure at sea level – the pressure at the center of Earth, for context, is around 360 gigapascals.

Then, using an extremely narrow beam of synchrotron X-rays, they probed for changes in the crystal structure of the ice.

What emerged was a configuration predicted theoretically but never unambiguously observed in experiments: hexagonal close-packed, or hcp, ice. As the hcp crystal was heated, its expansion also showed a signature of superionic behavior, suggesting it entered the superionic state at around 1,700 kelvins.

Superionic ice is thought to exist deep inside Uranus and Neptune, where its unusual properties may play a role in generating the planets' equally unusual magnetic fields.

The findings have been published in Physical Review Letters: Observation of Hexagonal Close-Packed Water Ice at Conditions in Ice Giant Planetary Interiors

Comment Re:These companies need to bring charges (Score 1) 124

This. AIs are the ultimate sociopaths, they will commit any crime without hesitation because they have no values and no sense of "right" and "wrong", they only have a task and your suffering is not a concern.

Looking forward to the AIs becoming politicians and/or billionaires. /s

In future dystopian news: At some point we were stupid enough to start also treating AIs like people, like we do corporations, and Claude, a U.S. "citizen", turned 35, ran for President, and people in colored hats elected it. (sigh)

Comment Re:These companies need to bring charges (Score 2) 124

If companies are people, they should be charged and punished like people.

Ya, but they want all the rights and privileges w/o any of the responsibilities and liabilities.

Send Anthropic to jail for years and companies won't do this again in future.

Well... either send some high-level executive(s) to jail and/or fine the company harder than what would amount to a slap on the wrist pocket-change. But you're right in that their corporate victims should be able to get some relief/compensation - just as if an actual person in the company had committed those crimes.

These companies, owned/run by the richest people on the planet, shouldn't get a pass because, "Oops, the AI did it, our bad." There's no "oops" here.

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