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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every state is going to write different laws. Define an interface for "state mandated user metadata" and put this back on the states to provide their implementations of this interface. It is a mistake to create anything that hints at what you think might be compliant. The state should be providing the code that satisfies this law and all of the deployment infrastructure required to get this code into the operating system publishing streams that they want to intervene in. There is still the giant disconnect between the OS and the browser that they will have to work through next. No current browser provides APIs for operating system user metadata ,,, AND THIS IS BY DESIGN, This is a deliberate privacy and security constraint enforced across all major browsers. The state is essentially mandating the piercing of this security veil ... or they will as soon as they figure out that having the OS aware of the user's age does nothing for their intended use cases.

In the 1980's one of the things that came out of the changes Demming brought to the U.S. auto industry under the quality improvement efforts at that time was a reduction in part count. Back then, dealers made all of their money at the time of the car sale. Today cars are sold at little to negative profit so that the dealers can make money in many other irritating ways. So, your car has a different board for controlling the passenger window on the left and right and crazy unnecessarily different parts like that. The goal is to make it not profitable for an aftermarket vendor like AutoZone to carry all of these part and thereby create a dealership monopoly. They also change these parts across model years to further fragment the market. My wife's car has 5 circuit boards scattered around her tailgate that are all related to the opening and closing of the tailgate.

Their insane current focus on "branding" over U/X is a perfect example of "deep organizational dysfunction". The people in charge are focused on the wrong things and it shows. The "Windows App" which is their replacement for Remote Desktop ... which was their replacement for Remote Desktop :/ (yes there are 2) is a perfect example of this insanity.

It would make far more sense for the state to require consumer devices to support an Always-VPN mode and then the state supply a "Family VPN" that parents can opt into for free. Then the state makes providing adult content via the state's "Family VPN" against the law. Then all the adult content providers have to do blacklist some well-known IPs. Many consumer devices already support this mode, all common operating systems can already be configured this way. This doesn't require a fundamental change to any OS, just configuration.

The cost for lab-grown beef has dropped from a ridiculous 1,000,000X to 8X that of farm beef. It is not that no one wants to eat it, it is that no one wants to eat it at the current prices. The price needs to be less, not more than farm beef. The price curve is falling fast enough that farm producers are trying to get protectionist, but with modern shipping capabilities, only one state has to allow this for it to be everywhere if it is cheap enough.

14 years, with the option to renew for one additional 14year term IF the author was still alive at the end of the first term.

The relative cost of distribution has gone nothing but down since the Copyright Act of 1790, yet the copyright term has always increased to the current ridiculous life of the author + 70 years. Seriously WTF?

So Stallman is right. The law we have today is what Disney and friends corruptly paid our Congress critters to enact, and does not reflect what the will of the citizens -- which it if we were an actual democracy. The current law is the product of abject corruption and should be ignored. Everything produced before 1998 should be free of DRM and widely available.

Yeah, he certainly isn't going to get an attorney to work on contingency after this. He should have filed the suit, not thrown a temper tantrum that harmed the company we an executive for. Now an attorney is going to cost him more than he is ever likely to get if he won and that is a big big IF at this point.

Sure desalinization costs 10X to produce. But the same distribution overhead applies regardless of the source which is $1.20 to $3.00 per 1000 gallons. So even if your ground water costs $0.50/1,000 to obtain your household at the tap cost is $1.40 to $3.20. Compare that to $3.75 per 1000 gallons for desalination and your at-the-tap cost is $4.95 to $6.75 ... so 3X to 2X, not 10X and the more costly the infrastructure, the less the impact. The golf courses of Cabo San Lucas are watered with desalinated water ... it just cannot be that egregiously expensive. A lot of municipal well water in Florida is desalinated because of saltwater intrusion into the aquifer.