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Comment Re: Is anyone already doing this? (Score 1) 64

That works at some intersections. At others, buildings and echoes make it pretty much impossible to tell if the siren you hear is an emergency vehicle about to cross the intersection in front of you where you have a green light, or there's some emergency somewhere else, which is often true. They could still go through red lights, but not at full speed. With the new system, they find that the light is green for them at every intersection, and they don't have to slow down.

Comment Re: Or, hear me out... (Score 1) 98

I'm well aware. It was a subject matter that appealed to a wide audience. It had very high budget, and was a project Cameron was passionate about. It was very well constructed technically. The costuming and set design was beautiful, with fantastic attention to detail. The cinematography, visual effects, and sound editing were all top notch too. It genuinely deserved *most* of the awards it won.

But you can have a very very well produced very very stupid movie.

It was was dumb screenplay. The love story was painfully tedious and silly, and we all knew the boat was going to sink before we bought the ticket and that's what people were there to see anyway. The boat sinking is what won best picture. Not the love story or the characters party to it. It was simply not a compelling story all. It was an extremely well produced spectacle about a sinking boat, but the actual plot?

Reminds of another technical acheivement spectacle film... also by James Cameron, also won multiple awards and nominated for several more (collectively 9). Also with a painfully stupid plot: Avatar.

Comment Re: Or, hear me out... (Score 2, Insightful) 98

Titanic? Really? I had more empathy for the guy whose car they defiled than either character. Hundreds of actual real people died on that ship so we could have a back drop to a trite and unbelievably sappy romance about fictional characters? The ending was beyond annoying too with the whole throwing a unique priceless heirloom into the ocean, you know to "let go" of Jack. you know -- that boy she knew for almost 4 whole days.

Comment Re: Good (Score 1) 146

"the Democrat college educated voter will vote for a dingbat who knows nothing."

We would have even voted for a potted plant because even a potted plant would be a better choice.

"I voted for a 3rd party candidate."

Would you like a sticker? Supporting a 3rd party is nice and all but in the current US system, voting 3rd party in any remotely competitive state amounts to not voting. Basic game theory stuff. I'll vote 3rd party when we have a proper STV system in place or something comparable.

Comment Re: That translates into job losses (Score 1) 48

I think what you think of as recipients resenting handouts is commonly misunderstood. People have a basic need to feel like they are doing something worthwhile, which is traditionally fulfilled by them having jobs that pay them an amount that indicates how much other people value the work. Telling people they need handouts, then, indicates that they aren't capable of doing meaningful work. On the other hand, if people see that their work is valuable to people who can't afford to pay them a living wage (for example, daycare providers for retail workers who are parents), they're much more willing for somebody else to provide the money. UBI also helps the perception, in that there's no implication that recipients aren't also capable of getting paid for their work, since it's universal, and that frees people to look for things to do that they personally value but may not have built-in funding.

Of course, none of this helps if no occupations people can do are worthwhile any more because AI just does it better. You still have to worry about a high rate of idleness, even if the people aren't broke, but that's a somewhat different problem.

Comment Re: More naunced (Score 2) 36

My favorite bug was when they started using message-signaled interrupts. When enabling MSI, they didn't disable the traditional IRQ, and my machine would keep delivering it. In particular, the network card would do something to toggle the IRQ line whenever a packet came in, but would leave the line triggered when idle. If this persisted for five minutes, the kernel would decide that line was stuck and mask it, but it was shared with my hard drive, whose driver would then never find out that operations had completed. Very odd to debug a computer that would fail if you left it alone too long, and nothing suggested that the network card was using that IRQ once it was configured to use MSI instead.

The fun part was that other people had machines where disabling the IRQ would also disable the MSI, so my fix broke other motherboards, and the PCI standard said something that could be interpreted as requiring either behavior. Fortunately, there was something you could check about the manufacturer to decide what to expect.

Comment Re: It's weird (Score 1) 118

Applications which required getting mRNA into particular cells had problems with delivery, unless those cells were in the liver where everything tends to end up eventually. But getting cells in muscles in one arm to present antigens of a respiratory disease turns out to be fine for producing an immune response to the disease when it shows up in the lungs, so delivery isn't an issue for vaccines. This was known at the time of the article, but all the diseases with known proteins that would make good antigens already had approved vaccines, and nobody really wanted to develop a flu vaccine technology that wasn't more effective and just didn't take all summer to grow after settling on a strain. Then COVID showed up, and the ability to produce a vaccine knowing just the antigen and do it fast was suddenly important.

For that matter, this year it would be useful to be able to change the flu vaccine between Thanksgiving and New Years, because they picked the wrong H3N2 in the spring, but we don't have a suitable regulatory framework for approving that change, even though it's easy to make with mRNA.

Comment Re:Not new. (Score 1) 143

In the 80s/90s we were tasked to read several novels from grade school through high school; The Incredible Journey, Where the Red Fern Grows, In the Heat of the Night, The Hobbit, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet are some that I remember reading for school. I know Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and Farenheit 451 were also on the curriculum as friends took those in other blocks. And those are just the ones I recall... there were others.

Comment Re: Nitpicky phrasing department: (Score 1) 29

The decision to do it was made in 2011, and they've been building the parts that will go into it, and they'd already committed to doing the installation at the end of the current operating period, but the schedule for ending that period is "mid-2026", so he gets to be the one who makes that date exact, with people hoping to get one last experiment that doesn't need the upgrade in before they have to wait a long time.

Comment Re: Standby on Linux (Score 1) 59

That's what a kernel developer told me when I reported this problem. In particular, they said I had a machine with an nVidia device that was different from all the similar devices they'd seen in not having the second copy engine actually function. They gave me one line of config for my PCI ID, and then it worked perfectly.

They found and fixed the issue immediately upon seeing logs from my machine, but they'd never seen exactly that issue before to know in advance that it was a possibility.

Comment This seems intentional (Score 2) 6

It seems to me that, if you were developing something like this, you'd want to write the encryption and decryption code separately from the non-trivial key management code, so that you can unlock it easily if someone accidentally locks the wrong system. You only make the build that doesn't have an obvious key when you're really going to use it. For that matter, it's probably wise to do your demos with the version with the master key, so that potential affiliates can't attack a real target for the demo. Then you give the version that doesn't make it easy to unlock to paying affiliates who aren't SentinelOne. It's not like they'd need to redesign the whole system to generate a random key and not write it in plaintext anywhere.

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