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Comment Unintended combination of stupid laws? (Score 4, Interesting) 210

So... now no one from Australia under the age of 21 is allowed in the US?

But, that aside, what does this even mean? Like, putting aside that it's a terrible idea, functionally, how would you do this? The *idea* of the law (so much as there is one) seems to assume that the number of social media accounts per platform that a person has is exactly one. Not zero, and not several. This is false. And how do they want it delivered? Just a link to your public profile? A download of all of your activity for five years? Your username and password? The first seems pointless, the rest seem terrible.

Comment How unique and immutable is a face? (Score 1) 81

I seem to recall an issue in... South Korea? where they were becoming a popular destination for plastic surgery medical tourism, and they faced a problem where people would fly in, get facial surgery, and then have problems leaving because their face no longer looked like their passport. Doctors started giving their patients certificates explaining that they'd had facial surgery. The certificates carried no legal weight, but did help people explain things to officials.

I feel like facial recognition based passports would probably make this worse.

Comment Re:If it's done well... (Score 1) 117

Honestly, I might not even mind this... if it were easy to switch between accounts on most devices. On a PC, it's not super hard to log out and log back in as a different user, especially if you have a decent password manager. Mostly the same on a phone. But on a TV, it's a pain. Sure it's easy to switch between profiles on a single account, but switching to a different *account* on a TV is annoying at best.

Comment Re:Please do. I no longer have the car(s). (Score 2) 78

Different people have different experiences. I'm in the US, and I get approximately 40 calls *per day*. I'm pretty sure I'm an outlier.

Most of them are trying to sell me final expense insurance plans. Their script is "I'm calling to let you know about final expense insurance plans that have recently been authorized in your area that can cover up to 100% of your funeral, burial, and cremation costs."

Some are trying to sell me supplemental medicare. "I want to talk to you about new low-cost supplemental medicare coverage. I believe you have medicare parts A and B, right?" (I do not)

Sometimes it will be a blatant scam. "This is amazon customer service calling to verify that you have purchased a macbook pro for $950" (I forget the exact wording on that one) Sometimes I tell them that yes, I absolutely made that purchase. That makes them angry and they start cussing at me. Indian telephone scammers have brought English cussing to an art form. Sometimes I tell them I'm glad they called, I'm from Microsoft tech support and our logs show they may have a virus on their computer.

My phone is basically useless as a phone.

Comment Why just Monday or Friday (Score 1) 28

First off, that guarantees that half of your staff are gone two days out of the week.

Second, if it catches on (which would be great) it introduces new problems... one of the great things about this is that it allows you to simultaneously have a job and also go to businesses that keep what is ironically referred to as "banker's hours", so those businesses will have big spikes of activity on Mondays and Fridays, which isn't efficient or pleasant for anyone.

Third... Wednesdays suck.

I guess it depends in part on your point of view. If a day off is relaxing and lets you return to work rejuvenated, then taking off a mid-week day is great for productivity. If it's disruptive and causes problems when you context-switch, then it'd be better to clump off-days even more, say with a 9-on/5-off schedule, or 20-on/10off.

On the other side of things, this is great if you want to do leisure activities that take more than 2 days, like traveling somewhere kind of far away to do something. It's not so great if you don't have plans, half your friends don't have the same day off, and by the third day of every weekend you're sitting around, bored and listless.

Comment "word processor" (Score 1) 148

"word processor" is such a weird term. My favorite application for applying processes to words is Python.

But my favorite application for creating documents that contain primarily words is... it depends. Notepad++ for doing useful things with text. MS Word for making documents that are pretty. Google docs for making documents that may or may not be pretty, but that I can access from many places and will likely survive and be find-able through multiple computer upgrades and replacements.

Strangely, one of the big advantages of Google Docs (that it's in a browser) is also one of its big disadvantages (it gets lost in a taskbar filled with other browser windows)

Comment Re:Is this the nuclear salt water engine? (Score 1) 145

I also really wish that the article had more detail. "nuclear rocket" could mean a whole lot of things, from nuclear thermal rockets, (probably what they're talking about) to nuclear salt water, to Orion, to... technically, if you put an RTG on a craft with an ion thruster, it's a nuclear powered propulsion system, and both of those are currently fielded, though I can't find a single craft that uses both.

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