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Comment Halfnium grenade? (Score 1) 72

In advance, I promise I'm not promoting any conspiracy theories here, this is a sincere question...

There's an old, largely ridiculed idea of the "nuclear hand-grenade", with most references talking about using a particular isomer of Halfnium. The primary objection I've seen to the idea is we have no practical way to "excite" nucleons in any meaningful sense - at least not without gear the size of a particle accelerator. But... This clock appears to be making use of exactly such an effect, just at sub-fissile energy levels.

Is this effectively a disproof of the most common disproof of the "Halfnium grenade"?

Comment Re:data || GTFO (Score 1) 67

In server-grade hardware, sure. And you paid $$$$$ for it.

The earliest "consumer" grade RAID cards, by contrast, were basically just softRAIDs with a built-in IDE controller - And that's still true to a large degree; the "RAID-mode" in your gaming PC's BIOS is still merely offloading the hard work to the CPU.

I'm not claiming Linux' softRAID implementation was or wasn't faster than cheap RAID hardware, but I have no problem believing it could at least be comparable.

Comment Re: DNS is a tyrant's paradise (Score 1) 56

"Anyone I disagree with must be an rsilvergun sockpuppet". That's so broken I'm not even sure what kind of logical fallacy to label it as. Poisoning the well? A variant of Reductio ad Hitlerum? Genetic fallacy by proxy?

It's funny - Thanks to your efforts, I suspect virtually every /.'er knows who rsilvergun is at this point. And I can promise you, the vast majority of us find him far less obnoxious than his stalkers.

Comment Re: Excellent Move (Score 1) 191

It's explicitly fraud, because in sponsoring H1-Bs, a company needs to attest that it's unable to fill open positions with available domestic talent. If they just fired 6000 domestic workers, there are clearly 6000 domestic workers available for those roles.

Granted, it's almost never enforced, which is what most of us in IT have been screaming about for decades.

And I may just need to buy a lottery ticket tonight while dodging flying pigs, because the current administration has managed to hit "stopped o'clock" for the second time!

Comment Re:Not a real physicist then. (Score 2) 187

That's kind of the point of most Malthusian scenarios. No, the population won't really grow exponentially forever - But it will grow exponentially within the availability of any constraining sub-exponential resources (e.g. food or physical space).

What happens when we hit that limit varies, but a common natural pattern is exponential growth followed by population collapse, rinse wash repeat. That's all well and good when we're talking about squirrels or deer; not so pleasant when we're talking about 4B humans starving.

Comment Re:DNS is a tyrant's paradise (Score 5, Interesting) 56

We need companies with some balls to put technophobic politicians in their place. Don't appeal, just maliciously comply: "Okay, we've blocked all of France. Welcome back to the dark ages."

I'm pleasantly surprised to see a rare sane decision from courts who think their word is physical reality, but this shouldn't even have come up in the first place.

Comment But our brand of dog food tastes bad! (Score 1) 50

"The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the television industry."(Emphasis mine).

Wow. Nothing screams confidence quite like platform-X needing to play its own awards show on platform-Y just to get enough eyes to make it worth the effort. So cooked the smoke detector battery already went dead.

"None of y'all watch any of what we're going to talk about tonight, but hey, we have a second-rate comedian hosting, and maybe a band or two if they can get rides from the nursing home! And, uh, one of the regu... uh... recurring Seinfeld cast is in the audience tonight! Your parents couldn't get enough of it!"

Comment Re:Probably due to methodical errors (Score 1) 212

NGL, I'm definitely liberal-leaning, yet I sincerely believed the "pay gap" was 99% explained by reproductive status and a general willingness to negotiate more aggressively for better pay (or similarly, willingness to apply for more aspirational jobs beyond the applicant's qualifications and experience level)>

The former is clearly protected under Title VII, but that doesn't change the physical reality of someone who left the workforce for five years having five years' less experience than their peers. The latter is a much harder social indoctrination (or maybe just a testosterone) problem.

This new study though... Holy shit, that's pretty black-and-white! Barring some non-obvious methodological issues, there's nothing here to argue with. We now have concrete data that even the label "male" or "female" applied to a genderless construct adversely affects perceived value.

Comment Re:Who cares? (Score 1) 280

Finally, a sane voice among the noise! The arguments about "which" time we keep are slowly killing us all from inaction year after year after year. "Perfect is the enemy of good".

I seriously couldn't care less if we go to permanent standard time, permanent DST, or hell, just ditch time zones altogether and go to permanent global UTC. It makes no difference whatsoever whether we wake up at 6am EST, 7am EDT, or 11am UTC, they're all the same damned thing from a biological perspective.

The only approach that isn't perfectly fine is resetting the clocks multiple times each year because some morons can't stand the idea of waking up at "2:30am" even though that's still roughly their local dawn.

Comment Re: Kidneys (Score 0) 69

There's an entire grey-market industry of rich assholes traveling to third world countries for "young blood" transfusions.

Funny thing is, it apparently works and the current study is just one more bit of proof. One quick trip to Ecuador and bam, 70+ year olds get six months of being as healthy as a 30-something again. Hell, I have to admit some mornings I'm tempted to try it myself, though I'm nowhere near wealthy enough to fly halfway around the world every few months.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 163

I'm sorry you're getting downvoted, because I get what you're saying and largely agree (though I love programming and have zero interest in working as a meat proxy / reverse centaur).

The problem here is, you're describing a world where human labor is worthless. And I'm okay with that in the abstract; I harbor no delusions about the "nobility" of work for its own sake. Know who won't be okay with that (labor-cost-savings aside), however? The billionaires with a vested interest in preserving cut-throat capitalism who currently own all the frontier AIs.

Are we on the verge of a post-scarcity society? Maybe. Are the guys dangling that carrot, while building massive survival bunkers as quickly as possible, the same folks who have the most to lose from exactly that? Absolutely. It'd be awfully nice if we could get there without half the human population starving to death in the process.

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