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Comment Re:American exports (Score 1) 48

That was always the case. And it's always the case in every representative country that allows voters to elects leaders.

You can have stability and continuity or you can have elections in which voters can make large policy changes.

Obviously a lot of that policy is unwise, but people were fooling themselves if they somehow believe that any representative system is immune from "population elects person with unwise policy platform".

Comment What an insightful comment... (Score 4, Insightful) 56

"Games are competing with every other option for spending your leisure time and money, and the competition is brutal." --John Carmack

I had never thought about games in this way before. When I fell in love with Doom (and gaming) as a teenager, I didn't have any social media & smartphones competing for my time, because they didn't exist. Lots more time for gaming. The games back then were made to reward you for investing more time in the game itself. There was a joy in it, discovering all the hidden places that rewarded you with power-ups. Finish a level only to find out you found 87% of the secrets? That's when the OCD in your brain kicks in, you re-load the level, and hit spacebar on every inch of wall space you can can muster until you find that hidden BFG-9000.

Today's "games" don't try to reward you in that classic sense anymore. They've turned gameplay into a casino, where you grind away for six hours hoping for that rare-item drop. They can't beat the addictive components that make up social media, so instead they incorporated some of them into the gameplay...If you can't beat 'em, join 'em, I guess. The only winning move is not to play.

Submission + - StormWall: Scientists Propose Space-Based Shield Against Dangerous Solar Storms (orbitaltoday.com)

fjo3 writes: Walsh and his colleagues explored a different approach: modifying near-Earth space to reduce the impact of incoming solar storms. The idea draws inspiration from a natural process in which particles from Earth’s upper atmosphere drift outward and help reinforce parts of the planet’s magnetosphere. This magnetic bubble shields Earth from charged particles.

Under the proposed StormWall architecture, six spacecraft would operate in geosynchronous orbit. Each vehicle would carry stores of material such as barium or lithium. When a major solar storm is forecast, the spacecraft would release this material into space. Sunlight would ionise the particles, creating a cloud of plasma that spreads toward the outer regions of Earth’s magnetosphere.

According to the team’s computer simulations, the added plasma could alter how solar storm energy enters the magnetosphere. In some scenarios, it reduced the intensity of a major geomagnetic storm by roughly 50% and redirected a significant fraction of the incoming energy away from Earth.

Comment Re:...not that you should be speeding on public ro (Score 1) 200

30km/h implies urban/residential areas, not wide open highways.

But you can't implement average-speed based on an urban/residential area where there are lots of possible paths, you can only implement it on straight line highways with very few exits.

I think much more safety would be to enforce traffic laws much more strictly around kids/schools and the like.

Comment It's easy to understand how this is happening (Score 2) 51

Lawyers are some of the most overworked people on the planet. Not only that, but the work they do requires a lot of high-level thinking and processing for long stretches of time. It's exhausting work.

So along comes AI, which can turn hours of work into minutes, saving them a lot of time and work (at least up front). Of course they'll take a chance at it, especially when it lets them get eight hours of sleep a few more times a week. Besides, with better odds than a coin flip, the case will probably settle anyways, and what they write will never see the light of day.

Besides, it's very easy to skim through what AI generates and feel convinced that it's good enough. Only if one were to really scrutinize the work would one discover how terrible it is, but why bother doing all that extra evaluation...wasn't AI supposed to save you time?

Comment Re:Please don't (Score 1) 66

The feature isn't targeted toward users who spend all their time in the terminal. Those users are likely already savvy enough to realize you shouldn't paste untrusted text into a terminal window. It's targeted toward non-power users who are completely unfamiliar with the Terminal, i.e. the majority of Mac users.

Comment Re:Please don't (Score 1) 66

The corollary is you have to not have too many false positives such that the warning is just a nuisance. Consider: how often does the type of user this is intended to protect (i.e. who would paste random text from a website into a terminal window) "normally" paste text into a Terminal window? Not very often. This warning system would go completely unnoticed for the majority of users in the course of their normal use. When they *do* have occasion to paste text into a Terminal window, ideally, it would *also* not be an irritation since false positives would be held to a reasonable rate. Power users (who actually *do* frequently paste stuff into terminal windows regularly) can just toggle the feature off. Toggling the feature off doesn't represent any security degradation relative to the prior status quo.

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