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Comment Rural Electrification (Score 1) 89

We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.

If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?

They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.

If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.

The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to areas where FTTH is entirely reasonable and achievable.

Government almost always sucks at applying broad rules without subtlety at both the median and the far sigmas.

I live in an area where welfare broadband is offered for about $15/mo for about 60Mbps. Frankly I could live with that almost all the time. I do download some massive datasets every few months but my smoothed average is probably 2% of my max.

But those welfare programs exist because society has decided that some Internet is required for participation so there is some responsibility to provide.

The bigger risk is probably dual-use dangers. Ukraine has been using Starlink for terrorist attacks and while Musk has said he cut them off the Russian FM has warned that Russia will take out the Starlink constellation if it continues because apparently it is.

So we don't run fiber and then Starlink goes away, and then what?

There are also ice storms, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc. that can take out landines for months so having a few satellite terminals in an area would be more antifragile.

FCC is seemingly treating this as simple when it's complex.

Comment Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score 3, Insightful) 61

> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?

Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.

Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.

> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year

Tell me you've never been to a fab without telling me you've never been to a fab.

If they could double their capacity Altman would buy *that* too. At least presume that the greedy capitalists are greedy.

> Capitalism needs a referee and US dumbasses fired the ref.

How, precisely, did they accomplish this coup in China?

Also, why not move to China, Cuba, or North Korea? They have varying degrees of central planning that should take care of your needs. Nobody wants you to be unhappy.

Comment Re:What a benefit! (Score 1) 51

Reenlisting is tougher since you already got your GI Bill and VA Benefits and such.

On a recent talk show a military guy was saying that DoD was instrumental in nationalizing the student loans under Obama.

They knew infinite money for school would jack up the price of school for everybody but unaffordable college is what drives people to the GI Bill and their recruiting was dragging ass after the last time a President lied us into war in the Middle East over made-up claims of weapons of mass destruction (and then promised to leave Iraq and close Gitmo).

Say what you want about TikTok but the kids all know about the scam now. They didn't even bother trying to convince the country this time.

Have we had a story here about the record-short procurement process last month for the new Draft management software?

Comment Re:Is it ragebait, or (Score 1, Insightful) 205

Yes, to expand on your point - just looking at demographics the Democrats tend to skew younger and the Republicans tend to skew older.

Emotional maturity tends to skew older as well, so it offers two possibilities:
1) The results would be the same based on age, not politicial affiliation.
2) People with less maturity tend to want echo chambers, those with emotional control can more easily engage with challenging opinions.

There are other studies that look at gender, mental health status, psych meds, etc based on party that could be tossed into the mix if somebody wants to do real analysis of variance.

It's hardly worth it IMO as the X feed is not designed to help people reach their highest state of enlightenment. Hooking people for ads is inherently limbic hijacking so any data derived from that is going to not reflect the participants' best minds.

Comment Re:Or (Score 1) 68

Trouble with trying to run a study on the Amish is that their lifestyles are pretty significantly different all around. Comparing groups on either side of a hard dividing line (there was a study in the UK of shingles vaccines where over/under a certain age was a hard line in the sand) works well because the lifestyles of the population groups are basically the same.

Comment Re:Once again (Score 1) 49

The benefit is for key distribution because you know whether that distribution has been intercepted or not.

The rest is more interesting than useful at this point. Clearly someone clever will find new uses in the future ... or at least it would be shocking if this is the end of the line (from a Philosophy of Science perspective).

Comment Re:Soo (Score 2) 85

I'm assuming that this works because when the AP is communicating with endpoints in fixed locations, the AP can tell when signal quality changes as attenuators move through the space. This might work better with modern 'beam forming' APs using modern 802.11 standards, but theoretically one could constantly measure the signal strength between a stationary endpoint and the AP and observe when that signal is weaker than it otherwise should be.

If there are insufficient stationary endpoints it might not work so well unless it can somehow measure reflectivity with enough precision to know that something moved through.

Comment Re:I'm German (Score 2) 85

That's why it's necessary to take the concept of Communism and understand that it's an unattainable asymptote. Humanity is what gets in the way, we're selfish and we would nearly all of us take in order to have for ourselves even if our peers don't have the option. It would take a post-scarcity economy (think the situation of The Federation in Star Trek) for there to even be a chance at something working, it would require that anyone can have access to almost anything that's new.

I don't look at specific socialist concepts as unattainable though. The way a society treats its young, its old, its infirm, its poor, its powerless, and the way it curbs the excesses of those who've managed to profit off of said society speaks volumes for it. And unfortunately we're failing big-time now because a whole lot of people will voluntarily go against their own best interests and the interests of those in similar circumstances.

Comment Re:Payday Loans *2 (Score 1) 146

Unfortunately debt is wealth for those who can manage to convince those who loan money to make those loans to them, particularly if one can find a way to convert the borrowed money into one's personal money while shedding the debts in specially-tailored bankruptcies.

This is partly why there are whole classes of investors that buy struggling companies, separate them into business-units where one unit gets saddled with basically all the debts, sells-off the good bits for profit, and sends the red-ink business unit into bankruptcy.

This is also why some businessmen will set up company after company and leverage naming rights and other costs to said companies to have those companies pay-out to said businessmen, then let the companies die on the vine and go into bankruptcy after extracting as much wealth out of the other investors and lenders. And they are allowed to do this again and again and again since these aren't personal bankruptcies.

The bankruptcy process needs significant reform. Those who engage in these practices one time need to be barred from serving in or owning new corporations in a controlling capacity after the second time. Once is a fluke, twice is the beginning of a pattern.

Comment Quote from the store and service company (Score 1) 119

A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: "We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager." A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. "A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store," they said.

That's frankly bullshit. The system put a red ring around his face on the security monitoring system. The system told the employees to treat him as a shoplifter and as dutiful employees of their company with the system their company told them to use, they complied.

This is almost the exact same excuse made in the movie Brazil by Michael Palin's character Jack Lint, "Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the *right* man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?" after torturing an innocent man to death.

It appears that the United Kingdom is becoming the very dystopia that speculative fiction writers and screenwriters have been warning about for the better part of a century now. And the rest of the world is right along with them to varying degrees.

Comment Re:So what (Score 3, Insightful) 140

Well they've done 95% of the work required to make the books available to everybody.

Perhaps they could be persuaded to do the last 5% after some competitive advantage latency?

If I had to choose between preserving the physical book and allowing access for a billion people, I would sacrifice the paper.

"It belongs in a museum" is really dated and felt to be wrong today.

Why isn't anybody else making these books available? That's the bigger question.

Granted, modern Copyright Law is ruinous to society.

The Google Books project has many of the older ones. There is no moral case against duplication for books that are impossible to purchase but still "protected" by Copyright.

I would like to know the average price of these books. If they are $7 that means something very different than $700.

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