Yep, we called the non-typers "Chicken Peckers". If you watch them for a few seconds you'll see why.

I'm not convinced that learning to touch type the IDE shortcuts is worthwhile. The only exception is Unix system programmers who can use an environment which was developed half a century ago!!

Now, what I really need is three hands. Two for touch typing and one to operate the mouse. Sadly voice recognition systems are still rubbish for programming.

Just my thoughts.

I'm guessing you've never seen a house fire with flames spewing out of all the windows, and eventually the roof collapsing inwards. There's plenty of flammable material in a modern European homes.

The problem in California is that there are three potential threats to your home. Fire, wind, and earthquakes. While it would be possible to build homes which could resist all of these threats, (reinforced concrete structures on earthquake dampers) it would cost ten times more than a comparable wooden structure. Cheaper to build in wood, and rebuild from time to time.

Has April 1st arrived early this year??

Even if you could make a core that small go critical in a controlled way, the radiation dose would kill everyone in the building in a matter of seconds. Check out some of the reports from accidental criticality events. For example, https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

If you look closely enough everyone is a criminal.

But, in an authoritarian regime you don't need to look that closely. Everyone is automatically a criminal, as evidenced by China's court's >99% conviction rate ( https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsafeguarddefenders.com... ).

I can see some good reasons for siting data centers near nuclear power stations.

  1) Data center power consumption is pretty constant, and nuclear power is well suited to constant loads. You can't just start and stop a reactor.
  2) Nuclear plants are situated where there is abundant cooling water, that's good for data centers too
  3) Nobody wants to live or work near a nuclear plant, that means lower land costs for building the data center and fewer nimbys.
  4) Less cost installing high power feeder lines, and lower transmisson losses.
  5) If there is a Chernobyl event and if we lose a few hardware engineers, they're ten a penny these days.

On a slightly more serious note, data centers will generally get better prices for their electricity for many reasons. Firstly, they are a customer who doesn't experience big swings during the day/night cycle (known as base load customers). Secondly, they generally have a power factor close to 1 so they need less infrastructure. Thirdly, they can afford to take on long term supply contracts, which usually mean lower prices. Finally, data centers usually need two independent supplies from different grid access points. This allows them to play one supplier off against another to keep prices down.

Whether this is good or bad for the municipal consumers depends on supply and demand. If the power supply in your area is already maxed out in the summer and someone builds a 50,000 square foot co-lo site on the other side of the interstate, prices are going to go up. That's just basic economics.

It's not just the politicians, the journalists are no better. They are happy to use software like Telegram to protect their sources and avoid stories leaking. But when those same tools are used by 'bad people' it's a national scandal and the government needs to do something about it. They don't seem to understand that private communications work both ways.

As a previous poster noted, the government already has tools which can compromise the endpoints of secure communications, and legal opportunities to install them every time 'bad people' pass through a US airport. There's really no reason to install additional backdoors which can be abused by foreign governments/hackets.

So, let's think about who profits from this. I suspect the real winners of all this are the lawyers. I expect that the income from the 'online scholarly edition' over the remaining years will be dwarfed by the legal fees for this crazy escalation to the Hoge Raad der Nederlanden.

Next time a lawyer tells you, "We can win this!!" don't let your emotional involvement lead you into a lemming like dash off a cliff. The first question you should ask is, "How much will winning this cost me, and how much value will winning add".

In summary, don't let those suit wearing weasels suck you in !!

Unfortunately, there will always be secrets that governments need to keep. Whether that is stealing technology (look up Alexander Hamilton), or hiding capabilities from opponents. In addition there are some forms of 'free speech' which most people find unacceptable such as incitement to violence or child pornography. So we can never have completely free speech.

However, in the modern era where computers, and soon AI, can be used to monitor vast volumes of 'free speech' there the risk that this can be misused by those in power to find and imprison their opponents. Even including the words 'bomb', 'President' and 'Wednesday' in the same post could result in unwanted scrutiny and possibly arrest.

With this in mind, I think we need a team of programmers to start work on a truly decentralized messaging system. That means all nodes in the network replicate a small portion of the message data, and meta-data to allow store and forward delivery of end-to-end encrypted messages. It's massively inefficient compared to centralized servers, but it's much less amenable to government snooping.

Corrected for you

I can see two options for the smugglers here.

A low altitude flying drone which crosses the border using GPS navigation, drops small high value packages like fentanyl somewhere along it's flight plan, then returns home for fuel and another load. There's a lot of desert within 50 miles of the mexico border, and a drone flying 30 feet above the ground would get lost in the ground clutter on most radar systems.

The second option is a ground drone based on something like the Argo Frontier (https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fargoxtv.com%2Fintl%2Fvehicles%2Ffrontier). This would need several changes to reduce the IR signature, add camouflage, and make it obscure its own tracks. But this could deliver hundreds of kg within 100 miles of the border.

The ground drone would be cheaper and could be built using off the shelf components, so I assume that has already been done. Detection would probably require a light aircraft with an infrared camera looking for the thermal signature at night. Low flying drones are much more difficult to build and have a limited payload but they are harder to detect and stop.

It would be interesting to hear what the CBP have actually found out in the desert.

Better to describe it as 'Assembled in India' since most of the key components aren't manufactured there, and the profits will be paid in 'software license fees' to some Apple subsidiary in a Caribbean tax haven.

But if you're manufacturing a product with a large input of human labor countries like India, Vietnam, and Thailand are less than half the price of doing the same work in the good old U.S..of A. And, they don't (yet) have all the intellectual property protection issues that production in China involves.

I think we need a new multi-dimensional system for evaluating governments. One axis for internal repression (death squads, murdering opponents etc), one axis for genocidal tendencies (pick a group of your own people to demonize and execute), then economic destruction (kleptocracy and/or nationalization), and finally warlike behavior (claiming parts of other countries belong to you and/or invading them). No need to care whether they are left wing or right wing b*st*rds.

Perhaps this could be converted into a scoring system like the ones used for car insurance. Each country's scores on the various axis are multiplied together to produce a final rating on the evil-o-meter. The results could be announced on new year's eve by some second rate celebrity with masses of fake enthusiasm.

Something like this:

          "Now, in fifth place we have Russia with seven hundred and twenty points on the Evil-o-meter. [canned applause] Those warlike tendencies and the arrest of people holding blank sheets of paper really helped their score this year...[more fake applause] Only twenty two minutes until midnight and we're heading for the fourth most evil country in the world, after this short break...[cut to Republican talking head advert]..."

Yep, a minor shortage of neurons somewhere in the system.

They're saying that the volume of the caldera collapse was about 6 cubic kilometers, and this should be comparable to the volume of magma erupted. This puts the eruption in the same ballpark as Mt. Pinatubo's 1991 eruption. The volcano also lost several cubic km from a flank collapse which probably caused a tidal wave.

The important difference is that most of this material remained in the sea, forming underwater clastic deposits rather than being launched into the atmosphere.

What they forget to mention is that the vast majority of these underwater eruptions occur along mid-ocean ridges where low silica basalt is erupted without drama several kilometers underwater. This is very different from the situation in Tonga which lies on a subduction zone.

Counting phreatic eruptions and effusive eruptions together really is apples and oranges. But I guess that's as close as earth scientists get to clickbait.

It's a potential waste of time and money designing a chip to match government rules because those rules can change without warning. Delaying release just increases the risk of this happening.

Maybe they should be developing a design with fusible links to power down sections of the processor and local cache. Then they can just configure the permitted performance immediately before packaging the dies.