Posts by Charles 9

Re: libraries

Don't think about the librarians. Think about the IT people working behind the counter at the access point. Since their network access is either delegated by the government or leased and therefore metered, they will have an obligation, one way or the other, to manage the traffic to keep on the lookout for abuses. Now, if the traffic capped at some absurd sub-Mbit/sec rate, then you're right; anyone trying to abuse such a low rate would be no more than a nuisance and would only raise awareness if library-goers start complaining of dropped connections. But if a subscriber starts hammering the connection for long periods, that should be enough to trip watchdogs and at least post a notice to take a closer look. Point is, such a device isn't going to be of much use. ANYWHERE there's an open Wi-Fi spot, people are going to notice it, especially since many devices are on the lookout for open spots so as to divert from low mobile data allowances. Eventually, one of two things happen: either it gets hammered on a low bandwidth allowance and becomes clogged or it draws enough attention that someone's going to investigate.

Re: It's self-limiting

"Also, the "illegal lottery" idea fails because Bitcoin mining is a game of skill, not of chance. Still doesn't mean there is any winning move besides not to play, though."

Playing Devil's Advocate. If Bitcoin mining is a game of skill, that implies that one can, with enough skill and/or resources, predict the next winning block or come reasonably close to it, just as one can try to read the other players at a poker table (thus why poker is at least partially skill). How does one figure out the next winning block in that case?

"China has two PBMRs under construction, expected to produce 210 MWe combined, beginning AROUND 2017. At the end of 2012, China had installed 76 GW wind power capacity. That's nearly 400 times the EXPECTED PBMR output 5 years earlier. This is the shining promise of nuclear?"

China can afford to do the wind turbines. Not only are they less concerned about toxic byproducts, but they have lots of rare earths lying around to use. this combination cannot be said elsewhere. Plus China's facing the same problems wind farms elsewhere are having: the sources are nowhere near the sinks, and running transmission lines are expensive, reduce efficiency, and introduce additional points of failure.

BTW, China's hedging its bets. They're building plenty of nuclear reactors, too, and by the numbers, their reactor output will be comparable to their wind potential with the added benefit they can build them closer to the populated areas.

"But "have to take what we've been dealt"? What does that mean? We must take whatever GE and Westinghouse develop (to profit their stockholders)?"

Like I said, got any better ideas? Wind and solar have toxic byproducts in their manufacture (so they're not really "green"), their long-term longevity cannot be assured, and since they're intermittent, they cannot be used as baseload power. And yes I know about solar thermal which is one of the few solar techs that can still generate at night, but the largest one in the world's can't even supply 1% of the power needs of nearby Los Angeles County, so scale's an issue. And I've heard enough alternative power pipe dreams to fill a book, so I'd like to see something rather more realistic.

Well, as they say, no guts, no glory. If America had gotten cold feet after Apollo 1, they wouldn't have won the Space Race. Every technology available has its problems, and NO site in my memory has been SO contaminated as to be completely uncleanable: even Hanford, unless you can demonstrate otherwise. And before you say nuclear is the only bad thing around, consider Love Canal, Times Beach, and Bhopal, all victims of chemical, not nuclear disasters, so it's a case of pick your poison. We need lots of power, we need it soon, and none of the alternatives has the oomph without side effects (including wind and solar, both of which require exotic materials with their side effects of toxic byproducts). Show us a proven and completly green (from resource extraction to disposal) power generation technology able to feed a yottawatt of power to the world and perhaps we can start talking. Otherwise, we'll have to take what we've been dealt. And things CAN improve. Otherwise, someone would've found a way to cause stuff like a pebble bed reactor to catastrophically fail (no way found yet).

Re: Well...

Can you PROVE that with IRS records?

Re: very old news, deliberately ignored for too long

The closest thing we have to an energy storage innovation is the US Navy's research into artificial hydrocarbon production. They at least have a genuine incentive to push this through (their carriers have power to spare and the carrier jets need plenty of jet fuel to stay in the air), so if they can't do it, odds are no one can.

Re: Current Renewables are a Band-Aid

That's also some claim when Germany is in such tight electrical straits they've had to buy a sizable chunk of their electricity from France lately. Would love to see this claim backed up with some hard data and plenty of details that spell out exactly what they mean by renewable sources.

Re: Stop proposing....

"80% of civilization lives where there is a WINTER season!

80% of the US population lives somewhere that needs AC."

And plenty of the world lives in an area where BOTH conditions exist, usually in turn, which means the area requires climate control for most of the year: double whammy. That's why the heat pump is popular in these kinds of areas: one device that can handle either temperature extreme as needed.

