Posts by Stoneshop 5954 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Oct 2009
But I doubt it'd be much shorter. It would also be rather unpronounceable except for native speakers of Welsh.
There would also be a single German word for it, but you'd have run out of air at least three times already before you've pronounced the first half.
No house numbers there; in fact, there's a phrase "living in the numbers" referring to urban living, where the houses have numbers.
Contrasting this was the address of a colleague of my father, who for a good while lived at $VERYSMALLVILLAGE 14. As I recall there were three more or less distinct roads of which one partly unpaved, but apparently no one had seen the need to name those in any way, and just consecutively numbering the houses was the result.
I repeatedly find that delivery attempts go to a street of the same name in the next town.
Once met a woman, name of $SURNAME living in $VILLAGE. Unfortunately there's also a village $SURNAME with someone with the surname $VILLAGE on a nearly identically named street as she lived on.
Even a decade after postcodes had become common they regularly received each other's mail.
Apparently they had a couple of those Spanish delivery drivers at one of the Dutch couriers. Despite living at a most accessible location almost in the middle of a major city, that courier scored highest by several orders of magnitude in the "can't deliver, won't deliver" ratings. Okay, it was a former office building, but even offices are not unknown to receive the occasional parcel, and its street number was clearly visible on an awning over the front door, a single number half a meter high. On a major access road into that city. Still, "couldn't find the address". Another nice one "Driver was told no-one lives there any more". Err, by whom?
Collecting parcels from their depot? 30km away shortest distance, 40 if you took the more sensible route avoiding a congested bridge, then straight through the centre of the next city over. No, repeat delivery was not in their book. Thank you so much, Navigational Nitwits.
There's also the Boeing McDD HQ being moved from Seattle to Chicago post-'merger'. Before that, Boeing techs could basically walk over to the management offices, grab one of them by the tie and drag him to a construction hall if the tech needed to have management being *quite* aware of some problem.
Less easy if HQ is a couple of hours by plane away.
What about when doing, say 70mph down hill. In an ICE car you can just about take your foot of the accelerator and pretty much maintain speed for almost no fuel usage. Can an EV do that too or would that be like stepping on the brakes?
You just ease off the accelerator a bit with half an eye on the speedo, or an ear for the tyre/wind noise, and you'll see the power draw go negative. Actually, the accelerator is quite a lot like "I want this speed", and you hardly have to adjust going up or down hills if they're not that steep. And if downhill you take your foot off you will still slow down a lot, but at low speeds there's just too little regen braking to compensate for the gravity so you won't stop unless you use the pad brakes..
About eco driving, our Kangoo has a switch for that limiting the maximum power draw. You do notice that in less forceful acceleration, and going uphill you will lose speed if that hill would normally put the power meter in the red at the speed you're doing. I suppose most EVs have such a switch, or one with several settings
I'm not sure if your last sentence would imply that you expect an EV to still have a gearbox, or that it's meant to mean "analogous to an ICE car in gear": the ones I know don't have gearboxes at all. It's like driving an automatic, or rather a CVT.
For example, when you turn on a ring on the cooker, your immersion heater is switched off.
I already do that hardware-wise for a circuit that both the washing machine and a flash heater are connected to. They're not expected to draw power at the same time, but there's a relay in between to prevent overload in case the heater wants to turn on while the laundry is in progress.
Most home automation systems can do that through software (and of course hardware to control the mains), with specific rules on top of that such as to not switch off particular devices during some time slot.
Resale value will be directly tied to the state of the battery if that's not leased.
Looking for a used ZE we came across several that were surprisingly cheap. Turns out those all had *no battery at all*, apparently something to do with the batteries being leased and the trader not wishing/able to transfer the lease or just buy the cars plus their batteries. These were all traders in Eastern Europe offering a number of ZEs evidently used as fleet cars by French businesses and municipalities; same style and colour, and some still had their markings.
If you buy a dozen or so ZEs and you don't know how fast you will shift them, transferring the battery leases may become a costly affair so from that perspective it makes some sense. But buying an EV without a way to move it even one inch under its own power is not something I'd go for as a private buyer.
EV chargers should have multiple charging cables coming off of them, and enoguh power to run one at a time at the maximum current.
You say that as if you'd have some kind of charging octopus with cars all around it. Bit of a bugger to situate that at service stations and other charging locations in a way that all spots are still easily accessible.
