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Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 80

Dude. I'm so old I have actually used a VT100. I actually used a teletype for a few minutes for the heck of it. No punch cards, though.

I'm pretty clear on what a terminal emulator is. I've probably used one more days than not over my more than half century.

My point was: **We're totally ditching github!!** - and yet their website still links only to source on github.

Comment Re:FAT32 Gaslighting (Score 1) 85

No, the 4GiB file limit is part of the filesystem itself. Changing that would be a breaking change. That's why, when they changed it, they also changed the name to ExFAT, along with a number of other fixes and updates. The 32GiB limit was just an artificial limitation of the GUI formatting tool. IIRC, the command line tools have never had such a limitation, and the drivers can access larger filesystems just fine. The 2TiB limit is a hard limit of the filesystem spec and going higher would be a breaking change. Again with the ExFAT fixing that problem.

Comment Re: Let's see in six weeks... (Score 2) 364

We do have HUGE stockpiles of food. It's just not at grocery stores anymore, which can be a bit of a problem in times of crisis, for sure. Stockpiles of other shit: not so much. The reason we have huge stockpiles of food is because food is produced in seasonal patterns but consumed year-round. If you harvest apples twice per year, once in the southern hemisphere and once in the northern hemisphere, but you want to have apples available year-round, you'll need to stockpile them. And, with apples, they aren't grown much in the southern hemisphere, so we stockpile like a year's worth at basically all times. This is true of many crops, like potatoes, grains, corn, nuts, basically anything that can be dried out or chilled and stored gets stored. We COULD grow that stuff like we do for vegetables, which is in greenhouses on a constant cycle to always have fresh available, but it's pretty difficult to do that for plants like apple trees, and high-bulk crops like grains, onions, and potatoes, so we don't.

Speaking of potatoes, as a chef, I can tell you that I know when the first crop of the year comes out. The variety and quality of the potatoes will suddenly change when the first harvest of potatoes of the year comes out. The prior year potatoes become very cheap and generally get turned into fries and dried and frozen potato products (like mashed potato mix, shredded hashbrowns, that kind of thing), and the new, locally produced potatoes become available at lower prices. This, oddly enough, kind of sucks, at least in Michigan. The variety of large sized potatoes grown in Michigan, where I'm from, kind of suck. They tend to explode when boiled. The potatoes available in the winter are usually from Idaho and Eastern Oregon and are of a variety that doesn't fall explode so bad, but they do tend to have hollow-core*, a defect that requires an extra step to remove the nastiness at the very center of the potato. The variety grown in Michigan isn't prone to hollow-core, so that's nice, but is prone to explosions, which sucks. Trade-offs, I guess.

* What is hollow-core? you ask. Hollow-core is a defect that happens when potatoes grow really, really fast. The center of the potato forms a hollow cavity lined with potato skin and filled with grossness. This is easily removed if you cut the potato in half while peeling. An extremely similar (the same?) condition can also be caused by some kind of plant disease, in which case the cavity will be filled with rottenness and evil and often makes the whole potato useless. (Keep in mind that restaurants often peel potatoes after boiling, rather than before boiling. It's much, much faster that way. I highly recommend that you do that when making American Fries (aka Home Fries) at home.)

Comment Re: Win the battle, lose the war (Score 1) 81

Anarcho-capitalism isn't really a thing. Or at least, it isn't anarchism. It's essentially end-stage libertarianism. If you want to see what it looks like, Somalia is currently in such a situation. It ends up being less freedom and more feudalism with petty warlords all fighting for dominance. It's not unlike the Crips, Bloods, the Mafia, etc., just with everything instead of just with illegal vices.

This is all to say that this kind of anarchy would not be pleasant. Only teenagers, idiots, and assholes actually want it. Actual anarchism, by the way, is the end-stage of Communism. Totes different things.

Comment Terawatt in space? My ASS! (Score 1) 126

There's no way on (or off) Jupiter's Green Earth that you could ever put a terawatt of anything in space. Every one of those watts would have to be radiated into space somehow. Can you imagine how large the heat sinks would have to be? Keep in mind that radiating heat in a vacuum is about the most inefficient way to get rid of heat that one can think of. On Earth, you can use air and water to move heat around and then dump the air or heat into the environment. In space, you only have radiation, which is basically proportional to exterior surface area and temperature. And, that exterior qualifier is important in space. Using some kind of finned radiator like we use in air or water won't work very well, since most of the heat radiated off will just be re-absorbed by other parts of the radiator. This means that in space, the most efficient (in terms of mass and heat loss) is gigantic, quite thin, highly conductive disc of metal. To distribute the heat across the entire disc, you'd probably embed a grid of heat pipes.

