Posts by imanidiot

Re: Google's minimum viable response

Even more interesting, will location data ONLY be deleted within that radius if they visit the clinic? So someone visiting the bar 2 doors over IS tracked for instance. Then it becomes a simple: Well your location data was deleted so you MUST have visited this clinic!

If it's for going anywhere NEAR said clinic then Google just shot their location tracking in the foot. I declare my home to be a weight loss center! And my job! And my entire local MTB trail! Stop tracking me Google.

With the amount of times I've heard of people losing bagage at CDG, I would expect CDG to just be a giant borg cube of luggage in stead of an airport.

Re: that jerk with the annoying voice and that other bastard who sniffs all day.

If you're in the US I'd argue you're f*&^ed in general. The choice you get is either senile old man who doesn't seem to understand 90% of what he's talking about or a loudmouth orangutan in a suit. Before that it was a (not quite provably but obviously corrupt) career politician with a husband famous for cheating on her while POTUS vs. the same loudmouth orangutan. The more I learn about the US political system and it's current state the more I'd argue the US is pretty much f*(^ed no matter who you vote for. There are no good choices and the US economy WILL crash at some point, taking down a lot of the rest of the world economy with it.

Re: Scheme

But how else are the politicians, high-level civil servants and their cronies going to make a profit?

Re: Genius

Unfortunately it is not. It's also the reason the main domain is now the .com and no longer .co.uk

Re: Careful what you ask for

"The letter reminds me of an anecdote I heard from a friend who used to play SimCity. He built an airport well outside of a city, and later urban sprawl resulted in the city expanding to meet the airport. At this point, complaints were raised from those living near the airport that the airport was causing too much noise pollution and hence should be shut down."

That's just real life too. See just about any major airport worldwide. Amsterdam Schiphol is a prime example, people move in very close to the airport that's been there for decades, then complain about the noise. There's literally been news articles about how there's a lot of housing planned within the noise contours of the airport and their "solution" is to call for reducing the number of flights and noise levels instead of stating "maybe we shouldn't be building there?".

Re: Must do better ...

I've seen that happen. As far as I'm concerned people like that should get blacklisted from priority boarding and assistance until they can prove they actually need it. If there's one thing I can't stand it's asshats taking away time of well-willing people that are already overworked and thus preventing people who actually need it from receiving good service or getting treated like liars and cheats when they can just about manage to walk up a short 10 step staircase every once in a while before needing to sit down again.

To be fair to the old people though, getting INTO the airport and onto the plane often involves standing for hours on end, which they might not be able to do. Getting off the plane is quite often a leisurely stroll to the baggage claim, where they can then sit down, and then a leisurely stroll straight out of the airport without much stopping. Getting from the front door to the plane has never taken me less than 45 minutes and once over 2 hours, getting from the plane out the front door was usually 10 to 15 minutes (excluding waiting for luggage) and never more than 30 even with waiting for luggage.

Re: Long and thin eh?

It's a shame the A380 didn't quite sell enough to allow Airbus to do a Neo/engine upgrade on the 380. It would likely have given them at least a dozen or so more orders (several airlines stated they would have liked a few 380s if it had newer and more economical engines but couldn't make it work as it was).

Re: picking nits

Correction:

More accurately, not needing multi-patterning reduces the number of exposures/masks required.

Because of course proofreading is just so damn hard or something...

Re: Social media is terrible for "Everyone"

That division is not just down to social media, it seems to have been societal trend in many western countries where career politicians took over and will say whatever it takes to keep them in power and in their seat. And thus, every year they have to get edgier and edgier just to "stay relevant" while turning into complete moral vacuums with no opinion or idea of their own, brandishing whatever lobbied buzzword bullshit they get paid for.

Re: Obviously social media is terrible for kids

But it's so easy to keep your 4 year old crotch goblin calm and occupied while you make dinner by just handing them a phone with tictoc or youtube!

Re: Social media is killing us

"insurrection"

Forgive my ignorance but everything I have seen points to what happened being rather overblown by certain media and falling very short of an "insurrection". There was nothing organised about it and bar a very small number of numbskulls the majority of the people there had not clue what they were doing beyond "protesting".

