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Comment Re:No creativity, talent or specific knowlege requ (Score 1) 18

How do you reach the conclusion that you did? From TFS:

"They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention," the office said. "When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard."

On its face, that contradicts the idea that Whoever has the "biggest computer" can lock up all of human progress and collect rents for it into the future -- a natural person still needs to conceive of the invention, rather than patenting the output of tool that happens to be the "biggest computer".

Comment Re:Often Excel _is_ the right tool for the job. (Score 3, Interesting) 91

Are the latest versions of Excel tracking to 42 decimal places and offering rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch, or am I missing something as to how certain flavors (rhymes with sex sell) of inaccuracy are perfectly acceptable in business?

The problem here is geekmux, not Excel. I've never heard of somebody saying a spreadsheet does, or should, "track[] to 42 decimal places". I don't even know what you meant by "rounding accuracy that makes GPS timing look like a 19th Century pocket watch" -- I can tell you what kinds of errors exist for different GNSS satellite and receiver clocks, but rounding errors are dwarfed by others.

If you have some technical complaint, be specific about it rather than trying to be cute, because you run a risk of making yourself look stupid rather than clever. There are some well-known problems with Excel's default behavior, like how it aggressively treats text as dates -- but a lot of spreadsheet errors and loss of precision are purely user errors.

Comment Re:And more AI nonsense gets exposed (Score 1) 80

DuckDuckGo's LLM generates this, for example

Right-hand drive (RHD) refers to vehicles designed with the steering wheel on the right side, which is typical in countries that follow right-hand traffic (RHT) rules. In these countries, vehicles drive on the right side of the road, and roundabouts circulate counterclockwise.

... (emphases added) and if you click "more" it may change to say that RHD vehicles drive of the *left* side of the road (LHT, which is true).

Comment Re:Yes, there are good android tablets (Score 2) 129

I replaced my Galaxy Tab S6 with an S10 Ultra, and the new one is just too big for my druthers. I didn't realize that it wouldn't fit as well in places like my backpack's tablet pouch, and it's heavy. The pen might be good for some users, but I haven't found a place that I would use it.

On the plus side, windowed apps seem theoretically nice, although I haven't yet used them in anger.

Comment Re:Title should read ... (Score 1) 55

Can you elaborate on #2? In principle, an IPv6 firewall / stateful router can protect devices on the LAN by essentially using NAT logic except for rewriting addresses, right? Assuming that a more naive approach of blocking incoming SYN packets by default isn't good enough, at least.

(Posting as AC so I can moderate up some deserving comments below.)

Comment Re:Hmm (Score 4, Interesting) 174

The problem in this case, as usual, was lazy government rather than big government. A government with high capacity to get things done is not necessarily bad, but usually government turns into a power trip or a mire of reasons that things cannot be done -- and big or effective government is bad in both of those cases.

Comment Re:Pointless article .. (Score 4, Insightful) 140

Did TFA explain why the mother didn't get a court to order her ex to transfer the parental role to her? There are decades of precedent about how to have courts sort out custody disputes and to deal with people who won't cooperate. As an added benefit, it is almost entirely independent of the account provider -- it will work for Apple, Google Samsung, whomever.

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