And, then, holy space solar panels, Batman. A terawatt is a LOT of solar panels. You could probably make the solar panels double as radiators, but that would only work if you kept them relatively cool. You're still going to also need a bunch of radiator disc. The only way I think that you get possibly get this to work is to make like a sort of triangular prism type of design. Make one side solar panels and face the sun. Make the other two sides radiators. Keep the computers in the middle, connected to the radiators through heat pipes. And then you'd need a satellite dish sticking out one end, or, preferably, both, along with a smattering of thrusters.

Considering the difficulties in dealing with the and the delay added to communications by being in space (even LEO would be bad; roughly half the time the satellites would be on the other side of the planet.), it would be much, much simpler, and cheaper, to put all of that computing power on the ground, preferably nearer to the Poles than the Equator, and preferably near a large body of water, like a lake or ocean. The Great Lakes region in the US and Canada would be great. Solar power isn't super great around The Great Lakes, but wind power is quite feasible, and the cooling potential is off the hook. I mean, there's cold water everywhere. I would think that, in Europe, the fjords of Norway and Sweden would be pretty ideal. Iceland would be pretty good too, so long as you bring in enough cross-oceanic cables from Europe and Canada. The mere fact that you wouldn't have to launch satellites into orbit along would make Iceland seem like a steal compared to space, even with the cables. Hell, even Antarctica would be cheaper and easier than space, and would have similar ping times.

Comment Re:Silly politcal granstanding all around (Score 4, Insightful) 255

... Trump is a moron elected by a very vocal minority of idiots....

Yeah. I wish that were true. Trump was elected by a majority. And his current support numbers are still around 38%.
https://www.economist.com/inte...

It turns out the number of idiots if really high. And the ones running the country and enforcing the 'laws' include a lot of 'em.

I would much rather go nearly anywhere in Europe.

Comment Re: Great (Score 1) 17

Well considering that cancer is a class of diseases, rather than a disease of and in itself, meaning that one cannot "cure cancer", only cure certain kinds of cancer one at a time, I'd say we're doing pretty well, thank you very much. I mean, we basically cured most types of vaginal, cervical, and anal cancers as well as a number of oral and esophagal cancers in one shot with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re: Quantum computer required? Oh really? (Score 1) 17

This. If I could upvoter you on this site, I'd make a stack of alts and mod you to the moon. The sooner this AI craze dies, the better. Even though I also think that quantum computing will likely remain a niche physics experiment until after I'm dead in fifty years, I support physics research wholeheartedly and desire for more of it. At least that has a hope being awesome. So far, these AIs have really only gotten good at talking people into suicide and annoying all of us mathematicians who know how it works.

Comment Re: Huh? (Score 3, Insightful) 65

Microsoft themselves actually did go after the Texas company nearly a decade ago and won. Why the government didn't prosecute them criminally as well is beyond me.

As far the the scam goes, I think people aren't wrote realizing that the CoA stickers aren't the license to use Windows. Will they activate a copy of Windows? Probably. I have no idea if Microsoft can blacklist blocks of stickers or not. I think what people are missing is that someone has to print up those stickers. This lady just bought a few rolls of those stickers under the table from the printer. But she definitely didn't buy licenses from Microsoft and I don't think, realistically, that she could have thought otherwise. Technically, when she was selling those stickers, it was a type of fraud because she didn't have the Windows licenses to sell, just the stickers, but any ordinary buyer is going to see the sticker and think they're getting a license, when they technically aren't. You don't really need to give out DVDs or other installation media anymore; anyone can get that from Microsoft's website for free.

(I would also like to point out that I think the person I'm replying to probably knows all of paragraph 2 already; I'm just making it explicit.)

Comment Re: Adverts and films? (Score 1) 96

The courts have already addressed this and shot it down. No matter how creative the prompt is, the output of the AI is not eligible for copyright. The prompt itself may be, but only if it's actually creative and not just a rote list of descriptors. And even then, a prompt isn't all that likely to produce the same output every time. The way the LLMs currently work, there's quite a bit of randomness that go into the image generation.

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