kepler1

What's your point?

Everything with a price is unkind to poor people.

So you can't do anything that affects poor people? What rule/principle are you suggesting then, to get anything done?

Is this a case of: "private equity / venture capital ruins everything"?

And relate to that, who exactly (what person) is applying pressure to the company directors to do this, who is it seeking to benefit, and who exactly is responding with decisions to meet what amount of bar of achievement? What $ is enough, and who is deciding that?

Does anyone else get the feeling that the "great filter" to our continued global civilization advance is how you manage, after reaching a certain size, the millions of competing motivations and concerns that branch out and cause confusion when there are no longer just a few clear problems to solve?

By the way, if you know, what are the kinds of detectors at the other end of the laser pulse that receive the signal? Are they like the pixels of a CCD but without the need for periodic / time-bound readout? They just are like silicon photocells that can react at the femto(?)-second speed and turn it into pulses translated into electrons?

I was thinking somehow that the response / recovery time of the silicon detectors to react to the laser pulses would be a limiting factor, is that at all valid?

Like, you cannot blink faster than <x> nanoseconds and get a CCD(?) to see it properly. (I'm sure it's not like a CCD with readout, etc. but whatever mechanism is the correct one, is there some natural minimum read time?)

Thanks for that -- And is something analogous not possible for electrons in a wire?

Can someone help be understand "intuitively" why light is able to transmit so much more than electrons over a wire (is that even correct)? I guess this is a request for ELI5.

Is it because with light, you can basically cram infinite photons along a pipe and they can all travel without any effect on each other and the "medium" itself (of course, no medium)? Whereas with electrons in a wire, they start to interfere with each other, the harmonics / capacitance of the wire, and more? Or is there a natural minimum pulse length that electrons cannot go beyond in a wire?

And to get out all the bandwidth at the end (when using light), you just split out the wavelengths with as many narrow band filters as you need, then send that to a decoder that then turns it into the usual bottlenecked ethernet at your favorite router?

Well, just like the giant oak that falls and gives nourishment to the forest saplings seeking to grow, so do senile old people give away their wealth to young hungry people in other countries seeking to sustain their internet scam businesses.

Just kidding. Although, maybe not totally. You wonder, when someone gets to some certain old age and is totally out of it, yet has tons of wealth tied up and doing no one any good, what is that money for except to be given to the next generation? I guess, some of it unwitting, hopefully more of it in a deliberate fashion to those it was intended for....

If granny can't even tell that $300k of her savings is gone, what's the problem then? Aside from her kids no longer being able to be the recipients of it.

God, I hope that I am able to realize that I'm reaching such a state and actively choose to give away my control of my assets to someone trustworthy, before I get scammed.

I don't know whether it's the general awareness of it that has been increasing or what, but it seems like job scams, bank scams, rental scams, these are all exploding in frequency lately.

Sometimes, it feels like we're in the middle disillusionment era of the internet and tech, where all the hope and positive potential of the new medium has now given way to just previous crappy life problems taking it over, only magnified.

Although it was a little bit of a long way to get to a point, I did somewhat appreciate the article's going into the idea of the circuit structure and look up tables.

It made me think (and I don't know if this is an apt analogy), it's like if you have 2 versions of a machine responsible for sorting different size balls in a factory.

One of them (#1) is built with pipes that exactly encode (in hardware, like a grid of holes) which balls are allowed to pass which size buckets on a production line. The other (#2) uses a robot that looks at each ball passing by, does some measurements, and decides whether it's the right size for a certain bucket.

(#1) is not very flexible, but is really great at the job and can do it just by shaking the tray and works for thousands of balls at once. (#2) needs to take time to study each one passing by. But you can reprogram it more easily.

Each has its purpose. And the FPGA tries to give you the advantages of #1 with a bit more flexibility to change the size of the holes, etc.

Then, replace balls with input video files that need an efficient decoder in hardware, etc. and I see the link.

Somehow, I see 2 empty campuses merging to sell off their real estate value that is currently worth more than any new intellectual property being produced.

I wonder, have they considered recruiting from the Vatsim online community? Not sure what side effects this might have of course, but you would think that that is already something of a helpful screening mechanism for people who are both interested and have shown some ability to do the job.

Maybe someone remind me, why Intel leadership thought they should get into the business of doing this?

Why is it that I always have to "talk to you" when I'm at a big company to get a quote, instead of just receiving some standard price I can see on the page?

Is it because, working for a big company, there's a sales target on my back and you want to use that to extract the maximum tolerable pricing from my group, just because you can?

Is it because my use case is so complicated you think that you need to offer me value-added services that help you achieve the margins you want?

Why is it that you, even just as an individual with a startup idea, have already fallen into this kind of pricing behavior? Where did you learn to do this? Do you already have VC-backed sales people telling you to do this?

Why is this such a common practice?

Maybe that's why I use other services that at least treat me the same as everyone else.

Now that the ruling has landed, it's clear she's going to prison, and her born and unborn kids have outlasted their purpose, I'm sure she's going to ship them off to whatever outsourced child supervision service she's procured for that purpose. As long as the price was good.

Again, "genetic" is not maybe what some people want to think it means, as an immutable thing. People's genes (as a population) change over time, education and culture select for different things. One group now, even if you said that they were "genetically" less performing, might well change within a few generations.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply you, I meant the general reader.

