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Comment The Firefly (Score 1) 47

There used to be a nuclear power plant in Brazil that at one time locals called The Firefly due to its operating history. Clinton Nuclear Plant is the US' closest equivalent to that. ComEd, which has a long and large if not always 100% successful of running nuclear plants, spent years resisting all pressure from the ICC and state government to take it over from its original owner and then when their new corporate parent forced the issue spent years and many careers trying to make it work.

Comment CEO in over his head (Score 1) 75

A few weeks SO staff posted a "we're rebranding" post on the site in the Q&A format. They've been throwing out all kinds of supposed strategic expansions lately, which look scattered and less than coherent.This particular post generated comments and the CEO Prashanth Chandrasekar started responding.

Observation: The CEO (unfiltered by editors, legal, or PR) can barely write a coherent English sentence. They're not making any sense at all with their current plans, as far as I can tell. Their goose is probably cooked. Remember when Slashdot came off its peak and was sold and shuffled around a couple times by corporations grasping for some way to leverage its former popularity? Like that.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmeta.stackexchange.com%2Fa%2F408825%2F341383

Comment NY Regents Testing Similar (Score 5, Informative) 337

Since 1866, New York State has had a standardized testing regime at the end of high school to qualify for a statewide Regents Diploma. Since at least 2015, they likewise goose the scores in a broadly similar way. You can see a scoring conversion chart from last year here. For example, out of 82 possible points on the Algebra I test, scoring 29 (that is, 35%) gets scaled up to a reported score of 65, qualifying for performance level 3 (out of 5, like a 'C'), and so qualifies for the Regents Diploma (more).

In the time since that's been done, the proficiency of basic math skills for incoming college students has become so poor, the colleges (like CUNY) have had to abandon the requirement to know any algebra even as an expectation to graduate college.

Comment "Propping up"? (Score 1) 113

Unclear why one of the traditional routes of population increase in US states - for the last 425+ years in most states, closer to 525 years in what is now California - is deemed to be "propping up" the population. Almost as if there is an agenda and a narrative to declare more recent immigrants as not real citizens or not real people. As opposed to, say, a German family that immigrated to the United States in 1904.

Comment Sure glad the Bell System was destroyed (Score 5, Interesting) 157

In the Old Days(tm), say 1990, electric power companies depended on Bell System wires for the most critical protective relaying applications, and the Bell Operating Companies provided nine 9s reliability with latency approaching the speed of light. Television networks likewise: national distribution in as close to atomic time synchronization as was humanly possible.

Today one is lucky to be able to make a voice call from one medium sized city to another without dropouts, jitter, disconnections, and other digital voice garbage. Latency? Ha ha ha ha. Reliability? Not even funny.

Progress!

Comment Well, shit (Score 1) 62

I guess I was one of the dozen users still using Pocket.
Why, you ask? It is (was) simple, not terribly intrusive or advert-happy, and it just suited my needs.
I use(d) it as a cross-platform link-sharing tool between my mobile and various personal and work PCs - just a big bucket of links accessible anywhere, which I would occasionally revisit and prune if/when the list grew too long.
So now what? Google Keep? Microsoft OneNote? (shudder)

Comment Already been done. (Score 1) 10

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

The MEV-1 successfully docked with a geostationary satellite in 2020. Completed its mission in April, and is on its way to dock with a second satellite. It uses the engine nozzle as a docking port.

What they're saying is starfish is planning the first commercial docking in Low Earth Orbit, which is a really dumb distinction to make.

Comment Re:The glass was completely empty (Score 2) 34

As first described the Google glasses would have been very useful in industrial environment and for jobs such as railroad locomotive and airliner maintenance - having maintenance instructions automatically overlaying your sight picure based on what you were working on would be a great thing for productivity and safety. Problem is that would have been billions of dollars in development of the hardware and the pattern recognition software alone. Then maintenance documents (drawings, procedures, etc) would have had to be incorporated and the owners of that IP would not have been willing to participate except on an equal contractual footing. So huge upfront costs and no equally huge revenue stream for Google in sight (heh).

That said, the idea that a secretive recluse billionaire who made his money by stealing other people's PII might not realize that ordinary human beings do not care to be under a combination of Superman's x-ray vision and Thiel's tracking database 24/7 is... not surprising.

Comment Plenty of workers (Score 0) 115

I'm looking forward the legions of Slashdotters who will quit their work-from-home coding and data jobs to move to remote rural areas for 40 years and devote themselves to hot, uncomfortable, 60 hour/week physical jobs with the added bonus of up to 5 REM/year of radiation exposure operating nuclear power plants.

Comment Re:Stackoverflow has devolved into narcissism (Score 2) 58

I've said for quite some time that an essential problem with SO is that, since people are incited to score points, they want that to come easy, and so they get irritable when there's a fundamentally hard question that gets asked. Hence the downgrading and looking for reasons to close or delete a question. Which especially sucks for high-knowledge question-askers who have already thought through, researched, and ruled out any easy solutions.

The Iron Law of Stack Exchange

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