Re: Nukes....

"perhaps Charles, risk assessment comes into vogue again. As in how idiot human factors play a major causative role in the "accidents" As for other deliberate events, a read of the technology article on how hard, dangerous and generally fatal attempts to steal and manufacture nuclear weapons from powerplants would be to the terrorists. Electronics Australia July 1987? ITIRC, had a reprint of article. Was a hilarious read on a greenie pushed nightmare."

But that was nearly 30 years ago. We know some people CAN be that damn crazy and they may have found ways to get around the dangers if they're that bloody determined.

Re: Nukes....

"Maybe the "duck and cover" generation need to die off before the fear goes away."

No, because they teach the next generation and keep stoking fears of Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the nightmare scenario of a 9/11 attack on major nuclear plants.

Re: Who does this?

The trouble is, to fix this problem you have to update the updater, creating a potential chicken-and-egg problem that apparently necessitates an OTA update to fix. Now, you'd think you can just install an updated version on top like you can with other system apps, but perhaps they're worried about exploited downgrading or some other security mechanism that only works if installed to /system.

It's not a little inconvenience. It's a LOT of inconvenience since most of the firmwares have to be signed off by the network operators before they can be patched OTA (and if they want the phones to be sold in the carrier stores, they better the heck be signed off or else). That means getting in touch with hundreds of operators around the world, not all of which may be forthcoming. And let's not start on the handsets that are close to if not past EOL status.

It WOULD be easier if LG could send this direct to the phones, but only Apple has the consumer pull to dictate terms. Everyone else as of now is beholden to the operators.

You don't care about things like the Chinese Cannon, then? Even if you don't care, your apathy can hurt others, so yes everyone MUST get involved or everyone will get hurt. We're a SOCIETY. Our actions AND inactions WILL have an effect on others, will ye nil ye.

"For a moment, I thought that maybe the answer is to have a two-layer display. One layer alternates between black and transparent, and below that is a layer of pixels that change between white and one of three colors. But that won't allow bright reds or yellows, even if it allows white, so instead three layers that alternate between transparent or a subtractive primary are what you need."

I think the trouble with a layered approach is that the lower layers will likely look muted or blurred having to go through the intervening layers to be reflected and then through them again to get out. Whichever primary's on the bottom—cyan, magenta, or yellow—isn't going to look too pretty if that's the only color you need to display. That's probably why most color tech uses the color dot approach instead.

Re: double sided tablet?

That's how the Yotaphone works, IIRC. I think part of the concern is that people normally put their fingers on the backside of a reader while reading so there's concern of triggering something accidentally. And even with an appropriate cover and toughened glass, I have to wonder about endurance issues.

Re: Not a near miss

Until two cars on opposite sides of an opening in the middle lane choose to commit at the same instant. Either they crash halfway or they'll yoyo in and out.

"Support for what exactly? Most common PC hardware works out of the box."

Talk to performance gamers. High-end graphics support tends to lag in the Linux front, which kind of puts a crimp on Valve's effort to push Linux gaming with Steam Machines. Flaky graphics support is one reason I had to abandon Xubuntu (spontaneous resets), and my Radeon 6850 should've been near the top of the support list.

"IMHO hardware support under Linux is far superior than any other OS."

Oh? I tried Ubuntu on a old Dell Inspiron. Fell flat because no nVidia driver worked on it. Noveaux was too slow and the nVidia blob wouldn't support the chipset. Dead end. And this isn't the first time.

"Linux is a kernel. It's not really the kernel's fault that the current desktop market share is mostly Windows so that's what commercial developers target. There's nothing particular about the Linux kernel that means the type of applications that run on Windows couldn't run on Linux."

But the Linux community, which includes the kernel community, should be pushing for most mainstream support, but they're not, so they're in the rut they are now.

"So you're not talking about Linux. You're talking about common types of applications that desktop users need whether they are running Linux, OSX,... Anyhow this is going to be less and less of a problem now that everyone wants to use more portable development tools etc so they can get their stuff running on the desktop, web, mobile etc."

Except the desktop will continue to exist for performance applications like gaming. See the above common beef PC gamers have concerning their video cards.

Perhaps, but it's still far from the preferred choice in terms of overall adoption. If Linux wants to be THE OS for the desktop, it will need several boosts here and there.

Support has improved considerably, yes, but it can still have teething issues, particularly where vendors aren't exactly forthcoming with hardware support for various reasons such as protection of trade secrets. The closer to mainstream, off-the-bleeding-edge you get, the more likely you'll have a smooth time. And then there's the software selection, particularly for the consumer end where people just want to put it in and work. There are native applications that can do a lot such as GIMP and LibreOffice if they're to your taste (I've spent time on it so can speak from experience), and thanks to the WINE project, Windows compatibility continues to improve, but it will always trail the bleeding edge (and that's what killed it for me since I like to game).

