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User: Chalnoth

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  1. Re: One word on Ask Slashdot: Why Are There No Huge Leaps Forward In CPU/GPU Power? · · Score: 1

    There also the point that large technological leaps from current tech are really, really hard. You could potentially improve usage of the same amount of silicon dramatically by switching to asynchronous processing, for example, but that's a very different paradigm. GPU and CPU manufacturers would have to relearn many of the things they have learned over the last few decades when it comes to building a high performance processor. It's just not possible to do that quickly, so if we get major tech changes like that, they'll first appear for small processors that don't need a whole lot of processing power.

  2. The BE-4 engine is in nowhere near the range that is likely required for manned spaceflight to the Moon.

    With the BE-4, the Vulcan rocket is planned to have a max payload to low Earth orbit somewhere in the range of 49,000 kg. The Saturn V rockets which went to the Moon had a payload to low Earth orbit of 140,000kg.

    And even if they think they have a workable plan to get humans to the Moon with far less weight, first flight in 2019 will not mean regular use in 2020.

  3. Re:Ridiculous on Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin To Offer 'Amazon-Like' Moon Delivery By 2020 (geekwire.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It's the three year timeframe that makes it ridiculous.

    I'm not saying anything about who makes the rockets, but rather who pays for the investment. There just aren't private groups who can realistically pay the likely hundreds of billions of dollars that such a project would cost, for essentially zero commercial benefit.

  4. It may be technically possible to get to the Moon in three years, but it would take a truly massive investment to do so. I don't think that private entities exist that could put forward that kind of investment with little chance of return, and Republicans tend to balk at large spending increases unless they're military. I could see Trump wanting this due to his ego, but I don't think he could get congress on his side for this kind of massive endeavor.

  5. Re:Social media? on Social Media Are Driving Americans Insane (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    The fears of conservatives with regard to Obama were based on facts that were entirely fabricated. They weren't based upon anything Obama actually said or did, but were often the result of conservative commentators simply making up horrible things out of whole cloth. Witness the whole birth certificate scandal that lasted for years.

    By contrast, the fears of liberals with regard to Trump are based on Trump's words and actions. If anything, many Liberals have given Trump far more of a benefit of a doubt than he deserves. For example, many believed that Trump would be okay on Transgender rights, and then this happens.

    Trump is a serial liar, but he has always been very honest about his intentions (despite widespread beliefs, this honesty is the norm among politicians). Conservatives were afraid of Obama because they thought he was doing or was going to do things that he never said he'd do and never actually did. Liberals are afraid of Trump because he's doing exactly what he said he would do.

  6. Re:What is the benefit? on Google Says Almost Every Recent 'Trusted' DMCA Notices Were Bogus (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 1

    If infringing content is usually hidden behind robots.txt blocks, then this makes a fair amount of sense.

    I suspect it would mean that in order to find the infringing content, the people making the takedown requests are likely violating the robots.txt. I doubt that's enforceable, unfortunately.

  7. During the IAU meeting which categorized Pluto as a dwarf planet (or plutoid), there were two competing definitions. One of them was functionally identical to this definition. It was struck down.

  8. Also: reliability is an important issue. Intel has traditionally had a pretty significant reliability advantage compared to AMD.

  9. Provided independent benchmarks across a wide range of applications corroborate these results, that is.

    I seriously hope that this finally puts AMD back in the game when it comes to high-performance CPU's. They've been too far behind for too long.

  10. Yes, Obama deported many. But Lord Dampnut has promised to dramatically increase those deportations. He can't do that without having somewhere to house them temporarily (and "temporarily" may prove to be a bit longer if the deportations get tied up in court and/or conflict with Mexico or other countries).

    Also, he can't increase deportations without massive and widespread violations of civil liberties, which will mostly be felt by non-white people.

  11. Also mass deportation. Which, incidentally, will require the construction of concentration camps or something functionally identical to them.

  12. The "Read My Lips" lie wasn't really a significant lie in the grand scheme of things. It was a campaign promise that turned out to not work so well when faced by the realities of government. These are pretty common, such as Obama's promise to close Guantanamo Bay. Lord Dampnut's promise to create a massive infrastructure spending plan may prove to be a similar lie (technically he still has time, I just don't think that even if implemented his plan has any chance at all of motivating $1T of new infrastructure spending. For now he hasn't even tried to get that plan off the ground).

    I don't think there were any really significant policy-based lies in either the H.W. Bush, Clinton, or Obama administrations. W. Bush, however, fabricated evidence out of thin air to justify a war of aggression against Iraq. That was a truly massive lie, and one that wasn't really recognized by most people in the US as a lie until years later.

