Posts by jake

Re: Chinese New Year...that area can be sketchy

I lived in the Haight for a couple years in the early 90s (long story). SF was much, much more fit for human beings at that time. Today, all it is fit for is a convenient bit of road to get from Marin to San Mateo (or vice-versa). And they are trying to put the kibosh on THAT by forcing CalTrans to make the through-highways into toll roads.

Re: HHGTTG reference

What? Not the Pak? Shirley you jest!

Re: Curious?

To (attempt) to get this back on topic, the Waymo car in question was a Jaguar i-pace, designed by Ian Stuart Callum CBE FRSE RDI, a Scot.

_{We now return you to the usual gratuitous Yank bashing.}

"Did Daneel have access to a TARDIS?"

No, not yet ... but as with all fiction, you can write that story yourself if you like.

Re: There is a Report on Ecch (Twitter)

"I think that the people of San Francisco are sick and tired of being guinea pigs."

Living in a massive habitrail doesn't help. People aren't meant the live in their millions, cheek by jowl, stacked on top of each other like so much cord wood.

So of course San Francisco is building MORE housing (ostensibly for "the unhoused", who will never be able to afford it), thus packing even more people into a tiny, little 7X7sqmi city. It's getting close to the point of critical mass, and the explosion will make a mess when it happens.

San Francisco is a shithole, and its elected officials seem determined to keep it that way. Keep voting them back in, idiots!

Re: Flexi time

"WTF are elections held on a Tuesday?"

They are not. They are held over a period of time. I received my ballot for the election to be held on March 5th, by mail, last Wednesday (Feb. 7th). I can fill it out and return it several ways between now and the close of polls. Counting of ballots begins at close of polls on Election Day, which is on a Tuesday for historical reasons, as you point out. Not that anyone gives a fuck, they could start counting at High Noon on the following Sunday and I'm sure that only the usual batch of religious whackjobs and other bellyachers would bitch about it.

With that said, employers in California are required to give 2 paid hours off for employees to go to the polls on so-called "election day".

As a side note, last time I renewed my driver's license, it was online.

I am in California, which last time I checked, was still in the USA.

"What is “Mozilla,” a portmanteau between Mosaic and Godzilla?"

In 1998, the Mosaic Communications Corporation released the originally named "Mosaic Netscape", which was called "Mosaic Killer" internally. This internal name morphed into Mozilla. The Godzilla reference and subsequent logo came after the name change.

"Polarisation of politics means that if two experts disagree, it is impossible to consider that they might both be truthful."

It's worse than that ... It's also impossible to consider that they might both be full of shit.

Re: ... quantum computing hardware and software

Last time I checked, AI was still a fundamental science project. Yes there are companies collecting investor money and selling access to supposed "AI" computing, but so far nobody has run a useful computation on these. It's a bit like fusion energy: we know it works in principle but we don't know if we can assemble a device that scales sufficiently to be useful.

Still is, from what I can see.

He is quite Jobsian.

I was immune to Steve's machinations, too.

I'll probably be first up against the wall.

Re: What's next

"Could those chips be used for something else than AI?"

Heaters to keep us all warm during the upcoming AI Winter?

Here's some respect.

A NASA book converted to HTML many moons ago. Including pictures, diagrams, and etc.

https://www.hq.nasa.gov/pao/History/SP-400/contents.htm

Well worth a read, even if you're old enough to remember it while it was happening.

Send a link to any kids in your life. Explain to them that yes, the pictures aren't up to today's quality ... but the first commercial digital camera (the CROMEMCO Cyclops) was still a year or so in the future when the Skylab 4 crew left the key under the mat for the next crew, who sadly never got off the ground.

Re: "dress code"

The last 9-5 I interviewed for (in 1989), I was wearing my racing leathers. When the interviewer queried my choice of "uniform", I pointed out that he had asked me to drive up from Palo Alto to South San Francisco by 10AM ... and had called at 9AM. I knew I could make it on the bike, but there was no way I was driving the Bayshore without armor ... I got the job.

The 9-5 prior to that, I wore the same outfit, for similar reasons. When queried, I responded along the lines of "are you hiring an engineer or a fashion plate?" ... They made me an offer. I counter offered, they hired me at my price point.

"Why do you feel the urge to be distracted or to distract your colleagues?"

How to tell us you've never actually held a job without saying "I've never had a job".