I would think you need BOTH at the same time. Just as you need to spread the coverage, so too do you need to improve the speed within the covered area to handle two factors of growth: new customers and increased demands of existing ones.

Re: Which is why

"Surely you can select 12 or 24 hour on any watch?"

How can you select between 12 and 24 hours on a dial watch...or clock for that matter?

Re: Which is why @Charles 9

"I think the pound weight and pound currency have different derivations (does anyone know?)"

If I read my sources correctly, they were originally one and the same, based on the weight of 1 pound of silver coinage (20 shillings, 8 half-crowns, or 4 crowns) in the old system. There was no silver pound coin (it was based on collective), but the sovereign was the equivalent value in a gold coin. 240 pence was the equivalent value in copper(s).

Of course, this all went out the door when the currency system was replaced with the Pound Sterling.

Re: Which is why @Charles 9

"Does your clock faces also indicate AM & PM? Digital clocks here have 24 hours."

Most digital clocks only show 12 hours and use a dot to indicate which set of 12. Some clocks have a 24-hour option, but you have to set it. Military and other specialist fields make sure to obtain clocks with that capability. Meanwhile, I'm talking analog dial clocks, which typically have no AM/PM indicator. Wanna know which half it is, look out the nearest window. Most of us can keep a general reckoning of which half we wake up on; it takes a real bender, insomnia, or the swing shift to confuse us significantly, and again it's usually just a quick glance out a window to know which is which (yes, even sunup and sundown, since the sun rises in the east and sets in the west). It's extremely rare to see a 24-hour analog dial anywhere, and the ones that do typically have a specific reason for being there.

"How many can convert sq miles to sq feet or do you just memorize the factors? What about cubics?"

It's not to hard to remember a factor of 9 to convert square yards to square feet. And we're taught it's 4840 square yards to an acre. Beyond rough estimates, we break out the measurers and calculate on paper. As for cubics, we tend to stick to feet unless it's fluids, which we then switch to gallons.

Re: Which is why @Charles 9

"Our 1 pence piece weighs 1/8 ounce, 2p weighs 1/4 ounce."

And thus why the pound is associated with both currency and weight, IIRC. And BTW, aren't heavy things still weighed in stone?

"Another factor in choosing 999 as the UK emergency number was that, on the old dial phones, it was the number that took the least time to dial having the shortest distance to travel on the dial itself before allowing another number to be chosen."

I would LOVE to see a picture of such a phone because every rotary dial phone I've seen has it the other way, with 1 being the shortest distance (one pulse) and 0 the longest (10 pulses). 9 would be second-longest at nine pulses.

"All right, who's the lunatic who downvoted this post? 8601 is in fact the only unambiguous date format."

8601 is just pretty darn convenient since sorting alphabetically automatically sorts 8601 dates chronologically (by year, then by month, then by day; time can be sorted next using a 24-hour clock).

Re: Which is why

"We're very militaristic over here. Which is strange given we don't have anything like as many weapons or do as much invading. My systray clock says "Wednesday 24 June 16:43:58". Which, too, is strange as I thought it was Thursday!"

We SEPARATE our conventions in America. If you go to a military installation, then 24-hour time is drilled into you (And you say it, "Twelve hundred hours," mister!). Outside these establishments, clocks still have 12 hours on their faces, and that's the way we like it, just as we like our feet and inches just the way they are.

There is NO unambigious number-only date format as long as the date is within the first 12 days of a given month. SOMEONE is going to get it wrong, guaranteed.

Re: The "We're all going to die" hand-waving aside

"FWIW, I take unreasonable exception to the phrase 'go extinct'..."

I suppose you also take exception to the phrase "go spare" (or as we Americans put it, "go bananas").

Re: Hmm

Because they'll just hide the stuff in another chip using mask concealments and other stuff to hide even from decapping and x-rays. And this stuff will just override anything you flash AND return false flags to anything you try to use to authenticate it.

Re: Wouldn't it be simpler...

Courier services can be infiltrated or subverted, too.

Re: Why not nationalise all the banks?

So how do you live with two competing utilities without having two competing sets of infrastructure (since the utility will also own the infrastructure as a matter of control)? Note that most industries with high upfront but low marginal costs trend naturally toward monopolies simply because this structure always favors the incumbent who's already gotten past the high barrier of entry.