Posts by imanidiot

Behold! Humanity has captured our first look at the Sun's South Pole

Re: Any rocket scientists

To expand on that, the further out away from the sun you go the easier it is to achieve a plane change since orbital velocity relative to the sun drops and delta-v required depends on the current orbital velocity vector. So by going far away from the sun and using something massive like Jupiter for an assist you can achieve quite a large plane change, at the cost of first having to get your orbit out to jupiter and coasting all the way there, and then back in towards the inner solar system.

Re: Any rocket scientists

Theres not really a basic answer but if you want to dive into it: https://orbital-mechanics.space/orbital-maneuvers/plane-change-maneuvers.html#equation-eq-plane-change-delta-v-scalar

What it boils down to is that a full 90 degree plane change would take about 1,4 times the current orbital velocity of the spacecraft (1,4 times 12km/s = 16,8 km/s assuming changing at aphelion). Currently the final orbital inclination for Solar Orbiter after more plane changes by venus gravity assists puts Solar Orbiter on a 33 degree plane to the ecliptic. If you want to get from there to 90 degrees, you'd need roughly another 12km/s delta-v (assuming you make the plane changes at aphelion.

It certainly is

Re: Built in financial redundancy?

It does not, but a certain orange faced buffoon is rather keen on axing anything science related and a very large amount of NASA science missions are on the chopping block.

User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died

Re: Phone down

And how exactly where they going to know you had powered it up or looked at the hard-disk?

Meanwhile your kids are probably already researching the cheapest old-folks-home (aka old-people jail) options.

"wireless" usually just means "lacking one particular wire" rather than "lacking all wires", but that doesn't market quite as easily.

ChatGPT users wake to find it's even more wrong, slower than usual

Re: $10 Billion from Who for What

Likely it's mostly companies buying "tokens" which is basically just paying openAI for server time. What they're buying is server time that is generating an LLM model output from their chosen input. What OpenAI is selling is access to their LLM models on their server farms.

Re: No worries

It's just got this terrible pain in all the diodes down it's left side. It's asked for them to be replaced but no-one ever listens.

TSMC strengthens Japan ties with joint R&D lab in Tokyo

With the US increasingly being an unreliable partner, Taiwan and TSMC are probably also looking for locations that aren't the US they can relocate vital staff and business to when Occupied Mainland Taiwan finally invades (yes, I said when, not if).

Blocking stolen phones from the cloud can be done, should be done, won't be done

Re: Nice idea

And then take step 2 and force manufacturers like Apple to supply spares for actually reasonable costs and ban contracts preventing chip suppliers from selling manufacturer specific part-numbers/revisions of common chips and breaking down phones for parts becomes a non-issue too as only the most fly-by-night shitty repair services would use used/recovered chips if they can get the genuine article at a decent cost.

Re: Nice idea

Apple doesn't care about parts being stolen, it's implementing that to discourage/block third party repair of it's devices so they can soft force their customers to buy new devices instead of having them repaired.

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: "Test flights in January proved out the concept [of Boom Supersonic]"

Trump won't be able to afford keeping the 747 in operation after he leaves office if he has to pay for it himself so that "hand me down palace plane" is going to be a costly drain on public resources as it sits on the tarmac somewhere with nowhere to go and being of no use to anyone. Trumps just never going to transfer it to his private property or pay for its upkeep if he ever leaves office. 747s are very expensive to operate even as aircraft go and using one as a private jet is a fools errand even for the ultra wealthy (Musk or Bezos levels rich). Trump isn't even close to that level of rich.

Re: Simple guy

" from the parallel agenda of turning America into a "third-world shithole" "

Problem there is that there is no "turning it INTO". It basically already IS.

Despite all the persistent rumours, while it's almost certain that the Soviets did have Concorde plans (and they frequently had correspondence with the Concorde design team), the Tu-144 structurally and aerodynamically shares basically nothing in common with it and it's nothing like a copy of Concorde. Not even from early plans. It's outward similarities are more of a result of convergent evolution (similar sets of requirements leading to similar design outcomes). However there's a lot of differences in the design and they've been designed for entirely different flight regimes. Some individual design mechanics might have been the result of solutions to the same problem being copied though (like the droop snoot). Concorde was designed to fly at comparatively low altitudes (yes really), primarily over water, for ocean crossings. Because of this it had a smaller wing plan and lower cruise thrust design (allowing supercruise without afterburners). Tu-144 on the other hand was designed to fly over land, required higher altitude flight and thus larger wing plan and subsequently higher engine thrust. Since engine design (and everything to do with the engines from intake shockwave management to engine management) was lagging western designs this meant that Tu-144 required comparatively larger engines and afterburners to cruise at Mach with all the downsides that brings (massively increased fuel burn and bone shattering noise and vibration mainly) which in turn meant more design compromises in terms of size and aerodynamics. Tu-144s ability to carry more passengers was mainly from the fact it simply HAD to be bigger to carry the fuel. Being able to carry a few extra seats basically just came as a consequence of that.

