Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:The AI slop/backlash (Score 1) 51

The class in question was given IN PERSON.

lol, no it wasn't. If it was, you'd have a "receipt", lol.

I didn't carefully review the article

lol, no shit.

but that happened.

no it didn't. If it happened, the stories about it on conservative media would have referenced it, but they ALL refer to the LinkedinLearning video, not an in person class.

Anything about Linkedin Learning is a deliberate decoy

The entire story is about the content of the "Confronting Racism" video by Robin DiAngelo that was on LinkedinLearning

This is my last post on the topic.

lol, no shit. Because I proved you're a lying, little bitch. Well that, and it's time for you to queue up CockGobblers IV: The Voyage Home (To Gobble More Cock)

Comment Re:The AI slop/backlash (Score 1) 51

I love that you couldn't be assed to read your own "receipt"

Coca-Cola told Newsweek that the video and images "are not part of the company's learning curriculum." Coca-Cola said it has a "Better Together" training initiative that includes access to the LinkedIn diversity lesson but that it "was not part of the company's curriculum. We will continue to listen to our employees and refine our learning programs as appropriate." On Tuesday, Coca-Cola sent an additional statement to Newsweek that read: "The video in question was accessible on a third-party platform and was not part of the company's curriculum, so it was not required. Our overall diversity, equity and inclusion training is required and received input from employees reflecting a wide range of backgrounds, views and expertise."

Was the article too many words for you to understand? Do you need it spelled out for you?

1) Coca-Cola subscribed to the Linkedin Learning training platform

2) Subscriptions to LinkedIn Learning get access to all of the content in the platform. Subscribers don't pick and choose with videos they get access to.

3) Coca-Cola's diversity training used videos in the Linkedin Learning platform, but that video was not one that was part of their training. Notice how your "receipt" doesn't have any proof that it was part of their training?

4) Coca-Cola employees could access that video within LinkedInLearning, just as they could access every other video in LinkedInLearning, but it wasn't mandatory, just as all the other content in LinkedInLearning that wasn't part of Coca-Cola's training wasn't mandatory

Being able to access a video doesn't mean it's mandatory. For example, just because your cable subscription gives you access to CockGobblers III: The Search For More Cocks To Gobble, that doesn't mean it's mandatory for you to watch it; it's something you do on your own because you take your hobbies seriously.

"hERE's mY rECeiPT", lol, lmao. you illiterate, gullible fucking clown

Comment Re:Just don't tell the administration ... (Score 1) 174

Actually, Times Roman, new or not, is named for the Times of London.

Thank you for the correction on that. I had always heard it was for the NY Times, until I looked it up on wikipedia.

I would counter though that even with the Times of London being considered a "centre-right" newspaper in the UK, it is still a "far left" paper compared to anything Trump associates himself with.

Comment Re:The AI slop/backlash (Score 2) 51

I'm not mad at Coke for their ads, but they've earned my lifelong boycott for telling their employees to be less white.

Waiter: Anything to drink?

You: Pepsi, please.

Waiter: Sorry, we don't have Pepsi, is Coke okay?

You: No. I'm boycotting Coke for the rest of my life for something they didn't actually do.

Waiter: Oh, I see -- you're a sad little bitch. Would the sad wittle bitch wike some chocwate milk and some cwayons to dwraw wif?

You: Goo-goo, ga-ga

Comment Re:Package deals? (Score 1) 16

We might have cable tv, if that was the cheapest way to get internet in our house. I literally do not know, only one device is plugged into a coax cable in our entire house and that's the modem. I wouldn't even know where to look on my tv to see if they still come with coax connectors on the back, it hangs on the wall and there's a power plug, that's it.

Comment Re:How Fucking Cool?! (Score 2) 21

Where do you think cars are going? You already have to wait for permission to use your car as it boots up. And then there's the data tracking built into the vehicle which is relayed to third parties. This will only be the next step in people being given permission to use something they thought they purchased.

The eventual goal is to have people rent their PC or phone and all the software they use.

Comment Re:People that are otherwise rational (Score 1) 114

about environmental causes loose their shit when you tell them to cut back or eliminate eating meat.

Geez I guess they people would want to line all those on the "carnivore diet" against the proverbial wall and shoot them, eh?

By the way....do these documents give one carbon credits if you go on a diet???

If so, what can you buy with these credits?

Comment Re:Food (Score 1) 89

That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" systems we already do on Earth - you just need to get them there in an affordable manner.

The primary consumables are water and fertilizer. Nobody seriously is proposing building a colony that can't produce its own water. As for fertilizer, that would start off as an import, but a much smaller import than the food mass. On Earth, open-loop fert systems are fairly common, but they're slowly losing ground to closed-loop where you just maintain the EC, filter the returning solution, and every now and then due a nutrient-level test on the solution and individually adjust whatever nutrient might be lacking vs. the others.

