Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Cold war motivation (Score 1) 78

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.

Comment Re:Older students (Score 1) 35

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.

Comment Re: Older students (Score 1) 35

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.

Comment Models Wrong but Actually Right (Score 1, Informative) 183

> 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.

Comment Speech (Score 1) 236

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.

Comment Re:Time to pick up the toys. (Score 1) 29

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.

Comment Phreaking (Score 1) 29

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.

Comment Re:Uber is a company I'll never use (Score 1) 48

Just last month I was in Boston with family at a huge event and the trip back was 2.2 miles. Most of them waited in a huge line for the train or queued for an Uber.

Two of us walked instead, grabbed some Pho at a takeout place, and got back two minutes after the first Uber arrived.

It wasn't snowing though.

Comment Re:why is finding the leak so difficult? (Score 1) 25

UV dye is actually meant for this - I have some for car air conditioners.

You'd need a way to isolate the module and vaporize it with enough air to leak out and then an ROV with a UV light and a camera.

These are all normal engineering problems except for the ROV.

Do they have an ROV or do they still make astronauts go outside?

It always seemed weird in Star Trek that they didn't have maintbots like on B5.

Slashdot Top Deals

Klein bottle for rent -- inquire within.

Working...