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Comment Re:People will oppose this (Score 1) 51

It's me. I will oppose this. I do not want loud buzzing machines flying around my neighborhood whenever someone feels like a coffee. Neither do the birds at my feeder or the butterflies at my flowers.

I can't find any clips, but there are few scenes in the Amazon series "Upload" depicting *numerous* delivery drones flying all over the place. Many are carrying Amazon boxes and (I think) there are even some Starbucks drones. It's noisy and actually a bit unsettling, though fits with the satirical dystopian tech future of the comedy.

Comment American drone dominance? (Score 1) 51

"We are going to unleash American drone dominance," [U.S.] Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said ...

Over who/what? Presumably he's talking about more drones flying within the U.S., so this, unsurprisingly, literally makes no sense.

... you may get a Starbucks cup of coffee from a drone," Duffy said.

Isn't that already the case. #BaristaSlam (Hah! Joking - joking - baristas.)
More seriously, can't imagine it arriving fresher than getting it at a shop...

Comment Re: seafloor carbon-fiber cannoli (Score 1) 77

Not a problem. You can build your home on the East Coast in a flood zone which is impacted by hurricanes every few years. Then, when your home is destroyed because you didn't want to spend the money to make it hurricane-resistant, you get to pay to rebuild. Not your insurance company, and definitely not the government.

To see why we have "budensome" regulations, look at Boeing jets.

Comment What about other vehicles? (Score 1) 67

Hydrogen does not make a good fuel, tor a tonne of reasons, but nitrogen fuel would be less prone to nasty reactions and fewer problems. Could N6 combustion be controlled at levels suitable for heavy road vehicles or trains?

(Electric trains have their own problems, due to the fact that the junction needs to be poor and the cost of copper is so great that lines need to use far worse conductors to reduce theft.)

Submission + - History is best told as a story of organised crime (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader writes: “We can’t put a date on Doomsday, but by looking at the 5,000 years of [civilisation], we can understand the trajectories we face today – and self-termination is most likely,” says Dr Luke Kemp at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge.
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and could lead to the worst societal collapse yet, he says. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.

Comment Thanks Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Score 1) 48

Reading TFS make me even happier I don't have any Alexa (or other similar) devices - and never will.

The sole exception is my Pixel 5a, but Google Assistant is specifically not enabled and Gemini isn't installed (or selected as the Assistant) -- this sort of thing seems fairly unavoidable with smartphones now, but, thankfully, they can be disabled, for now anyway..

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (7) Well, it's an excellent idea, but it would make the compilers too hard to write.

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