Re: downvoted but no rebuttal

"You know you've hit the nail on the head."

Not this time, sabroni. More like hit the nail squarely on the thumb.

The sports car was never an expense, the childcare and transportation costs were.

Last time I looked it up, here in Sonoma County California the median cost of infant day-care is about $20,000/yr, and pre-school kids about $15,000/yr. That is a very real savings if one or both parents are working out of the house and the kid(s) can stay home.

I'll leave the cost of transportation for two adults going to work, five days per week, as an exercise for the reader.

All of this adds up to significant out-of-pocket expense for a working couple. Unless one or both are working from home.

Bluntly, elsergiovolador is dead wrong.

Re: Problems in the future?

"We don't long for the days of using beads for calculations"

I use an abacus to calculate livestock feed & supplement needs down in the feed barn. Electronic calculators tend to die quite quickly in that environment.

I also still use a sliderule about the place. It's more accurate than guestimating for fencing, fertilizer, seed, roofing, paint, roadbase, DG, working loads on beams and the like.

Re: Problems in the future?

Offices have been around a lot longer than even (electro)mechanical computers. Ask Lloyd's, just as one example.

Also, almost as soon as computers became more than somewhat useful to business, they were accessible from home. The Teletype Model 33 came out in 1963, and was in common(ish) use by top-tier remote mainframe support staff by the late 1960s. Dad had one installed in '67 or thereabouts ... the company even brought a second POTS line into our house for it, their dime. I soon used the same system to access ORVYL, the Stanford timeshare system, with the blessing of Dad's company. (I also later used it to access a new-fangled thingie that DARPA had Stanford and Berkeley et al working on ... but that's another story for another day.)

Re: manually dragged a PDP system

Not just dropped off the flatbed, but bounced up a flight of stairs, only to discover it is to be installed in the basement, and so bounced back down two flights. The heavy goods lift was out of order at the time. After re-setting all the cards (just in case), it was with great trepidation that I tried booting it for the first time. I shouldn't have bothered worrying.

Happened at SLAC in about 1985. Last time I checked, the equipment was still functional and used fairly regularly.

Re: manually dragged a PDP system

"If this was the 1980s, it was very likely it was obsolete and decommissioned anyway."

I could show you PDP kit still in active duty. I have contracts for a couple bits & bobs that supervise, monitor and/or record some rather large and expensive equipment that isn't going to be upgraded any time soon, if ever.

Re: A wasted trip

"and also because the "turn it off an on" is a rarely not worth trying"

Reminds me of an early '80s AI koan ...

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Re: Yep.

"For some time now parents have delegated responsibility for the upbringing of their kids to other people."

But where is it written that this is a good thing, or even legal? Last time I checked, the law says in no uncertain terms that the parent/guardian is responsible for their sprog's actions. The fact that nobody is doing anything about it has nothing to do with the actual law.

Is laziness on the part of the parent a good legal defense? Should it be?

Will another law or laws actually fix the problem, when it's quite clear that the existing laws covering the problem aren't doing any good?

Will a hastily prepared and passed into law cause more problems than expected? (They seemingly always do ... )

Yep.

If parents would parent, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Consider that in this country (USA), a minor is not legally allowed to enter into a contract. Their parent or guardian has to sign it for them. Thus kids having access to Internet pr0n and etc. is squarely on the backs of the parents, who have tacitly allowed it by giving their sprog the tools to easily access it.

And of course the kids WILL access it if they can. Remember when you were that age? Does anyone reading this truly believe kids have changed appreciably in the last couple decades?

No, even though I think it is a parental problem, it doesn't follow that I think that BigMedia should be off the hook ... There is still such a thing as maintaining an attractive nuisance.

"That's not what people were saying when newspapers published comics"

Political cartoons, satire and caricatures of people in the public eye are protected works in civilized countries.

It remains to be seen if a computer generated "porn" image of somebody who may (or may not) be a pop singer is similarly protected. What would happen if the porn industry produced a real, live gal that was close enough in looks to the person in question that it'd fool the casual onlooker? Would this double not be allowed to participate in porn? Would computer generated images of her be allowed?

_{As a side question, has anybody ever actually made a real ruling on the definition of "porn"?}

Re: More laws that will be ignored

"The easiest thing to do is add "moral rights" to copyright"

Whose morals, Kemosabe?