* Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

21278 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009

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EU lawmakers vote to ban sales of combustion engine cars from 2035

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Re: The charger numbers seem a bit low.

That's why we're never going to be able to switch from horses to these new fangled combustion engines.

Imagine all the infrastructure needed to get oil out of rock miles below the north sea, get it to shore, refine it, distribute a toxic explosive liquid around the country to enough cars that every household can use one.

Not to mention the disruption to the 30% of agriculture devoted to growing horse feed.

Still it will be nice to have environmental and health benefits not to have a million tons of manure on the city streets.

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Re: In other words...

That's going to be the big difference with EVs that nobody is talking about.

Right now 3 year old off-lease 30,000mi EV are widely available if a bit expensive, and have some life left.

But in 20years there aren't going to be 500quid banger EVs with 9months tax+test from backstreet dealers.

Firstly the battery is going to be toast long before the engine on a Toyota/Honda/VW wears out.

Secondly the makers are going to tie you into some sort of subscription model, probably by limiting software licences.

Alibaba sued for selling a 3D printer that overheated, caught fire, and killed a man

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Re: Ebay

Yes a lawyer from the office that has their brass plaque will turn up to see "my clients are a market place, they have no liability, they have no employees in the USA"

The CEO of Alibaba isn't being dragged from Shenzen in an orange jumpsuit

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Ebay

Apart from the chances of anyone from Alibaba turning up in court in the USA

Has there been a successful case of anyone suing Ebay for the damages from a bit of tat they sold?

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

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Re: Beige, not Platinum

I bet you're fun at parties

Twitter shareholders to vote on Elon Musk's acquisition

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Re: hey, what's $1 billion to the world's richest man?

>My guess is that the "less than 5% bots" claim came during the early discussions

Worse, it's in Twitter's financial reports.

So all the poor innocent shareholders, including his muskiness, were all misled by the evil corporation and amid wailing and gnashing of teeth the price will drop and he can buy it for much less than it was worth when he made the offer.

His only downside is the drop in the value of the 9% he bought up front.

Their downside is that unless they can convince a court that they believed, and it was reasonable to believe, the 5% - then they go to club fed.

Google calculates Pi to 100 trillion digits

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Re: If they were proper engineers...

Well roughly it's true

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Re: They'd get a shock...

>Therefore, it's likely to include the telephone number and social security number of almost everyone on the planet?

Possibly not.

There are irrational numbers that go on for ever and contain a random distribution of digits - so all possible sequences exist. And another class that go on for ever but aren't random. (Can't remember what they are called)

AFAIK we haven't proved which type Pi is.

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Re: They'd get a shock...

>OK, that sounds a little risky but I update it every year!

You change the last 12 digits of Pi every year?

Is that why I have to keep buying new wheels?

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

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Re: 48V vs 50V

Yes but it's the volts that jump out and bite you.

If the Holy Scripture of CE/IEC says that 50V means you have to prove that nobody can come into contact with a live conductor, even if the case is broken, or you pour 2 litres of water onto it, or you use a ISO standard small child's finger - then that seems an unnecessary expense

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: 48V vs 50V

Yes the devices (at least from reputable makers) is going to be safety tested.

But my memory from CE stuff was that under 48V was low voltage and so you didn't have to worry about electric shock. Above 48V certification rules were supposed to get 'intense'

Personally don't like anything above 5V so was happy not to be involved.

So if those are still the rules it's odd that they didn't pick 47.9V and save a lot of testing+paperwork for the sake of 10W.

My main concern would be that your Apple laptop and charger can handle 240W but if you link them with a Poundland cable does it know ?

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>How????????????

5A @ 50V, requirement is that the cable can handle 63V

Only cables with a special logo on meet the spec - don't know if there is logic so the charger knows the cable is legit?

But normally CE etc specify that 48V is 'totally safe low voltage, nothing to see here, don't worry" while they chose 50V for the specification ? Don't know of there is an exemption or if the totally arbitrary 48V limit has changed

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Re: Next week:

>Apple can still sell us overpriced Lightning ports/chargers at rip-off prices

That's the brilliance of no import customs checks.

You can buy very cheap "Appel" Lightning chargers everywhere

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Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

I think I read that in some super safety critical environment you are required to have all the wires the same colour.

The idea is that you HAVE to individually test / trace each wire rather than just assume that this red wire is the same as that red wire in the other room

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Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

>This probably means that we will not be able to take a UK charger into the EU ...

Of course you can. You'll just need a long extension lead

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Re: The BS 546 Brexit connector next

Standard connector? What kind of lilly-livered euro-weeny are you ?

