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180709206
comment
byMartin Blank
y 31, 2026 @10:46AM
(#65960890)
Attached to: White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules
Trump doesn't use email, and he never has.
And as of last summer, NIST recommends against complex passwords and expiration while calling for a 15-character minimum. Forced password changes should happen only when they're suspected to have been compromised.
180709186
comment
byMartin Blank
y 31, 2026 @10:41AM
(#65960876)
Attached to: White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules
>Trans people are less than 1/10 that. This means that it's easy to go your entire life without ever knowing one.
Treatments are getting a lot better, so the odds that you know one are a bit higher than you might think. But knowing that you know one is harder because the treatments are better and because they're unwilling to bring it up. When gay marriage was legalized in the US, a lot of people only realized that they had gay friends and family because wedding announcements started coming. It caused a lot of people -- some of whom had been actual leaders of movements against gay marriage -- to rethink things.
180709170
comment
byMartin Blank
y 31, 2026 @10:35AM
(#65960868)
Attached to: White House Scraps 'Burdensome' Software Security Rules
I was hired in part to write my employer's IT security policies and standards, and to guide the various IT groups in building their procedure documentation. Most of it has gone reasonably well since I started mostly with established methods and tightening things here and there. There have been some areas of contention, but the things that have received the most pushback are around development. For example, the idea that developers for enterprise systems with deployment tiers (dev, test, UAT, prod) should not have direct, full-time access to prod sparked heated debate. In addition, a couple of groups seem to be about to start a political fight over the idea that they should document some basic practices like allowed programming languages, minimum versions of those languages, security features like ASLR, and compiler settings. I've been accused of trying to dictate their development environment, but I'm just trying to get them to write down what they're already doing and agree to set some minimums on their own. The only thing that I've "imposed" is that any library or platform they use for new projects should be officially supported so that they're not writing new Python 2 or .NET 3 code.
> You got virus checkers and software solutions to handle the technical stuff, the hard part is to convince the damn receptionist to stop buying from spam mails, because THATS where most of the damage comes from.
It's not the receptionists that we have to worry about so much as middle management. We get more compromises at that level than at the lower tiers.
180679436
comment
byMartin Blank
ry 28, 2026 @01:16PM
(#65954780)
Attached to: Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon
The mass of 2024 YR4 is estimated to be in the range of 2.8e8 kg, or about 280,000 tons, near the weight of three fully loaded US supercarriers. The mass of the moon is about 7.3e22 kg. That's about 14 orders of magnitude.
RUs1729 suggested below that this is like "a fly impinging on an incoming locomotive." A housefly has a mass of about 20 mg (2.0e-2 g) on the larger end of the scale. The heaviest railway train ever operated was an ore carrier in Australia that had a total mass of just under 100,000 metric tons, or about 1.0e11 g. That's 13 orders of magnitude difference.
The effect of this asteroid hitting the moon would be roughly in the range a housefly hitting the heaviest locomotive train ever used, and quite possibly less. Maybe you're aware of a housefly dislodging a train somewhere, but I've not heard of it.
180611344
comment
byMartin Blank
18, 2026 @02:50PM
(#65933258)
Attached to: 2026's Breakthrough Technologies? MIT Technology Review Chooses Sodium-ion Batteries, Commercial Space Stations
The pressure differential for a space station doesn't need to be above one atmosphere. You reach that at 10 m underwater.
180611334
comment
byMartin Blank
18, 2026 @02:47PM
(#65933254)
Attached to: 2026's Breakthrough Technologies? MIT Technology Review Chooses Sodium-ion Batteries, Commercial Space Stations
> no need to mine salt, it's everywhere
Most salt that we use is mined. Desalinization is expensive. It's cheaper and faster to use heavy machinery to dig it out of the ground. There's a mine in New York that produces 18,000 tons a day, and that's just one of several large mines in the US alone.
180611328
comment
byMartin Blank
18, 2026 @02:45PM
(#65933248)
Attached to: 2026's Breakthrough Technologies? MIT Technology Review Chooses Sodium-ion Batteries, Commercial Space Stations
Promethium's natural availability is around 1e-15 ppm of the Earth's crust. It's actually cheaper to make it by bombarding uranium and then isolating the products to make the sub-kilogram annual volumes needed to meet commercial demand.
180611288
comment
byMartin Blank
18, 2026 @02:38PM
(#65933238)
Attached to: 2026's Breakthrough Technologies? MIT Technology Review Chooses Sodium-ion Batteries, Commercial Space Stations
Salt mines are even easier and cheaper, and they're located all over the world, often well away from oceans (Austria, Switzerland, and Kazakhstan all produce several hundred thousand tons or more per year from mines and salt flats). There's a mine in New York that produces 18,000 tons of salt per day. Remove the chlorine, and that's 7,000 tons of sodium per day from just one location.