Much simpler in my view to arrange the chargers like petrol pumps are now, and link them electronically.
Yes, I know about regenerative braking, but having never driven an EV, anyone know how much of the braking is regen and how much conventional?
Anticipating properly we've found there's _very_ little need to use the brakes on the ZE. You can even bring the car to a full stop just by getting off the accelerator, and while you do have a longer 'braking' distance that way it's not atrociously so, perhaps 25% over moderate braking in a conventional car. You clearly feel a same-ish level of deceleration. More than that you just add a bit of pad braking, way less than what a conventional car would need. Regen braking also signals to the car poised to reshape your rear fender that it's performing actual braking by lighting up the brake lights.
There's a power meter in the instrument panel, and regen braking jams the pointer solidly against the left stop.
Also, I wonder about the efficiency of home or workplace charge points in terms of energy loss (the cord heating up) vs an industrial setup.
In my case my home charging point is properly wired, 18m of 5x4mm^2 and fused at 25A, from the main breaker panel to the charge controller and its relay, then 6m of 5x2.5mm^2 to the actual socket. 5x4mm^2 would be a bit of a bugger getting it into the box at the back of the socket, hence the wire sized one size smaller. No thermal effects out of the ordinary at any point.
But we also charge at my inlaws occasionally. Standard Schuko socket in the laundry room. No problems either, as the granny charger limits itself to 10A from the socket, not more than the average kettle, just longer. 10A would take about 10 hours for a full charge, but as it's just about getting 5 or 6 kWh in so we don't have to sit tight on the way back, a few hours charging is quite enough.
BP (Before Pandemic) there were two charge points installed at work. A bit sparse if you consider the 300 or so people working there, but few come by car anyway. There's three roomfulls of computers downstairs, so even at 3-phase 32 amps per socket those extra electrons are probably just noise.
We don't generate enough green power for that not to amount to merely moving the tailpipe
Even when your electricity is supplied by a fossil fuel source there are environmental gains, as you don't have all those separate engines emitting exhaust fumes where they are (and also when idling in a queue), instead having a single point where you can do stuff like supplying what would be waste heat to housing estates or nearby industries, feeding CO2 into greenhouses, and the actual generating can be run much closer to the optimum efficiency for the load at that moment than a car engine can.
If the battery packs are truly modular then you could also reasonably switch out the proportions of which battery type you used.
There was talk of the Kangoo ZE van getting such a modular battery. If you needed the range you took the auxiliary battery; if you needed the carrying capacity you left it at home (or the shop; it was in a magazine aimed at small businesses and tradespeople). That apparently didn't work out as there was no trace of such an option on any of the ZEs I looked at before buying one.
Also your 100kW charges ain't going to happen because where has an electric supply that will support that? You'd have to replace the local substations, the cables to the house, and the internal fuseboxes
There's generally no need for fast charging at home; that's what one would want at a motorway charging station, twenty minutes to put two or three hours of motorway driving into the battery. At home you can plug in, and in most cases there'll be ten hours available to charge. Also, you just plug in every time, whether the battery is empty or not, or even still three quarters full.
I dont see why that cant be standardised
Because the fscking crayon brigade at every phone and tablet builder wants their next creation to be sufficiently different from the previous series to entice buyers once more to get one, and that means making the next one taller, narrower and thinner, which means the battery has to get taller, narrower and thinner too.
I'm all for recycling those crayon wielders into some nicely composted mulch, then used as agricultural fertiliser.
I don't see why all of these devices can't just use 18650s individually? Kind of like AA batteries. I used to have devices that would use 6 or 8 AA batteries in a kind-of two-level pack.
Tried getting an 18650 into a phone? Because those use Li-Ions too, and we're talking about recycling those as well.
Power tools and stuff like cordless vacuums DO nearly always use 18650s, or 16340s for smaller devices that need less power.
"There's a separate slot for coin cells"
at the tip?
No, at the supermarkets. Square-ish, couple of slots to put the various items in. They're put there by some recycling company set up specifically for this. Shops dealing with electric/electronic gear will also have them, or similar ones from another recycling outfit.
That way the environmental damage is significantly worse.
There's no way that would be the case.
