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Comment Re:Hotter nights (Score 1) 115

The overall semi-passive temperature control concept seems like something that deserves a lot more attention than it's gotten. I used to have a town home with no AC, but with a house fan that would blow air up through the attic... sounded like an airliner in the upstairs hallway when we turned it on. It was actually surprisingly effective, but to keep things comfortable in the summer we had to turn the house fan on at the right time in the evening, turn it off at the right time in the morning, open/close downstairs windows to draw in cool air, and then keeping the blinds closed on windows when the sun was on that side of the house.

It's the kind of thing that's annoying for humans to keep track of, but trivial to optimize with software. The hard part would be in having the actuated systems to control the vents, windows, blinds, and fans, and then software to integrate it all. Some of those things exist, but they're expensive so the ROI generally isn't there. A system like yours though basically fully automates the stuff I was doing with the house fan.

Have you ever crunched numbers on the savings? I would bet in terms of cost efficiency a simple system could pay for itself in a couple years, but in terms of energy efficiency I would think you're using at least an order of magnitude less energy than active cooling.

Comment Re:Hotter nights (Score 1) 115

To be fair, we had plenty of that even back in the glory days... but the noise has stayed constant while the signal seems to have dropped off with most topics.

I'm curious, do you think the semi-passive cooling system will still be useful at beginning and end of summer, even if the night get too warm? Savings obviously aren't going to be as attractive as using it all through the summer, but I would hope there are still seasons where the system is worth running.

Comment Rural Electrification (Score 2) 149

We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.

If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?

They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.

If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.

The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to areas where FTTH is entirely reasonable and achievable.

Government almost always sucks at applying broad rules without subtlety at both the median and the far sigmas.

I live in an area where welfare broadband is offered for about $15/mo for about 60Mbps. Frankly I could live with that almost all the time. I do download some massive datasets every few months but my smoothed average is probably 2% of my max.

But those welfare programs exist because society has decided that some Internet is required for participation so there is some responsibility to provide.

The bigger risk is probably dual-use dangers. Ukraine has been using Starlink for terrorist attacks and while Musk has said he cut them off the Russian FM has warned that Russia will take out the Starlink constellation if it continues because apparently it is.

So we don't run fiber and then Starlink goes away, and then what?

There are also ice storms, hurricanes, tornados, wildfires, etc. that can take out landines for months so having a few satellite terminals in an area would be more antifragile.

FCC is seemingly treating this as simple when it's complex.

Comment Re:Isn't capitalism supposed to fix this? (Score 1, Troll) 76

> We have a massive shortage why is nobody stepping up to make more supply?

Look up some stuff instead of just commie ranting.

Apple is testing supply from an up-and-coming DRAM supplier in China. Hynix is working on converting old fabs into a smaller process to create more fast RAM. TSMC is building a fab in Arizona. Samsung is opening a fab in Texas next year.

> the big three can anytime they want drastically increase production within 6 months to a year

Tell me you've never been to a fab without telling me you've never been to a fab.

If they could double their capacity Altman would buy *that* too. At least presume that the greedy capitalists are greedy.

> Capitalism needs a referee and US dumbasses fired the ref.

How, precisely, did they accomplish this coup in China?

Also, why not move to China, Cuba, or North Korea? They have varying degrees of central planning that should take care of your needs. Nobody wants you to be unhappy.

Comment Re:What a benefit! (Score 1) 53

Reenlisting is tougher since you already got your GI Bill and VA Benefits and such.

On a recent talk show a military guy was saying that DoD was instrumental in nationalizing the student loans under Obama.

They knew infinite money for school would jack up the price of school for everybody but unaffordable college is what drives people to the GI Bill and their recruiting was dragging ass after the last time a President lied us into war in the Middle East over made-up claims of weapons of mass destruction (and then promised to leave Iraq and close Gitmo).

Say what you want about TikTok but the kids all know about the scam now. They didn't even bother trying to convince the country this time.

Have we had a story here about the record-short procurement process last month for the new Draft management software?

Comment Re:Is it ragebait, or (Score 1, Insightful) 214

Yes, to expand on your point - just looking at demographics the Democrats tend to skew younger and the Republicans tend to skew older.

Emotional maturity tends to skew older as well, so it offers two possibilities:
1) The results would be the same based on age, not politicial affiliation.
2) People with less maturity tend to want echo chambers, those with emotional control can more easily engage with challenging opinions.

There are other studies that look at gender, mental health status, psych meds, etc based on party that could be tossed into the mix if somebody wants to do real analysis of variance.

It's hardly worth it IMO as the X feed is not designed to help people reach their highest state of enlightenment. Hooking people for ads is inherently limbic hijacking so any data derived from that is going to not reflect the participants' best minds.

Comment Re:Once again (Score 1) 52

The benefit is for key distribution because you know whether that distribution has been intercepted or not.

The rest is more interesting than useful at this point. Clearly someone clever will find new uses in the future ... or at least it would be shocking if this is the end of the line (from a Philosophy of Science perspective).

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