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Comment poorly written clickbait (Score 1) 37

you would have thought that anyone who passed grade school english would know enough to put a clear description of what a digital twin is but no this is the internet
so if you click on the motor trend link, you get, as is now SOP on teh web all sorts of useless words before they bother to tell you what a DT is and then

it is merely a new word for a fancy CAD file
probably has to do with battles over who gets the money among people who sell CAD software

Comment Don't any of you kids know what FUD means ? (Score 1) 143

For decades, MS has been releasing news about amazing new features that will be in the next gen product
and 9 times out of ten, it is just vaporware

FUD means Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt
It comes from the pre Google/FB era, when MS ruled the roost and it was thought that MS deliberately announced new features that were never intended to be real, just to scare competitors

Comment Is this true ? (Score 1) 139

we have a report from the NYT saying that the gov't will release regulations requiring child care
but so far, as of 4PM teusday 28th feb, those regs are not public

so we don't actually know if this is true or not

after all companies are incredibly invenntive at getting around so called requirements
and lets say Intel doesn't do what it is is supposed to and then gets fined; big whoop

Comment speculative if not clickbait (Score 1) 38

given how fast computer hardware and software is improving, these guys are gonna have to work awfully fast
and even if (big if) they succeed, these organoid brain computers are incredibly fragile things that need a sophisticated lab enviroment eg the slightest contamination with bacteria leads to destruction (which is why mammalian cells when grown in a Petri Dish are grown in super sterile special hoods and the medium has loads of antibotic)

IMO, a waste of money, but we shall see

Comment most of the posts sound so juvenile and whiny (Score 1) 225

ok, so FF isn't perfect
what software is
all you people sound like you are whining cause FF doesn't have some feature that 5 people in the entire universe want

I have no idea why ff is less popular then chrome or edge, at least on laptops (I don't own a smart phone)
I haven't used edge, but both FF and chrome have multiple sucko issues, just stupid stuff that makes them hard to use like bookmark management, etc etc

United States

Why the Pandemic Is So Bad in America (theatlantic.com) 542

A virus has brought the world's most powerful country to its knees. From a report: A pandemic can be prevented in two ways: Stop an infection from ever arising, or stop an infection from becoming thousands more. The first way is likely impossible. There are simply too many viruses and too many animals that harbor them. Bats alone could host thousands of unknown coronaviruses; in some Chinese caves, one out of every 20 bats is infected. Many people live near these caves, shelter in them, or collect guano from them for fertilizer. Thousands of bats also fly over these people's villages and roost in their homes, creating opportunities for the bats' viral stowaways to spill over into human hosts. Based on antibody testing in rural parts of China, Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that studies emerging diseases, estimates that such viruses infect a substantial number of people every year. "Most infected people don't know about it, and most of the viruses aren't transmissible," Daszak says. But it takes just one transmissible virus to start a pandemic.

Sometime in late 2019, the wrong virus left a bat and ended up, perhaps via an intermediate host, in a human -- and another, and another. Eventually it found its way to the Huanan seafood market, and jumped into dozens of new hosts in an explosive super-spreading event. The COVID-19 pandemic had begun. [...] Being prepared means being ready to spring into action, "so that when something like this happens, you're moving quickly," Ronald Klain, who coordinated the U.S. response to the West African Ebola outbreak in 2014, told me. "By early February, we should have triggered a series of actions, precisely zero of which were taken." Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst. Instead, he focused on the border. On January 31, Trump announced that the U.S. would bar entry to foreigners who had recently been in China, and urged Americans to avoid going there.

Comment Unsure about video, but censorship is censorship (Score 1) 566

I watched a few minutes of the video. I'm not qualified to weigh in on the substance, but the speakers, for me, seemed to be acting a part rather than behaving genuinely. But so what? This censorship is in itself enough to strip youtube, et al., of Safe Harbor protection. Frankly, given the level of active censorship they're already doing, I doubt that the loss of protection will require a lot more censorship/curating efforts to avoid most libel suits.

Government

Trump Administration Begins Formal Withdrawal From WHO (thehill.com) 313

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: The White House has officially moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization (WHO), a senior administration official confirmed Tuesday, breaking ties with a global public health body in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. has submitted its withdrawal notification to the United Nations secretary-general, the official said. Withdrawal requires a year's notice, so it will not go into effect until July 6, 2021, raising the possibility the decision could be reversed.

The formal notification of withdrawal concludes months of threats from the Trump administration to pull the United States out of the WHO, which is affiliated with the United Nations. President Trump has repeatedly assailed the organization for alleged bias toward China and its slow response to the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan. But public health experts and Democrats have raised alarms that the decision may be short-sighted and could undercut the global response to the pandemic, which has infected 11.6 million people worldwide. The U.S. has the highest number of reported cases in the world at nearly 3 million. They have also argued that some of the WHO's initial missteps can be attributed to China's lack of transparency in the early stages of the outbreak.

Comment Problematic (Score 3, Insightful) 62

I see two problems with this. First, limiting the dataset will have the effect of limiting the communication of information. I knew a person whose first language was Russian, and even though his English seemed excellent to me, he once told me his frustration in fully expressing his thoughts in English. Second, to the extent that such communication is possible, it seems to me that all that will happen is that a perjorative is expunged from the language, the actual concept might not be, and will result in language that will fall to the next little Hitler witchhunt of the perpetually offended.

Comment Sloppy reporting (Score 1) 399

I actually listened to the press conference when Trump talked about that, and he didn't say any such thing. So-called news agencies that report such rubbish are either political operatives or too lazy to back check. They should be ashamed of themselves, and it's telling that they're issuing no retractions.

Government

A New Report Documents Two Years of Science Being Scrubbed From .Gov Sites (vice.com) 373

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A report published by the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative (EDGI) on Monday found that language related to climate change has disappeared at an alarming pace since Trump took office in 2016. Across 5,301 pages -- ranging from websites belonging to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) -- the use of the terms "climate change," "clean energy," and "adaptation" plummeted by 26 percent between 2016 and 2018. Of the pages where "climate change" was stricken, more than half belong to the EPA. The EPA homepage was the 1,750th most-visited website in the U.S. in early 2019, according to the report, giving it more reach than Whitehouse.gov. But "unlike the much-discussed White House effort to question climate change findings, website changes go unannounced and are often beyond immediate public recognition," the report argues. "They insidiously undermine publicly-funded infrastructure for knowledge dissemination."

According to the report, clear scientific terminology on government websites was often replaced with politicized language such as "energy independence," a buzzword ripped directly from Trump's "America First Energy Plan" which demands an increase in fossil fuel production. The watchdog also found evidence of "diminished connections" between climate change and its effects on government websites, or quite literally, the breaking of links between public information about the topic.

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