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Comment Re:Fantastic! (Score 1) 62

You can get CuriosityStream as an add on channel to Amazon prime for $20/year. It was created by the founder of the Discovery Channel and is basically all documentaries. Some of the stuff is pretty low budget but it seems to be getting better and is usually interesting and educational and reminds me more of the good old days of the Discovery.

Comment No existing coronavirus vaccine to modify (Score 1) 121

It would have been much faster to get a vaccine approved if we had an existing coronavirus vaccine to modify. That's how we get new flu vaccines approved every year. Unfortunately previous efforts to create vaccines for SARS and MERS got the funding rug pulled out from under them when outbreaks for those viruses were controlled. If one of those vaccines had been taken all the way through the approval process we would probably only be looking at months to get a SARS-coV-2 vaccine to market instead of potentially years. That's an area where government funding could have made a big difference by funding vaccines like that despite the lack of market demand.

Comment Re: Go ahead, take down a drone, or just watch clo (Score 1) 82

The other thing I would add is trespassing on private land used for agriculture (which is almost all of the land in this area) in Colorado is a felony, especially with a firearm and it is illegal to shoot from public roads. Not to mention these drones are too high to shoot down with a shotgun and shooting a rifle into the air is absolutely stupid.

Comment Re:Proof of immunization (Score 1) 261

The CDC is recommending anyone vaccinated before 1989 get a second MMR vaccine anyway. Before 1989 the protocol was to only give one round of the vaccine, now it's two. The vaccine is only around 93% effective after one dose and 97% effective after two, so with all these unvaccinated people running around it's probably a good idea to get that second dose.

Comment Re:I wonder... (Score 1) 222

A good portion of coal in North America is from Wyoming now and they have an almost limitless supply of wind there too, we could put the coal right back where we got it from with wind energy! On a more serious note, could we use technology like this to make carbon fiber products? Or carbon nanotubes? Seems a shame to bury basically purified carbon...

Comment Re:Really (Score 1) 569

What about smaller self contained reactors? Once a design for a reactor like that is tested and approved it can be manufactured in volume and deployed without nearly as much cost in terms of construction and approval. It seems like most existing nuclear plants are large, unique, one-off designs that ran up the construction costs and required significant approval costs to prove their design was safe.

Comment Re:software developer tends not to be a stressful. (Score 1) 128

To be fair none of these jobs have much of a career path. Physician assistants and nurses are still going to be PAs and nurses 20 years later. Most of the rest of the jobs listed are doctors of some kind or another so you could argue they are already at the top of their food chain, but even they will have to move into management if they want career advancement. I'm not sure what statisticians do to advance their careers but I'm sure most places they have to get on a management track to move up as well.

Comment Re:Title needed some work. (Score 1) 344

Really. They haven't even succeeding in replacing the one job everyone seems focused on replacing: driving. Almost every heavyweight tech company in the US is throwing money at the problem and the best they can do is a limited roll-out in a completely mapped out part of Phoenix with perfect weather and perfect streets. Sorry guys AI isn't coming for anyone's job real soon.

Comment Re:SAT & ACT don't measure competency (Score 1) 180

No matter what criteria colleges use, parents with means are going to do everything they can to see their kids succeed, there is just no way to level the playing field. In a way a standardized test is probably the most fair, I just bought 3 of the top rated ACT prep books for one of my kids off of Amazon for less than $60. That's at least doable for lower income families If colleges start looking at other factors like extracurricular activities and internships and things like that it'll really tilt the playing field in favor of the middle and upper class families, all of those things can come much easier to students of means.

Comment Re:Yeah sorry, no (Score 1) 299

The dead give away should be that the Forest Service is part of the US Department of Agriculture. Our forests represent the largest crop in North America if not the world. That's part of the reason pine beetles are killing a lot of the forests in the western half of the US, because they are not forests at all, they are mono-culture stands of lodge pole pines with all the susceptibility to pests and disease that any other mono-culture crop represents.

Comment Re:Who cares about succinctness .... (Score 1) 165

I used to think this as well but it is not backed up by the data in the study linked to above (read the actual pdf paper). They compare the number of errors per language and the less succinct languages (C, C#, Java etc) actually have fewer errors than the succinct ones like Python and Ruby. In fact Python, which was the most succinct language, had the lowest percentage (79%) of programs that ran without timeout or errors.

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