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Comment Re:Probably not as useful. (Score 2) 96

I disagree. The measure of highway utilization for a single vehicle is not just the amount of space it uses (length plus front separation). It's that space multiplied by the amount of time it needs that space. If everyone is supposed to maintain X seconds of separation (I've been told 3) between their vehicle and the one in front, then additional speed won't change the total utilization. Except for one thing: as speed approaches infinity, the portion of utilization that the vehicle length contributes shrinks to zero. Therefore, the faster vehicles travel, the less capacity they use.

Of course, that assumes that everyone drives perfectly, which is the real problem: even something as simple as an unexpected lane change can trigger slow downs in an at-capacity roadway that ripple throughout the following traffic, breaking the flow and potentially causing a cascade down to stop-and-go.

Comment Re: The helium leak (Score 2) 44

You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Diversity in promotions and hiring has lowered standards throughout corporate America as well as in government.

An example: a manufacturing company in the western U.S. needed to replace a mechanical engineer who was leaving. Hiring manager located an excellent candidate, but could not get sign-off to hire, because the candidate was a white male. He was told, “That would hurt our POC metrics.” The departing ME was a south Asian with dark skin, so they counted him as a POC in their ESG reports. After a battle, the manager was able to hire him. True story.

Boeing Corporation has aggressively pursued the hiring of underrepresented minorities, which necessarily has dumbed down what was once the world’s foremost aeronautical engineering company.

NASA same. Whistleblowers and general staff inside the agency have been complaining that the previous leadership was overly focused on racial equity and gender bias training and similar wastes of time. The previous administrator stated that it was NASA’s goal to land “the first woman and the first person of color on the moon”.

Then we could discuss how the FAA has been dumbing down Air Traffic Control. It is rampant.

And no, DEI is not about fairness. It’s about making whites in positions of power feel virtuous.

Comment The helium leak (Score 5, Insightful) 44

A helium leak was reported prior to launch, yet they proceeded with the mission because it was “minor”. Then, it became a major issue and they were forced to scrap the mission. Do I have it right?

The old NASA made occasional mistakes, but they had a culture of must-not-fail; each team had to prove their subsystem was nominal before the mission could proceed. Their dedication was legendary.

Politicization, DEI, and the general decline in American technical standards and work ethic have ruined Boeing and NASA.

Comment Diamond Age (Score 1) 183

Reminds me of one of the conflicts represented in Neal Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" regarding centralization of control, though in that case it was about who is in control when nanotechnology can be used to conjure virtually any physical thing you want. In the here and now, we're talking about how computer technology can be used to conjure virtually any digital thing you want. My 1980s perspective, informed by an age of ownership when your computer was your own, hopes for a time when an AI can run on a home computer and open source can give us the power to use it without someone else's guardrails chaining our choices.

Comment Are there really no PD Asian fonts? (Score 1) 94

I would have thought by now, after 40 years of computerization, that there would be some robust Asian language fonts available in the public domain or perhaps licensed through government agencies to promote their use.

All the way back in the 1980s, I was involved in a Japanese/Chinese/English photo-typesetter project using what I believe were freely available font sets.

Seems like the Japanese game companies should switch to Google or MS fonts. $20K/year in Japan is someone's salary.

Comment Re:maybe AI helped shape the study (Score 1) 80

If agentic AI were involved, given sufficient prompts and naivete on the part of Toner-Rogers, the AI could have performed the registration of the false Corning website on its own and even fooled the human researcher into believing the materials were real. Won't be long before we're all questioning whether the answers we get from our computers are legitimate or a tremendously detailed hallucination conjured to match what we appear to want to see.

Comment The purpose of trigger warnings (Score 5, Insightful) 155

The whole purpose of trigger warnings is to advise people who already know that they have psychological triggers that can cause an uncontrollable cascade of emotions. It's not to keep the queasy from tossing their cookies. It gives empowered individuals (like those with properly diagnosed PTSD) the information they need to use that power.

Comment Re: So adjusting for (Score 0, Offtopic) 124

Despite very credible allegations, Biden was never convicted of raping raping Tara Reade. And his daughter's recollections of him inappropriately showering with her outlasted any statute of limitations. But I see where you're going, there. The rest is a good fit, right down to the weaponized government, for sure. The plot twist is that the real kingpins are behind the scenes, using him as a puppet. It's good villain story line material fresh from real life.

Comment Re:Always online (Score 1) 151

The biggest problem with this approach is that no one part of the ATC system exists on its own. All the pieces communicate with each other in an ancient architecture. You can use this approach to upgrade any one piece, but you can never replace the ancient architecture without a much more invasive and risky transition

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