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Comment The Firefly (Score 1) 47

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Comment "Propping up"? (Score 1) 113

Unclear why one of the traditional routes of population increase in US states - for the last 425+ years in most states, closer to 525 years in what is now California - is deemed to be "propping up" the population. Almost as if there is an agenda and a narrative to declare more recent immigrants as not real citizens or not real people. As opposed to, say, a German family that immigrated to the United States in 1904.

Comment Sure glad the Bell System was destroyed (Score 5, Interesting) 157

In the Old Days(tm), say 1990, electric power companies depended on Bell System wires for the most critical protective relaying applications, and the Bell Operating Companies provided nine 9s reliability with latency approaching the speed of light. Television networks likewise: national distribution in as close to atomic time synchronization as was humanly possible.

Today one is lucky to be able to make a voice call from one medium sized city to another without dropouts, jitter, disconnections, and other digital voice garbage. Latency? Ha ha ha ha. Reliability? Not even funny.

Progress!

Comment Re:The glass was completely empty (Score 2) 34

As first described the Google glasses would have been very useful in industrial environment and for jobs such as railroad locomotive and airliner maintenance - having maintenance instructions automatically overlaying your sight picure based on what you were working on would be a great thing for productivity and safety. Problem is that would have been billions of dollars in development of the hardware and the pattern recognition software alone. Then maintenance documents (drawings, procedures, etc) would have had to be incorporated and the owners of that IP would not have been willing to participate except on an equal contractual footing. So huge upfront costs and no equally huge revenue stream for Google in sight (heh).

That said, the idea that a secretive recluse billionaire who made his money by stealing other people's PII might not realize that ordinary human beings do not care to be under a combination of Superman's x-ray vision and Thiel's tracking database 24/7 is... not surprising.

Comment Plenty of workers (Score 0) 115

I'm looking forward the legions of Slashdotters who will quit their work-from-home coding and data jobs to move to remote rural areas for 40 years and devote themselves to hot, uncomfortable, 60 hour/week physical jobs with the added bonus of up to 5 REM/year of radiation exposure operating nuclear power plants.

Comment Tell us you know nothing of macroeconomics (Score 4, Informative) 153

There is no single or even leading theory of macroeconomics, but there are several strong schools and some agreed upon basics and underlying mechanisms. Whenever a technology person starts fulminating about "national debt" and "our national debt will bankrupt us", with us being the United States, it tells me they know nothing of macroeconomics, the leading theories of national debt, or the role of the US national debt in light of the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.

tl;dr: technobabble baloney

Comment Re:Sigh (Score 3, Informative) 272

Bosch dishwashers have had the best capability/cost ratio on the US market for 15 years, since Maytag went down the enshittification tube. Everyone who had them recommends them to their friends, and every appliance review site ends up recommending at least one Bosch in their top 3 rating. Mieles are good - I think they are still designed and built by the same team that builds Miele laboratory dishwashers - but they are more expensive and hard to find in most of the US. Based on the reasonable amount of research done the Bosch was an equally reasonable choice - except it turned out the company has started its higher end models down the enshittification tube as well. Hard to know that based on past good experience until it happens.

Comment Very confused article (Score 4, Informative) 98

I realized the linked post about a very complex technology in an article is intended for a general audience but even by that standard it is very confused.

Chip scale atomic clocks have been commercially available for 20 years

https://www.nist.gov/noac/tech...

and continue to improve in accuracy, durability, and reliability. Reading some of the commercial supplier listings to the point just before they stop and say "DOD customers call your sales rep" it appears that there are CSACs designed and qualified to be fired inside artillery shells so I think we can conclude they can be made pretty tough.

I think the article is trying to say that what is needed is an atomic clock that would fit in an aircraft electronics rack that also has the accuracy of a cold atom fountain clock, which is the current NIST/NPL/NRC standard. To which laboratories around the world say, please, bring it on. And all the national labs have been working on such for quite a while, not only NPL.

Comment Re:Guessing ... (Score 2) 244

Brexit was an additional anvil on the pony's back, but the basic problems were not rebuilding the heavy industrial economy into a high-tech industrial economy (the US hasn't been totally successful at this but has done much better than England*) and transferring most of their wealth into the financialization center of the City. The latter is the most devastating long-term: whatever financialization and investment capital run by the 0.5% touches it destroys. And it touched most of England.

[*] yes, I do mean England not the UK. Scotland and Wales have their own problems and of course also suffer when England it damaged, but the worse effects are in English. Northern Ireland was doing OK until Brexit destroyed its value as and import/export coordinator.

Comment UK Online Safety Act (Score 3, Informative) 142

It seems ridiculous and invasive on the face of it but I'm guessing Mozilla's lawyers are looking at the UK Online Safety Act, similar bills introduced into US state legislatures with a non-zero chance of enactment, and talk in the US Congress of repealing Section 230 and telling their executives that the operation of the browser - which by nature does see and pass all the information the user exchanges to/from the rest of the world - could be construed as being an accessory to violation of those laws and upcoming laws. A more extreme version of photosharing sites needing some sort of license to your work to be able to display it.

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