Re: Win 10 is good enough

Once enough companies get fed up with Microsofts antics, and the call for Linux support becomes strong enough, those CAD/CAM suites will "suddenly" be ported to Linux. As someone working in engineering, the call is there, and it's strength is growing. Many in the IT department here (and at our clients) detest the latest flavours of Windows as much as we do and the engineers REALLY don't care as long as the CAD/CAM works and they have their 3D mouse working. The rest is all incidental.

Re: As in the days of the pharoahs

TSMC (and support companies like ASML and Applied Materials) probably have a list of employees that'll be on the first plane or boat away from the island at the first sign of (possible) trouble.

He might well be from one of the larger Chinese cities. If you walk through Beijing, Shenzen or Suzhou you wouldn't know how poor most of China is unless you traveled far away from those areas. But most Chinese never have and never will. It's also good to keep in mind just how big China actually is. It's like saying someone living on the US east coast who's never traveled past Jersey should be aware of the homeless problem in LA. In the US he might know somethings up from at least SOME reporting on the issue, in China people are blind and blinkered because the media simply will not report on the existence of the poverty and mass labour camps.

Re: "communism"

Capitalism is the system now shown in the long term to result in the LEAST amount of overall deaths and the best chance of "upward mobility" of all layers of society.

TRUE communism doesn't exist. True communism CANNOT exist because there will always be authority and there will always be those that TAKE authority if there is no good system to suppress them. Communism doesn't have the means to prevent those in charge from taking the power and authority for themselves. There must always be a "transition period" and once that transitional "government" is in charge there will always be those who take power who will not want to then relinquish it. See Russia, Cuba, China and every other communist experiment ever. Communism has not worked, communism will not work, communism cannot work. It's killed tens if not hundreds of millions every time its been tried and there is absolutely NO excuse to think any further attempt will be different.

Your claims amount to "well if I were in charge" and I can guarantee you that if you TRY to enact your version of "true" communism, you'll either fail or get removed and erased from history by less scrupulous people in very very short order.

The people worked to death in the mines or in he textile industry would before those existed worked themselves to death in the fields of subsistence level farming or worked themselves to death in less organised mines or home textile operations. Capitalism didn't change anything in that. Under communism they would have STILL worked themselves to death in the mines or mills, as "equals" to those working themselves to death in the factories or on the farms because someone has to do those jobs and everyone being equal, they can work themselves to death just fine. Communism wouldn't change that (In fact it probably made it worse).

I suggest you read books like "the gulag archipelago" and read up on how people under every single nominally communist system actually worked and lived. Or better yet talk to people who lived it. It wasn't better (and for some it wasn't worse either). People have been abused and oppressed under every single political system in the world. A somewhat controlled capitalism under a democratic government seems by far to be the most benign form we have until now found.

Capitalism is far from perfect and horrendous things have been done, but to think they wouldn't have happened under your flavour of "communism" or any other sort of system is naive at best.

Tell me you have no idea what went down without actually saying you don't have a clue what went down...

It's hard to resist if you've been deported to a re-education camp. It's hard to resist if the government is clearly taking away the custody of your own children. It's hard to resist if hundreds if not thousands of outside military personnel are carted in to quell any protest with a VERY heavy hand. It's hard to resist if the government implements tracking and societal control systems at an unprecedented scale so that they can squash even the mere hint of subversive thought. The list goes on and on.

Exactly what all the Hong-kongers feared would happen after the handover has happened and since the west just shrugged their shoulders and told them "it's your problem now", there really isn't anything any of them can do anymore. They tried protesting and fighting back and it got them nowhere (or in jail in the middle of nowhere).

Re: The sound of Perseverance

That is not what the commenter is claiming or pretending. He's saying that in those papers, those who made up the statistic that 1 in 5 children is victim to child sexual abuse arrive at that conclusion through several levels of obfuscation. One of which is that those researchers (thus not the poster) lump together "child was spanked" (any form or level thereof) with "child was physically abused" (kicked, beaten, burned, thrown down the stairs, etc) under the single header of "abused". The next layer of obfuscation above then lumps all of those in that "abused" group together with children victim of sexual abuse together and thus the number of 1 in 5 children is more accurately described as "1 in 5 children was either mildly spanked once or violently raped over a period of years". One is not great, the other is all manner of abhorrent.

Re: even more safer to operate?

