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Comment Re:Kilocalories of energy each contestant burned? (Score 1) 43

*nerd alert*

The original script had The Matrix running in parallel on all the human brains.

Studio execs said that was too confusing and that they should be batteries.

Also Neo is seen on the Nebuchadnezzar with hundreds of acupuncture-looking needles with wires to get his muscles working while he's in a coma.

Writers should have been left alone (a story old as time).

Comment Re: Everyone start handing out DVDs and USBs of Li (Score 1) 125

The other year, installing Win11 ended with an unsupported CPU error on a fairly new at the time Thinkcenter with a 7th generation CPU. The last time I had a similar experience with Linux many years ago just meant some Googling and adding a boot parameter to tell the kernel that yes I did have PAE even if the CPU didn't admit it. Would have been easy to use a different distribution then Ubuntu too.
A general use operating system rejecting a 3 year old computer due to it being too old does not equal an easy install.

Comment Corals are Ancient (Score 3, Informative) 39

The Earth has frequently been much warmer than it is today and coral reefs grew much faster then.

Perhaps they have a fine point to make but the implications fly in the face of established evidence.

And not shaky evidence - you can go vacation on huge islands made of these old reefs, from when the oceans were higher.

You can go visit Chazy Fossil Reef today and see coral fossils 480 million years old, from when Northern Vermont was a tropical marine environment.

These data aren't disputed in the field.

Comment Re:It's pretty clear Google hates custom ROMs (Score 1) 2

I was 100% C=64 before I transitioned to Apple ][ before I went IBM-PC DOS, briefly Windows/OS2 Warp, then MacOS, then 100% linux, and added Android later.

(sprinkle in some brief CP/M, BeOS, and NetBSD sidequests)

I'll deal with the shift to the next phone platform OK, I think.

I should probably dust off my Pine64 and try the latest builds again. It's been a few years since they were unusable as a daily driver.

Folks, this might be a huge opportunity if you correctly pick the successor and are the first developers.

Comment Re:One non-inconsistent observation != PROOF (Score 1) 40

> "Proves" might be too strong

Different fields have different standards of proof. The most rigorous that I'm aware of, is in mathematics, wherein a proposal that almost all the experts think must surely end up being true, can be heavily studied and yet remain "unproven" for an arbitrarily large number of centuries, until eventually someone finds an actual real-world use case for the math that you get if it's NOT true. (The poster child for this is non-Euclidean geometry, but there are lots of other examples.)

There's an old joke about three university professors from England who took a trip up north together, and on their way out of the train station, the journalism professor looked over at some livestock grazing on a hill, and said, "Oh, look, the sheep in Scotland are black!" The biology professor corrected him, "Some of the sheep in Scotland are black." But the math professor said, "There exist at least three ship in Scotland, and at least three of them appear black on at least one side, at least some of the time."

Comment Re:Hurry up already (Score 1) 240

Sorry, no, that isn't the issue either. The problem the OP is running into is much, much more basic than that.

Forget, for a moment, that the ports are USB ports, and that the peripherals are USB peripherals, because as long as they match up (which they do, in the OP's scenario), none of that is the problem. The number of ports doesn't even matter, we can abstract away the 4 (or 2 + 2, same difference) and just call it N. The problem is that he's got N ports, and N peripherals that he wants to keep plugged into ports all the time, and that leaves N - N ports available to plug anything else into, if he needs to plug something in temporarily. But N - N is 0, so something has to be unplugged to free one up. That's a number-of-ports problem, entirely irrespective of the port type.

If you were proposing replacing the 2 USB-A ports with a *larger* number of USB-C ports, then your argument might have some relevance. But just changing the type of port won't bend the arithmetic in any useful direction. They could be upgraded to the new USB type K ports introduced in 2042, and it still wouldn't solve the problem: if there are still four ports and four all-the-type peripherals, there still won't be any unoccupied ports available for temporarily plugging in transitory things.

At least USB is (mostly) hot-pluggable. But, again, that's as true of A as it is of C.

Comment Re:You should know better. (Score 1) 69

I read somewhere that even totally annihilating a gram of matter/antimatter only gives enough energy to accelerate a gram of matter to 50% light speed, assuming perfectly using the energy. How to harness the gamma rays is unknown.
Basically current physics says getting to relativistic speeds is close to impossible.

Comment Re:You should know better. (Score 1) 69

You can't reach the speed of light, just get closer and closer. Takes about a year at 1G to really get the relativistic effects at close to light speed.
Problem is everything you hit, even light, has so much energy that survival would be, lets say hard. The energy requirements make it impossible according to current physics.

Comment Re: You should know better. (Score 2) 69

Actually about 7.2 years ship time and just over 42 years Earth time, quicker if you don't want to stop at the end. Takes about a year at 1G to get close to light speed and really take advantage of relativistic time compression.
Of course the energy requirements would be huge and current physics says it is close to impossible.

Comment Re:We know what perl is capable of (Score 2) 83

> Python isn't perfect with its syntactically meaningful whitespace nonsense

I know a programmer with a visiospatial disability.

Braces are fine. Python is literally impossible.

I looked at a few 'Python with braces' preprocessors for her but they all seemed to be half-done and not really usable.

I'm not quite sure why.

It's a dumb reason to shut someone out of an entire software ecosystem. Almost every other language is accessible to her.

Comment Re: Legal/illegal bikes (Score 1) 146

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

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