Posts by Nigel 11 3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
but why recycle them (which costs money but is still worthwhile) when they are still usable
Because the profit in recycling one in order to manufacture a new e-car battery might exceed the resale value of a half-knackered Lithium battery fit only for solar energy storage, in which application it would be competing with lower power/weight battery technologies using much cheaper metals.
... depleted vehicle power packs ...
Interesting. I thought good Lithium sources were sufficiently scarce, that it would always pay to recycle a Lii-ion battery to make a new one.
Personally, I'd be wary of them for solar storage, because they burn so well. It's one thing to have one in a car (you'll be awake, and probably will have time to slam on the brakes and run for it should smoke or flames appear). It's quite a different thing to have one downstairs while you are asleep upstairs.
Someone really does need to take another look at the NiFe battery for solar storage. " It is a very robust battery which is tolerant of abuse, (overcharge, overdischarge, and short-circuiting) and can have very long life even if so treated.[7] It is often used in backup situations where it can be continuously charged and can last for more than 20 years. ... They are being examined again for use in wind and solar power systems where battery weight is not important ... "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
BTW lead-acid also lasts surprisingly well if maintained well. My 13-year-old Seat Leon diesel is still starting reliably on its original battery. The garage keeps telling me that they only last five years, but I'm starting to think that this battery may outlast the car. Kudos to Seat / VAG for designing a top-grade battery charging regulator.
My understanding is that Tesla aims to drive down the cost of Li-Ion batteries. These have the best known power to weight ratio, so are good for electric vehicles, and I wish Tesla well. But why use them for solar storage? It matters very little whether a house-scale solar storage battery weighs 10kg, 100kg, 1 tonne or possibly even 10 tonnes. But it does matter whether the battery can become a fire hazard if a fault causes it to overheat.
Lead-acid might do the job, but battery life might be a problem (they don't take kindly to deep discharge, especially not to discharge-until-flat). They don't catch fire, even if you abuse one to the extent of shorting it out with a thick lump of conductor (which may melt, and the battery may boil).
Or what about Nickel-Iron (NiFe)? The raw materials are cheap and abundant. As a battery they have the advantage of being extremely robust with respect to deep discharge and high currents. They have a worse power/weight ration than lead-acid. And they have a high self-discharge rate which rules them out for auto starter batteries, but in a solar installation one isn't likely to want to store energy for more than 12 hours or so. Several tons of these on a concrete pad would be smaller than the smallest garden shed.
Or of course, the yet-to-be-discovered Langford basilisks, or something that the Laundry is trying to protect us from.
Also don't forget the humble animated GIF flickering in the epilepsy-inducing range of frequencies. This is not SF. This is reality. You really can crash a human brain. Luckily if the resulting narcolepsy or grand mal siezure doesn't result in a car crash or falling under a train, nature has equipped us with watchdog timers and auto-reboot mechanisms.
So you're saying it's reasonable that you have to view every attachment of every unsolicited mail you receive?
I'm sure there are messages left in my inbox where I quickly scanned the text, thought "later" so I did not immediately delete the message, and then forgot all about it. If such a message had an attachment and it was not egregiously huge, I might well be unaware of its nature.
Also everyone should know the dangers of opening attachments from strangers or even casual acquaintances ... not that it might be extreme Pron, but that it might be a vector to infect your computing device with virii, malware, spyware, ransomware or hardware-brickware (and that short of public-key encryption of all mail, no email can be trusted to have been sent by a volitional act of the person it claims to have come from).
It's even worse than you think.
I personally don't care what they call it, but I do want to know that if I buy something on Amazon or Ebay called a SharkStar957BW, I'm going to get the same as what was described in a posted review of the same sillynamed thingy. This is especially important if one is planning to evict the manufacturer's firmware and to install OpenWRT or one of its cousins. (Why? Well, the factory firmware will cease being bugfixed shortly after they stop selling it, and your router will be Pwnable by the world and his dog a few months thereafter).
But with several manufacturers, you can't guarantee that the innards of a particular model stay the same. Netgear have a particularly bad track record of keeping the model number and plastic box design, while totally changing the internals. You have to establish whether its a v1, v2, ... v5, ... and that information is not always clearly displayed on the actual unit, let alone clearly written on the packaging or advertized by a seller. I'm not talking minor redesigns (which are bad enough) ... the v4 may be Broadcom and the v5 Atheros!
BTW why doesn't someone make a router specifically for use with OpenWRT? With no proprietary firmware development and maintenance to fund, they could spend the money on more RAM, Flash and USB ports, and on making it unbrickable.