Trade-ins for a newer model are rarely if ever scrapped; if the car's that far gone a dealer will generally point you at the nearest breaker yard as they then won't have to be a middleman who'd have to be paid for their involvement.
And every car ending up at the scrapyard, sorry, vehicle parts salvage and reprocessing centre, gets parted out for any bit still usable in some way. Which for EVs certainly includes the batteries, even if they'd not always end up in another car that way.
With respect to charge retention, conservative estimates are a loss of 2.3% / year, so the battery will retain over 90% of capacity for at least 5 years.
Ours is a 2012 model, so nine years old, but with comparatively low mileage. Bought at 23kkm, now, three years on, it's at 35kkm. That's mainly due to the short range, about 100km, but 90% of our car trips are 30..40km anyway as were apparently those of the previous owner (a local delivery service). So it's a good fit especially since it's allowed into the environmental exclusion zones in the nearby cities. The short range meant it was fairly cheap, even for a car as little used as this one; newer models have at least double the range and hence are way more popular.
Battery is still about 75..80%.
The problem is that it's very expensive to take apart a 1000 different size and shaped custom batteries embedded inside smartphones or power tool battery packs.
The main culprit here would be the phones and other electronic gadgets where the battery has to have a particular shape and size to fit inside. And of course it's rare for any of those batteries to fit more than just a few models, never mind models from another brand. Occasionally you'll find some device, such as a GoPro-like camera or the PiJuice, stuff from a comparatively small manufacturer, that takes a commonly available phone battery, But on the other hand, work has issued me a MiFi thingie, and I have a nearly similar one from my ISP, same manufacturer (Huawei), same size, same functionality, same battery size even. Still the batteries are Not. Fscking. Interchangeable. That's the first thing that such a directive should address.
For power tools and other gear where size is secondary the manufacturer will nearly always go for a standard 18650 or 16340 cell because those are just by far the cheapest per Wh. Even laptop battery packs, except those for the ultraportable models, are often built around such standard cells.
We drive a Renault Kangoo ZE. You can get one and either buy its battery, or lease it. The one we bought (used) has a leased battery. Of course that's a fixed cost per month, but once the battery capacity gets below 70% you'll get a replacement. It's stated in the contract that this can be a refurbished one, but they fully guarantee the capacity and endurance.
So those packs are serviceable, bad or defective (groups of) cells taken out and replaced with new ones. And as this is done centrally by Renault, or on behalf of, there are a few locations where busted cells collect.
The packs may be manufacturer-specific, but the cells inside are nearly always standard 18650 or some other common industry size; I found a couple of dead packs that would fit my battery-powered tools[0] and opened them up to see if I could fit new cells. Well, opening up was the hardest part, the rest was getting the cells with the solder tabs on the right way.
Recycling bins here are just 'one compartment takes all'[1], so it's up to the recycler to sort the Li-Ions from the alkalines and the NiCad/NiMH ones.
[0] yes, standardised on Makita 18V LXT, except for one smaller (and lighter) 12V one, more agreeable to working overhead.
[1] there's a separate slot for coin cells, and a large compartment for CFL and LED bulbs.
Reminds me of the story years ago that you could point a microphone at a window from outside a building and be able to tell what somebody was typing by listening in on their keystrokes.
Point a laser at the window and the reflected beam will be modulated with the keystrokes.
I seem to have done okay from even before the Internet was available to more than just the few who worked at the companies whose line of business it was. At which time email between different companies could well be as slow as snail mail, or even slower. A friend worked at IBM in Heidelberg, I worked at Digital in the Netherlands. I've more than once covered that distance faster on a motorbike than email did.
Yes, by today's standards snail mail is slow, comparatively speaking. Did it matter before the Internet and email came along? Occasionally, in which case you called, sent a telegram or a telex.
Social media has clearly created the need it purports to fill.
"The last is what it tells us about Facebook itself, where it goes next, and whether its strip-mining of societal values for profit will continue."
Who cares?
Personally I don't care one femtoiota, but there is a sufficiently large number of users abused who want this to stay, and those aren't just found within Facebook's higher echelons. People who think the good outweighs the bad, or are in a bubble not negatively affected that much at all. People who run their business through Facebook, and wouldn't have an immediately workable alternative. And where I would consider that tough shit and a bad business decision, those people would definitely want Facebook resurrected,warts pustulent boils and all because that's where their assembled clientele was; on any other platform they would have to rebuild that, taking time. Same same for 'social' interactions.