Proper British connections will just give a you a pair of bare copper wires, red and black (none of this euro brn/blu/grn rubbish) and you will connect up your own device for charging.

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Micro-USB

They could have kept the micro-usb option. It's easy enough to adapt to a new USB-C charger but it's easier/cheaper to fit on small flashlights etc

Meteoroid hits main mirror on James Webb Space Telescope

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Re: Mitigation Options?

On the ground you generally paint holes black to stop stray light - in space, and with an IR telescope, you should be ok - unless you are very unlucky.

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Re: Disappointing

>with the meteoroid passing straight through the mirror.

These ultra high speed collisions generally result in the projectile vaporising.

At these speeds and energies the projectile has no structural strength at all, even a tungsten bullet is basically a water drop. That's why the field is called Warhead "Hydro"dynamics

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Re: Disappointing

>I'm wondering whether the L2 point will actually be busier than open space

It's not a stable minima so it doesn't collect debris.

It's a lot better than low earth orbit like Hubble, there sin't a lot of space debris 1.5M km away

Possibly there is a higher risk being outside the moon's orbit but it's likely this bit was just a random smaller version of your average dinosaur destroyer.

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Mitigation Options?

>1. Is there enough strength in the mirror & coating to avoid damage?

For a rock doing 10km/s? Faster than an explosive shaped charge, like the ones you use to make holes in tanks? No

>2. If there is an impact & damage occurs, how much can you sustain before the capabilities are degraded?

If you just punch a hole through a solar panel or sunshield - minor effect.

Even a ding out of a mirror isn't a huge problem. The mirrors are very stiff so you tend to make a small chip rather than bending it.

>3. How much adjustment do you have to correct mirror alignment if an impact duffs up more than specs on the coating?

You can't realign to fix a chip smaller than a mirror segment. Potentially you could lose an entire segment if a rock totally smashed it, or hit it hard enough to bend the support. Still better than losing an entire mirror

Enemies Waymo, Uber now friends making self-driving-ish trucks for US highways

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Re: Trucks are where the money is

An autonomous truck also won't over rev engines or speed or brake hard.

Autonomous mining trucks are cheaper to run because they are much easier on $30,000 tires.

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Re: one fully licensed professional truck driver

It's a hard job. There's so much to do. You've got to change gear, change gear, change gear, check mirror... murder a prostitute. Change gear, change gear, murder."

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For now - this is a test remember

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Re: How about... trains?

>rail unions to deal with, at least here in the UK.

Not a problem you just have to keep 2man crews in the cab with the AI

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Re: How about... trains?

>those are still simpler than traffic downtown

So automate the long haul part.

The AI drives the trucks 24hr/day for the 1000s km of freeway between coasts and into the massive out-of-town distribution centres just of the freeway.

Then the squishy drivers do the last mile delivery to your local supermarket.

There is no way for AI to do last mile delivery in the city without some major changes

Intel to get $7.3b for Germany fab site as TSMC dismisses Europe plans

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Good value?

€7Bn cash and I assume they are not going to be paying business rates / property tax (whatever they have in Germany) and they won't make any profit cos a fab is a cost.

Around 4500 people work at Intel's fab campus in Ireland (also a 300mm 7nm) so Germany is looking at paying close to €2M/job

The only return is the employee income tax + anything they spend in the local economy. But if these are highly qualified semiconductor engineers they presumably already have well paid jobs somewhere else. How many semiconductor PhDs do these fabs employ vs lower paid assembly line workers?

There will be a bunch of construction worker jobs for 6months - pity they can't hire cheap Geordies now we aren't in the Eu

Feds raid dark web market selling data on 24 million Americans

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SSN

Dear American businesses and bits of government.

If you are going to use SSN as a unique identifier (which you are explicitly told not to do) please don't assume it is somehow a secret private key that proves the holder is that person.

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

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Re: Quality vs Quantity

But you are then supposed to get the 'Scandinavian rebound'.

First generation of women that can get contraception/jobs/university have fewer kids, birth rate drops. Then a generation (or two) later women are a valued part of the workforce/politics and the employers and state offer excellent child care options - they all start having children again and the reproduction rate goes back up.

It's just that bits of the Eu/UK/America/Japan seem to have not reached stage 2 for some reason

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Why allow the slow stuff?

Partly not to have to do paperwork on every last 555

But mostly I suspect to troll them !

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Re: Sans The Snark

The US is (or claims to) there is a visa scheme for USSR 'defectors' that was never cancelled.

The UK will announce they are talking more than any other country while only actually allowing in a couple of billionaires

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Re: Digital Cameras?

Zenit-Leica digital camera made in Russia! Somebody must have rebooted the Matrix.

Although I'm guessing a few Leica sales guys are drowning their sorrows right now.

