I, for one, welcome our new squirrel overlords.

I did not know about that. Time for me to do some reading. Thanks for your post!

I’ve tried a great many different black and green teas, but my favorite is Constant Comment. I realize that makes me a barbarian low-life, but I genuinely enjoy the flavor.

I have thought for years that we needed more political parties in this countries, but the current system makes it almost impossible for them to hold any real power.

What’s needed is a takeover of the Democratic party. The Republicans did it, for evil. We could do it for good.

The practical problem is that Citizens United gives the super-rich most of the power. It would take a very large-scale populist movement to push them out and take back control.

My first presidential election was in 1980. I waited almost six hours to vote for Jimmy Carter in Iowa City, Iowa, USA (a medium-sized college town).

It was surprisingly festive. There were people walking the line handing out water and snacks. There were several musicians performing at various points along the line.

G.

That is a cute puppy!

I thought I was past being shocked by things like this, but it still shocked me,

We are experiencing a bizarre confluence of terrible things. Large numbers of people have checked out from reality, which is bad. Meanwhile, more and more people are willing to resort to extreme violence toward anyone who disagrees with them, which is worse. The combination is incredibly destructive.

That is a much larger delay than I would expect too. I can see why you’re curious.

To determine how long the signal took to arrive you would need to know the exact distance it traveled and its propagation speed.

To calculate the shortest distance the signal could travel you would need to know the exact locations of the transmitter and the receiver. That, plus some trigonometry, would get you a minimum distance. That seems to be a good enough correction for things like GPS to work.

If you really want to know the exact distance the signal traveled, it gets a lot trickier. Radio waves do not follow the curvature of the earth. To receive a signal that is beyond the range of sight, it needs to bounce off the ionosphere and back down to the surface. It may need to do that multiple times. That doesn’t always work, and when it does, it happens at various altitudes that vary based on a multiple factors. Without access to a lot more information, you will never know exactly how far the signal traveled.

Then you need to know how fast the signal was moving over the course of its journey. Radio waves only move at the speed of light in a perfect vacuum. The chemical composition, and even the temperature, of the atmosphere affect how fast it moves. And, of course, those factors will not remain constant from the transmitter to the receiver. So you would need to know the exact route the signal took, as above, and then know the details of the atmosphere at each point over that route. That would require access to even more extremely detailed information. And a lot of computer power to make use of it.

I don’t think there is currently any way you could get data about the signal bounce path. I am even more doubtful about getting detailed information about the composition and temperature of the atmosphere along the entire path.

There are probably other considerations that a physicist would bring into this, but I’m just a layman.

What is a sufficiently accurate estimate? That depends on what you need to do with it. There is no universal answer. The uncorrected time signal itself is good enough for nearly all purposes.

Having said all that, I’m actually with you on this. It would make me happy to have the delay-corrected time, even though the difference could not possibly matter to me. I don’t need it. But it would be cool.

Just bear in mind that nothing involved in “refurbishing” a drive removes the wear it has already experienced. That may or may not matter to you. The mean time between failures for a particular model is a meaningful statistic, but it doesn’t tell you too much about any individual drive. You may get lucky or unlucky with the lifespan.

If you check and monitor your drives, as various people have recommended here, you are less likely to be surprised by a failure. If you keep them backed up you won’t be out anything more than the replacement cost of the drive when it does happen.

Exactly. The rich will be able to buy privacy, while the rest become ever easier to exploit.

I saw an article a year or two back that talked about this very thing. It was actually management people at Amazon saying that they predicted they would be “out of employees” before the end of this decade.

What scares me is that con men and delusional idiots are the ones making the decisions about AI. Like biological weapons development, this is an area where unintended consequences have the potential to destroy mankind. And it is in the hands of people who have demonstrated that they will fire anyone who wants to slow them down by examining the risks and the underlying ethics of what they are doing.

Altman is the most obviously terrible example of someone who should never be allowed near this technology, but his counterparts at Google, IBM, Apple, and the other tech giants are nearly as bad. They want the fame, money, and power this could bring them. None of them are looking out for the good of humanity as a whole.

I firmly believe that our best hope, at least for the moment, is that general AI is going to take longer than they think. We are not going to achieve it by building more powerful versions of what we have now. It will require something new and different. By the time that breakthrough happens, we need to have responsible people managing it.

The different personalities are so clear from this picture, but they’re both gorgeous.

Paper tape would probably work, as long as you could find a reliable reader for it. I’m actually old enough to have used it and the readers often had problems. Getting rid of the mechanical aspects of the reader and replacing them with light sensors would go a long way toward fixing that.

Magnetic tape only lasts for a decade or two.

This could be considered a trojan.

Lawmakers ask the President to fix a bad law they passed because they can’t actually pass a law to correct it. Whatever the Republican-controlled House is doing, it does not include governing.

She’s beautiful! And there is wisdom in those eyes.

That’s a far better summary than anything I’ve seen in the press. Good work!