Could well be that schizophrenia is one of those side effects of Too Much Social Media, like body dysmorphia, low self-esteem and hunger for likes.
Of course Facebook counts those double; why wouldn't they? Bigger Numbers are Better. And sufferers from quadrophrenia can be counted double again.
Make sure you turn off complexity requirements and regular password rotation as well as per the latest nist password recommendations.
"You"? We don't have any say in those matters. In so far as we have control over password requirements it's only for one specific legacy platform we manage that already sits behind a further two logins: the work laptop's and a 2FA login on a virtual machine. Only from that VM can you get to those systems, and when an oukaze from Security was sent out that password life times on that VM and everything behind it had to be set at 3 months, we went "It's now at 30 days. Let's just happily ignore this silliness.". The password I'm using for another platform behind that VM is now some 30 months old, as every time I try to change it I get an error thrown back at me, and as the login keeps working I don't bother any more as that one's a SEP.
The 20-character length BTW is for that 2FA-secured login.
You got an email? Luxury.
Computer: "Your password has expired and needs to be changed. Please enter old password."
Colleague: tappitytappitytatptap.
Computer: "Please enter new password."
Colleague: taptaptaptappetytap.
Computer: "New password not accepted. Minimum password length is 20 characters"
Colleague:: #^$^*&#^*&^*^*@*&^@*&*()#IU#!!!
Apparently this is a new chapter in the ever-ongoing play in the security theatre, which, as usual, gets distributed through screen prompts, not via messages one can read in advance. 20 characters will have people writing them down. Which is fine if you keep whatever it's written down on well away from the computer which it applies to, but we all know that won't happen if it's the work laptop you have to take with you when working from home.
Would that be more or less permanent than temporary portacabins in schools?
Those self-destruct even without 20mm (or any other size) drills poking holes in them. Although I've worked at a government department housed in emergency barracks from the late 1950 or maybe early 1960s, that were still doing reasonably well forty years on.
Temporary fixes left to themselves tend to be even longer-lived.
The repeatability is a bit of a problem here, as we can't reset the CO2 levels, put the glaciers and the ice caps back, etcetera, then do the same emissions thing again and see if it has the same effect, or reset + no emissions and check what the outcome is two centuries on. Not on an earth scale.
So the scientists are stuck with "all of this data points to", which is enough for any climate chance denier to go "nanana, you haven't proved it's caused by human activity", then going and bying an even bigger SUV and cranking the aircon up because geegollygosh, it sure is hotter these days.
They should have those controls in place already, but that doesn't really help if it's someone authorised to work with the documents that are now public.
And if they don't have those controls yet, well, boohoo. Cry me a river. Something about trying to capture the horses after the barn doors have fallen off their hinges, or something.
"Despite all this, we agree on one thing; it’s time to begin to create standard rules for the internet."
"Rules for the Internet". Presumably they mean "Rules for public content on the WWW"; What I care to send in private mail, rsyncing files, whatever, is none of their business, and if that's stuff that violates local laws at either end then it's a matter for law enforcement.
And who would be the arbiter of those rules? The US? They shouldn't have a say over content that for instance an Icelandic citizen places on a French server or someone from Burkina Faso commenting on a Kenian site, though the US might want to block people under their jurisdiction from seeing it if applicable. And that holds for any entity trying to take on that role; what they deem indecent or illegal may not be indecent or illegal at all elsewhere.
I presume you've heard of the Царь-бо́мба, but (un)fortunately only one has been built. It would definitely take out all of Santa Clara, Mountain View as well as Cupertino if you'd aim at some point in the middle between those places and detonate it at about 5km up. Even a 20 megaton bomb would do, But that's going for full physical destruction; even smaller bombs would do sufficient damage as well as making the area somewhat unhealthy. In addition there will have been a bit of EMP playing havoc with things electronic. Like computers and their storage.
Everyone knows that picture of someone cutting a branch off a tree while sitting on it. On the wrong side of the cut, of course.
Looking at the BGP visualisation posted in the other article it looks very much like they ran an automated branch-cutting chainsaw over the entire tree leaving just a bare, smooth trunk, and requiring some network jockeys to first find climbing irons to get at the core gear halfway up.
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