It requires safe design principles to address the specific concerns with timber/wood construction, but some places are starting to do the research to show how wood can be made safe. This interview with a fire safety engineer talks about the state of the industry in different regulatory jurisdictions.

Yeah. Top floors doomed from the start, but a wheelchair-bound person on the 69th floor was safely evacuated. This link says that 5 people were saved using this evacuation chair.

Yup, Grenfell was one of two disasters that I had in mind in my answer, that was bad enough that able bodied people needed firefighter rescues (or where rescue was futile and they were basically doomed from the start).

this seems really dangerous for anyone who might get stranded.

I’d take a step back and say no, this isn’t actually as bad as some of the comments seem to suggest.

The vast, vast majority of building emergencies are safe to shelter in place. Modern building codes generally prevent fires from spreading too far, and isolate smoke to a specific place in the building.

Then, for certain types of catastrophic disasters, being able bodied doesn’t actually help, as people can still get stuck and need rescue from firefighters anyway.

You need some kind of disaster Goldilocks zone where things are bad enough to where quick evacuation is helpful and things aren’t so bad that evacuation isn’t feasible, before it starts making a difference.

And in those situations, many buildings do have evacuation chairs in the stairwells. And stronger people can assist carrying down the stairs, too. There are a lot of variations on two-person or single person carries that depend on exactly what mobility limitation there is. If you live or work with or around people with mobility issues, it’s worth looking them up, maybe taking a first aid/survival class or something.

(taps head) Can’t infect a system that won’t turn on.

Nintendo 64 games could hit $75 in 1997 dollars. It wasn’t until Sony enforced a $50 cap on Playstation games that the industry started seeing a practical cap.

reaching those limits requires more manpower in creating assets to populate these larger worlds

Yeah, when a character design consisted of like 30 sprites of 32x32 pixel resolution, that could basically be done by an artist in a day. Then the “physics” of game play could be simply defined in a two dimensional space.

Going to 3D, with different models of clothing, armor, weapons, hair, requires a lot more conscious artistic choices within a broad but consistent visual design language. Each time resolution or polygon count or frame rate or hit box number go up, the complexity of the visual design, gameplay design, etc. go up accordingly.

Physical realism in games increases game development cost exponentially with each generation in tech. A lot of studios simply stepped off of that rat race and went towards cartoony visuals and physics that don’t even pretend to be realistic.

I’ve always thought it was intentional so that humans could train the edge detection of the machine vision algorithms.

In addition to the stone/clay based works that you might be thinking of, I find certain metalworking sculptures to be interesting, too. Alexander Calder made a bunch of red steel sculptures, almost architectural art, in addition to things like dynamic mobiles. Louise Bourgeois’s “Maman” is an interesting one, too.

There are small metal sculptures, too. From little trinkets made from wire, to welded metal parts, to elaborate chandeliers, these all involve artistic creativity in manipulating materials in a three dimensional space, and it’s a skillset that I admire and respect (and do not have any, myself).

So its the citizen that has to go to court over it, shame.

That’s the system. Congress created a way to encourage government agencies to make their records public, and a mechanism to get the courts involved to oversee it. Before that, there was no public entitlement to the records in the first place, and no way to get the courts to order the agency to do anything about it.

I still propose that in cases like the above tape we should try and request any information about it as possible.

I’m pretty sure that’s already required. That’s why we know what we know about this case:

The NSA’s excuse? It didn’t have anything to play the tapes back, couldn’t listen to them, and therefore couldn’t clear them for release. “When the search was conducted, our office reached out to the organization that would have the tape you requested if it still exists. We were informed that although there are some older video tapes that are potentially responsive, they are on a format that NSA no longer has the ability to view or digitize,” the NSA FOIA office said in a follow-up. “Without being able to view the tapes, NSA has no way to verify their responsiveness. NSA is not required to find or obtain new technology (outdated or current) in order to process a request.”