Wrenches and spanners .. another biroid life-form.
I once dropped one into the sump-shield of my car. Could see it but could not reach it with any tool. So I thought, get up to 10 mph or so and slam the brakes on, it'll shoot out by inertia ...
Which it did. Hit the road, bounced sideways, straight down the drain that materialized out of nowhere. Sigh.
Not a huge exaggeration ... maybe not exaggerated at all.
Typically ten lengths in five guages. Times two (imperial, metric). Times four commonly available patterns (slot, philips, pozi, at least one of many others). Times two head styles (countersunk, raised). Times three common materials (mild steel, brass, zinc-plated).
That's 2400 permutations. I'm sure some of the permutations are unobtainable, but I've also left out a lot of variants (stainless steel, green organic, black lacquer ... huge ones and minuscule ones .... tri-wing and many other obscure drive patterns ... single and double helix ... with or without a cutting or ripping flat on the sharp end ....) Then there are the many families of self-tappers for use on metal sheeting ....
I could cheat, by including all the evolutionary culls ... I've found occasional headless screws, slotless screws, threadless screws, banana-shaped screws, pointless screws, you name it, in boxes of usable ones. And of course there are what we might call Apple specials ... if you buy by the million, they'll make them the exact length and guage you specify, slightly lighter and slightly cheaper than a million standard-size ones.
BTW did you see the size of the woodscrews that they were assembling Canary Wharf Crossrail station with, on the TV last night? Something like 60cm by 40mm. (is that 24x80 guage in imperial? )
The strongest is that which binds quarks together into hadrons. It has the well-nigh pathological property of increasing with distance, which is why quarks are only ever found in pairs and triples (and theoretically, in one-point-something solar-mass chunks denser than neutronium but still not quite big enough to collapse into a black hole).
You need a screwdriver with a hex shank, or (slightly less good) with a flat on the shank, or (much less good) with a hexagonal handle. You apply an adjustable spanner to the flat part, press the end of the handle hard onto the screw head with one hand and torque via the spanner with the other.
Unscrewing (or shearing the head off) is guaranteed.
You can also improvise with a hex screwdriver bit, a spanner, and a flat piece of metal with which to press down. With this arrangement you can rotate a screw with barely an inch of vertical clearance above its head, as I once had to do to get a swollen UPS out of a rack before it exploded. OK, that was technically a bolt.
Ever had a good look at an eagle? Or a casawary? Now imagine a thirty-foot tall casawary with big teeth ... the movie-makers wouldn't even need to add claws designed for disembowelling, the casawary's already got them.
They say that inside every small dog is a big dog trying to get out. On a similar principle, inside every sparrowhawk is a T.Rex trying to get out ....
And when it leaks that these bugs are not accidental, but deliberate noncompliance with what is an ISO standard (or deliberate exploitation of problems with that standard)?
Microsoft has tried to play hardball with the EC anti-monopolies people before. It took billion-dollar fines before they accepted defeat. Do we think that they are willing to go there again? With the EC far more desperately short of money than it was back then?
With a hybrid, there is a complex efficiency trade-off between the power and charge capacity of the electric components, and the cost of dragging them around with you when the vehicle is running on its internal combustion engine. The designer takes a (hopefully well-informed) view of the likely spectrum of journey distances and road types that the average owner will require, and then optimises the electrical system for overall vehicle lifetime efficiency. (Note: if you are very far from that average owner profile, a hybrid may not be the right vehicle for you).
I'd guess that the electrical system is aimed at use in stop-start urban traffic, and for shorter commutes. Internal combustion engines are at their worst in stop-start conditions. Lighter weight trumps blistering e-acceleration (needs heavier motors) or long electrical range (heavier batteries). Those requirements are satisfied by the other engine. You have the option to engage it even in city traffic, if that's your (energy-wasting) style.
You can always buy an all-electric Tesla ... but you have to be sure about being able to recharge it before its batteries run empty, and even if there's a charging station on route, recharging it is less quick than refuelling. It'll be a fair while before an all-electric car is any good in rural parts (where the locals will tell you that the electricity suppy is less than totally reliable, and many of them own a petrol generator, just in case. Thought -- a multi-kilowatt inverter accessory for a hybrid car might open up the rural market? )
I thought the addiction danger was that these drugs become less effective with repeated use. At which stage you may be tempted to take a larger dose. Which then becomes ineffective with repeated use, and you stumble down the path to total addiction to doses that would kill a non-addict, and ultimately to doses dangerous even to an addict.