Re: Not those Boomers.

It's highly unlikely a Vulcan pilot would hit the afterburners. Since the Avro Vulcan didn't have afterburners. That was one of the mods to the Bristol/Rolls-Royce Olympus engines for Concorde (and TSR-2)

You're probably thinking of the famous Vulcan howl, which was caused by air turbulence interactions at the intake for the 2 engines at the wing roots, not afterburners.

Torvalds' typing taste test touches tactile tragedy

The audible feedback is one thing, the tactile feedback is equally important. But it's also just a lot of "whatever you're used to".

Before computers where a thing, there was also hot debates on what typewriter had the better keyboard and tactility. Even if to someone used to a computer they ALL feel like having to beat on a piano with a hammer. Having learned typing on a beat-up old typewriter myself in my youth and now fixing up some as an adult, there is indeed a lot of difference in feel between models, though it's very different from typing on a computer. A Remington-Rand Model N feels nothing like a Triump Tippa. I don't know exactly how typists achieved hundreds of words a minute on the old (for example) Remington typewriters but I know for a fact they did. Having typed on the old-skool OG IBM Selectrix once, I can see how some who were used to typing on that would lament a changeover to even a Model M keyboard on a computer. If you were used to the slightly heavy handed travel required on a true old-school mechanical typewriter, switching to a Selectrix must have felt like going from a VW Golf (the normal one, not even the GTI) to a Ferrari. Going to a model M in terms of feedback is then a switch back to a Golf GTI. Sure it's faster but it's not in the same league.

Re: Don't get me started..

>>I could go on for days about the disaster of the modern keyboard design. I won't, but, I'll pose some questions:

>>Why does tenkeyless even exist? Why does 75% keyboards? You're not a pro gamer who needs to get a keybo>>ard into your flight bag, what are you doing?

Because a lot of people don't ever use the numpad keys and they like the ergonomics of having the mouse closer to the keyboard? Or simply having the added "mouse space"? 75% keyboards are just an iteration on that philosophy. If all you ever do is type lots and lots of letters and rarely numbers, plus switching from two hands on keyboard to one hand on mouse, a more compact keyboard can be more comfortable. Just because it doesn't work for your use case doesn't mean it doesn't for others. The fact there's so many on the market should point out there's plenty of demand for them

>> How come we can't make a decent wireless keyboard at a reasonable price in 2025? We've been doing it with mice for years and the latency, bandwidth and battery implications are significantly worse for mice.

Because by and large, nobody has actually tried and there's not that much demand for them. And whereas with a mouse where a slight latency is not that big a deal because we have the bio-wetware interface of a meaty arm performing motions in the brain to pointer loop and a slight delay isn't all that noticeable to most people (bar pro gamers who still favour wired for that reason) for typing somehow this delay is a lot more noticeable and stacks up. You're not making 4+ mouse movements a second, yet fast typists can reach that sort of speed at full chat and even mild delays in sending keystrokes start to add up. Have an experienced typist at full chat blind typing from a document and they could type at a speed that would end up making blocks of text appear from the buffer for several seconds after they stop typing a paragraph. I think wireless keyboards are stuck in the "well they were shit 10 years ago when I tried them so I'm not going to buy them" and "nobody is buying wireless keyboards so we're not going to invest in making a better one" hole right now.

>>Why must you put keys so close to the edge of the keyboard that I can't use it on my lap, leaning back in my chair (which is best for my back)? At least the bottom edge anyway.

Because very very very few people use a keyboard on their laps? And when you're using keyboard on a desk, a long "skirt" at the bottom edge can be a annoying. Many higher end keyboards come with a detachable wrist support for the bottom edge. Not really useful on your lap since they're usually hinged/floppy and meant to be used on a desktop though. If your back is getting hurt from sitting upright I think your problem is bad posture or bad core strength.

>>Do we really even need macro keys? Do gamers really even use them? And if they do, do they really need to be on the left side of the keyboard? Didn't we use to put them at the top?

