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Comment Assertion dissonance (Score 2) 112

The actual paper instead of a press release about a paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core...

A 767 operates at Reynold's numbers between 30 and 40 million which is to right side of the curves in this paper where the with/without lines come back together.

Interesting, but the hyperbole is multidimensional.

Comment Re:How do they define "gambling?" (Score 1) 22

Generally, it is gambling if the result is largely based on chance. So, in the misnamed "prediction markets", if you have insider information it is not gambling, and if you don't have insider information it is gambling. Since most people do not have insider information, these sites should largely be considered gambling sites.

Comment This isn't science (Score 2) 41

They are asserting that humans are going to change their ways despite all the evidence to the contrary. There is only one scenario that is anything close to realistic in this report and that is the one labeled "H". The rest of these are wishful thinking. To get the "HL elbow" shown at 2080, humans would have had to have radically changed their ways in 2010 -- we clearly didn't do this. There is a lag of roughly 70 years from the time we change the atmosphere to the point where the earth approaches a new equilibrium. We have done nothing over the last 70 years but push further way from the "1850-1900 equilibrium" ... which already wasn't an equilibrium situation. In order to see the downward trend predicted for "M" that starts in 2100 we would have to cut so far back on emissions in the next four years that by 2100 the atmosphere would be back to 1950 levels. Why would anyone think this was even a possibility?

Comment Re:AT&T morons (Score 1) 123

AT&T does force these transitions in the rest of the country, often without the customer even being aware. Many people who think they still have POTS to central service are really plugged into a box like one of these: https://www.peplink.com/produc... that convert their POTS line to cellular. I have a friend whose last gig at AT&T in Virginia before retirement was trying to stomp out POTS. California is not allowing AT&T to do things other states have allowed. Various states have different rules, like in some states AT&T has to wait for storm damage in some cases to make the switch.

Buildings like New York's 33 Thomas Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... are in every city at various scales. AT&T desperately wants to stop paying taxes on these buildings and sell them, but they can't so long as there are live POTS connections going to these buildings.

Comment Re:Lack of accountability (Score 2) 132

The problem is exactly "accountability", at least the way it has been used as a weapon to make sure that schools that need the money the most do not get it.

Have you not heard of "No Child Left Behind" whose title belies its true purpose to not fund the schools that need the money the most so that more money can be poured into the schools of wealthier suburban enclaves? This law set a goal that all students would be proficient in reading and math, and schools that did not show progress could face penalties. Every financial accountability initiative employed as a weapon against schools since 1979 has had one goal: To NOT send money to the schools that need it the most. How exactly did our politicians and policy makers think this would turn out?

No Child Left Behind was created by republicans as a tool to justify not sending money to poor schools. It was a reaction to states losing in court across the nation and particularly in the south for not funding schools fairly. It defined the justification to continue the unfairness.

But this notion that more "accountability" is the way to fix things has metastasized and lodged itself in the very schools that initially benefitted from this notion. Teachers everywhere are now miserable because the thing that most determines their success in the eye of the accountability troll is something they have absolutely no control over -- the parents of the children in their classroom.

Comment Re:Need a unit that everyone understands (Score 1) 183

Yes, and almost the entire mass of the continents was aggregated in Gondwana which included the South pole. Almost nothing was in the Northern hemisphere, so there was one big cooler very mountainous continent to the South and one giant warm ocean to the North and everything about the weather and wind patterns was different. Throwing out one fact without all the rest of the context isn't useful. It was a very different planet at that time, and the temperate zone was likely inside the Antarctic circle. So, while peak CO2 may have produced mean Earth temperatures as high as 36C (11C higher than today), the position of Gondwana greatly mitigated the impacts of these temperatures on life at that time.

Comment Kilowatts? (Score 1) 57

Beautifully put together video on the Panthalassa site, but the facts buried in it belie key assertions. They have created a gigantic expensive machine to accomplish what a $1000 diesel generator can provide. They are orders of magnitude off in their costs per kilowatt from being the least expensive energy source they purport they will be and I do not see how they are going to close that gap with scaled manufacturing. Giant devices that can survive in the ocean are expensive. They are building a 3D device that effectively makes energy from a 2D moving surface. They are going to quickly hit a size scaling limit where the bigger they go the less their efficiency in device cost versus energy available is going to be. If the current 12m circumference, 46 sqm device gives kilowatts, they are going to need 46,000 sqm device to get megawatts ... that is something three times the size of the Nimitz. They cannot scale up in size to gain a cost savings and they cannot make a bunch of small devices like their current prototype to generate enough power to make it work it. I do not see a cost-effective happy middle between these extremes. Love the engineering just do not see this ever being cost effective.

Comment Not if mastery comes from repetition (Score 1) 192

In many cases students need to not only know something but be fast at getting to the answer in order to progress in their studies. This is especially true with math and science. It is not enough to have a generally correct idea of how algebra works when taking calculus, to succeed at calculus you have to be fast at algebra. You get fast by doing boring homework ... over and over.

My son got an A in high school calculus, but I was suspicious because I never saw the homework coming home. College calculus was a harsh lesson to him that he had not actually learned calculus in high school.

My son was not alone in his experience. This was already happening to 3 in 10 kids a few years ago: https://www.utdanacenter.org/b....

Less homework is just going to make this worse.

Comment Re:It was price (Score 4, Interesting) 62

The price for a working system was high, but AT&T sold systems with just Unix running on them for much less. If I remember correctly every little component was a plus-up (sh, compiler, nroff, etc). The sum of all of the plus-ups to make a useful system was high. But you could buy a system that booted but couldn't do anything for much less and some people did which did not make for happy customers. We got two for our university lab on a 2-for-1 deal on the hardware and a free-to-us university-wide software license. Wasn't a bad deal for us, there were only 3 vendors selling 386 based systems at the time and AT&T was one of them. One of those clunky hard drives did not even last a year and its 3C501 based networking stack was awful.

Comment Overt is what is new (Score 1) 62

Law enforcement agencies have been doing this forever. What is new is that they are not having some contractor buy these tools for them in a way that hides who is using the tool. They have cut out the obfuscatory middleman because they believe that they do not have to do this anymore. For instance: https://www.engadget.com/nypd-...

Not sure if it is good or bad that they feel overt is OK.

Comment So they can design sociopathy in on purpose? (Score 1) 162

It should be well understood by now that religion destroys empathy through deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility, moral disengagement and dehumanization; and replaces empathy with doctrine, ritual and prayer. Prayer gives people the satisfaction of having helped a person when in reality they have not helped at all. Religion needs to be kept as far from AI as possible if we don't want accidental sociopathy to become purposeful sociopathy.

See for instance: https://www.sciencedirect.com/...

Churches are sociopath factories.

Comment Bungled from the beginning (Score 2) 73

The contract to Raytheon bundled operations and new development contracts. Raytheon completely bungled the transition and clearly didn't understand legally what they had committed to. They failed to transition key personnel and lost the SMEs. They won the contract by underbidding what it was going to take to keep the SMEs salary-wise and did not notice that these people did not live in the city where they were planning on doing the work. They couldn't afford to move them from another state to California. They couldn't afford to bring existing employers of the SMEs on as subs, couldn't afford to match salaries. The Air Force should have immediately fired them after the first 3 months in 2010 because there was no way this was going to go well. Before 2010, the operation of these satellites occurred via a limited number of highly secure closets at contractor locations in buildings with satellite dishes on the roof. The people who worked in these closets had all the operational knowledge and they were all lost in the transition. The Air Force allowed this to happen and really encouraged it with the way they wrote the contract in the first place.

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