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ctdonath

Employees can quit.

Customers can buy elsewhere.

Corporation isn't going to shoot them for doing so.

Re:“Beowulf”: A Horror Show on Monday September 26, 2022 @04:19PM (#32987803)
Likewise. Have read it several times, clearly heroic action (albeit perhaps gruesome), never seemed "horror". Never occurred to me there was "something to be afraid of" after the overwrought funeral, at least nothing more than the usual risks of existence in the age.

Horror evokes existential dread, a [quasi-]supernatural threat against an unwilling [relatively] impotent protagonist, often with an ambiguous ending. The monsters may be terrifying to the Danes in general, but they are not the protagonists.

Action evokes willing combat, antagonist(s) viewed as challenger or threat to vanquish by a duty/honor-bound protagonist. Beowulf travels far to engage the heard-of horror, as challenge for pride and later protecting his people.

Beowulf sees the first monster as a voluntary challenge, the second an obligatory follow-up, and the third a duty. Any subsequent vague threats are just the way of humanity; this is not "and they lived happily ever after."

A few, yes.

Not by the thousands, short of taking ALL satellites out.

SX is actively solving the light pollution problem.

A few satellites orbiting use far fewer materials to provide coverage of the entire planet than doing so terrestrially would.

As Starlink satellites age out they de-orbit. No space junk.

You’re welcome to propose & implement better solutions. Until then, this is the very best humans can do to lift all of humanity with minimal environmental impact.

Tell that to the Hoh tribe, and many similar, who had zero data connectivity until Starlink connected the tribe to the world for just $150/mo.
Most things are probably cheaper to replace than to bring back from the most remote area on Earth, and far cheaper to leave for someone else to use than make them bring their own. If unwanted, it’s trash - too expensive to move when there’s presumably an acceptable landfill right there (may sound environmentally unfriendly, but hauling trash back is likely worse).
Re:Try Stable Diffusion's Img2Img Mode on Monday August 29, 2022 @09:57PM (#32645820)
I keep providing drawings, and it mostly just produces other drawings. Thought it was to fill in content accordingly. What am I missing?
With room occupancy detection, it should start modeling likely HVAC needs - able to predict accordingly, and adjust power use & timing jitter accordingly.
Seems a rather demeaning choice of name, given the content currently dominating the site.
Massive tomes work well as audiobooks: expert reader paces the content well, forcing you to carry through the bogged-down parts.

Anecdote: War And Peace was so massive it broke my audiobook reader app. 400 pages in it just quit progressing.

Re:We should have a $25 minimum wage on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @07:40PM (#31267355)
$0 is the real minimum wage. If one cannot produce value commensurate with wages, the wages will end and alternative work solutions found.
Re:We should have a $25 minimum wage on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @07:39PM (#31267340)
May be the point, but is grossly unrealistic.

Wages trade value of work for currency (as a convenient abstraction from barter). If the work is not of mandated value, the employment evaporates as employers find other means of getting the work done.

Notice the proliferation of kiosk and app based ordering replacing live clerks, retail shift from brick-and-mortar to robot-augmented warehoused shipping, etc. Notice the flight of workers from expensive urban centers when "work from home" finally became a thing, moving to lower cost areas where higher minimum wages are less necessary (and thus supporting workforce leads to lower local cost of living).

Private employers are not in the business of supplying wages above their worth. If compelled, they will find whatever means possible to circumvent such compulsion.

Re:We should have a $25 minimum wage on Wednesday May 04, 2022 @07:30PM (#31267237)
Minimum wage: if you can't produce enough, you're not allowed to produce at all.
Night happens.
Prospect of a nuclear-powered desalination plant supplying its own fuel? Awesome.
You need a computer to compile at all. If you’re doing iOS you probably already have an iPhone. Old physical phones (cheap) are fine for dev, can simulate latest. $100/yr only needed if you’re actually charging for the app - which should earn you those costs pretty soon. Yes, $1000 baseline for what you likely already have most of.

The “largely free” is in contrast with platforms having >$25,000/yr entry costs just for a license.

Agreed, there were numerous "green lights" given by Biden. This "will not send troops" comment was the most blunt/clear of all.
Transcript of speech?
Biden's spokesperson stated today "US will not send troops to help Ukraine under any scenario."

Seems a concession, if not directive, to Russia to invade Ukraine.

Re:Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @02:08PM (#30276967)
In context - using solar energy to extract atmospheric CO2 and manufacture methane - yes.

We're not discussing "massive deforestation" here. Germany's biofuel mandate does not affect rockets in Texas.

Re:Ask HN: What Has Happened to Twitter? on Wednesday February 09, 2022 @07:57AM (#30272065)
Re:Starlink lost 40 satellites to a geomagnetic storm on Tuesday February 08, 2022 @10:05PM (#30268227)
These launches are getting SpaceX the money to advance to methane-powered rockets: they will literally make rocket fuel out of air and sunlight, making them absolutely carbon neutral.
Re:North Korea hacked him, so he took down its internet on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @04:36PM (#30184389)
Remember: the US Constitution includes "letters of marque" clause, empowering Congress to grant citizens' requests to wage private warfare against foreign entities. Wish people would exercise this option more.
Re:mmWave radar, you won't see it coming on Wednesday February 02, 2022 @10:58AM (#30179312)
Those camera manufacturers quickly eliminated that capability, likely via optical filtering. That was about 20 years ago. Consumer-grade cameras do not have that ability nowadays (bad publicity).
Re:Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @02:46PM (#30168105)
That's...preposterous. There are a great many illegal acts that are so rarely enforced that the act is normalized, with enforcement surprising the culprits - speeding and rolling stops being the primary examples. Such are normalized because individual enforcement is practically impossible; it's when the behavior gets codified by a business as/in a product that gov't has a chance to crack down on it.
Re:Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @11:16AM (#30164547)
Illegal is binary. Enforcement is what's squishy, because liability normally doesn't address deep pockets.
Re:Tesla to recall vehicles that may disobey stop signs on Tuesday February 01, 2022 @11:15AM (#30164532)
This is one of the really hard issues of automation: humans normalize disobedience to the point that strict obedience ranges from irritating to dangerous; the gap is not an engineering problem.
It has been popular for a long time. Internet has made concept exposure & social networking easier. My parents did it as hobby and crisis management; two generations further back my relatives were living it in earnest as norm for immigrants and descendants.
Optimally, it's obtaining a sufficient plot of bare land and building a roughly self-sufficient complex thereon (home, barn, workshop, garden, orchard, fuel/power, pond, robust kitchen, storage, and/or etc). One may buy a property already with any degree thereof, focus on operational near-self-sufficiency.

This is particularly ingrained in American culture as we're a very few generations away from such lifestyle being normal during expansion across an undeveloped continent.

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