The problem I see on this topic is that many people takes sides on the debate it as if it were an immutable story, to be used as a judgement for all time, fueling people's good or bad political purposes.

But if anything, time and history has shown us that even if you adopt the proposition that IQ scores measure something meaningful and some groups score less than others -- the situation is totally changeable and moveable. People become more educated, more skilled, share more culturally over time.

There is nothing intrinsic about IQ that cannot change. So to use is as if it means someone is "inferior" is just a fallacy or at best a blinded snapshot in time.

Don't use the concept this way.

I wonder if a lot of things in society are going to require some kind of physical in-person proof because of our inability to distinguish fake from real at some point soon.

Sometimes I am grateful that our country is so large and prosperous that it can afford to have industries that exist like minor parasites on the government and the people, sucking just enough for their sustenance off the inconvenience of everyone, and they put up enough of a fight that people accept it.

Because in some other country that wasn't so well off, these entities (and other countless other interests) might be enough to push the country over the edge into [outright inefficient | corruption | drag on economic growth] territory and people would be rightfully indignant at middlemen skimming off people's inconvenience to enrich themselves.

Maybe it's also the curse of having had such a long and stable history that enabled legacy interests and systems to arise, where eventually you need another country to show you what's possible when you start from scratch for you to realize that the way you're doing something is just stupid.

If I were being snarky I could say that this makes one reminisce of days when the engineering was so important and everyone was so focused on it that there was not even time to think of the publicity and marketing of what they were about to do. Versus now, where it sometimes seems that you prepare the product launch marketing materials even before the product.

But of course, even NASA soon had those kinds of considerations to worry about as well, even in the 60s/70s.

Why are LGBT youth for some reason the special subgroup of people against whom every concern about rights being tested against? More so than anyone else's rights? It's like they somehow occupy a privileged position in your mind that everyone has to watch out for this group. Why is that?

I wonder if a nasal spray (or a tablet) is enough to make vaccine deniers change their minds. Sometimes you wonder, is all the ridiculousness of their protest because they're just afraid of needles and injections?

There is a pattern emerging in my mind.

Whether the novel political upheaval of the day is anti-monarchist revolutionaries, anti-Communists, or LGBT/BLM/defund-the-police activists, it takes the silent majority of moderate reasonable people a little time to figure out what the fomentor's game is, and distinguish political change with real sustained staying power vs. the flash in the pan. Then, as people grow tired of the day's fad and having daily life disrupted by something that clearly isn't working, they develop the successful counterarguments and the public support to quiet those unreasonable agitators.

It takes time, but you eventually see what actually sticks as the change desired by the bulk of reasonable people.

There is a pattern emerging in my mind.

Whether the novel political upheaval of the day is anti-monarchist revolutionaries, anti-Communists, or LGBT/BLM/defund-the-police activists, it takes the silent majority of moderate reasonable people a little time to figure out what the fomentor's game is, and distinguish political change with real sustained staying power vs. the flash in the pan. Then, as people grow tired of the day's fad and having daily life disrupted by something that clearly isn't working, they develop the successful counterarguments and the public support to quiet those unreasonable agitators.

It takes time, but you eventually see what actually sticks as the change desired by the bulk of reasonable people.

What this indicates to me is that most websites are in a constant state of breaking and needing maintenance, such that no company wants to have even a small distraction / obligation / annoyance of keeping a site up. Has the feel of like, you inherit a free building that's constantly falling apart, might as well get rid of it, no matter how many people find it useful.

Is that the reality of owning a website?

Well, I mean in a sense it's a laughable game that companies and their executives (and their employees) play, isn't it? There's a constant battle going on, and not just a little because of the company's own choices, don't you think?

Company X wants to keep plans and products confidential and internal, yet at the same time, wants to achieve world domination and penetration of its products to all the world's users. Somewhat inevitable to be in conflict, these goals, especially when you start to have on the order of 100,000 people you hire to be able to take over the world.

And I get the frustration, but not the outrage of executives. You created this human-based organization to power your capitalist (in the best sense) ambitions -- don't imagine that you have full control over it, especially if your past actions have created a culture that doesn't trust your publicly stated intentions fully.

And just to caricature even more, boo-hoo, my problem is that the media got told my huge company is building a phone, but we're not. Cry me a river. It's the greatest injustice humanity has ever experienced.

One chooses to work on health, privacy, face / fingerprint / camera apps on iPhone, are given a work iPhone with proprietary / internal experimental software explicitly for use by employees, and are somehow surprised that part of the clearly disclosed and understood purpose is to collect data for use / development of the software? I don't get where term "whistleblower" has any applicability here. There's no secret or violation of what an employee has agreed to.

Sounds like someone has an inflated sense of being a victim. Or at least manufacturing some story to get attention.

I imagine people in the actual real world looking at a story like this and wondering why someone's teacup soap opera in the SV tech bubble rises to worthiness to broadcast an installment of the world's most boring soap opera.

I agree that forcing people to read their mail on only certain devices at certain times under supervision is not a human-being-respectful rule. But there is also the consideration that probably it's there for the reason of preventing drugs from being laced into the mail, even into the very paper.

How about they do the simple step of scanning the mail, and reprinting it for the inmates to receive a physical copy? Of course, then you get into the problem of how much a markup is the shitty jail company going to apply to that.