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Comment Re: What about the trees that fall over? (Score 2) 59

It's impressive to see the amount of damage humans have done to out natural environment.
Fortunately, others have demonstrated that "rewilding" is possible without a great effort. All you need to do is stop clearing and burning and let nature do the rewilding. When you consider that 70% of cleared land is used to support industrial meat production, a logical first step would be to let this land recover. There would be less meat but that is a good thing for human health as well as the environment.

Comment Re:Books (Score 1) 202

Books are the product of intelligent humans.
When you read a book you benefit from their intelligence.
Books themselves are not intelligent in the same sense that people are intelligent. They are static representations of the intelligent thoughts of people but they are not intelligent. Just as AI is not intelligent. AI just parrots random stuff it reads on the internet. Sometimes the AI output reproduces the intelligent thoughts of humans but there is no ability for independent intelligent thought.

Submission + - For Algorithms, a Little Memory Outweighs a Lot of Time (quantamagazine.org)

mspohr writes: Time and memory (also called space) are the two most fundamental resources in computation: Every algorithm takes some time to run, and requires some space to store data while it’s running. Until now, the only known algorithms for accomplishing certain tasks required an amount of space roughly proportional to their runtime, and researchers had long assumed there’s no way to do better. Williams’ proof established a mathematical procedure for transforming any algorithm — no matter what it does — into a form that uses much less space.
One of the most important classes goes by the humble name “P.” Roughly speaking, it encompasses all problems that can be solved in a reasonable amount of time. An analogous complexity class for space is dubbed “PSPACE.”

The relationship between these two classes is one of the central questions of complexity theory. Every problem in P is also in PSPACE, because fast algorithms just don’t have enough time to fill up much space in a computer’s memory. If the reverse statement were also true, the two classes would be equivalent: Space and time would have comparable computational power. But complexity theorists suspect that PSPACE is a much larger class, containing many problems that aren’t in P. In other words, they believe that space is a far more powerful computational resource than time. This belief stems from the fact that algorithms can use the same small chunk of memory over and over, while time isn’t as forgiving — once it passes, you can’t get it back.

Comment Re:Taxes are backward (Score 1) 192

The government knows what you earned and has deducted from the W-2 information that employers are required to submit.
For the vast majority of people that is all of their income.
Most people take the standard deduction which since they don't have a lot of deductions.
It's simple to calculate payments and refunds from this. Many other countries already do this.
The US tax code is intentionally complicated because of all of the special loopholes put in by bribed politicians to cater to the rich. Most people aren't eligible for these.
Taxes are simple for most people. No need for special tax software.

Comment I was wondering how they communicated... (Score 1) 245

"Early analysis from Russian military bloggers on Telegram indicates that the drones communicated back to their Ukrainian handlers via Russian mobile networks using a simple modem that’s connected to a Raspberry Pi-style board."

The Ardupilot software has a few advantages for this use:
"The software can connect to a DIY drone, pull up a map of the area they’re in that’s connected to GPS, and tell the drone to take off, fly around, and land. A drone pilot can use ArduFlight to create a series of waypoints that a drone will fly along, charting its path as best it can. But even when it is not flying on autopilot (which requires GPS; Russia jams GPS and runs its own proprietary system called GLONASS), it has assistive features that are useful.

ArduPilot can handle tasks like stabilizing a drone in the air while the pilot focuses on moving to their next objective. Pilots can switch them into loitering mode, for example, if they need to step away or perform another task, and it has failsafe modes that keep a drone aloft if signal is lost. "

Comment Re:Go Vegan... And Nobody Gets Hurt (Score 2) 85

Fish is healthy.
Meat is not healthy (as shown by literally thousands of studies of health vs. diet)
Humans are "built" to be omnivores. That is, they can eat and survive on both plants and animals.
Pre-agricultural humans hunted meat, fish, insects and plants and survived.
The problem is that meat consumption doesn't scale.
What worked for small bands of hunter gatherers doesn't work for modern humans. As soon as agriculture was developed, land was cleared and burned to raise crops and feed for animals. Over time, most of the deciduous forest in the world was cleared for agriculture (70% of plant crops go to feed industrial meat production). This released vast quantities of CO2 and prevented future uptake and storage of CO2.
So today we find ourselves in a world denuded of forest carbon storage and vast herds of methane emitting cattle. This is not sustainable and is one of the reasons we are being burned up by climate change.

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