Ravnitzky asked the NSA for pictures of the tapes and they complied. The pictures revealed the tapes were recorded on an AMPEX 1-inch Video Tape Recorder. There were three different standardized types of AMPEX machines, but it wouldn’t be impossible to find a device that could play back the tapes. A cursory search on eBay revealed dozens of machines that might fit the bill.

If they end up finding a mutually agreeable solution, great. But it doesn’t even sound like they’re done negotiating, before filing a lawsuit. If it gets to that point, then I’m sure the court will want to know all the details and make a judgment call on whether the request is reasonable.

so this would only make sense if you provide the original file for verification purposes

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m imagining. You’re keeping receipts for after-the-fact proof, in case it needs to be audited. If you have a newsworthy photograph, or evidence that needs to be presented to the court system, this could provide an important method of proving an untampered original.

Maybe a central trusted authority can verify the signatures and generate a thumbnail for verification (take the signed photo and put it through an established, open source, destructive algorithm to punch out a 200x300 lossy compressed jpeg that at least confirms that the approximate photo was taken at that time and place, but without sufficient resolution/bit depth to compete with the original author on postprocessing.

But wholesale prices shift significantly by time of day, especially in the spring and fall. California’s wholesale prices dipped to the negatives during the days this past spring, hitting -$26/MWh at one point in April. One can imagine projects that only mine when energy is cheap or Bitcoin is expensive, in places that can take advantage of that price volatility.

There are also a few projects that don’t rely on grid electricity because they’ve provisioned their own energy sources (one creative solution is a shipping container with a data center powered by waste flaring of natural gas at oil wells).

So I’d think the price volatility would make it hard to derive a meaningful calculation of energy use from real-time electricity pricing, rather than real-time computational complexity.

the current price of a bitcoin divided by the wholesale price of electricity.

Doesn’t this formula assume that electricity costs the same everywhere at that particular moment? The wholesale price of electricity can vary significantly across different parts of national grids, and certainly can vary significantly between countries, especially countries whose electricity prices are denominated in different currencies.

And then the actual end user price of the electricity can be hedged with futures and other options/contracts/securities, to where two people using power from the same grid are paying very different prices. And once you introduce financial instruments, the bottom line cost might depend on stuff like interest rates or other financial/economic conditions local to that place.

After XP, though, the work in the core OS was basically done

There were a lot of big things happening in computer hardware: migration to 64-bit instruction sets and memory addressing, multicore processors, the rise of the GPU. The security paradigm also shifted to less trust between programs, with a lot of implementation details on encryption and permissions.

So I’d argue that Windows has some pretty different things going on under the hood from what it was 20 years ago.

Oh damn, just read about these baseband exploits. Ok, you’ve changed my mind.

We just all got lazy and decided to congregate around pre built platforms.

It’s not just laziness. The economies of scale can potentially be worth huge cost savings, and higher reliability, in addition to a significantly less burdensome workload to maintain. Especially for smaller sites.

I mean even when I was running my own homelab for years, the FOSS software I relied on was in many ways “pre-built platforms.” From the Linux kernel to a distro package manager (and all the maintained packages), I was always standing on the shoulder of giants anyway.

We’re starting to see it in some cameras, mostly for still photography, but I don’t see why the basic concept wouldn’t extend to video files, too. Leica released a camera last year that signs the photo, including the timestamp and location data, and Canon, Nikon, Sony, Adobe, and Getty have various implementations of the technique.

Once the major photo software editing workflows support it, we’ll probably see some kind of chain of custody authentication support from camera to publication.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent fakes in the sense of staged productions, but the timestamp and location data would go a long way.

Stingrays don’t do shit for this. That’s mostly real time location data focused in by tricking your phone into reporting its location to a fake cell tower controlled by an adversary. That doesn’t get into the data in your phone, and even if someone used the fake tower to man in the middle, by default pretty much all of a phone’s Internet traffic is encrypted from the ISP.

The world of breaking disk encryption on devices is a completely different line of technology, tools, and techniques.

Who determines whats reasonable?

The government decides that, and then if the requestor doesn’t like it, they can kick it to a court for review.

“Where we’re going, we don’t need tracks”