Posts by Mephistro 2329 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2007
When "we" automated farming, there was a tampon ready to absorb all or most of that excess workforce, namely factory work and infrastructure construction/maintenance. It wasn't exactly a frictionless process, but it worked, sorta.
This time, with so many jobs being automated simultaneously, there is a good chance that more than 90% of that excess workforce will be unemployed (or severely sub-employed) forever. Which indeed will fuck the world's economy to an extent never seen before, perhaps even to the point of total societal collapse.
But we can count on our governments to take appropriate measures before this happens, can't we?
Sigh...
It has often been said before, but it's worth repeating:
The human operator will take over instantly and competently in an emergency after being subject to either several hours of just watching the road ("highway hypnosis" on steroids) or even worse, using his/her smartphone?
Yeah, like fuck!
'They seem to delight in taking things that work and have few complaints about and decide to 'fix' it.'
In their eyes that compensates several bugs that have been in Office since Office Fucking 97, and remain strong and healthy today. E.g. .csv import functions when the ASCII characters page is not the one used in English.
Use both, glass and aerogel.
You can make the panes with aerogel + a very thin top layer of Gorilla Glass or similar*, which adds structural integrity and gas insulation for a small amount of weight. What's more, using these materials in this way would create a composite material far stronger than the sum of its components. There are prefabricated concrete walls that use a similar principle, sandwiching blocks of styrofoam between thin(-nish) concrete "layers". The results were quite spectacular in terms of resistance and light weight.
And it's easier to remove Martian dust from a glass surface than from an aerogel surface.
* Or sandwich the Aerogel between two thin layers of glass instead.
Edited to add: sorry to all those that have proposed this same thing a few hours ago and a few comments below.
(***blushes***)
Nobody. This is a very obvious solution to the issues caused by miniaturization in big dies. IMHO it's as obvious -at least for chip designers- as "rounded corners" is for mobe designers.
Yeah, I know this is just a joke in the context of ElReg's "mock tabloid" style, but some naif/young/Intel hating readers may not get the joke, so...
And Intel has enough troubles already! ;-D
The point is that THC itself doesn't cause hallucinations by itself, but other components of differentl varieties of cannabis do. Regarding the "Molly" thing you're right, of course. Sorry for the mind fart. Diclaimer: I've tried MDMA twice and the results were very different.
To be frank, back then I considered the possibility that the stuff had been spiced with "something else", but the guy seemed quit legit. When I showed interest in the matter, he gave me a tour of his small home lab, where he kept a "pedrigee book" of the hybrids he was testing. He was even making chimeras from different plants + cannabis!
It was a small setup with about 60 plants, and he probably was spending more in materials and electricity than what he was getting from selling the stuff he wasn't consuming himself. When he told me he was canning the line I commented about, because of a single bad reaction, I considered it as a definite proof that he wasn't a crook, but I might be wrong.
I've been smoking molly now and then (not a "pro" stoner, by far) since I was sixteen, and I only hallucinated once, with some weird weed I obtained from and indoors planting "scientist", that is, a guy who, as a hobby, created his own "cultivars" mixing different varieties to obtain specific results.
It was really funny. I was thinking "my, this shit is too mild, I'm not getting high at all" when suddenly I began hearing a low buzz and some strange music, felt a tingling in the skin of my face and hands and when I looked up to the cloudy night sky, the underside of the clouds semed painted in all the colors of the rainbow. All the experience lasted less than ten minutes, it was really beautiful and left me happy and relaxed for hours.
A few days later, I asked the guy -a friend of a friend- and he explained to me that most molly for sale had been selected to produce high amounts of THC, in detriment of other compounds, some of which were mildly hallucinogenic. He also told me that he was preparing another crop of the same variety, as he had greatly enjoyed the experience as well.
I asked again some two months later and he told me that he had canned the project, as another of the "testers" had suffered a really bad hallucination. Sigh...
"...yet nothing of the opposing side."
To be fair, the comments from Carlos Maza include lots of embedded comments from "the opposing side". Vile stuff, imo.
And there is some nominative determinism at work, as this Steven Crowder seems to be that guy that's always at the front of a linching crowd.
Add to that the myriad of MDS style vulns in most modern microprocessors that allow any miscreant with a VM running in the same processor as your VM to access your data. No computer is totally safe, but having a VM in the cloud with sensitive data is like having a big bullseye painted in your arse!
Yep, this was foreseen by dozens of commentards -including myself- in these forums years ago. I personally explained the (then probable) issues to a few dozens of my customers, and exactly seven of them refused my advice, one of them even telling me that that I was a conspiranoic. I guess I'll be hearing for them in the next few days.
Thanks, Microsoft!
8^)
"...the other naughty thing they are supposed to have been doing: selling stuff to Iran."
The UN sanctions against Iran ended on 16 January 2016, due to an agreement reached between Iran an the UN limiting the developement of Iran's nuclear program, and things were going well until a certain extremely sociopathic "leader of the free world" with far less braincells that hairs in his head (and that's not putting the bar too high) decided to break said treaty and impose sanctions against Iran, again, only this time all by himself. Nowadays, most of the planet, except less than a dozen of shithocountries don't support said sanctions.
If Trump was directly following orders from Putin to isolate the USA from the rest of the world and destroy its economy and global influence, he would be doing precisely what he is doing, but knowing the fecker, we can't totally rule out a mixture of bigotry and incompetence.
In my experience, nylon is a finicky material to use in sustainedly warm environments. No need to go to high temperatures, just about 40 ºC for several hours a day and, depending of the additives used in the nylon parts and the mechanical stresses applied, it either goes soft, goes brittle, suffers permanent deformations or just breaks.
A few years ago I tried to fix a high end HP laptop that was just out of its two years guarantee period. The nylon connectors in the motherboard just disintegrated when trying to open them!
After a bit of research in the relevant forums, I learned about these issues with the nylon connectors. It wasn't clear whether the issue affected all units of this model or only some batches, but lots and lots of users were complainig about these symptoms. The solution offered by HP was a mainboard replacement, worth about half the price of a new model, and with no guarantee the issues wouldn't reappear in another two years. Sigh...
It was my understanding that for the OSs to support updating the microcode in a given computer model, they usually need the help and feedback from the computer maker, at least regarding the motherboard* and the BIOS**, and I read in these same forums a year or so ago that many manufacturers weren't providing that help. Am I in the wrong here?
*note: Including motherboards personalized to the specifications of the computer manufacturer.
**note: Ditto regarding BIOSs and its updates.
"The disconnect between body and vision is at least part of what causes car sickness and the like."
This!. As a corroborating example, I've never got seasick in a boat, even in quite rough waters, but in car trips I was a walking vomarcoiris fountain till the age of ten or so, when I noticed that not reading while the car was moving made the problem vanish. I still suffer this issue occasionally, when I reckon that the boredom is worse than the sickness.
Funny thing: the more interesting my readings are, the higher my probability of getting sick.
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