On the other hand I'm also aware of quite a bit of literature suggesting that if you do not have an "addictive personality", you won't have any trouble keeping your intake of opiates at the effective therapeutic dose and no higher. There's a lot not yet understood about opiates, even after centuries of use and abuse thereof.
Oh, and there were many Victorian addicts who lived quite long and productive lives. Perhaps medics shouldn't care about people becoming addicted, if they have nothing else that can deal with a chronic source of severe pain. It's not as if opiates are expensive.
Ibuprofen, Naproxen, Diclofenac and dozens of other prescription drugs are NSAIDs: non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. They relieve pain caused by inflammation, by reducing the inflammation. As a gout sufferer I know that large doses of these drugs are spectacularly successful on the right sort of problem. Crippling agony to mild ache in six hours. Magic that works!
But if you have back pain, it may very well be neurological: a trapped or pinched nerve. In which case an anti-inflammatory drug is useless. Which leaves Paracetamol, Aspirin and the all-too-addictive opiates.
Personally, the only thing I've found Paracetamol any use for is flu / bad colds (and I do wonder whether palliative interference with the natural self-curing of these ailments is wise) I used to find Aspirin much more effective, except it's contra-indicated for gout sufferers like me. Aspirin has a direct effect at the neurological level, as well as being an anti-inflammatory drug.
Another reason to avoid NSAIDs for back pain is that it's likely to be chronic, and long-term use of anti-inflammatories is rather bad for you. They appear to block your body's natural repair mechanisms, and if you take them long-term your risk of suffering a stroke or heart attack slowly rises. In some people they also cause stomach bleeding, which long-term can lead to ulcers or anaemia.
A water world is another interesting possibility. Liquid H2O in far greater abundance than Earth, 200km or so deep i.e. down to the point where the pressure causes it to crystallize into a denser-than-liquid high-pressure phase of ice. Earth's ~2km of water would be stripped by the solar wind in about 100My without our geomagnetic field. A water world might well last until its sun boiled it, even if losing water to space at 2km per 100My.
Radiation may be a problem only for life that evolved on this planet with good radiation protection in place. Protection against a non-existent threat doesn't evolve. Even here, blue-green algae will thrive in the cooling jacket of a laser discharge tube (intense UV) and live off the Cherenkov glow inside a nuclear reactor (huge neutron flux and lots of other nasties). It's probable that they are descended directly from the first life on the panet, which evolved before we had an oxygen atmosphere or an ozone layer, and so needed good radiation tolerance.
One datum allows no conclusions to be drawn about the population it is taken from. Maybe we are alone. Maybe as many as one in twenty stars carries life on one of its planets. The evidence so far can rule out neither, nor anything between.
Oh, and what do we know of the possibilities for life in the various phases of degenerate nuclear matter on the surface of a neutron star with a strong magnetic field? NOTHING!. Apart from the obvious facts that we'd never get to shake hands or share biospheres, and that given the relative speed of nuclear chemistry compared to the everyday sort, one of our months might be long enough for the complete rise and fall of a civilisation.
We will never find a "new Earth" -- there will be too many chemicals, bacteria, viruses that will be deadly for humans.
Stated on what basis? We have zero observations to choose between these possibilities:
1. Life in general is poorly able to attack alien life. Our defences will overwhelm their bacterial attackers and vice versa. The Space-opera writer's choice.
2. The reverse: their bacteria would rapidly reduce our higher life to smelly slime and vice versa, followed by a long battle between two different clades of single-celled life for supremacy or symbiosis.
3. A one-way knock-out victory: our bacteria overwhelm their biosystem in short order, or their bacteria overwhelm ours. There can be only one ....
4. Panspermia: all life in our galaxy has a common origin, so it's only invaders from Andromeda we have to fear.
5. There's only one way to do life with the physics and chemistry of this universe that's not a thermodynamic impossibility, so convergent evolution means it'll look like panspermia even though it isn't.
All of which is ignoring the extreme unlikelyhood of mankind ever reaching another star. We are too fragile and too short-lived to endure interstellar travel at a realistic (small) fraction of the speed of light.
Our Von Neumann machines have a better chance, but the last place in the universe that Silicon-based A-life would want to conquer would be planets with moist oxidizing atmospheres. Alien A-life might even be established in our Solar system, and if they don't use radio to communicate (or if they use VERY efficient coding indistinguishable from noise) we might not have noticed it!