And ORWO, the former E German maker of weird cheap slide film, is launching a new range of B&W 35mm film. At this rate my flares will be back in fashion !

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Re: Intermediaries

IBM downsizing in action

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Re: meanwhile in Russia...

>to die for an old man’s ego and delusions of empire.

But they definitely had weapons of mass destruction and could use them in 45mins.

Anyway ‘We Will, In Fact, Be Greeted As Liberators’

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Overclocked water-cooled BBC micros then ?

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Re: Intermediaries

Nothing except it would cost them many times list price, take a long time, be complicated to setup, involve limited supply volumes and long delivery - and when what's actually delivered is a box with a brick in it - who are they going to complain to ?

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Re: Digital Cameras?

Apparently made in Belarus so they probably don't have the technology anymore

Cable cut blamed for global four-hour internet disruption

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Re: Regional data centres

> why are the police asking people to report crimes using Facebook and Twitter?

Cos the only reason to report a crime to the polis is to get a crime number that you can put on your insurance claim.

US tweaks requirement for investors to dump Chinese tech stocks

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Re: The Land of the Free

But they just realized that forcing people to sell means giving $bn in free shares to foreigners

No, OpenAI's image-making DALL·E 2 doesn't understand some secret language

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Re: AI libel

And the small print that you didn't sign says the case will be held in California, and if when you say "suing American corporation" as the reason for visiting the border guard doesn't let you in .

Mars helicopter needs patch to fly again after sensor failure

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Re: Shakes head in amazement

Good job Mars has right-to-repair laws

Taser maker offers electric-shock drones to stop school shootings

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Re: Another cause of mass shootings -

Most politicians are, they are surrounded by expert marketeers and data analysts and know exactly what to say to each group to maximize financial or electoral support.

The insane ones actually believe what they are saying

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Re: Another cause of mass shootings -

So if only a couple of them survive they are still ahead of the Japanese, the USA are just r-strategists

Japan lets its banks and other entities issue stablecoins

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Re: the decision relied heavily on trends in the US and Europe

>and what real life problems only these currencies can solve is glaringly absent

My XXX born colleague wants to send some money home to his parents. He can't because the banks won't deal with XXX because our government doesn't like the country's leader. So he has to give some $ to a guy at the local XXX food store, who knows somebody who is going there who will pass the money on - hopefully.

Another friend wants to send money home to a friendly country where people don't have international bank accounts so he has to use a money transfer service that charges 20%.

I want to pay a few cents when I read a post/view a youtube video to support the creator. But KYC rules means that it would cost $10s for them to process a payment from my country.

I want an algorithm that pays someone when certain easily verifiable events happen online - but I don't want to pay an accountant and lawyer $1000s to handle this.

There are lots of things that I might want to do with money that are quite legal but difficult with our banking system.

Sony launches a space laser subsidiary (for comms, not conflict)

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Re: It's not a weapon

It certainly sent a message to the rest of the rebel alliance - at least the ones not on Alderan at the time.

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Re: So Sony wants to fire lasers at satellites

If this is satellite-satellite then eye safety shouldn't t be an issue. They are at least 300km above any pilot and are quite precisely pointed at the destination satellite.

You would need quite a chunky laser to have a Beam Hazard Distance of a satellite on the horizon 300km up. Pointing isn't a big issue, you know where the other satellite is from stored orbital data and a bit of spherical trig.

Advantage apart from bandwidth is as you say, spectrum availability. Even with narrow radio beams you are going to have some overspil and with 1000s of targets all talking at each other you are going to need quite a lot of radio channels.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

Re: Launch

Didn't the UK have a test range in Oz?

Compared to the dangerous creatures at ground level going up a snake/croc/spider free gantry to a running rocket seems like a safer option

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Re: Why a "retired farmer"?

Or if you are in the windy swamp university that house the British Antarctic Survey you go to the course on handling cryogenics and get a cool lecture on gruesome frostbite from being stuck in crevasses.

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Re: Why a "retired farmer"?

After a case where a chemistry PhD student decided to heat something amusingly reactive on an open flame and blew a fume cupboard into his stomach.

So HSE ruled that grad students were public not employees, which caused a whole can of worms about IP. We had to have IP assignments to use any software they wrote.

With everyone convinced they were going to be the Steve Jobs and every uni convinced that they were going to make $$$ from startups - it got a bit fraught

AI-driven HR startup snapped up as companies fight to retain employees

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A cunning plan

Hey developer are you thinking of leaving $MEGACORP$ ?

Well the place you planning jumping ship to uses "AI‑powered skills intelligence is the foundation for the future of work," !

Oh, so you decided to stay here? Good......

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