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Comment Re:"reached orbit" is a misnomer (Score 1) 73

A little history: NASA did try the model of doing more missions for less money, but it was bad for them because they got blamed for every failure, even useful or inconsequential ones. The entire program that funded the development of Falcon 9 (COTS) was created so that real development could happen without "NASA" getting dragged into congress every time some minor rocket or spacecraft didn't work correctly. SpaceX didn't come up with some brilliant idea nobody thought of, they were doing exactly what NASA intended. Fortunately it worked, voters and senators were ok with failures when "NASA" wasn't written on the side of the vehicle, even if NASA was paying the bill. Things have moved on from Falcon 9, but I think the scheme did get the US (and world) space industry un-stuck.

Comment Re:Uncomfortable truth (Score 1) 129

I used various Raspberry Pi's over the past decade, starting with the Pi B+, then Pi 3 B , then Pi 4.

The Raspberry Pi's have support in mainline distros (e.g. Debian and Ubuntu), so that is why their support is good, compared to the more powerful SBC's that have 'one hit wonder' Linux releases (Odroid, Banana Pi, Orange Pi, ...etc), then no support after that.

Although, something similar happened to me on the Pi 3 B: I am stuck with Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and can't upgrade to 24.04 LTS or later, because they stopped support for 32bit ARM.

And the Pi suffer in other ways:

Power consumption used to be the Pi's forte, but now when you buy a mini PC, say with an Intel N100, you get low power consumption, and the difference between that and Pi's is negligible. For example, the N100 TDP is 6W, and the i5-1135G7 is 15W. Both are found in mini PCs these days, as well as other Intel and AMD CPUs.

6W means if you run it 24/7 at 25% utilization, and electricity cost is $0.25/kWh (Ontario's summer rate), your consumption is a whopping $3.28 PER YEAR.

Then there is hardware support. When you buy a mini PC, you get things included, such as a case, a fan (for some models that require it), upgradeable RAM, SATA connectors, an M.2 slot, and so on. Some of that is available on Raspberry Pis, but usually as a HAT or kit, for extra dollars ...

The experience with a mini PC is just as seemless as a laptop or a desktop: there is no difference at all in installation, upgrades, ...etc.

Comment Re:Who's waste is it? (Score 1) 74

It does seem a bit hard to judge the context. The form is kindof important. For example, in normal operation, pressurized water reactors in the U.S. released 1500 TBq per year in 2003. That's not "leaked" that is approved release rates of tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons) in water. That is normal for nuclear reactors and not dangerous compared to background radiation if dispersed in the planned way, even if it is detectable.

Also, based on Japan's number, it would seem that Fukushima either wasn't quantified yet at the time of that report or wasn't qualified as a "historical dumping, accidents, or losses at sea." One of the main releases eventually arising from the Fukushima accidents is all the tritium-containing water after the other nasty stuff has been removed. Again, not dangerous if released in a controlled way. The main question really is how well other things have really been removed.

Comment Re:Kubuntu (Score 1) 82

I was on Kubuntu for many years as my sole desktop.
Then I ran into trouble upgrading (though I always stuck with LTS releases, never in between ones).

I switched to Xubuntu (XFCE), and never looked back.
There are sure some areas with more functionality in KDE, but I don't miss them at all.
XFCE stays out of the way, and allows you to focus on the applications.

Comment Re:why? (Score 1) 128

The solution is to acknowledge the simple truth that a trained model is a derivative work of its training data. One could go further and consider output of the model also derivative work of the training data (not that far from the truth) but even just considering the model itself a derivative work would go a long way toward making things right with free software. Note that I said to "acknowledge." It is a simple fact that the model is a derivative work and it produces a lot of output that is derivative work (just rephrasing of something in the training set). That's real - it's just a question of how it is treated socially and legally.

Comment Lecture by Subir Sarkar (Score 2) 88

The corresponding author is Subir Sarkar.

He is a professor at Oxford who has done some interesting work about the expansion of the universe is NOT accelerating.

Instead, he is saying that there is a dipole effect because earth, and the galaxy cluster that we are in, are all moving in space, and that gives the effect of accelerating expansion!

He provides compelling evidence (for a non-specialist at least) for what he says and also casts doubts on the evidence for acceleration by analyzing their data (supernovae as standard candles, and their red shift), since a dipole effect is observed on that.

If his hypothesis is confirmed by other research and observations, then the 2011 Nobel Prize for Saul Perlmutter and Adam Reiss maybe for nothing ...

Watch his lecture on Beyond The Cosmological Standard Model.

This latest paper is yet another analysis towards that.

Let us see which hypothesis is supported by the evidence, current and future ...

Comment We actually looked at it (Score 5, Interesting) 57

Installed it, looked at the components.

While it's technically open-source, to make it usable beyond a simple proof of concept, you need to pay for a lot of "pro" stuff that requires a license.

I have no idea what it costs, but I doubt it will turn out cheaper as Microsoft.

Currently, it does not look like it's multi-tenant. So you need a full installation for every customer.

Comment Re:Different worlds (Score 5, Interesting) 504

Being a familiar tactic, it is also well known how to deal with it. This is what tariffs (on specific goods) are actually for, coordination of those with other trading partners, as well as support for US domestic industry. The problem is that the current US government is so incompetent that they can't do it even close to right. Just as an example, the right move here is likely to tie industry subsidies to improvements in manufacturing (automation) and EV deployment that make US cars more competitive on the world market. One problem in the US is that some policies that support industry through government get the nasty "socialism" label and some don't. And whether they do or don't has more to do with corruption in the political process than any real-world differences.

Comment Re: This isn't the EU. He's going to win. (Score 1) 314

I think those may be ways you can lose permanent resident status, but not reasons to be denied entry. But some of this is a question of practice. A border agent "denying entry" on the basis of #2 is not necessarily denying entry to a permanent resident - they are making a judgement that the person before them no longer has status because that is a condition. Even for that there is a due process issue in that if the person claims that that is a record error they should be admitted and then followed up. In a correctly functioning system, it is not the border agent's job to litigate the green card status itself, only to correctly map the person to their status and then admit or refer for other processing accordingly. Obviously the current administration is attempting to do illegal things that sound kindof like the rules but aren't really.

Comment Re:If he is found guilty (Score 2) 182

I think what you say is not as strong as you think it is. It only applies to limited things like due process, not necessarily all constitutional rights such as those restricting search and seizure. There is something called the "entry fiction" where people who have entered can be treated as if they are requesting entry and therefore only have the rights they would have at the border. See this podcast episode. Rights they have do include a few things like habeas corpus and due process, but, as I understand it, not things like freedom from search or right to silence or freedom from indefinite detention. And, as others point out, currently federal law enforcement is even ignoring many of those rules or massively abusing them.

Now I think the entry fiction is an incorrect interpretation of the U.S. constitution and should not exist, but my understanding is that it is the current functioning precedent of law in the U.S. Among other things this is the hole through which the current administration is trying to create its police state - if they claim someone entered the country without authorization, the entry fiction kicks in and they can detain them effectively indefinitely. And how exactly does one go about proving one did not enter without authorization while sitting in detention? And there is no one phone call required in this type of detention. You're just gone. This is happening to people right now. Someone else has to notice the person disappeared.

Comment Re: Why were critical systems not replaced? (Score 1) 36

Iâ(TM)m aware of long-lived companies who got advised to: sell off then lease back their real estate, reduce cash on hand myriad ways, changing buying habits (so inventory value on the books plunges), etc. Literally, theyâ(TM)ve been coached to eliminate every bit of those decades of reserves.

When a bad thing happens, the company dies.

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