We can consume lots of growing medium, like disposable rock wool cubes and the like, but we can also not do that. For example, it's perfectly fine to grow plants in clean sand / fine gravel - just clean it and sterilize it between uses. Something like pumice is better, though it slowly breaks down between uses. But you don't have to use anything special.

If you do LED lights, you may get a decade or so out of them. You can reduce shipping mass for replacement by going with designs that let you replace just the light boards from them (Mechatronix has lights like this for example), no need to resend e.g. the heavy heat sink, etc.

There's a million random things you use or that can wear out, from cleaning solutions to solution pumps to climate computers and and on and on. But they're not a meaningful import-mass, at least compared to food. Really, the big thing is fert. But regenerating fertilizer from waste (plant waste, human waste) should not be - industrially - immensely complicated. For the metals, burn to oxides / hydroxides, dissolve in acid, fractionally crystallize. You'll always lose some from the system, but we're not talking large amounts. For nitrates, Haber-Bosch is nothing exotic to adapt, and you have easy feedstocks (mining is complex, sucking in gases isn't).

Comment Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score 1) 89

(To elaborate about PELs: Venus's middle cloud layer is ~1-10mg/m3, depending on altitude, latitude, and what study you trust (our existing data isn't great). OSHA PELs are 1mg/m3 for an 8-hour shift. NIOSH's RELs are also 1mg/m3 for a 10-hour shift, with IDLH of 15mg/m3. Now, this has the two aforementioned caveats. On the downside, Venus's aerosols are higher molarity - 75-85% concentrated vs. ~20% on Earth. On the upside, the vast majority of the PEL/REL/IDLH risk is from inhalation, which obviously, you can't be doing in any atmosphere in our solar system other than Earth. Dermatitis thresholds are far higher. So again, so long as there's not rain/snow/dew/frosts, and you're at the right altitude/latitude combination**, you could probably spend some time outside in shirtsleeves and a facemask, and feel an alien breeze against your skin.

** One also has to stress latitude, not just altitude, as it's cooler for a given altitude as you get closer to the poles. While Venus's middle cloud layer climate is "similar" to Earth's, it's a bit on the warmer side for a given pressure than Earth's - and because an aerostat rides "down" in the atmosphere vs. its internal pressure, esp. at night when it's no longer being heated by the sun, it amplifies the impact. So if you're going to be living in the envelope, you need to find the right balance between how far you want to go below 1atm and how hot you want to have it be outside. Shifting more poleward helps find a better balance between the two (at the cost of lower sunlight availability for solar power vs. the super-bright equatorial regions). It also shortens your effective day (faster superrotation period). You probably don't want to go fully to the poles, though, because of the polar vortices (though how turbulent they are is still an open question).

Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 2) 89

BS. There's no ozone and at the height these balloons would float the UV and assorted stuff from the sun would fry you in seconds.

They are, however, correct. Venus has no (innate) magnetic field, only a weak induced one (about 2x that of Mars's induced field), but it has a massive atmosphere. The mass of matter over your head at a reasonable habitat altitude/latitude combination is equivalent to that of about 5 meters of water. Way more shielding than is necessary for human life. Of course, having even more shielding would be even better, as it would of course be nice to have Earthlike protection levels. But you could survive even a Carrington Event on Venus. Getting 5 meters of water-mass-equivalent over a Mars habitat, while doable, is quite an undertaking, and means you're living basically in a bunker.

Wtf re you smoking? Archimedes principle holds on Venus just as on Earth. Lose your lifting gas and you sink and on Venus you'll soon start to cook.

Aerostat internal pressures are very similar to the pressure outside of them, and they hold a tremendous amount of gas. A 1 cm hole is basically irrelevant in an aerostat; it's just some extra work for your gas generators, vs. what it already has to overcome due to gas diffusion through the envelope. By contrast, a 1cm hole in a tin-can habitat on Mars will kill you in minutes.

Comment Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score 1) 89

Venus's middle cloud layer is quite similar in most properties to Earth's troposphere, with convection cells, wind speeds, etc seemingly having a similar distribution to that on Earth. There's also lighting, seemingly at roughly Earth levels (though a lot of uncertainty), although we know very little about it, including even where it occurs (incl. whether it's in the middle layer), and why. Because Mars hogs most of the planetary exploration budget :P

Aerostats generally deal better with turbulence than fixed wing aircraft. They interact with it sort of like a ship at sea, with long, slow undulations rather than sharp jerks.

Comment Re:Venus is orders of magnitude easier to colonize (Score 4, Interesting) 89

Uhh,, are you crazy?? It's got an atmosphere with clouds of pure acid that snows lead sulfide on a surface that'll melt you face in 5 seconds.

