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Comment Re: So, it has had this much before w/o humans (Score 4, Insightful) 135

Thatâ(TM)s great. But in case youâ(TM)re not joking, Less than 1,000 people have ever gone into space and all of them simply come back when theyâ(TM)re done in months. We have forgotten how to land things on the moon, and in fact when we were good at it, we only managed to land two people six times for three days or less. Mars? Only one person wants to live there. Fine. Let him. Moving to currently uninhabited places on earth means recreating nearly all of the infrastructure of all the existing cities. Good luck with that. In the US it took 250 years to create the current infrastructure. Generously 100 years for the current generation. How about maybe we just cut back on some things? Never mind that the people who are A-Ok with the cause of the pollution have a conniption every time they see the bill for a federal space flight.

Comment Re:Nope, I was wrong (Score 1) 80

Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.

It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.

If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbps nominal. The new plans drop this down to 100Mbps nominal for everything except the new ~2Gbps plan, which gets 250Mbps nominal.

Unfortunately, you're facing an either/or proposition. Comcast won't remove the data cap for existing plans, you have to transition to a new plan. But if you do that, then you'll get the new, lower upload speeds. With that said, Comcast isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, so current customers can stay on their legacy plans indefinitely.

Comment Re:so what happened? (Score 5, Informative) 60

It's a very good question. It looks like it was mainly failures to generate a result within a predetermined time. Some of the failures were due to cryostat hardware failures (a fridge went out during a NIST campus closure); some due to fiber + interferometer polarization drifts; and so on. It also appears that [perhaps?] a few of the misses are due to latencies in the timetaggers to record a common timebase. I can't quite tell from the arXived version of the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.052...

All in all, it's a marvelously good overview of the impressive experiment!

Comment Re: What did HyperCard even do? (Score 3, Informative) 53

Bill required that Apple bundle it with every Mac. The beauty of it was the language. Stacks were made of cards that were made of fields, objects, each of which had a dozen attributes that could be set and all of it could be directed with a simple and straightforward language. Easy, permissive and forgiving structure, still pretty powerful results. We had an external research site for Apple ATG, testing actual use of Apple IIGS vs Mac SE. Along the way, they ported Hypercard to the GS. It was a four hour port. I still have an archive of teacher and student coding projects done in Hypercard. The results of your code were tangible, graphical, and didnâ(TM)t blow up when there were errors. At the time the other k-12 coding options were BASIC, LOGO, Pascal⦠Hypercard was IMHO better for jumpstarting teaching coding than any of those.

https://cancel.fm/stuff/share/...

Comment Re:It's even funnier in Russia (Score 1) 77

quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

Comment Call me skeptical, (Score 1) 183

But starship after nine missions has yet to complete a single orbit of the Earth. They then have to perfect unmanned on orbit fuel, transfers, etc., etc. Musk seems to be good at taking existing established technologies, branding them and scaling them up, not so much on the new things. Which really points to sending robots instead of humans. If he wants a vanity project, let him fund it himself.

Comment Re:Sad (Score 1) 28

> it's been neither "stable" nor "reliable."

I was going to say the same thing. CenturyLink/Quantum's fiber service has been spotty pretty much since the beginning. Which tracks, since their DSL service wasn't much better.

AT&T may find new and interesting ways to screw things up. But Quantum residential customers have already been getting the short end of the stick for reliability.

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