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Comment Saw a similar article (Score 4, Interesting) 69

BBC Science has an article where experts ranked 400 jobs by their dementia risk. Those least likely to die from Alzheimer's were taxi drivers and ambulance drivers. The reason behind this seems to be that constant spatial and navigation processing tasks might offer some protection from Alzheimer's.

The authors do have one caveat: While researchers found that taxi and ambulance drivers were less likely to die of Alzheimer's, they were also more likely to die young.

That's an issue because Alzheimer's is a disease that becomes more likely the older you get. If people in those professions aren't living long enough to get Alzheimer's, that could explain some of the results.

"The paper isn't an advert for becoming a taxi driver - unfortunately they're dying earlier" Spiers says. "Importantly, however, the researchers reran their analysis correcting for age and still found a significant effect."

It seems using your brain other than for existence might help stave off mental decline.

Comment Re:Trump cut the funding (Score 5, Insightful) 129

Ever notice how the people on the left calling for Sharia law, would be the first to be thrown off of buildings if it were ever implemented?

Hey dumbass, it's those Red states trying their best to implement Sharia law through forcing the Bible into the classroom (but no other religious texts), displaying the ten commandments in schools (which they ignore), telling women what they can wear, telling women they must have babies, and a whole host of other things they're trying to force down people's throats.

As always, every accusation is a confession with you people.

Comment Re:The US needs to get on board too (Score 2) 84

Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good.

No. The lack of anti-aircraft measures is why middle-range drones are being used so extensively. Ukraine put a lot time and effort into degrading Russian AA, whether radar systems, S-300/400/500, Pantsir, or anything else. The last number I saw was about 1,700 AA of all types damaged or destroyed.

Once AA is reduced, this opens corridors for drones/missiles, which is exactly what Ukraine is doing. Crimea is now essentially an island, with supplies rapidly dwindling and people fleeing while they can. Moscow has three rings of AA to try (and faling) to protect itself. Meanwhile, oil refineries the length and breadth of Russia are going up in flames each week.

Ukraine does have Baba Yaga drones (heavy drones which can carry multiple, large mortars/bombs), and those are being used to take out fortified positions.

Single-use drones are stil highly in use, which is what a middle-range drone is.

Comment Not surprising (Score 2) 328

Almost got plowed into by one of these oversized trucks a few days ago. I was walking in the driving lane between rows and a guy in one of these oversized pickups drove through the parking spots into the lane. He stopped only a few feet from me, then admitted he didn't see me.

Aside from the oversized truck, this is why you don't drive through parking spots.

Comment Re:Justice delayed is justice denied (Score 1) 65

That timeframe is ridiculous. There's no reason why the courts can't operate more efficiently than they do other than that the lawyers and judges have no incentive to move things along.

Tell us you don't know how courts operate without telling us you don't know how courts operate.

The parties have to file the appropriate paperwork and there are specified timeframes when they have to be done. For example, the plaintiff files to start the case, the defendant generally has 20 - 30 days to respond. Then the plaintiff has additional days to respond to the defendant's response. And so on. This doesn't even take into consideration the discovery process. Just getting to the point to start a trial can take up to a year with all the back and forth filings, motions, and so on. In many cases, one or both parties will wait until the last moment to file just under the last possible filing date to drag things out.

Then the court has to schedule the case in between all the other cases they're dealing with. The parties may be ready to go to trial on April 1st, but if the first available slot in the court's docket isn't until June 1st, guess when the trial starts.

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Comment Re:Question (Score 0) 30

I have updates turned off. Every time I open Fx after a shut down, it harasses me. Then, about a minute later, it does it again. Throughout the day it harasses me.

If I tell it never to install updates unless I choose to, don't harass me.

It used to be like that until a year or so ago. Check the box, never be harassed. Now it's incessant.

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