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Comment Re: Typical. (Score 3, Interesting) 21

I think the problem is that the first step is actually "Make an expensive system that's free to use, that we don't know how to sustainably pay for."

I don't buy it. They've made it to massive scale without anyone going bankrupt; clearly no one is paying 0.3% of every transaction ($100 billion/year) to keep the current system afloat. The internet itself is evidence that you can have billions of secure, complex transactions where each party just pays a minimal amount for access to the network and no third party needs to be paid for every transaction (roughly $0.06 for a couple hundred bytes in this case).

This is just banks trying to muscle in on some nice-looking transactions.

Comment Re:Disconnecting the car? (Score 1) 249

Chevrolet stopped providing (selling) updates to my 2016 Colorado's nav system, so I bought a Garmin standalone unit for maps and just use the colorado screen to connect speakers to my phone and stream.

If it ever started doing that ad thing (not likely since they aren't doing updates on my truck) I'd rip out the built in and put in a third party unit.

Honestly, part of me wants to go in and rip out the OnStar box so they don't decide to monetize my driving telemetry without my consent. (they charge too much for the onstar crap)

Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 174

If you can do it for $2000, you have $998,000 profit.

Yeah, but you have to regard this as a probabilistic effort: when you spend the $2,000, do you have a greater than 0.2% chance of solving the problem? If not, you're throwing your money away. And chances are, you donâ(TM)t know your odds when you start, so then things become really speculative.

Comment âoesignificant political ramificationsâ& (Score 5, Insightful) 48

Apple is not required to obtain U.S. government approval to purchase chips from the companies, but doing so without the administration's support could expose it to significant political ramifications.

This line is really chilling. The fact that it passes without comment shows that we've now gotten used to living in an authoritarian state instead of a democracy. In a country that actually supported free enterprise, a company wouldn't have to worry what the president thinks of their perfectly legal business decisions. Nor would they need to be on the president's good side to run their business as they see fit in the future. âoePolitical ramificationsâ of this sort have no place in a free, non-corrupt society.

Comment Not three to five (Score 4, Informative) 189

These reports always assume a 6 oz. serving of coffee, which isn't how people have drunk it in the U.S. for a long time. A 12 oz. serving of brewed coffee contains 140-240 mg caffeine, so 400 mg/day is actually roughly 1.5 to 3 servings.

Also, as usual, this looks like an observational study, so they can't actually say whether people are healthy because they drink coffee or people drink coffee because they are healthy or some third factor drives both.

Comment Re: They're obsolete. (Score 2) 238

There is no conceivable scenario today in which a modern automatic transmission will be outperformed by a manual.

Well, there is one, but it's been a long time since I needed it. If you get your vehicle semi-stuck in a deeply rutted road (or off-road), with a manual transmission you can often "rock" it free: let out the clutch to start moving forward, push it in to roll back and up the other side, repeat to go forward again, increasing the travel each time until you get up and out of the rut. This can work well when you're stuck in a gravity well without enough friction to pull yourself out or even to build the momentum at the bottom to get yourself to the top. But it's not common to need this, and careful drivers can usually avoid it.

Comment Re:We need Google (Score 1) 27

Also, the majority of us (in said minority) are probably running ad / tracking blockers (I run uBlock Origin on Waterfox with NoScript - which probably makes it easy to fingerprint me .. if not precisely, then as someone who is not going to watch/see their ads).

So yeah it would need to be a nonprofit or a paid engine.

I really liked the idea of Kagi but their reliance on Yandex (Russian owned /operated engine which Putin has had increasing say over since 2019)

I mean, I think somewhere there are projects that have made their crawler result set available - maybe there's room for a nonprofit to build a better interface / search on one of those?

I dunno, it's one thing to understand on a high level "we need a reliable up to date index, and then make a fair, transparent search system that implements a patent-free ranking algorithm (is Page rank up yet?) and just searches using provided keywords and respects 'exact quoted phrases', but it's quite another to build something that can keep that index updated, and that can handle queries at scale and not cost so much that its impossible to do without an advertising model.

Comment Re:Good for him (Score 4, Insightful) 116

Are we great again yet?

Ok Ok low effort reply there but truthfully this is a direct example of brain drain due to an administration that is downright hostile to science. We used to be the envy of the world in terms of our research institutions and science.

The more the nationalists try and keep others out and the more they make science into a political point the more folks are going to just give up on America.... and I don't blame them. If I had any "in" elsewhere (family history, available opportunity) I'd leave

Sorry in truth I really wish they hadn't made science and education and many peoples very humanity and human rights political...

Comment Re: Yes, we should be concerned about these things (Score 4, Insightful) 151

All seems really short sighted. It's like squeezing a balloon... doesn't work unless it's universally applied.

If you think the Pope should refrain from offering moral advice because some people may not follow it, I think you may have misunderstood how the Catholic Church works.

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