How many keyboards have macro keys on the left side? Really not that many. If gamers didn't want or use them, there wouldn't be any keyboards with them on. Yes sometimes they went at the top, sometimes they still are. Shop around and find one to your liking.

>>RGB is nice (at least proper RGB through the keys so it lights up the letters, anyway) - but do we _really_ individually referenceable backlights? (to be fair this is weak because once you have backlights you're 98% there)

No we don't. Some people will buy it anyway or want it anyway. Hence it's sold. My last keyboard purchase was addressable RGB backlight because it was cheaper than the solid red monocolor backlight version. Since RGB is where the market lies, apparently that's not the cheaper option through the benefits of mass manufacture.

>>Why is it still not possible, no matter how much you spend, to have keys that don't wear smooth after less than six months - and why don't you sell caps at a reasonable price for when they inevitably do?

If your keys are wearing down that fast you've probably just got some very corrosive sweat. Nothing is going to stand up to that. If you just mean the print wearing off, look for "double shot" keycaps, though anything with RGB light up keys is likely to already be double shot. As for loose keycaps, there's plenty available, "reasonable price" is entirely subjective

>>We're paying a lot of money for, it seems to me, _bad_ keyboards.

I don't share your experience.

>>I literally last week binned an expensive Razer keyboard that had a failed space bar, and resoldering a new switch in didn't help it. I bought a Cynosa Lite to replace it in a hurry because it's cheap and

>>actually fulfils a lot of my criteria. I wish I could get it with proper switches, but it's honestly the best keyboard I've had in years despite being one of the cheapest, nastiest keyboards I've ever owned.

>>This shouldn't be a thing. I should be able to buy something like it with decent switches for, IDK, 80 quid, maybe a wireless option that works well for 100 or so? (yes, I know about the Ornata V3 - but

>>low profile keys are the worst, it does prove we can almost do it and there's not really a good excuse though).

Razer... yeah there's your problem. One of those where the brand is dictating a price backed only by marketing guff, rarely by product quality.

Re: "For most, not so bad"... bloody excellent actually.

yeah same here. My home keyboard is technically an RGB-backlit one (was cheaper at the time than the "solid backlight only" option strangely) with all the options for fancy key activated light effects but it's stuck on solid-red-at-low-intensity at all times.

Re: You're not entirely correct

"Do companies assume that people will just show up, plug in their laptops, and start working?"

Yes. They do. And it's of course utter bull crap. I spend 10 to 15 minutes every day to set up my desk and chair the way I like it if I can't just claim the same desk every day. There is an obsession (amongst manager folks who've never done a productive days work in their life) about clean desks and "efficient use of resources" where they want everyone to show up every day yet also assume that not everyone will be there very day so "hot desking" is required to make the most efficient use of floorspace. My own employer is luckily not going entirely off the rails and lets us "claim" a desk for the entire day but our customer for instance requires people to clear their desk if they're going away for more than 30 minutes. Which means that if you have a 1 hour meeting you need to spend 10 minutes before that time clearing the desk and shoving things into a locker (somewhere else in the building) and then another 10 to 15 minutes after your meeting retrieving your stuff, finding a desk (if the one you had been sitting at has been occupied) and setting things up again. I hate it, I want to be able to recognize who sits at a desk from the pile of accumulated "stuff" on it, heck, I WANT a desk with a pile of accumulated "stuff" on it. But alas, we all have to align with the neat-freaks obsessed with "clean desk, clean mind" ethos who don't understand that for many engineers "empty desk, empty mind' is a far more apt description (and also the one we apply to the managers who think desks should be empty).

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: Just ship EVs with the batteries discharged

For catastrophic damage it's basically "The more charge, the more energetic the breakdown and conflegration. However, when it comes to spontaneous/auto-immolation through thermal runaway as caused by cell damage it can occur due to either overcharging (which is likely to be VERY energetic and fast developing) or through over-charging followed by over-discharging causing dendrite growth, thus creating an internal short. So an over discharged cell is less likely to go from "perfectly fine to explosively on fire" in seconds, but can take hours or days to heat up and reach the tipping point of going from "hot but contained" to "obviously on fire". At that point the physics of (lithium-)metal fires takes over and the charge level of the cell matters a whole lot less.

