kalkulat @ kalkulat @lemmy.world

Background in hard sciences, computing (FOSS), electronics, music, Zen.

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2 yr. ago

Seems like a lot of people need to know that these things **can ** -bite- you. We recently went to a restaurant that used one to direct you to an online menu. We asked for on-paper menus instead.... If this is going to be service industry, it better get smarter about it.

"How QR codes work and what makes them dangerous – a computer scientist explains" https://theconversation.com/how-qr-codes-work-and-what-makes-them-dangerous-a-computer-scientist-explains-177217

https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2021/qr-codes.html

Have a look at Gorbachev. A big loss, that.

It can be hard to find the right community to post a link in. Figuring out the rules and knowing who's reading them (and sometimes what they're really about) might cause someone to give up. (Especially when people complain about 'this isn't the place for that' without stating the better alternative.)

Bill Gates, except when Ballmer was there.

For Krogh, the source of the number, it was a quite reasonable estimate, which was about all that was possible at the time. And it was 'wrong' by less than an order of magnitude ... compared to the newest estimate. AND an estimate of a truly unimportant number is as good as you can get (or need) in many cases. What's the total length of all the ice cores drilled since Camp Century? And their total volume is?

Either greed or religion has killed the most people before their time. One of them has to go.

I'd bet that 'lemmings' wouldn't work.

I specially liked the part where he collected $50k by clueing the affected companies.

Sabine is a very competent physicist. That's why her viewpoint - right or wrong - is well worth hearing. The fact that the Nobel went to a computer scientist instead says a lot about the state-of-the-art.

Sabine knows her shit. May she coax some physicists into getting back into experimenting... and away from Big Science funding.

Leave the poor things alone. They already don't kill each other all of the time.

If we are realistic enough to put the fight against further global warming on a wartime basis, then we can operate things on a wartime basis. Which means planning things so that everything is focussed on winning the war. For example gasoline rationing would encourage people to plan their use of gasoline for maximum efficiency. It means people can get only as much as they can justify.

Rationing was used in the US during WW2. To see what that meant, read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing_in_the_United_States

I'd like to encourage the author of of this to leave the line- and paragraph- breaks in the source text. This is impossible to read as is.

Sugar daddies ...

A new Linux OS may emit unfamiliar sounds if some network app is still running and set to use them for notifications. Quitting the (sound-making) app(s) and/or the network connection will can avoid that problem. Of course you can just turn the sound volume all the way down.

Suspended OSs may sometimes 'wake up for no reason' if some vibration causes the mouse, for example, to jiggle around enough.

Logging out of your user account before suspending/sleeping the machine will stop that stuff without having to dig thru settings. Faster to log back in than to reboot.

I ran into a very old saying yesterday: A fish rots from the head down.

Quite the contrary! The idea is that today's curricula and methods of instruction have changed a lot over two centuries. Here in the US, it is not uncommon for secondary arts teachers and programs to be dropped whenever schools are feeling a budget crunch. Now we see similar things going on in major universities.

In the high school I attended, and later in one that I taught in, the separate building for the sports program was as large as the rest of the school. I thought those were fairly clear statements of what the district's priorities were. 'Education' is a very broad word that can mean many things in many places.

A musician friend of mine, when asked "Why are there no Mozarts or Beethovens any more?" replies "We went through your schools."

As they always teach over at Electoral College.

Up to about the 1980s, the popular magazines used to frequently run cartoons with ragged-looking people holding up 'It's the END OF THE WORLD!!!!' signs. Guess they ran out of variants on that joke. But Doomsday Prophets have been around for centuries (some made big money from it) ... and yet ... here we all are.

We humans like to scare ourselves, but observation seems to show that it's not a big worry. Will it all end, sure, some day. When? NOBODY KNOWS. Carpe diem, my friend ... seize the day. And go ahead and make plans and execute them. Save your worry time for the little things that are inevitable.