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Comment Re: Universities teaching the 'truth' (Score 1) 34

No cancer does not hit everyone equally. If you smoke you are more likely to be hit by cancer, and if you are over weight you are more likely to be hit by cancer. These two factors are the biggest avoidable ones for cancer.

In the UK at least (and I doubt it is different in any western country) those factors are overwhelmingly prevalent in lower socioeconomic groups. That is the better off you are the less likely you are to be a smoker and the less likely you are to be overweight so the less likely you are to get cancer.

Comment Re:The Sun Could Wreck Our Grid and We're Not Read (Score 0) 51

Not really, the government would in such a scenario tell the AI firms they just got bumped to the back of the queue, because power for the general population is more important. The alternative is the population riots and that will not work out well for those in charge of the AI firms if they kick up a fuss. Especially in the US were the mob will be armed with guns.

Comment Re:Ban infrastructre is like that (Score 2) 51

That is a bad example. The height of the wall was sufficient to stop the site being flooded. What they didn't figure in was the land dropping over one metre in height, so all of a sudden the wall was no longer high enough. The bigger issue was having the backup generators in the basement, which is a dumb idea were ever you happen to be when their failure in a disaster situation has such dire consequences.

Comment Re:US number plates should be hard to read (Score 1) 115

The problem with that argument is that I can point to countless examples were the rest of the world have or are busy adopting superior systems in also sorts of areas that the USA has refused to adopt is busy resisting to the last on what amounts to nothing more than it's foreign so commy.

To keep it on road transport theme, I would mention road signs, roundabouts and emergency sirens as just three examples of the rest of the world using science to improve our lived experience and the USA resisting because it was not invented here.

Comment Re:the only science-based UI? (Score 2) 26

The problem with those sorts of studies is that they can make a computer system less productive *if* you have some experience in using the system. The problem them becomes very quickly *most* users have *some* experience of using the system and it becomes less productive.

For example most sensible people consider that using LaTeX to enter mathematical formulas is wildly more productive than using Word *provided* you have put in the effort required to learn how to use it.

Consequently there is no one best system. The problem is UI studies have a tendency to focus on making systems easy to use for beginners not more productive for those with some experience.

Comment Re:Contradictory statements in the article (Score 1) 115

My read was less that on in a million plates are read incorrectly. Perfectly believable, the Flock cameras are probably reading hundreds of millions of plates a day. The ~â..." error rate is that the number of plates flagged that are wrong, which is partly because a small number of plates are repeatedly being flagged incorrectly.

Two things can simultaneously be correct.

Comment Re:Us number plates are hard to read (Score 1, Funny) 115

Yes but you have to remember that the idea that any other country could have come up with a better standard for number plates goes against the American exceptionalism that the USA is the greatest and best and everything and it's consequential near total refusal to adopt any standard that was "not invented here" even if it is demonstratively superior in every way.

Comment Re:U.S. license plate design is quite bad. (Score 1) 115

The UK have also removed certain characters from [A-Z] [0-9] from our numberplates as they can be too easily confused. So for example you cannot confuse a 1 and I if your numberplates simply don't have I's in them. Same for 8 and B. O and 0 etc. It does reduce the number of possible plates you can produce but with six digits in the plates there are hundreds of millions of possibilities.

IMHO I would also be an idea to include a check character, that would virtually eliminate mistakes in a stroke going forward.

Comment Re: Understand the NYT's and the ex-agent's agenda (Score 2) 126

Yeah that is a load of rubbish. Both the UK and the Soviet Union invaded Persia in WWII, to secure supply routes essential to defeating the Nazi's. Want to blame anyone for that then blame the Germans. After WWII, the Soviets in typically Russian fashion spent a lot of time interfering in Persia to install a communist regime (they did the same thing in Afghanistan). The USA intervened to prevent that happening. If you think the Shahs regime was remotely as bad as the current one you are an imbecile. The total number of people killed or disappeared during the 38 years of the Shahs rule is less than 3000. Contrast that to just the recent protests this year where more than double that are known to have been killed and it is likely more than ten times by the current regime.

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