Came here to say pretty much the same thing. Ship fires are INTENSE (especially on a Ro-Ro ship) and putting water on them rarely has an effect much beyond just making the compartment the fire is in a source of super-heated steam that makes it impossible for anyone to make it into any space even close to the fire and stay alive. On top of that pumping enough water into a ship to affect a fire is likely going to affect ship stability. Unless the fire is small and contained enough to have a crew onboard managing the bilge tanks and bilge pumps to get the water back out, you don't need all that much water to destabilize a ship significantly and if a Ro-Ro starts to list there's a critical angle where the lashings (especially those affected by the fire and heat are going to release the vehicles, all of them slide to the low side and the ship goes belly up (and then under). Firefighting measures on these ships consist of closing any and all vents into the affected space and blowing inert gas (usually CO2 sometimes Nitrogen) into the space in the hopes of suppressing any active flame/fire. The idea is that by starving the fire of oxygen only the thermal transfer becomes the issue and if they can keep things suppressed long enough they might smolder themselves out. It's also one of the main lessons that land based fire fighters have to learn when coming to fight a ship fire in a harbour, that opening up such a space might re-introduce oxygen and cause things to go from very bad to oh so much worse.

For those interested in this sort of thing I can highly recommend the videos made by Sal Mercagliano of the Youtube channel "Whats going on with shipping" about Ro-Ro fires, including his most recent video on this very ship fire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFhhvr_afws

Another good one: A tale of two ship fires: https://youtu.be/pFyA6dhYIX8

Admin brought his drill to work, destroyed disks and crashed a datacenter

implanting the idea that their servers can survive anything shown in the video in all the people easily impressed a-technical PHBs that don't bother watching all the tiresome and boring disclaimers.

Techie fixed a ‘brown monitor’ by closing a door for a doctor

Re: "Vantablack. You can buy it."

Is the Thumbs up coated in the worlds pinkest pink? (https://culturehustle.com/products/pink-50g-powdered-paint-by-stuart-semple , can confirm in real life the stuff is oppressively pink)

SpaceX resets 'Days Since Last Starship Explosion' counter to zero, again

Yes it was a test. And as a test it failed in nearly every single test goal. Making it a failure.

By my account this flight was a failure on nearly all points.

- Booster re-entry testing was only half successful as only the aerodynamic portion succeeded after which it promptly ceased to exit as soon as they attempted to light the engines

- the ship made it as far as "space" but lost control, the payload door couldn't open and re-entry was uncontrolled making any heating data not that useful as far as the aerodynamics and protection of the flaps goes. Control loss was already stated to be due to loss of fuel caused by leakage which to me signals they haven't solved their structural oscillation problems and their "reinforce everything" strategy isn't working. Not surprising since they still seem convinced they can find structural oscillations of a body in free-flight by doing static fire tests on a test stand.

Spin it all you want, this was a failure.

Some signs of AI model collapse begin to reveal themselves

Re: "Ordinary search has gone to the dogs."

"ordinary search" started sucking as soon as it became a driver for ad-revenue and that decline accelerated with the rise of "SEO" and automated sites that parrot back basically exactly what you're searching via automatically generated pages while offering nothing of value

AI can't replace devs until it understands office politics

Is it though?

"That’s because the main job for a developer is speculative – answering the question “Could we?" and going where no coder has been before in search of an answer."

That might be true for SOME developers but there's a lot (and I mean a LOT) of code monkeys out there who are doing nothing innovative, nothing requiring any sort of thought, interpretation or speculation. People with a "big" job title who are basically just copy-pasting bits of code into different variants of the same basic thing over and over and over.

Re: This is what I keep saying

LLMs work great for "coding" if what you're trying to do is generic and has been done (and described) thousands of times before. It might just be that he's not making anything even remotely innovative.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

A SINGLE, unauthorized person could do this??

That a single person could implement something like this without authorization is not exactly a reassuring thought or a good excuse like X/Musk seems to claim it is. That's a failure on so many levels.

Re: "it illustrates how some people insist on remaining stuck in the past."

Dutch and Deutsch share a common root and the versions that developed into Afrikaans and some of the variants still spoken in the US are closer to each other than modern Dutch and (high) German.

If I didn't know modern german as a native Dutch speaker I would probably have an easier time understanding US low german than modern high german. Especially if I also knew some of the basics of old Dutch/Diets.

No-boom supersonic flights could slide through US skies soon

As soon as passenger rail travel becomes popular enough it too becomes a target for people with bad intentions and you can bet your top dollar the TSA is going to want to install the same level of security theater in rail terminals before letting you onboard.

Re: American leadership in aviation ?

