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Comment Re:Cold weather performance? (Score 1) 145

So you save energy by using an electric heater all night to keep a battery warm enough to function at all. I detect a logical problem there.

And if you don't have a charger that you can leave plugged in all night then what? You aren't going anywhere in the morning?

If you can get the car moving in the morning, after a say 30 mile commute, then you park it in the company parking lot, I assume the car will discharge the battery as needed to keep the battery warm. After a 9 hour day sitting in a brisk wind at say -15 C how much charge would that expend? Can you still get home?

By the way, the LFP batteries I looked said -5 C for lowest discharge temperature. Those were not car batteries though.

Comment Re: Maybe programmers aren't quite obsolete (Score 1) 137

A point to the contrary- in the US, you would think that the advent of spreadsheet software would have bad for the accounting field, that jobs would go away and fewer accountants would be needed. The opposite turned out to be true. Accountants gained productivity and because each thing became cheaper to keep track of, we started keeping track of more things. There's a big shortage of accountants now, the profession has not suffered under the technology advancements of the past 50 years.

Comment Re:I kind of wrote off Intel (Score 1) 41

I don't see how you can fire a quarter of your staff and continue to support your products.

Intel's products aren't generating enough revenue, and they're losing money, so they don't have any choice.

Stock BuyBacks killed Intel.

Sure. Stock buybacks are magnifiers. If a CEO does a stock buyback and his strategy is successful, then the leveraged effect makes him look like a genius. But if the plan doesn't work, the leverage works in the opposite direction, and he looks like a fool.

Intel's strategy of designing chips and also running fabs is fundamentally flawed. Fabless AMD is doing well. Fabless Nvidia's market is forty times Intel's.

Intel needs to spin off its fabs.

Comment The thing "progressives" always miss... (Score 2, Insightful) 154

Is on display right here in one posted story.

If you are pushing a message, and claim it's "the SCIENCE", and you are not getting the reception you wish for among the populace and your conclusion is that you need a way to either massage the information or manipulate the way you present it in order to manipulate people into doing what you want, You are NOT "the SCIENCE", you are NOT doing science, and you are going to undermine your credibility and the credibility of all science - you are doing POLITICS and everybody can see it. The manipulation of populations is POLITICAL. Science is APOLITICAL.

We can all go back and forth arguing about "climate change" - we've done it here on Slashdot many many times and no-doubt will do so into the future. This story, however, is less about climate change or science, generally, at all than it is about left-leaning politics and the complete blindness to the concept that by swirling politics and science together and using political techniques to try to manipulate the public, the very people who keep claiming to be the ones embracing science are actually the ones stomping all over the reputation of all sciences in the minds of the masses. I have come to despise this destruction of confidence in science which is being done by all this garbage. Stop claiming to love science while doing everything you could possibly do to undermine the public's confidence in it! People can tell they are being politically manipulated on the climate stuff. Stop it. If you keep this up, you will end up convincing people not to believe in chemistry and physics and think that even those "pure" sciences are actually just politics-in-a-mask.

If you are so certain about climate change, then by all means do your research and publish your results just as would be done in any other field of science, but then you need to let the public do what they will about it, as any other field does. It's NOT a scientific act to try to swing public opinion to accept a conclusion. You never see physicists trying to manipulate public opinion like this. The people involved in this are guilty of a classic error; they think THEIR field is the only field, or the most important field, and that everybody must be made to agree with them because they are the keepers of the sacred knowledge. The hubris is astounding.

Comment Re:It is the way they cancelled it (Score 2) 36

Google announced the phasing out of this service 7 years ago. I'd say we have had plenty of time to make adjustments.

I am NO fan of Google. I don't like their infamy over freezing email accounts and locking people out of their lives, with notoriously bad customer support. It's one reason I don't rely on their services.

But at the same time, the attitude of entitlement in the summary was a bit on the disgusting side. However big Google may be, it is still a profitable business, not a charity, and so it has no obligation to provide us with free services.

Comment Re:In other words.... (Score 4, Insightful) 96

There really isn't much TO say. Neither Nadella nor anyone else at the top has any incentive to keep employees that they don't need. So, they won't. If any of them have compassion as a motivator, they will donate to some charity. But they sure aren't going to keep paying people who they now consider redundant. That's just bad business, as far as they are concerned.

I have been through layoffs a few times over my career, and I have listened to executives say things like "A lot of you are asking "what does this mean for me?" But the most important thing to focus on is "what does this mean for the company?"" As if the people losing their jobs should somehow feel better because the company that just abandoned them will thrive in their absence. Separately I read articles (some right here on slashdot) about how people in positions of leadership undergo a neurological change that robs them of their ability to think from the perspective of those beneath them. This is just more evidence.

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