180608314
comment
byMartin Blank
y 17, 2026 @08:33PM
(#65932148)
Attached to: Ads Are Coming To ChatGPT in the Coming Weeks
That's the case with every single one. I was not terribly impressed by AI three or four years ago. It's gotten better, but I really think that it's plateaued in its capabilities. There are still improvements happening, but nothing so far like the shift we saw when ChatGPT first hit most people's radar. The coming changes are likely to be more subtle and focus on accuracy and focused tasks.
For all the worries about massive job displacement, it hasn't happened. At my workplace, people were almost screaming for access to the enterprise AIs. Most use them for a few weeks, and then usage drops to zero, or close to it. If we had let everyone have it a year ago, we would have had to buy thousands of licenses. We have several hundred, but really only about 100 seriously use it. No jobs have been cut in favor of AI. No one has closed a job req because AI could do it. Academic studies are showing that the supposed cost savings aren't there. That's not to say that no one else has fired people in favor of AI, but I think it was used more as an excuse in most cases to cut positions that had built up and were already seen as excess. It was better PR (or at least they thought it was) to say that it was due to AI rather than good old-fashioned cost-cutting.
180607702
comment
byMartin Blank
y 17, 2026 @04:48PM
(#65931874)
Attached to: Dozens of US Colleges Close as Falling Birth Rate Pushes Them Off Enrollment Cliff
The fertility rate in the US has been below replacement level since 1972, except for a handful of years. It started to decline with the Great Recession, and it continued a steady decline until 2022. It blipped up in 2024, but it's still not enough.
180607682
comment
byMartin Blank
y 17, 2026 @04:44PM
(#65931862)
Attached to: Dozens of US Colleges Close as Falling Birth Rate Pushes Them Off Enrollment Cliff
Tuitions aren't helping, but birth rates are a real factor. My kids' school district closed five elementary schools over the summer, and it may close one of its middle schools in the next couple of years after it escaped this round. The district built up about 20-25 years ago to accommodate over 50,000 students based on population forecasts, but it peaked at 44,000 and has been slowly sliding for several years. Other districts are doing or considering the same thing for the same reason. This is in the Dallas suburbs, an area that is still growing, but the number of kids being born is declining.
180602414
comment
byMartin Blank
16, 2026 @03:34PM
(#65930016)
Attached to: Ads Are Coming To ChatGPT in the Coming Weeks
The planned investment numbers they announced in late 2024 were the moment that I knew that they were a dead company walking, and that the entire AI industry is unstable. It reminds me of what I saw a domain for a homepage portal company in the dotcom boom sell for some ridiculous number of millions of dollars because people were still convinced that everyone would use the web by starting with a portal page like they did with AOL, ignoring that AOL basically forced you to do that.
Altman said that he plans to make a trillion dollars in investments for OpenAI by 2030. I don't think they have or will have anything remotely like the income or investments needed to cover that, and if they do an IPO to raise the cash, their debt and cash flow are likely going to become problems. They've been in panic mode for a few months as ChatGPT has fallen behind at least Gemini if not also Claude in quality and performance. I admin ChatGPT Enterprise where I work, and the interface and options are slapdash at best. Support is worse, as they don't have a ticket management system (because that's how old business does it, not how new business does it), and I've seen ticket/case numbers in three different formats.
Even Microsoft, one of OpenAI's biggest investors, is adding Claude as a model option, and with their in-house work on AI chips, I will not be surprised if Microsoft takes the path of Google Vertex and start acting as a portal for dozens or hundreds of models, build their own competitor as a primary, or both (Google's total model).
180568704
comment
byMartin Blank
12, 2026 @12:28PM
(#65918342)
Attached to: US President Calls for 10% Credit Card Interest Cap, Banks Push Back
> Meanwhile Amex are advertising cards at 98%.
The highest credit card rates are around 36%, and those are for people who have incredibly bad credit. Amex certainly isn't issuing 98% APR cards.
180568688
comment
byMartin Blank
12, 2026 @12:24PM
(#65918330)
Attached to: US President Calls for 10% Credit Card Interest Cap, Banks Push Back
Credit card companies won't. It's not Visa an MasterCard issuing the debt. The banks will write it down, which will affect their bottom line and the results of their stress tests. They'll rein in credit lines, making it harder for people to do the things they want and need to do.
180568664
comment
byMartin Blank
12, 2026 @12:19PM
(#65918308)
Attached to: US President Calls for 10% Credit Card Interest Cap, Banks Push Back
It would hit most businesses, exploitative and not. The US economy's backbone is effectively credit cards. Take those away, and a lot of people that use them as bridges between paychecks are going to have a hard time.
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