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Comment Criminal conspiracy to defraud (Score 1) 43

Taxpayers gave ATT literally hundreds of billions of dollars to build out last mile high speed internet. Actually, this goes back so far that SBC and even Pacific Bell were receiving this money here in California. Pacific Bell once promised all subscribers would be able to get ADSL by the year 2000!

ATT (and others, but ATT is the single largest beneficiary) handed this money out to shareholders and executives instead of delivering that access. These phone lines they are trying to shut down now are among those which they promised to deliver high speed internet access to, then never did.

If ATT were a person, we'd have thrown it in prison for decades.

The solution to the ATT problems here in California is the same as the solution to the PGE problem: Nationalization. Both corporations are frauds right on their faces; they take the money they're handed, but they don't meet any of their obligations. There is literally no way in which they are doing what they say they are doing. Why is fraud bad for me, but great for AT&T?

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 1) 39

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

Comment Re: Investing = Polymarket betting (Score 1) 111

I've seen some people who claim to know what they are talking about say that the thermal emissivity scales by the fourth power, so the hotter you let your satellite run, it scales considerably.

I'm not a physicist, but that would make sense -- the hotter you are, not only do you emit more light, you also emit a broader spectrum. If that wasn't the case, I think the sun could be infinitely hot and would only emit infrared. Or to put it another way, the more thermal energy you have in a system, the more it wants to dissipate. Ties into the second law of thermodynamics.

Maybe, but the problem is that the electronics have to run at those temperatures and not have solder joints start popping, or other fun failures.

Comment Re:That's a problem (Score 1) 119

My guess? I doubt it saw or recognized the intent of the hand gesture, but it almost certainly recognized the flashing red. I assume the "thought" process was "well, nobody else is going. We all stopped at roughly the same time. Yeehaw." but who knows. Doesn't Tesla have some sort of "playback" feature where it can show you what it saw? Or is that only a real-time view?

As far as I know, it is just real-time. And it didn't even slow down at the flashing red light. So either it recognized that someone was waving it on or it didn't see the flashing light at all.

Comment Re:Linux vs. BSD ex-macOS/Android/ioT/Chromebook? (Score 1) 62

All those datacentres around the globe powering Google, Meta, Amazon & AWS, Azure, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cloudflare; rack upon rack stuffed with servers consuming all the CPU, GPU, storage and memory the world can make... and they're (mostly) running Linux. Feels like they should be counted too.

I *think* that number actually is counting them, though it's hard to be certain. I'm pretty sure servers are outnumbered by PCs by a large margin.

Comment Re: Having your cake and eating it too (Score 1) 31

The argument is over the MRED desire to list internally on their *private* network of local agents (and via Compass listings) before making it public on Zillow.

MRED want to give their member agents a chance to sell the property first, before opening it up to the general public via Zillow. Compass lists properties publicly -but with a paywall ("like what you see? pay us to get the full details!")

Zillow wants to have the same (day 1 full info) access as the MRED (and Compass) members -or else Zillow won't carry the listing at all.

Comment Re:That's a problem (Score 1) 119

If the sensor suite is capable of detecting water (which I have no idea what sensors they even have on them, nor their capabilities) I assume it's a relatively easy fix.

Cameras and LIDAR. I am not a self-driving car engineer, but from what I understand, it seems likely that it is possible to detect water with even just cameras, at least under the right circumstances, and with cameras plus LIDAR under a lot more circumstances. But doing so would require proper training data; it's not like there's a "Ooh, that's water" recognizer built into the hardware or whatever.

More to the point, they would have to train it how to recognize that some particular sensor return pattern (e.g. zero LIDAR reflections off the ground) is a problem, and do so in a way that doesn't over-correct for flooded potholes, an inch of water in the street, etc. Presumably, detecting water is the easy part; detecting the depth of water is the hard part unless you know exactly how high the curbs are.

I'm a little spooked when I see Tesla FSD beta demos where the car plows right on ahead through slightly flooded streets as though there's nothing there. It makes me wonder whether it saw it and ignored it or just didn't see it. It's the same feeling I got this morning when someone was signaling me to go ahead at a flashing red light and FSD beta (12.6.4) went right on ahead. I wonder if it somehow saw the hand gestures, or if it just didn't see the flashing red light at all.

That's what makes all this stuff fun.

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