1. Would you like me to list the people who were taken away by the Republican junta without warrants or due process? The list is rather long and I don't know if Slashdot has the disk capacity for it.

2. Deliberate perversion of evidence for the explicit purpose of damaging a defendent is denying them due process. Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. That is what due process is.

1. There were no fakes, cheap or otherwise, posted by the Biden administration.

2. Unless you are saying that this woman was a top-ranking official in the Biden administration, then it is not "turnabout", it is orchestrated violence against someone who has not wronged you or been involved in any activity you believe (falsely, as it turns out) of having wronged you. Unless you are proposing that any time a Republican insults a Democrat governer, any innocent Republican can be arrested completely at random under a "turnabout seems fair" doctrine, then you don't believe turnabout is fair in the slightest.

You choose your politicians. If you vote for a lizard to prevent the wrong lizard getting in, then you are part of the precipitate, not the solution.

We have too many specialists, creating a total absence of cross-silo communication. The result is not actually advancing it, it is degrading progress and creating localised maxima that the specialists cannot ovecome because they've no understanding outside of their speciality.

We need specialists - and a lot of them - but we need a LOT more generalists than we currently have.

And the loss of a few billion here or there really isn't going to impact the number of specialists as it will be those incapable of complex thought who suffer the most.

Except it isn't. No serious scholar accepts those claims - the text doesn't fit, the plants don't fit, the animals don't fit. The guys who "translated" it are frauds. As, indeed, are you for asserting that they do without any evidence to back up your claims. You are a fraud, you know you are a fraud, and I wish you would apologise and admit to that.

Botanists Arthur Tucker and Rexford Talbert suggested that some plant drawings resemble species from the Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (a 1552 Aztec herbal) and argued for a post-Columbian New World origin. This idea is not widely accepted and is considered speculative because identifying plant drawings is highly subjective. Any large set of fanciful drawings will often produce coincidental resemblances to real plants. Critics point out that almost all proposed Nahuatl transcriptions and correspondences don’t hold up linguistically — the purported readings don’t follow Nahuatl phonology or morphology. Carbon dating places the manuscript to 1408, long before any sustained contact.

Sorry, but Google says you're full of it.

AI cannot discover or innovate, because AI is only capable of looking at pre-existing patterns and the preponderance of pre-existing patterns will always be where people have already done all the real work.

It is my conjecture that specialists using AI will continue becoming worse and worse at their subjects because that is NOT what AI is actually good at.

This is not to say I think AI is useless (although it largely is). I would argue that AI can be used by generalists to find interesting patterns between well-known subjects and to optimise those patterns, but generalists barely exist any more. I'm one of a dying breed and I wouldn't even consider be to be more than average in that area. But all of the real work, even with generalists, has to be from the generalists themselves.

Whilst I would normally dislike "both sides" arguments, here it is actually valid. Politicians are woefully clueless about tech, economics, open-source, security (the UK has this strange idea that you can make encryption easily breakable by only good guys, where of course they're they good guys even when they aren't), etc.

We've been through this many many times and we will have to go through this all again many more times - at least until politicians realise that there's a difference between governing (placing limits on extremes to ensure that all is fair) and power-plays that are blatantly to either boost their re-election finances or simply achieve absolute power.

It's so unimaginable, that was an episode of Thunderbirds Are Go.

It's certainly true that the brain does not exist in isolation, and that any tightly-coupled system essentially acts as a single system.

However, smartphones don't necessarily offload the right stuff from the brain. You ideally want the brain to do the thinking stuff and your smartphone to offload all the mundane stuff that interferes with coherent thinking. This is because of how the brain works.

If you push specific parts of your brain hard, you can extend them by up to 20% in the number of neurons involved (and much more than that in the number of synapses), but only by sacrificing neurons from other functions in the brain.

The ideal is to have the smartphone do the stuff you need to shrink in order to grow the stuff you want to actually utilise, so that your functionality hasn't worsened anywhere but you can still actually become a mega-genius at some tasks.

This is not how smartphones are designed and this is not how smartphones are used. Smartphones are designed stupidly and used stupidly. This is a serious problem, leads to phone addiction, and a net redunction in mental capacity. Now, off with ye, I need to get back to that minesweeper app.

Ummmm, no. It has never been deciphered. It is definitely not any language indigenous to any part of the Americas. It predates Columbus by almsot a century, the materials are European, the drawings do not match any architecture or plantlife in any known part of the world. If you want to claim otherwise, feel free to provide a link.

A larger satellite can have a larger signals collecting area, can have much more sophisticated electronics, can have better shielding against radiation, and (if it uses solar panels) can have substantially larger panels because it'll have the fuel to manoever.

Now, whether or not these particular large satellites are better, proof is in the pudding. Clearly, they're still being idiots about reflectivity. (Yes, you've got to get rid of the heat, and that's best done in a direction that doesn't worsen your altitude, but there's ways to do this that don't interfere with astronomy,)

The good thing is that it seems to be the same language used in the Voynich Manuscript, so hopefully they will be able to decipher it. The problem is, we won't be able to understand them when they do.

1. Lasers don't shine sideways, and laser light doesn't scatter on its own. Test it yourself, get a laser pointer and try to bounce off a building a thousand feet away. You will NOT see the light.

2. If you seriously think that searchlights are lasers, you've problems. Gigs aren't going to use lasers into the sky because that has a very nasty habit of blinding pilots.

3. You're an idiot.

The BBC has never been run by the government but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

British Telecom has never been run by the government (the prior organisation, the GPO, was but BT was not) but had the power to regulate and fine. And used it.

These were public corporations. The BBC still exists as a corporation by right of charter. That is to say, the government has never had any meaningful say in their governance but rather could set down in their charter (just a fancy contract) what a public corporation had to provide and under what general conditions.

But they've never been short of teeth.