Yes, Intel will eventually have to follow plan B. Use their world-leading process technology to fab the world's best-performing ARM chips for whoever pays them to do so. They won't make so much money this way, since royalties will flow to ARM, but a profit is a profit.
IMO ARM trying to breakl into the server room is much like Intel trying to break into mobile space. For various reasons, I expect Intel to keep its hold on servers for a long time to come.
Now that XP is EOLed, a good portion of new PC sales are for replacement of old XP kit.
Very much my thought too. The trend for all computer vendors will be down, as the replacement cycle stretches from three years up to five, even eight years. Hardware doesn't wear out fast. Today's hardware is fast enough for most uses that people find for PCs, with huge amounts left in reserve for future software bloat.
Everyone who wants a Mac has got a Mac. Same for PC. Probably same for tablets soon if not already. There's a bulge in the PC replacement market caused by the EOL of XP and consequential replacement of many PCs 5+ years old that can't run more modern Windows well. It's distorting the figures.
In short, computer hardware is now a mature market.
BTW If you run Linux desktops in your business / school / home, you can acquire adequate hardware for free right now (i.e. ex-XP systems). You might even get paid a few quid to take it away.
Brittle materials are ... brittle. You can break even a diamond into pieces using a hard steel chisel and a small hammer. How do you think they divide a large natural diamond of irregular shape into pieces that can be ground into jewels? (And how do you think the expert gem-cutter feels, when after much planning the multimillion-dollar uncut diamond cleaves in a different way to the plan? )
As for phones ... when a mobile meets a flint-gravel drive, the phone will lose. Sods law says display down, onto a sharp flint point, every time, guaranteed. Heck, it even works for buttered toast onto carpet.
Power buttons are easy to find, they are on the front panel of the PC
yes, under the desk, behind someone's handbag.
Or two PCs stacked on top of a filing cabinet. You press a button and realize 0.1 seconds too late you've just shut down someone else's PC.
Or four PCs connected to a KVM switch. Tip: coloured cable ties are very useful. Cable ID you can see from any direction.
The trouble is that Microsoft has a direct or indirect almost-monopoly on certain widely used small enterprise application classes. There's no good equivalent of Autocad on Linux. Nor is there any equivalent of Sage Accounting. You can probably think of others. It's a scandal that MS is allowed to maintain such monopoly power, but until our legislators catch up there will continue to be applications where using Windows is essential (even if that's Windows in a VM on your Linux desktop).
Pretend that the hard problem has been solved, and a computer contains a weak AI that is capable of disambiguating natural language, that can filter your voice from others in the background, and work out the difference between input and meta-input (commands), and handle all the contextual mappings that are an instinctive part on natural language. (Personally I think that's fifty years to infinity away). But anyway,...
There's a subtle but significant difference between spoken / informal written communication (texts, memo pads), and formal written documents. There's also a not-so-subtle difference in how they are created. The former are linear, rarely revised, read once and thrown away, subject to question-and-answer clarification if unclear (conversation). Formal documents are usually not created in a linear fashion. They used to be written as drafts, with crossings out, arrows and boxes showing text relocations or insertions, etc. Then typed. With a computer one types and reads it back, and can do the editing as one goes. It's probably an improvement. But the key thing is, "how do I know what I think until I've read what I've written"? (A quote, possibly mangled). Speech has no part in this process - it would completely get in the way. Unless it's a play. In which case, the editing process likely involves listening to (and possibly watching) a rough and ready performance, and deciding what worked and what didn't.
BTW the reason why e-mail causes so many office embarassments, arguments, grudges and bust-ups is that it straddles the line between these two forms of communication, and what was intended as a conversation get interpreted as a formal document or vice versa. A genuinely useful AI would be capable of doing the same as a PA or a PR person - "do you really want to say that, because ..." Like I said, it'll be a long time coming.
What we need is "upwards-compatible". Windows 8 has a kernel that's probably an improvement on Windows 7, but only techies ever notice it. It could have had much the same UI as Windows 7 as "legacy mode" and that ghastly not-Metro interface as "new mode" with a choice between the two made every time one logs in (one click). But oh no - they had to tear up everything that went before, and force everyone to start over. F*** them.
It's not just a user issue either. Talk to someone who writes programs with Windows GUIs about it. If Microsoft cared about its customers, anything that prevented an old MS windows GUI program displaying on a new Windows platform would be called a BUG, and fixed asap.