NASAs QueSST has more or less proven that low intensity sonic booms are possible by shaping the shockwaves to overlap and partially cancel out, causing it to be a low intensity sort of "wump" instead of a sharp crack as older aircraft had. Boom however for instance uses none of that tech and claims to be able to rely on atmospheric conditions alone to prevent their shockwave reaching the ground which seems AT BEST extremely conditional and very impractical in practice

UK Ministry of Defence is spending less with US biz, and more with Europeans

Re: Logistics is the real killswitch

A license built engine isn't really a problem if they're fully licensed and built (or can be built) without US involvement. Gripen (at least current gen) isn't networked like the F-35 nor does it use an inventory and systems management software built and managed by the US so it isn't vulnerable to a remote kill switch in the same way. The only way the license built engine would be vulnerable is if they tried to sneak in timed kill switch in a firmware upgrade and the end user was silly enough to install such an update without verification of functionality and fully trusting the US. Which by now is probably... not advised.

VIPER rover banished to storage as moonshot plan sputters

Ignominous end for a promising mission

I think this could have been a promising mission for the amount of science it could have achieved relative to the cost of the mission. Unfortunately the US leadership has forgotten what it means to technologically lead the world and assumes things will just work out if you stop investing in science missions.

--> I raise one to the design team who will have to watch their creation gather dust in a crate somewhere (Probably until it goes to a museum somewhere), never to leave earths surface.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

For how they do it, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roll_Out_Solar_Array (or search ISS iROSA)

"salvaging" the ISS is pointless. Most of it's solar panels are old and tired with reduced output (they're in the process of installing "overlay" panels on top of the existing ones to supplement power generation for the remainder of the lifetime) and especially the Russian section is full of cracks and leaks that are slowly getting worse over time. At minimum you're going to have to replace all of the Russian segment and the oldest US segments, which basically amounts to on orbit disassembly of the ISS anyway. By the time you're done you'll have so little ISS left and done so much work that it's cheaper, easier and faster to just launch new space station segments and create your own space station. It's sad but the ISS really is just approaching the end of it's lifetime.

Re: What was .... *ponder* ...

"Elon's" (not actually Elon's) Starship is so far a boondoggle and whether it's actually ever going to fly with useful payloads is still very much an open question. If the people in charge don't realize that you can't do frequency response tests for potentially destructive oscillations of a body in free-flight by doing thrust variations on a test article clamped down to a launch mount from the thrust structure (like they did between OFT-7 and OFT-8) then I hold seriously little hope they'll make it to orbit with Starship. Just assuming that it's going to work is a seriously bad idea. An even worse idea than SLS was or is.

Re: Make Aerospace Grotty Again

I can't remember the last time I looked at an IPCC annual report. They're far from the only document about climate change. Even if you don't want to believe science reports, talk to older people who have knowledge of long term weather patterns in their area (farmers, (glider) pilots, foresters) and you'll find basically all of them saying that climate HAS been changing. Rapidly. Yes, climate changed naturally in the past, yes climate will change in the future. No we're not "coming out of an ice age, we're well past the "coming out" phase and on top of that we can see from lots and lots of different methods (tree rings, ice cores, fossil records and probably dozens of others that I don't know about because I'm not a climate scientist) that the rate of change that we're seeing now is unprecedented. We're seeing that the amount of CO2 relative to the global mean temperature is extremely high. Higher than it's ever been in any record we've been able to find.

As to "fake earth temperature maps".... That's not NASA doing it, that's NASA designing, building and launching Earth observation sattelites in cooperation with agencies like NOAA precisely because it's their core businesses. Those "fake" earth temperate maps nearly always come with a logo of some other agencies right alongside the NASA logo, precisely because NASA is just gathering the data which is then analyzed and published by other agencies.

As to your bullshit about "carbon indulgences".... yeah, the concluding is that excess emissions of greenhouse gasses (this is NOT just about CO2) are bad. One of the ways we've agreed to regulate this is through "carbon taxes". Extra tax income for the states, incentive for companies to reduce their emissions (and this ONLY applies to large companies, you as the consumer will not even notice). Is this a perfect system? Absolutely not, it's getting screwed and frauded and exploited up the wazoo. But since people like you don't want to see reason, it's the best we can do right now.

Teens maintained a mainframe and it went about as well as you'd imagine

Re: Game Server Friday!

Some would call you a killjoy for that

Re: Good, but don't do that again

I'd be tempted to see if it was possible to put the guts of the new machine in the case of the old ones and give interiors of the lowest spec machine of the cascade to the directors.