    Lord Dampnut and his administration make lies that are similar in character to the Iraq WMD lies told by Bush on a daily basis. We don't yet know if he'll ever be as effective in policy as W. Bush was. I'm hoping beyond hope that he'll utterly fail in his signature issues, and that he'll also fail to get us involved in another war. But at this point we don't really know. Dampnut's lies are massive and constant, but we'll have to wait and see if any of them will be as disastrous to human life as Bush's Iraq WMD lies.

  13. Not to anywhere close to the extent of Lord Dampnut's presidency. Simply making up world events is basically unheard of.

  14. It's quite a bit more nuanced than that, unfortunately.

    For one, purveyors of bullshit often get pretty good at hiding the fact that they lack solid sources for their information. Furthermore, for many politically controversial topics, it's quite easy to find authoritative sources to support any point of view. Climate change is a good example here: the scientific community has a near-unanimous consensus that global warming is happening, that it's primarily human-caused, and that its effects will be nasty. But it's not at all hard to find authoritative-sounding articles claiming otherwise, sometimes even from people with solid credentials who cite peer-reviewed research.

    Sometimes there are very clear indications that something is bullshit, such as claiming a scientific result for non-scientific concepts (e.g. vital or life energy). Sometimes it's a topic I already know quite a lot about and have learned to notice the ridiculous claims from a mile away.

    The really tricky situations, though, are when reading about something I know very little about. In those cases, I find it pays to first of all read different viewpoints. I first of all want to hear the viewpoints of relevant experts or people directly impacted by the topic. For example, if I want to learn about what fiscal stimulus means for the economy, I'm going to look up the opinions of different economists, primarily through blogs and op-eds (direct academic research is often too dense to be useful for somebody new to a field). Then the question becomes: how do I decide who is right? For the economics example, I'd want to look at who is using data to inform their opinions, and whether they are using sensible models to inform their conclusions. For other situations, such as racism, I'd want to look at who is paying attention to the people specifically impacted by racism, including a combination of empirical data and personal stories by those impacted.

    Very often, the answers to these sorts of controversial political opinions are not at all easy to suss out by somebody who is ignorant of the relevant information. It's easy to write an article that will fool people who don't know other data that contradicts the article. That's why learning how to detect bullshit is really important.

  15. Not likely to help diagnosis on Autism Starts Months Before Symptoms Appear, Study Shows (scientificamerican.com) · · Score: 1

    Autism has a prevalence of (very roughly) 2%. If the MRI test falsely diagnoses children without autism as being autistic 20% of the time, then roughly 90% of all people who test positive will not be autistic. You might be able to get a little bit better by only screening at-risk children (e.g. family history of autism), but this is still going to be wildly inaccurate and what would even be the point? It's not like parents have to do anything differently until the symptoms of autism present themselves.

    But it is nice to see more evidence that autism is in evidence long before symptoms appear, because it makes nonsense of many of the claims of bullshit artists that vaccines cause autism.

  16. Re:Which of the 3 do you have an issue with and wh on Chrome's Sandbox Feature Infringes On Three Patents So Google Must Now Pay $20 Million (bleepingcomputer.com) · · Score: 1

    This really is an example of why the patent system in the US is completely broken.

    The patent authors amended the patents years after Google Chrome implemented sandboxing in order to specifically make the patents apply more specifically to Chrome.

  17. Pretty sure this is unconstitutional on US Visitors May Have to Hand Over Social Media Passwords: DHS (nbcnews.com) · · Score: 1

    Courts have frequently extended constitutional protections to people from other countries interacting with the US government. I have a hard time seeing why this would be any different. I seriously hope this gets challenged in court, and the administration loses very badly.

  18. Intelligent animals are unlikely on First Human-Pig 'Chimera' Created in Milestone Study (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    There are many animals that are quite intelligent, but it's exceedingly unlikely that we would ever have the capability to genetically engineer an animal like a pig to have a human-like brain, even if we wanted to.

    The reason is simple: our brains are way bigger than pig brains (human brain: about 3.5lbs, pig brain: 0.4lbs). In order to have a pig with a human-like brain, you'd have to completely reshape it's skull, and because a pig skull is very different from an ape skull, you'd have to do it in a very different way than humans do. To do this, you'd need to generate a wide variety of novel adaptations to make it so that a pig can support a brain that's about 8 times the size. That's just not happening.

