Posts by rdhood

which hardware company has ever been too big to fail?

Re: These "new" iPhones

"Not saying others copied Apple rumors but clearly this began the design process before any bezel-less Android phone shipped."

"Clearly"??? Not to me. You obviously have inside info on ALL of the major manufacturers design processes so that you can make this "CLEAR" conclusion. But, Apple fanboi, let me say this: the bezel-less design is an obvious goal, just as it was for monitors and TVs. OBVIOUS!

Re: "Might have to move a couple more big cities"

"China is making more progress towards environmentaly sound travel than any other country..."

Yep. That is because they are a polluted mess. The same could have been said about the U.S. decades back. It seems the will to make progress is stronger when you can't breath.

Re: Who still uses farenheight for things like this ?

"The Register has to sadly support our old American neighbours. "

While that statement might make sense for any random person from the U.S., any American who is reading this article will generally be very well acquainted with different temperature and measurement systems. In fact, most of us wish the U.S. would just change so that we wouldn't have to learn every formula in two systems.

Re: How it made money is therefore a mystery...

THIS.

If I could get 52 millionaires per year to lend me $1,000,000 for a week each, set up sequentially, then I can continually earn interest on the money like I had a million dollars!

This is the way my credit union is able to offer me a free checking account... they make interest off of my direct deposit and money in the account.

If I can hold onto 1000 contractor's salaries ($2000 per week each) for a week at a time, then I essentially can pull down the interest on $2 million a year.

Re: Transparency...

"OK, everyone can call me naive and shoot me down in flames, but is there any reason why an AI CAN'T tell you why it has made a particular decision?"

In every situation, it can. BUT that does not mean you would understand it. Supposing I have some complex mathematical relationship with some changing natural phenomenon. By the time you get around to asking "but why?", the natural phenomenon that formed part of the input to the decision is gone, never to be reproduced, and the mathematical equation from which we derived the results might take you 4 years of college level mathematics to understand.

YES. AI can tell you why it made the decision. But you will not understand , nor will you be able to check, the answer.

Re: Nuclear Energy -- The Fuel of The Future

Not in this case. Two of those reactors (in Georgia. USA) are on the site of two older reactors. There are no protests nor NIMBY problems with these reactors, or the one in SC. This is a case of bad management, pure and simple, and the thought that they could pass cost overruns to the taxpayers. Anytime a pro-business Public Service Commission (the state government entity that allows the Southern Company, a parent company to Georgia Power, to charge customers instead of investors for power system expansion) starts approving charging the public for cost overruns, it sets up feed back mechanism to milk the taxpayer for BILLIONS extra in costs. Why come in on-time and in-budget when you can take an extra few years and get an extra few billion dollars from the taxpayers of Georgia? Methinks that they got lazy going for the extra billions, and let this one get away from them.

Re: Why are we creating bots and AI to combat fake news?

I'll tell you why: it is like all of the "fact checkers" run by newspapers. "Our impartial fact checker gave that story/quote 4 liar-liar-pants-on-fire"

They want to be able to say "Our impartial AI said that story is fake news".

Further, is a half truth fake or real? Is it fair to say, "illegal immigration brings rich diversity to our country" without saying "but costs us $120 billion dollars a year"? Both are real/true, but one without the other is a half truth.

So each side will produce its own AI to present it's factual side of the story, and anyone who doesn't agree with their impartial AI fake news detector will be wrong.

Re: Make something new

Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever... man that takes me back.

Re: Industrial policy versus science funding

"Science funding, on the other hand, should be broadly spread, because you can't predict the future results. If you can predict it, then the science is done and it turns into engineering. A side effect of Science funding is, of course, a population of creative and skilled scientists and engineers that might later go into profitable careers."

In an ideal world. sure. In the real world, it's not. Gov't money is invariably tied to expectations, and money is spread according to those expectations. Much of the time, you end up getting the science that you expect, with the same projects sucking up vast sums of money because of prevailing attitudes and expectations. And scientists tend to go where the money flows, and tries to give the expected results. A scientist has to eat too, after all.

Re: Guns + ammo, lack of electricity

and speaking of electricity, who is going to man the nuclear reactors? There are several in the state where "The Walking Dead" takes place.. one near Cartersville GA, one at Ga Tech (is that one still active?), one or several at the Savannah River Plant (military), two in south GA, and two more expected to come online in the near future, and one mothballed in the Dawson Forest, in Dawson county.

Re: Sudden crash coming again?

"The whole of the value is based on faith in people you probably can't trust (after all they're actively seeking an unregulated money transfer/launder)"

So, if I don't want the government or my CC company knowing (literally) every single thing I purchase, then I am seeking an unregulated money transfer or money laundering? I can't simply want to keep my business private? And If I want to deal with someone that only takes bitcoin, which of these two categories do I fall into? And if I am in, say, Venezuela, and I wanted to keep ANY wealth while my country is pissing away the economy, then I am money laundering?

You have reduced bitcoin to the realm of criminals, and missed the point entirely.

Re: Some people think it sounds crazy, some don't

That's not as crazy as it sounds. They could be making up press releases to expose who IS actually building one of these things, so they can hack them for the technology.

Re: And we thought BREXIT was bad

ALL U.S. Presidents are a time limited experiment, and we have a Constitution that prevents too much damage by one person. I look at world headlines and wonder if they realize how the U.S. actually works.

The President can't create any laws by himself, can't negotiate/pass any treaties by himself, can't renig on any treaties by himself. The President can sign (or veto) bills into law. He can applie his policies to carrying out the executive branch (example, he can choose to not enforce immigration law or marijuana drug laws), he can appoint ambassadors/judges/ dept heads (including the supreme court justices). He is commander in chief of the armed services, but he cannot declare war. He can create regulations through existing federal government.