Chernobyl was a commie design with absolutely no reactor containment that made most western nuclear engineers get an involuntary shiver down their spines if you even mentioned it. Having both a positive void coefficient and a positive temperature coefficient (making it react faster if it got more steam in the core and if the core got hotter) was something that made more sane engineers quickly bin an idea. The commies liked it because it was both very cheap to build and produced lovely, lovely plutonium. And then they did several things to it that were KNOWN to be absolutely terrible to do, but badly trained operators on a night shift got pushed to perform an unfamiliar to them and badly defined test in bad conditions on a hot reactor core. And then it went kaboom. Something no reactor now in operation can do in the same way. Subsequent coverups, denial and mismanagement has made the impact of it far worse than it could have been

Fukushima is another example of bad management and political interference. It would have ended far less badly if they had been allowed to vent reactor pressure earlier, but political dithering and conditions conspired to prevent permission being given. It would never have happened if they had heeded warnings both at time of design and later that putting ALL your backup generators below sea-level is a bad idea. It would have ended less badly had they had external power hookups ready to go instead of having to jury-rig them afterwards, again they were warned of that ahead of time. It's also the absolute extreme worse-case scenario that can happen to a nuclear power plant. A very severe earthquake (which the station survived without issue, followed by a tsunami exceeding expected height by about 100% flooding all backup power generators AND destroying all power connections to the rest of the grid, leaving a nuclear power station with 3 active reactors in total blackout. Final tally is 1 reactor with a full fuel relocation (meltdown), potentially (partially) melted through the bottom of the reactor pressure vessel, 1 reactor with a partial fuel relocation where most evidence points to nearly all fuel still being in the RPV and 1 reactor with a partial meltdown where the core is still largely intact. Outside of the reactor, the earthquake and tsunami killed more people and did more devastation than the incident at the powerplant ever will, even long term. Most of the areas that were (unnecessarily) evacuated are being repopulated, the vast vast majority of contamination outside the plant has been cleaned up to a level far beyond what most countries would require and now things are simply going to take time to figure out how to safely remove the rest of the debris and fuel from the damaged reactors. It's a difficult process but not impossible.

As to the impact of coal plants it's not as if those incidents don't happen, and it's not as if the companies managing those plants don't do their best to shirk responsibility and ignore the risks

Re: much more safer to operate!

yeah, just dump it (after cleaning up all the other radio-nucleides, leaving only tritium and extremely low levels of other stuff with non-concerning levels of radioactivity, and after diluting it to levels lower than the radionucleide contamination levels found in most inland waterways in most of the world). The tritium doesn't do a damn thing to humans, the other stuff is so low level it's of no concern. You can literally drink a 2 litre bottle of the diluted "waste" water for the rest of your live and suffer no greater chance of ill effect than if you drank a 2 litre bottle from any other source (arguably less so because the contamination allowed in the waste water is tighter controlled than most bottled water companies bother with. There's a good chance there's more hazardous materials in your local drinking water supply!

Re: Opaque

Are NuScale and other SMR buildings doing the cherry picking to fit the narrative, or are the authors of the article making the claims? Because I get a strong "nuclear energy is bad hhmmmm'kay. Don't do SMRs hhmmm'kay. SMRs are bad hmm'kay" vibe from it.

The main idea behind SMRs is that putting in the smaller scale (and uniform) units will be easier in terms of licensing, operating and eventual disposal (since the main idea behind most SMRs is that you just plug up the ports on the RPV and bury the whole thing as a monolithic unit) over large scale BWR or PWR reactors that often take so long to build that even if you build a 4 reactor unit, by the time the first one or 2 are done, enough progress and "lessons learned" our found to require redesign of a lot of reactor systems for the next units to be built. This makes ongoing regulatory compliance an even bigger ball-ache on large reactors as no 2 units in the world are exactly the same, even if built by the same contractor to the same design. SMRs should theoretically be able to be built faster and to a more constant design, making sharing lessons learned between reactor units and operator training a lot easier too.

If building a large (Gigawatt scale) reactor was easier and cheaper then they would probably win out over SMRs, but rightly or wrongly they're surrounded by so many mountains of bureaucratic paperwork and red tape there's few countries actively working to build new ones.

Re: Would ground/plane based laser be effective ?

"as even though their individual kinetic energy might seem low, there will be a LOT of them:

at 30km/s the kinetic energy of small metal fragments is nothing to sneeze at either. Heck, things as small as paint chips are a hazard (a much smaller one, but still)