    What is being done in these kinds of experiments is far less ambitious: to use small amounts of human DNA to make animal tissues compatible for transplantation. This kind of research has gone on for a long time: it's common to genetically engineer mice and rats to have human immune systems, to make them better test subjects. In this case, if the research continues, you'll have a pig growing a pig liver, with some of its genetic markers changed just enough to fool a human body into thinking that it's a human liver rather than a pig liver.

  19. The problem here is that the federal government just doesn't have much control over many of these regulation, as they are mostly down to state and local regulations. At the federal level, then, implementing these policies as Pai describes isn't just about removing regulations: it's about increased regulations of the states, something that Republicans have been historically against, and which may open the way for court challenges.

    I also worry that he explicitly mentions private industry, but doesn't appear to care about the deployment of public broadband (an effort which has begun in many communities, but is often stymied by state laws implemented as a result of telecom lobbying).

    My big worry here is that these claims are a smokescreen. He doesn't actually want to regulate states more strongly. He wants to remove federal regulations related to the Internet, such as the 2015 net neutrality rules. For some of the things that Pai has opposed, see here. If he follows previous patterns, his effort will decrease competition, increase prices, and not make the slightest dent in broadband speeds.

  20. The memo may well have been intended to include peer-reviewed publications, however. My interpretation of the USDA's later statements is that this is the interpretation of the law that is actually legal: government employees have fairly broad free-speech rights, and by law cannot be silenced unless it's regarding classified information.

    I fully expect Trump to violate this law left and right, and I'm genuinely worried that he will largely succeed.

  21. Re: Continuation of the Bush policy "Hear No Evil" on USDA Scrambles To Ease Concerns After Researchers Were Ordered To Stop Publishing Publicly Funded Science (popsci.com) · · Score: 1

    That's a rosy view that isn't justified. True, Trump is worse than Bush, and Bush was worse than Reagan. But Reagan's administration was also pretty invested in hiding the truth, especially when it came to economic policy. His administration is the one that started the whole "trickle down" economics canard that the Republican party has been pushing to this day, and that policy was always pushed using lies about it creating growth.

    The downward slide of the Republican party started back with Nixon and his contemporaries in the party, whose southern strategy resulted in the Great Southern Realignment: the Republicans, starting with Nixon, shifted to a political strategy of exploiting racial prejudices to win votes (before this both parties were roughly equally-racist). This shift in political strategy, away from good governance using conservative principles and towards drumming up fear and tribalism, created an environment ripe for a party whose platform does little but enforce the desires of the wealthy, as it does today.

    Reagan may not have been as bad, but he was a major factor in the Republican party we know today.

  22. I doubt this is good for China on China Unseats US As Global Investment Leader In Financial Technology: Report (fortune.com) · · Score: 1

    A big part of the cause of the 2007/2008 crash was too much financial innovation (mortgage-backed derivatives, specifically). This may make help China's economy seem to be growing well in the short-term, and will almost certainly make some people rich, but it's very likely to blow up in their faces.

  23. Sorta kinda. It's not just a fancy name, for one, but an entirely new way of defining types.

    Interfaces in C++ are also far more limited than concepts. For one, interfaces only work on class types. Concepts work on both classes and built-in types (e.g. int, float, pointer types). To make use of interfaces, you must pass objects by pointer or reference, not by value. Classes used this way have to be virtual, which carries a performance cost. There's no clear way in C++ to state that an object adheres to both interface A and interface B: you'd have to create a third abstract interface class which inherits from A and B, and have your class inherit from this third class. Interfaces are also highly non-standardized, which would mean that in order for interfaces to replicate the functionality of concepts, library developers would need to come to an agreement on a common interface set and then completely refactor their class definitions to conform to that common interface set.

    So yes, it is possible to refactor code to use interfaces and virtual classes everywhere to produce a similar design to the one offered by concepts, but it will require a lot of work, won't be terribly readable, and comes with a performance penalty.

  24. Re:Never had a chance... on LG Is Abandoning the Modular Smartphone Idea (theverge.com) · · Score: 1

    Yup. It sounds really cool on paper, but just doesn't fit well with the form factor of a mobile phone.

  25. Re:Scary **** on Feds Unveil Rule Requiring Cars To 'Talk' To Each Other (thehill.com) · · Score: 2

    In the abstract, I think it could be done in a way that would be helpful but with minimal danger, but it wouldn't be easy.

    The key would be to construct the system so that information coming from another vehicle is never trusted. The information might still be useful, but only in terms of refining estimates gathered from the car's own sensors.