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Comment Old news (Score 1) 156

This surely is old news.

There is an old war movie (I forgot the name) in which a bunch of people get stranded after their plane crash lands in North Africa during WW2. A few of them set out to go "somewhere" in a certain given direction, but eventually stumble onto their own plane again. One of the characters (if I recall correctly, one who did not join the expedition and who possibly is the usual German bad guy) then explains that "humans tend to walk in a wide counterclockwise circle, because their right leg is slightly stronger/longer than their left." If my memory serves me right, he even adds that good soldiers are normally trained to compensate for that.

Of course that's a movie and as such not a good reference in se, but even so: someone must have expressed that theory/suspicion/fact before, as otherwise it can't be in the move script.

Comment Re:Oh look the grifters are back (Score 1) 107

Distributed power means having 2-3 orders of magnitude more power sources than with centralized systems. That increases the likelihood of an accident by the same factor.

In the US, we have already had near-disaster level nuclear accidents with about 100 total plants. Let's be generous and say that only one was really bad, TMI. That's a 1% failure rate where "failure" means the potential for disaster-level accident. If you want to remind yourself of what disaster-level accidents look like, recall what happened in Ukraine at the Chernobyl power plant, which was caused by human error. And recall that TMI was also caused by human error.

With 2-3 orders of magnitude more nuclear plants at 1% failure rate, that means 100-1000 nuclear disasters in the US, unless, somehow, we are able to engineer plants that are 2-3 orders of magnitude safer, and can find operators that make 2-3 orders of magnitude fewer bone-headed mistakes. As an engineer, albeit a non-nuclear one, I find that a daunting challenge. Yes, we as a society are capable of manufacturing at six and seven nines, but that's when we have lots and lots and lots of practice making things. Right now, nuclear plants only have two nines, with most of the relevant design and construction experience aged out. There aren't enough power plants to be made to develop that expertise, and we'll have plenty of disasters along the way as we learn, where disasters have centuries-long consequences.

So distributed nuclear power? No. Frelling. Thank. You.

Comment Re:Let's hope (Score 1) 207

Exactly. Just because a design is new with shiny gadgets does not mean it is automatically better than what has been previously on sale.

The sooner the newer generations understand this idea is nothing more than pure marketing hype, the sooner we can break away from and reject the enshittification.

Comment Re:Why do nerds care? Let the market decide + Marv (Score 1) 154

Yours is a far more eloquent way of saying what I had intended to: why is this on Slashdot? Is there any relevance at all? I fail to see it.

If these athletes were coached by AI, well... maybe, but that's a stretch. But they're not; they are just taking more extreme measures to performance enhancement than other athletes. And while I know (and employ) some smart jocks, I had the same experience as you in secondary school, because I, too, was not a jock.

Comment Re:No company lasts forever. (Score 5, Insightful) 79

No, it is not the beginning. That happened many years ago, when they first started to betray their original USP feature: just a simple textbox on a white page that searched very well and did nothing else. Add to that their massive Google Analytics privacy invasions and Google landed in my hate box a long time ago. I've basically dumped them (with the exception of maps) back when DuckDuckGo was first announced. For a while, I did still fall back on Google if I DDG didn't give me what I wanted fast enough, but over time I've just completely stopped using Google for search. The thought of maybe trying them when a search doesn't do what I want fast enough doesn't even come up anymore.

And yes, I also hate that even DDG has been adding crap extra features. Whenever they do, I disable those as well.

I did have a rarely used (i.e. secondary) Google e-mail address at one point, a couple of centuries ago. However, I dropped that as well around 2012 or so and I never looked back. I don't want them auto-reading my e-mail for their own nefarious purposes.

Comment Re:Wow (Score 1) 33

He's the CEO of a company whose value comes entirely from being a meme. Who do you think is going to run it? Also, he can't legally answer a lot of the questions they were asking him.

What questions that they asked, for which he said the answers were on the web site, can he not legally answer?

He clearly had an axe to grind with CNBC, given his multiple passive-aggressive mentions of how they predicted his downfall.

The one interviewer appeared to strike a body blow when she asked if his motivations were tied to a performance-based compensation package. All of GameStop's flailing malarky makes sense through that lens: the CEO was trying a hail mary, 'cause otherwise he gets didly-squat. Part of that malarky is claiming to own 5% of eBay when, as the main interviewer pointed out, most of that so-called ownership was through derivatives. This guy's a fraud. Time to short GameStop.

Comment Wow (Score 4, Informative) 33

The interview shows the CEO is kind of a jerk. He probably shouldn't be put in situations where communication is a requirement, like public interviews that are intended to help achieve an aggressive goal.

It's like he didn't understand he was on air during the conversation, despite the host clearly calling out that there was an audience listening.

The stark response from eBay is certainly understandable, having seen the interview.

Comment Re:Market forces at work (Score 1) 214

Agreed that the Mach-E is a terrible name. But how did they screw up such a guaranteed out-of-the-park home run with an electric Mustang? I mean the whole image of the Mustang is a sporty performance vehicle for the young and stupidly lead-footed. Mustangs are classically known for acceleration and EVs are wickedly good at that. I mean, if Ford were to create a 1965-styled electric Mustang, I shudder to think how many boomers would buy them. They were the dream car of an entire generation.

Ford, are you listening?

Comment and an exploit will be published in 3, 2, 1 ... (Score 1) 89

As a friend of mine in an uncharacteristic fit of insight once said, as long as there is a decision point that can be discovered, yes and the code goes this way, no and the code goes that way, it is in principle possible to write a patch to circumvent any DRM.

Here, there is a timeout test.

Need I say more?

Comment They won't fix it (Score 1) 89

I have been to all of the QC Snapdragon briefs, know the engineers personally, and have written about the shitshow on SemiAccurate.com extensively, basically I know what is going on. QC doesn't understand what they are doing and why, and there is ZERO internal impetus to change from the people on top. They do nearly nothing on software enablement because, "That is Microsoft's job". Drivers are intentionally locked down and encrypted to block Linux, and x86 compatibility is BETTER in hardware than the Mac Mx line (Same people who did the M1 and M2 did the X1 and X2, and they all just bailed on QC) but the software is.... oh look outside, there is a sky.

TLDR: No chance in hell there will be a fix.

                    -Charlie

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