Thus, he is not responsible for the economy (though he often gets credit , good or bad), he is not responsible for the price of gas/oil, he is not responsible for the budget (though he can veto it or propose a budget).

He CANNOT build a wall.

He CANNOT deport every illegal immigrant (he can try, but would run out of money).

He CANNOT change the tax code in any way, though he can encourage the IRS to interpret things his way.

... and so on and so forth. So forget the hyperbole. Life will go on.

Re: Pulsed agrilaser in the 40W range

"The best method is get a cat. They don't tend to crap in their own garden, and they are territorial, so generally keep other cats away..."

Not. PBS (here on the left side of the pond) aired a show of a cat population in a small Brit town. "50 felines from the Surrey village of Shamley Green were fitted with GPS collars and 'cat cams'". In viewing the episode, it was discovered that while cats do avoid each other, they end up "sharing" an area by taking shifts. In fact, they discovered that (for the people who had cat doors), other cats come into their homes while the owners are not there and eat the food and share the house!

Thus, getting a cat will not eliminate or keep other cats away, it will simply cause your property to be time shared.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2340714/The-Secret-Life-Cat-What-mischievous-moggies-gets-owners-backs.html#ixzz4OCO7plWc

Setting the speed limit on a road is arbitrary.

The requirement to obey the arbitrarily set speed limit is not.

Re: Yack Yack Yack

I could have written almost the exact same thing about Dahlonega, Ga (or 90% of the U.S.).

"John O Groats has just been enabled for fibre yet most of the communities outside the village itself still cannot get ADSL broadband let alone fibre."

North Georgia College has been enabled for fiber, yet the entire rest of the city/county still can only get ADSL at a rate of less than 6mbps.... and it costs MORE than subscribers in CA/NY/NJ who get a 25mbps-100mbps.

I'm not sure THAT is correct, either. Instantaneous spontaneous disintegration? Not likely. But then, maybe nobody would set aside time to study exploding satellites, so maybe they changed the title of the study without significantly changing the intent.

Re: Consider this

Oh, it is way worse than that. the rest:

" And if we can't lock people up, we want to call (them) out. We want to name and shame through indictments, or sanctions, or public relation campaigns – who is doing this and exactly what they're doing."

Really? Is it the place of the FBI to "send messages", to use the legal system to harass, embarrass and ruin the lives of people that they have decided that they want to lock up, but can't? That is f'n scary. That it came out of the mouth of the man who pushed to NOT indict a connected political candidate who broke rules governing classified information should scare people sh**less.

Re: Can't add USB?

"The don't make sense if the system can take a USB card"

Actually, these make sense if you have a system dated before about 2005-2006 where the firmware/boot process does not recognize a USB drive (even if the system had usb). Most systems after that time frame had the ability to boot/install from usb.

Re: Stars are mostly big burny things right?

"Not to mention that 0.3% dimming every year doesn't at all match phases that have time scales of millions of years."

Exactly. It doesn't match ANYTHING that we know about the physics of stars or their burnout. Someone mentioned the Drake equation, and that the odds of observing a civilization in realtime would be near zero. IMHO, this is no longer true. It could be that these "star dimming" things happen all of the time, but we never before had the computer power or observational equipment to detect them in real time. Think about supernovas... it use to be weeks/months/years before someone noticed a star going supernova. Now, we sometimes detect these things WITHIN HOURS/DAYS. Drake fail.

Re: Is it worth it ?

Indeed. Reading the reg article, one would think that the only folks on board are piloting the ship. In reality, ships need CONSTANT maintenance. The members of the crew that aren't piloting the ship are scrubbing, painting, lubricating, changing filters, breaking ice, yada, yada, yada. There is ALWAYS something to do.

Re: Re. KABOOM

"Is it just me, or does this have a lot to do with E-cigarettes taking away a lot of the business of Mar*bo*ro, Be*s*n & H*dg*s, etc? Sounds like someone did some lobbying.

In fact Li-Ion aren't that dangerous if they are made correctly, "

It's just you. First, there are different kinds of lithium batteries. Go to youtube and look up

"lipo battery fire" or "lithium battery fire" . What you will see is a LOT of energy being released from some reasonably small batteries. Do you really want this happening in the hold of an airplane in which you are flying? I happen to use various lipos in radio controlled vehicles, and the recommendation is to keep them in a metal box during transport in your auto AND home. One serious crash and you dispose of them even if they look okay. Lithium batteries used in electronics is a lot safer, but they still catch fire with (sometimes) disastrous results. Example, google: "electric car burns down home"

There is ample evidence that the danger is real, and not merely lobbying scare tactics.

Re: So-

"I find this quasi-religious attitude that "something is complicated so there is no need for us to do science about it" really weird."

Except that NO ONE IS SAYING THAT. What people are saying is that you don't reconstruct the economy and way of life for 7 billion people based on models that have not been properly hashed out. And when we keep finding new inputs to the climate model, it has NOT been properly hashed out.

Re: eat this

"Anybody with the tools necessary to cook, the patience to look for deals, and a larger budget can eat reasonably well."

That's harder than it sounds for a lot of folks who are on food stamps. Our inner cities in the U.S. are often "food deserts". The often unsavory clientèle (think about those thugs in Baltimore who just burned down their CVS drug store...) makes typical chains NOT want to locate there. So there is no "shopping around", as that would take a car and some travel. When I lived without a car in a large city, I got to know first hand this experience. It goes like this: get on bus, make 1 hour ride to grocery store, get as much as you can take back on the bus, make one hour ride back home. It's quite an eye-opening experience for someone who has always lived less than 8 minutes from a grocery store by car.

The location of grocery stores/supermarkets/farmers markets has a direct impact on what one can do with that $29 in food stamps. It's not just the amount of money, it's the availability and cost of food in your area.