In the Linux world, things work differently. The Gnome team actually did the same as Microsoft - foisted a radical new UI on their "customers" that they didn't like or want. But it's open source, so someone forked the old source and gave it a new name (Mate) and someone else took the newer version and re-skinned it to be less unlike the old version (Cinnamon - which is now also a complete fork). And there were several longstanding alternative UIs out there in the first place - no monopoly on our desktops, thank you!
My Philips TV.
True, it's merely sitting in my lounge. On the other hand it's sitting in a moist oxidizing atmosphere being shaken up and down by vehicles speeding over the speed-bump outside, rather than coasting in a vacuum - hardly an improvement. It's particularly impressive given that old vacuum display tube technology involves twenty-five kilovolts of EHT. Were that ever to spark somewhere it shouldn't, that would be curtains.
I keep telling myself not to be sentimental, but it's no good ... throwing away something that well engineered would be criminal.
It is pretty much impossible to design a switch mode power supply that is efficient at both low and high powers.
Not being an electronics engineer I won't say "bollocks"
But surely it's not beyond the wit of man to design a power supply that is integrated with a small rechargeable battery pack. The power supply would turn off leaving the standby electronics running off the battery. They'd be capable of commanding the power supply back on to recharge the battery as fast as possible when it was close to empty, and then off again. In normal operation that wouldn't happen, because the device would get used before the battery was close to empty.
You'd need a real switch to get it full-on if the battery had gone flat because of a long peropd without a mains connection. It might work better with an ultracapacitor instead of a battery (but NiMH cells are very reliable and could be user-replaceable).
Methinks it's a cost issue not a technological issue, and it needs legislation to outlaw devices with inefficient standby. Otherwose there's always an incentive to save pennies (straight to the bottom line!) by shipping inefficient devices.
after 3.6 billion years very little has managed to adapt itself to live in very salty water
Alternative explanation: very salty water on earth is a short-lived and unstable ecological niche. It normally arises when salt in a body of water is concentrated by evaporation because it's cut off from the planet's oceans. Over geological time it will prove short-lived. Its limited water input will fail and it will dry into a salt pan and then become a stratum of rock salt. Or a narrow channel will open wider and dilute the very salty water down much closer to the norm of Earth's oceans.
Life has certainly adapted as the oceans gradually became saltier without huge short-term fluctuation. Most of the salt ever released from rock by weathering, resides in today's oceans. When life was new, they were almost freshwater.
Another alternative explanation. Once life works out how to do something fairly well, that mechanism tends to persist. It's rare for a second way to do the same thing to evolve. For example, the DNA/RNA codes are much the same in the wierdest and oldest archaea and in all plants and animals. Maybe because life here evolved in (almost) fresh water, it is not well suited to very saline water and struggles to adapt sufficiently.
On Titan, where all the "ocean" is all highly saline, evolution may have taken different paths of which we know nothing.
I mean, how can the market share of XP be increasing unless people are doing new XP installs?
How? If Microsoft's market share is decreasing, and an increasing percentage of Microsoft's home users are those who have an old system running XP and don't intend ever to change it. (Businesses ought to have migrated to Windows 7, or even 8, before XP EOL'ed, though we know that there are a fair number that haven't finished their migration yet.)
Which feels right. An ever increasing percentage of the students at the uni where I work arrive with Macbooks rather than notebook PCs. Then there are the many domestic users who don't work with a computer but just consume media and web-browse. They'll be scrapping their Microsoft PC without replacing it, buying tablet devices (Apple or Android) instead. They bought PCs in the past only because there was no alternative.
It just confirms what someone working in electronics-store retail will tell you, that there are lots of customers saying "I want a new computer, but I absolutely don't want Windows 8". If the shop is clued up it can offer them Windows 7. If it's not, I suspect that they buy an iMac, or in a few cases get steered to Linux by a clueful relative. (Are the figures for desktop iMac vs PC available, or do iPads and iPhones muddy the waters? )
Well, if you have to preserve an XP environment to preserve various people's sanity ...
Get a modern desktop system, preferably with an SSD. Install Centos (or other Linux of choice). Install XP and all apps into a KVM VM (using a Linux LV as the XP system's "hard disk").
Advantages: you can make backups of the VM with all apps installed, so recovery after it borks itself is straightforward. (Using LVM snapshot you can do this remotely or automatically, while the XP VM is running). You can use a "network" share for the user's data, and set Linux to work safeguarding the data in it. You can configure firewalling for the poor old XP using Linux. You can be sure it'll never stop working for lack of compatible hardware. Lots of other smaller advantages.
It'll still be much faster than XP native on the old box.
