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Comment Re: Hold on to your papers... (Score 1) 173

If you can do it for $2000, you have $998,000 profit.

Yeah, but you have to regard this as a probabilistic effort: when you spend the $2,000, do you have a greater than 0.2% chance of solving the problem? If not, you're throwing your money away. And chances are, you donâ(TM)t know your odds when you start, so then things become really speculative.

Comment âoesignificant political ramificationsâ& (Score 5, Insightful) 48

Apple is not required to obtain U.S. government approval to purchase chips from the companies, but doing so without the administration's support could expose it to significant political ramifications.

This line is really chilling. The fact that it passes without comment shows that we've now gotten used to living in an authoritarian state instead of a democracy. In a country that actually supported free enterprise, a company wouldn't have to worry what the president thinks of their perfectly legal business decisions. Nor would they need to be on the president's good side to run their business as they see fit in the future. âoePolitical ramificationsâ of this sort have no place in a free, non-corrupt society.

Comment Not three to five (Score 4, Informative) 189

These reports always assume a 6 oz. serving of coffee, which isn't how people have drunk it in the U.S. for a long time. A 12 oz. serving of brewed coffee contains 140-240 mg caffeine, so 400 mg/day is actually roughly 1.5 to 3 servings.

Also, as usual, this looks like an observational study, so they can't actually say whether people are healthy because they drink coffee or people drink coffee because they are healthy or some third factor drives both.

Comment Re: They're obsolete. (Score 2) 238

There is no conceivable scenario today in which a modern automatic transmission will be outperformed by a manual.

Well, there is one, but it's been a long time since I needed it. If you get your vehicle semi-stuck in a deeply rutted road (or off-road), with a manual transmission you can often "rock" it free: let out the clutch to start moving forward, push it in to roll back and up the other side, repeat to go forward again, increasing the travel each time until you get up and out of the rut. This can work well when you're stuck in a gravity well without enough friction to pull yourself out or even to build the momentum at the bottom to get yourself to the top. But it's not common to need this, and careful drivers can usually avoid it.

Comment Re: Yes, we should be concerned about these things (Score 4, Insightful) 151

All seems really short sighted. It's like squeezing a balloon... doesn't work unless it's universally applied.

If you think the Pope should refrain from offering moral advice because some people may not follow it, I think you may have misunderstood how the Catholic Church works.

Comment Re: Think of the school children (Score 1) 141

I really don't understand all the moaning and groaning about daylight saving time. People naturally wake up earlier in the summer and later in the winter, and DST is the most straightforward way to adapt our work schedule to that. We get 6 months of better sleep/work alignment in exchange for adjusting our sleep schedule by an hour twice a year. It's a big reward for not much effort, especially considering most of us adjust our sleep schedule ant the start and end of every weekend anyway, i.e., around 100 times a year.

Comment Re: Software Cloning (Score 1) 125

Can it clone proprietary software and turn it into an open source project?

I think the answer is no if you don't have clean access to the proprietary software, e.g., if you decompile or reverse engineer it in violation of a license agreement that you agreed to. That taints the spec, which taints the clean room reimplementation. I think this also applies to leaked software - if you know it's someone's trade secret, but you use it anyway to create a competing product, you can be sued.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Is there majority support for any DST alternative? (nbcsandiego.com) 4

superposed writes: Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts Saturday night in the U.S. This is a perennial cause of complaint in Slashdot, but there may not be majority support for replacing it with either permanent summer time (more light in evenings, less in mornings) or permanent winter time (more light in mornings, less in evenings). This poll will determine if a majority would support either over DST. If votes for D are higher than A, then there is majority support for ending DST and replacing it with the greater of B or C. But if A > D, there is not majority support for a switch to either setting permanently.

Which would you prefer?

A. DST is better than both permanent summer and permanent winter time
B. summer time > DST > winter time
C. winter time > DST > summer time
D. either permanent winter or summer time would be better than DST

Comment Re: Do We Have Quantum Computers For this? (Score 2) 21

Is it still theoretical and prophylactic, or does this stuff exist today and have real world possibility now?

Theoretical and prophylactic are not the same thing. Quantum decryption is indeed still a future threat, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't protect yourself now. Various parties are already using a technique called "harvest now, decrypt later" to record web traffic today that they may be able to decrypt and read with quantum computers later. So using non-quantum-resistant encryption today is as risky as using plain text, just with a delay before the consequences appear.

Comment Re: First Hand Experience? (Score 3, Interesting) 167

I've ridden in one. It was just like riding in any car, but a little disconcerting to have the driver's seat empty while the car did its thing. Maybe a little smoother and more predictable than the average Uber.

Given how many Waymos there are on the road and how little trouble weâ(TM)ve heard about - despite breathless coverage of every incident, - Iâ(TM)d say they seem to be doing better than human drivers.

Comment Re: EVs are nice and all (Score 1) 122

If you want to migrate away from fossil fuels you will need to replace the plastics/hydrocarbons that are in clothing, shoes, tires, food packaging, medical supplies, roads, aircraft, wind turbines, and utility side electrical equipment

This is a fallacy. To halt climate change, we don't need to move away from extracting hyrdrocarbons, just from burning them. It would be a huge step forward to convert hydrocarbons to plastics using renewable electricity, then eventually recycle or bury those plastics. Using fossil hydrocarbons as a feedstock is potentially a zero-emission process, unlike using them as fuels.

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