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Comment Re: Crank physics (Score 1) 243

> There are a tiny number of scientists with hard evidence that humans were in North America 35000+ years ago

When it comes to evidence of human occupation 35 000 years ago, calling it "hard evidence" is definitly overstating it. There is, however, solid evidence for occupation well before 14 000 BP.

The earliest solid evidence for humans habitation in North America (so far) is from 21 000 - 23 000 years ago in the form of preserved human footprints at White Sands that have now been confidently dated. There are also a few disputed, but potentially promising sites that could indicate human occupation by around 25-26 000 BP.

However, any evidence for very early occupation, say some 30 000+ years ago is only indirect, such possible but ambiguos artifacts of stone and other material, or broken bones that may or may not come from human activity, but where other, natural causes can't really be ruled out. I would not call that hard evidence.

Comment Re:Yay! (Score 1) 17

I've read DPReview before buying my cameras. Their reviews are really thourough and allow buyers to make a well-informed choice. Never once have I been either pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised with how the camera performed. I got exactly what the reviews had infromed me I would get –both the good and the bad.

Comment Re: 'Misleading'? (Score 1) 14

This might add some more clarity on what Nokia did and didn't do:

All telecom equipment relies heavily on global standardization. These standards set specific requirements for any and all such products. Nokia's, as well as anyone else's telecom network components need to be compliant with these standards. If they aren't they would never be able to sell them to any telecom company.

One such standardized requirement is to include interfaces for lawful intercept (i.e. interfaces for enabling police wiretapping) where the standards require them. Nokia has sold network equipment to Russia. The products they have sold have the required lawful intercept interfaces as required by the standards, like any other vendor's would.

Nokia has, however, not provided any components or systems for conducting actual lawful intercepts in Russia – in this case the system called SORM. Nokia probably has such systems of their own, but many western companies are careful about selling them to non-democracies, for obvious reasons. Russia may instead have developed their own lawful intercept system or they simply bought theirs from one of the less picky third party providers of such systems. In any case Nokia had nothing to do with that part.

tl;dr Nokia sold standards compiant telecom network products to Russia, but did not sell them any surveillance system.

Comment Re: Free is right (Score 1) 132

Running data traffic on 4G/5G is far more spectrum efficent than 3G. Old 2G/3G networks are hogging a lot of spectrum resources for the limited data capacity they provide. Reallocating the spectrum occupied by 2G/3G to 4G/5G will enable far connected devices. Also, this is not something AT&T has deciced. 2G and 3G networks are being retired all across the world. It's driven by spectrum regulators. Quite a few countires have already shut down 3G.

Submission + - Amazon Unveils New Server Chip To Compete With Intel's Product (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon Web Services has developed a more powerful version of its own chips to power services for cloud-computing customers, as well as some of AWS’s own programs. AWS Chief Executive Andy Jassy on Tuesday introduced a second-generation chip, called Graviton2, aimed at general-purpose computing tasks. He didn’t specify a release date. The company last year unveiled its first line of Graviton chips, which it said would support new versions of its main EC2 cloud-computing service. Prior to that, Amazon — and other big cloud operators — had almost exclusively used Intel Xeon chips. The company said at the time that the Graviton-backed cloud service would be available at a “significantly lower cost” than existing offerings run on Intel processors.

Comment Re:more than cyber currency (Score 1) 83

Yeah, I was also wondering why everybody seemed to assume that his statement referred to virtual currencies, and bitcoin in particular. Xi's statement about block-chain was far more general than that, and there are plenty of completely currency-unrelated use cases that China could be interesting in.

Comment Re:You're either (Score 1) 196

Broad consumer brands that want to reach large audiences with pretty generic messages are probably the ones most concerned with brand-safe spaces, like softdrinks, shampoo, etc. They want to reach everyone without annoying anyone. I don't really think reddit is a great platform for that type of ads anyway. These advertisers can probably find other, brand-safe platforms where they can reach a wide audience without risk of negative exposure. I don't think cleaning up reddit to please these advertisers is going to make much difference, apart from pissing of the users. There are, however, lots of smaller subreddits that could offer very different value to advertisers – relevance. These are the communities of people dedicated to a specific (niche) interest. People go there for updates on a particular topic or interest. The visitors to these subreddits are far more likely than average to be interested in purchasing products tied to their interest, which would make putting an ad there far more relevant than in other channels. If you sell/make power washers, wouldn't an ad in r/powerwashingporn make a lot of sense? Wouldn't r/photocritique be a pretty good place to advertise your new online photography course? Many of these enthusiast subreddits are also pretty drama- and controversy-free. People may disagree with each other, but they're mostly there to enjoy the stuff they're interested in rather than fighting. To me, the self-segmented nature of subreddits seems like one of the most promising opportunities for the company to make money.

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