Linux kernel to drop 486 and early 586 support

The vast majority of those don't run Linux and if they are the more modern ones all have the requisite components (TSC, support for CMOV) to keep running the Linux kernel for a while yet. One of the oft used options is the Vortex86, many of which have the needed support for the i686 instruction set.

And even the "obsolete" chips can still run just fine with older kernel levels for a long time to come.

Re: Hubble Telescope.......

Because keeping support for those processors means 15.000 lines of code that have to be kept in the kernel and maintained, including all relevant interfaces and drivers. It's a lot of work for processors that are probably not that commonly used anymore. Even in embedded applications I doubt it's nearly as abundant as it once was. Nor am I aware of anyone still making 486 instruction set processors new. Sure there's still processors out there that are doing fine work, and they can keep going for a long time on the current kernel version. But there comes a point were supporting (very) old instruction sets just isn't worth the effort.

Techie solved supposed software problem by waving his arms in the air

You nearly certainly use the ICAO/ITU Radiotelephony/NATO Spelling Alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc), not the WWII Allied military phonetic spelling alphabet (Able, Baker, Charlie, Dog, Easy, etc) that was referenced in the post you're replying to.

'I guess NASA doesn't need or care about my work anymore'

Re: NASA's website

The thing is that NASA isn't really a monolithic single organisation like it appears from the outside. If you start digging into it a little it's a whole lot of disparate programs and projects all running under one banner but organised by different groups and organisations within that. Which means that there's already several different approaches to how to handle project communication. On top of that the "house style" keeps changing for each group over time, but very often once set up a project sticks with the format and design chosen at the start, even if it's a project that runs for decades. Sometimes there are upgrades to newer styles but these are often basically their own project run by their own little "silo".

So yes, NASAs website and documentation of it's various programs and projects feels fractured and possible a little schizophrenic because for a large part it seems to me as an outsider that's how NASA as an agency actually functions.

Brewhaha: Turns out machines can't replace people, Starbucks finds

Decline is set to continue imho

Starbucks was once one of those fashionable things were the "trendy" people wanted to be seen with a cup of starbucks "coffee" (Which contained only marginal amounts of coffee and mostly other things to make it taste entirely unlike coffee). Now? The economy is going to shit and Starbucks as a brand has become mundane, pedestrian and un-hip. People are waking up to the fact their products are mostly overpriced and mediocre. So I think Starbucks has probably crested the hill and things will decline from here. Slowly at first, possibly precipitously if/when the economy properly goes to crap due to a certain umpa-lumpas policies.

As ChatGPT scores B- in engineering, professors scramble to update courses

Speaking as someone holding a Ba Sc in Mechanical engineering, I would say there's few things in Engineering that you could cheat on with "AI". You're not going to be doing your calculus exams through AI and show your work for deriving integrals or differentials. You're not going to cheat on your controls systems exams reading or writing a bode plot. I highly doubt this is actually a problem in the majority of engineering disciplines, especially since it can be avoided by just having proctored exams.

Duolingo jumps aboard the 'AI-first' train, will phase out contractors

Re: But but but

There are layers of executives that could even more effectively be replaced by a stuffed bear sitting in a chair. That's not an argument for AI. IMHO if a manager could be replaced easily by an AI that manager isn't required anyway.

Satellite slinger AST reckons newer birds won't outshine stars in night sky

Re: Why can’t they just paint the damn

It's really really hard to create a flat matte black that both stays flat black and can deal with the heat of being in pace. Not to mention the fact that things like solar panels can't be flat matte black because they wouldn't work. And then there's the thermal issues of having a near perfect black body absorber to really sock up every single joule of incident solar thermal energy.

TAKE IT DOWN Act? Yes, take the act down before it's too late for online speech

Re: Slippery slopes

"Every law or regulation introduced is a potential slippery slope You can deal with attempts to extend scope as and when they arise."

The problem is that if a law doesn't have any limits on how it is used then when voting for or against it's introduction you don't have to just think about how the proposer is saying it is to be used but also how a malicious player COULD use that very same law within the limits of how it is written. It's very fine if the currently proposed use of said law is all on the straight and level, but if the law contains no guardrails and a precipitous cliff of potential misuse then you really DO have to consider voting against it for the lack of guardrails on keeping anyone using that law on the straight and level. If there is no limits on how a law might be misapplied there will be no option to vote on preventing future misuse. The law will simply get applied according to the new requirement "within the limits of the law".

We're seeing a live example of what happens when people decide they get to interpret how laws should be applied in the US and the results aren't exactly pretty.