How common of a name is Soham Parekh in India?

At one time I was in a tech group with three Mike Johnsons. Assuredly different people, though slightly confusing.

But I don't really feel sorry for these startups going for global minimum wage and getting burned.

Hire an American named Steve from Akron and you'll be less likely to be scammed.

Probably depends on its characteristics.

He had quite an amusing series of papers popping the bubbles of all the 'debunkers'.

He never proved what it was but he sure proved many things that it wasn't, as claimed by ThE eXpErTs.

Midwit scientists abhor an unknown and run to bad ideas like a safety blanket.

FWIW his grad student at the time had the better ideas, involving relative motion of solar systems within the Galactic Plane. His models were the best fit for the available data.

CD players were standard until 2019, when luxury brands started to phase them out.

The last manufacturer to have them standard was Subaru, through 2023.

You must be a lessee?

My truck never had a CD player. I replaced the head unit with a cassette player with a $30 Walmart bluetooth unit a few years ago, and it's legit the fastest bluetooth connection I own. About a second after it gets power it's linked to the phone.

It's good to own multiple paid-for vehicles.

ThriftBooks has great deals on DVD's and CD's.

The way they used the "Crowdstrike Outage" to hide crimes was to reboot into a WinPE environment and 'do recovery' while wiping evidence.

I haven't used a Mac in a while but it used to be booting from external media was easy.

I can imagine ways to require keys from secure boot and hardware to decrypt the main drive but I haven't seen those deployed myself.

So, reboot from external, copy data, reboot normally.

Somebody can tell me if Apple already provides a way to avoid this.

We don't have Patriots or THAAD near most US cities.

Our role, per DC, is to pay for the defense of other countries, not our own.

If Trump were worried about China he wouldn't have renewed the visas of 300,000 Chinese students in the past week or so.

China hardly has the money, population, or inclination to go to war. They do have the "excess male problem" but their population crash due to OCPF is so large they need them all to keep the economy running.

But the hypersonics are a good deterrent to war-mad nations where the legislators are all bought off by their military industry.

Depends on your jurisdiction.

The New Hampshire Constitution guarantees that the only purpose of prison is reform.

I know, in some self-proclaimed "Christian" states they love to talk about gay rape as a purpose of prison.

Those are psychopaths, Donnie.

"Oh, you're in Dallas, what part? That's very interesting. I'll be there next month - what's a good restaurant there that you like? I always like to ask locals where to eat when I'm visiting get the real scoop."

The North Koreans get tripped up and stammer something irrelevant. Buh-bye, stop wasting our time.

The Feds took down one instance of the racket. It's like busting Epstein and Diddy but not the other twelve.

> Why are we struggling to do now what we once achieved decades ago with far more complexity and far less technology?

"Everybody is stupid and lazy now" isn't the most parsimonious explanation.

Especially from the Gulf of Tonkin/MK Ultra era.

To add to what you said there wasn't a bright line between the Apollo Program and the ICBM program.

Though SpaceX is being funded to build a war-fighting duplicate of Starlink and a weapons-deployment copy of Starship for the Air Force.

Whether or not Armstrong walked on a moon or a set at Elgin Air Force Base wasn't important to the ICBM program, just to TV and politicians. And he refused any TV interviews for decades.

Most of the colleges used to have pubs on campus before the drinking age was raised to 21.

Beer and wine only. Students and faculty frequently had fraternity and lively debates.

Now states take federal highway dollars in exchange for enforcing the 21 age so most drinking occurs in fraternity basements and dorm rooms and it"s often the hardest cheapest booze available leading to alcohol poisoning and death.

So, yeah, states knowingly trade student lives for asphalt subsidies. It's horrendous and that's even if you ignore the absurdity of having an adult with lesser legal rights.

They won't raise everything to 25 because they want what would otherwise be called child soldiers. So they make mental abstractions and kids die. It's crazy.

The research is actually pretty good but that's now "biohacking" and 95% of physicians will refuse to engage in it because it's bad for the business model and they're afraid of lawsuits if they use their own judgment. "Standard of Care" is the new medical tyranny.

Maximum effort should be placed on upsetting that business model so that the research can flourish and get out to clinic.

Part of this is that retirees who die quickly help extend the inevitable collapse of the Social Security system.

I was surprised but high Medicare expenses for a few years is cheaper than long-lived healthy seniors.

It's morally abhorrent but the government people don't seem to have problems with this kind of strategy.

To be fair, you can't work from 22-62 and then live on the dole on the golf course from 62-120 and expect that system to still exist.

Something's gotta give.

> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change

Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:

Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?

Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.

I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total devastation.

Is there anything better for TTS, STT, and translation?

Problem I recently worked on:

Here is 20,000 hours of audio. Make it queryable.

Back in the 90's when I was doing some grad classes in Information Retrieval this would have been considered nearly insurmountable.

On the other hand I had 16MB then, now this takes 128GB of RAM.

That's mostly Python being obscene with RAM.

You need to invent propellentless drives, either solar or zero-point first so you can afford the Delta-V necessary to afford this.

And it's actually the small, fast, difficult pieces that ought to be addressed first in terms of risk but that blows the costs out of the realm of possibility. At least with chemical propellant.

I briefly glanced at a video that was about some hobbyists who find abandoned and commercially unreliable satellites and contact them and spend some time reverse engineering the protocols to toy around (if and when they are responding).

I didn't go too deep into it as I ain't that kinda time but whether or not this satellite ia such a case it's something for radio astronomers to keep in mind.

Deorbit burns seem to be the reliable off switch.