So, this is not only wrong, but it'd actually be more convenient if it were true ;)

Venus's middle cloud layer (the one in question) is actually more like vog (volcanic fog) on Earth. It's not an acid bath, it's a sparse aerosol, with visibility measured in kilometers. The particulates are higher molar than on Earth, but otherwise, it's not a very aggressive environment, and if not for the molarity difference it would be on the order of standard worker PEL levels. You could be out in shirtsleeves for quite a while before you started getting dermatitis (but you would need face protection, both for breathing, and to protect your eyes - not just from the aerosols, but also e.g. carbon monoxide).

(Here I should add the caveat that we don't know if there's any precipitation or dew/frost in Venus's middle cloud layer; it's still a debated topic. We've put so damned little resources into studying Venus, unfortunately, and as a result there's still massive unanswered questions)

Lead sulfide has absolutely nothing to do with Venus's middle cloud layer. It is a (probable) surface phenomenon in Venus's highest regions. The fact that Venus's surface is a natural chemical vapor deposition lab (plus has some interesting volcanic fractionalization / selective thermal erosion possibilities) does, however, raise interesting resource possibilities. The surface, though hostile, was accessible even to Soviet tech developed in the 1960s; much of what we build for industry has to endure vastly more hostile conditions than Venus's surface. The air is so dense that it makes landing much easier than on Mars - it's been calculated that with the right trajectory, you could fire a hollow titanium sphere at Venus, have it enter the atmosphere, decelerate from orbital velocity, and land intact on the surface, without any entry/descent system whatsoever). One probe lost its parachute during descent and still landed intact. The atmosphere is dense enough that you can "dredge" loose material, and fly around with a small metal bellows balloon (controlling flight with small winglets), and return to altitude with a phase-change balloon.

(There is - probably - a metal in Venus's middle cloud layer, but it's small amounts of iron chloride, a soluble salt)

As for the comment I made earlier about how it would be easier if the middle cloud layer had more acid: sulfuric acid is a resource to a Venus habitat. While it's not needed for lift (lift on Venus can be done with just normal, breathable Earth air, with about half the lift of helium on Earth - you can live inside your envelope, with N2 straight from the atmosphere and O2 made from CO2), H2SO4 is your main source of *hydrogen*. Specifically, heating the aerosols first releases free water vapour. Further heating splits it into SO3 and more H2O. You can then further heat the SO3 over a vanadium pentoxide catalyst to split it to SO2 and O2, or you can inject the SO3 into the front of your scrubber to help extract more free water vapour (it's not all in the aerosols) .

Hydrogen is needed not just for your habitats's water needs (note: gases will always slowly permeate in and out of your envelope, it's not a closed system), but also for propulsion for ascent stages and for producing polymers (including the envelope itself). Ascent stages need lots of hydrogen, unless you go hydrogen-free (carbon monoxide, cyanogen, etc), but these have either poor ISP or big problems with things like toxicity, stability, and/or esp. combustion chamber temperature); even "low hydrogen" fuels like acetylene, diacetylene, H additives to hydrogen-free props, etc still need massive amounts of hydrogen to reach orbit. Chemical rockets would need to be at least two stages, be recovered by balloons, hang and be manipulated from the bottom of the envelope, and would take up the majority of your lift capacity. Far more realistic are nuclear thermal rockets - while they burn pure hydrogen, they're so efficient at it that they don't use that much, they give you SSTO capability, and a number of designs can allow for propellantless atmospheric flight / hover (for easier docking).

Your three limiting resources are hydrogen, fluorine (from HF in the atmosphere, but there's not that much HF in the atmosphere if you plan to use a lot of fluoropolymers), and "metals" - the latter being limited by how much you're dredging or digging the surface (with the exception of small amounts of iron from iron chloride).

BTW, hydrogen on Venus isn't the same as on Earth - it's over 2 orders of magnitude higher deuterium percentage (H+ was lost via the solar wind). Probably not high enough to be a health threat, but high enough to be a resource. If you store energy via reversible fual cells/electrolysis, you can wire them in a cascade to separate deuterium every time you charge and discharge. Fuel cells and electrolysis have quite high separation factors for deuterium. At about $1k per tonne, deuterium wouldn't be a viable export commodity at *current* launch pricing, but if launch costs get down enough, it certainly could become one. The other thing Venus has in abundance is power - both solar (though it depends on your latitude and altitude), and of particular note, wind between different altitudes. If you hang a winged wind turbine off a long cable from the main altitude, having it fly many km lower or higher than the habitat, you have a nonstop, quite intense wind differential to generate from.

Slashdot Top Deals

I think there's a world market for about five computers. -- attr. Thomas J. Watson (Chairman of the Board, IBM), 1943

Working...