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Comment Re:SATs for grads (Score 3, Insightful) 112

If there was any difference between racial groups, or between men and women, on such an exam, it would be lawsuit-bait. A lot of the difficulty in hiring is coming up with measures which will easily pass Civil Rights Act scrutiny while still giving good signal (it has to pass _easily_ because even if you win lawsuits every time, the cost of defense will be ruinous). A college degree in a related field is generally accepted. Things like programming tests for programmers are. But the more general your test is, the more likely its relevance will be challenged. And the more widely your test is given, even if it passes CRA muster, the more pressure there will be to water it down to reduce racial and gender differences -- and also reduce useful signal.

Comment Yes, an export tax is unconstitutional (Score 1) 95

But an export ban is not. And it's often said that the power to tax is the power to destroy... it turns out that works both ways. If you can ban exports, you can accept a fee in exchange for not banning them, which is effectively a tax. Not sure if it would hold up in court, but it turns out that nobody willing to challenge it will have standing.

Comment Yes, Chad (Score 1) 95

Cryptocurrency is specifically intended for the use of people who don't want Xi, Putin, Trump, Modi or God-help-you von der Leyen deciding how and where they put and use their money. If govenments couldn't resist using the monetary system for spying on and controlling their citizens, crypto wouldn't have much of a draw.

Comment Re:That seems way too long (Score 1) 61

This isn't just about GPUs, though; it's about all the hardware. Servers are typically used much longer than 3 years. I expect networking hardware lasts at least as long as the servers. Maybe you're burning out the AI training and inference stuff in a couple of years, but the other stuff lasts much longer.

Comment But why a smart garage door opener? (Score 2, Informative) 126

What does this add over a simple RF control? All I want is to be able to open and close my door from my car and inside the garage. Turning the light on separately is a nice to have (which I do have), but I don't see any reason to network this.

Obviously putting it on the cloud is an even worse idea.

Comment Re:Meanwhile (Score 4, Insightful) 96

It turns out that if kids figure out they're being made to ride an extra half hour on the bus while it winds around its route and back the other way just so they don't have to cross the street, they'll start fibbing about the side they live on, or just getting off. And the driver won't always stop them.

Comment Re:We are so fucked! (Score 1) 130

If we're very lucky, we will only see linear increases in temperature. Far more likely, the ocean has been easing us into our dooms. Far more likely, immense amounts of carbon are going to come out of the world's permafrost, and increasing wildfires will add even more. Then we will see logarithmic growth in global temperatures.

Emphasis mine. LOL. You know that logarithmic is LESS than linear, right?

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