BTW VMware player is slicker and easier and free as in beer but not libre ... and probably not high on VMware's list of things to maintain support for. Which is why I'd recommend KVM, if you would rather put in more effort now than risk handling a problem years down the line when your elderly relative is even less able to adapt to using anything other than XP.
Edit - on second thoughts, probably not an SSD. Lots of RAM so Linux can cache loads without starving the XP VM, and software-mirrored hard disks, so your elderly relative isn't one disk device failure away from losing his sanity. (With smartd sending you regular reports, so you can turn up with a replacement disk drive when it's needed or soon will be).
I swear western civilisation would crumble to dust if anything ever happened to all the Excel spreadsheets that appear to run most businesses...
But it already has! (for pretty much all possible values of "Anything" )
There's a theory that if anybody ever manages to understand the universe, it will abruptly end and be replaced by something less understandable. There is another theory that this has already happened. many times. My personal theory is that this explains hangovers.
The price of the hardware components has continued to fall, so why has nobody decided to build a bigger one, and why a lack of enthusiasm for upgrades?
I'd guess that the problem is that we're close to the limits of what can be done in parallel with the types of hardware we have got. Single node speed has hit the physics limits, large multiple node counts run into interconnect bandwidth limits. Energy consumed scales with the number of nodes, useful work output does not. The %marginal value of an x% upgrade diminishes as the size of the supercomputer increases. What's needed is either a hardware breakthrough on the interconnect front (much more bandwidth), or a software breakthrough that can automatically generate more efficient parallel codes than a human programmer can (if that's possible).
Nature's answer to the problem of using vast numbers of low-power processors (a brain) is interconnection much closer to a fractal dimension of three than anything we can do today.
So you would prefer paedos don't get caught
If that is the price of maintaining one's right to privacy, of not living in a goldfish bowl where the powerful can find out everything about the rest of us without us knowing until they use what they know against us ... then YES.
In practice once they know that an illegal image has been downloaded, that'll be all the justification they need for a warrant to find out who downloaded it. So what you are arguing, is that they should have warrantless acess to a massive database of everything that everyone has ever browsed, so (official reason) they can go trawling for criminals. Do you really believe that is all they will ever go looking for?
Oh yes, the security services already have this access. (Snowdon disclosures). Today, they have to keep that access secret and can't use it except within a fairly narrow "state security" remit. They're well down the slippery slope, though. I fear that Orwell's 1984 is coming true, just 30-40 years later than he thought. (To say nothing of the Vingean nightmare of a society pushed over the edge of chaos by omnipresent surveillance, crashing back to the dark ages if not the stone age).
With respect to cyber-bullying, what's the problem? The police have a complainant who is being bullied, and an internet service provider who can tell them where the bully is. They'll just have to get a warrant for that disclosure in future. Is it being suggested that a warrant would not be granted in these circumstances?
In a city-communter environment, is anyone really going to run them off the petrol bit unless the worst has happened and the daily charge has run out?
So give them the same urban-area advantages as pure electrical cars. After all, if someone with a pure-electric car needs to make a long journety, he's going to use his other car, or hire a conventional car, so the CO2 emission will also be the same or worse. (Worse, if two cars have to be manufactured instead on one).
Digression
Back in the old days when a disk drive was the size of a washing machine and required an engineer from the computer company to install one ...
He turned up, un-crated it, and asked to borrow a phone. "Not working?" "No, and it won't. I need to call the shipping company and our loss adjusters ... go and take a look at it ..."
I did. There was a neat rectangular hole in the side. The exact size of a fork-lift-truck's prong ... right through the controller (about ten foot-square circuit boards).
Aren't dinosaurs the link between reptiles and birds? From the completely cold-blooded, to the creatures with (probably) the highest metabolic rate on the planet?
Dinosaurs were around for a long time. Plenty of time for evolution to get from cold blood, through cool, to hot. Pretty straightforward, compared to evolving feathers (a true miracle of biology, and perhaps the only radically new bio-structure since plants evolved wood? )
There's surely a good case here for an IPV4 address tax! Someone with a /8 block is likely to rapidly relinquish most of it, when a tax demand for 2^24 pounds/dollars/euros per annum arrives (about 4 million). Whereas the /30 block I have at home would cost me (via my ISP) an extra £4 per annum, which I'd happily pay. Heck, several times that wouldn't hurt much for any addresses actually being used.
Might even make ipv6 popular. People used to live in darkness rather than pay a windows tax. (NB, small W, 17th century).
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