Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"The El Reg office has decided that only left wingers get a positive review, regarsless of how bad they are doing their job.."
Would you care to point to all the positive articles published by El Reg about Kim, Xi and Putin please? I seem to be missing them.
Meanwhile, here in the real world...
Exactly. If the US wanted an expensive boondoggle multi-State pork barrelling employment project, why spend $billions on a throwaway rocket you can only launch once ever year or two if you have alien spacecraft to back-engineer? I'm sure they could have gone with something just as impressive and created more jobs, like, I dunno, trains capable of an astounding 100mph across the whole country, nationwide broadband for all that's faster than 25Mb/s
"Also, why are people here weirdly puritanical about how icons can be used?"
Are they? They are commonly repurposed meanings based purely in the graphic, despite what the mouse-over text may say. On the other, sometimes they just mean what they show/say :-) ----------------->
"And yet, years later, John 1:18 claims nobody has seen God. Apparently John never read the relevant bits of scripture. But that's OK, neither do modern xtians. Making it up as you go along is much, much more lucrative."
Ah, but you missed where when John was writing, there were many, many "books" about the Christian religion, primarily based on Jewish writings in the Old Testament and strongly influenced by Jewish religion in the New Testament, neither of which existed as "collections" back then until some Roman Emperor decided he'd had enough of all this conflicting information and defined his own Omnibus Edition and declared it The One Truth. I'm not sure he ever actually read those books or properly curated the reading order due to the many discrepancies still causing confusion to this day, despite further translations, refinements and editing, all inspired of course, by God Himself according to those doing the work. There's not even consensus that the Emperor was even a Christian doing Gods Work or just an opportunistic ruler seeing a good way to control his subjects by appearing to take on the peoples latest "fad religion" :-)
"Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?"
And have you listened to the recorded commentary of pilots seeing "something strange"? They are almost invariably cool, calm and professional at all times. Then you get these two "surfer doods" flying multi-million dollar US fighter jets screaming about "UFOs" and sounding like university football jocks at a toga party from Animal House, ie the so-called "tic-tac" video :-)
I think that now faulty logic has already been demonstrated at least once with an EV car fire spreading to other cars and the building.
No idea if this one was EV related or not, but it was pretty devastating for an above ground multi-story car park fire.
EDIT. Apparently it was a 16 year old car (so not EV) that had been modified to be "differently fuelled", so possibly a home/back street retrofit to cooking oil or LPG.
"(all rights to password privacy have gone by the time it gets to this stage. They can change it after if they're bothered , as long as they arnt straight back on the phone)"
If I did that at our place, I'd have to report myself to infosec for asking the user to do that. Then report them for doing it :-)
I'm only allowed to trigger a password reset for them and leave them to deal with it, or at best, show the poor dears where to click.
I have visions of the early unleaded solder concoctions and unexpected long-term whicker growth, which over time seems to have been mainly solved now. As others have said, try it out where the use cases match which brings experience, development and bulk production pricing.
"This does not bode well for the technology being discussed."
At a temps approaching 70C and high humidity, you're probably already outside the recommend operating parameters for many electronic circuit boards and/or devices and into "special environment" areas. So these boards would probably not be suitable for your application, same as they will not be suitable in some other applications, eg rigid, not flexible (although they didn't define what they mean by rigid. I remember circuit boards being pretty damned brittle and any flexion could be enough to break tracks where as, for example, modern PC/laptop system boards allow for a few degrees of flex, indeed is often required to fit some laptop boards into the case.
It isn't hard to note the current charge level and the rate of drop in real time, averaged over some period to produce a more dynamic range estimate than waiting for a drop to 50% charge and suddenly wildly dropping the range estimate.
Maybe they didn't actually write the algorithm and just ripped off and adapted the MS Windows file transfer time algo?
"I wonder what Musk will have to do to thoroughly crash TSLA."
Enable FSD?
"and I really do not understand the recovery."
Skittish markets. It's something we see all the time. the slightest hint at a problem with a listed company and the price crashes as the markets "panic". Almost invariably it turns out that most sensible people didn't really see the blip as a serious problem and clever ones start buying when they see the price falling and make a quick profit as the price recovers both because of the initial "panic"being overblown and the buying spree of now-cheap stocks in what is a perfectly viable business. Just look at stock falls when a company doesn't quite make it's predicted $billions, even though they are still beating last years profits.
It's generally the "get rich quick" short termers causing this. people in it for the long run are looking years down the line, not just next week.
"Tesla does not advertise."
Yes. At least, they don't *pay* to advertise. They (and Musk, especially Musk) just release wild PR and the media does it for them :-)
And, of course, designing a product with a specific shape and corporate logo on it is also advertising, emblazoning the Tesla logo on the "superchargers" is advertising etc etc etc :-)
Not making TV, print or online adverts doesn't mean they don't advertise.
"Seriously? If this is true, reselling the car would make it drop tens of K's in value."
The same applies to software controlled enhancements you pay BMW for. You pay for "lifetime" heated seats, but when you sell it, the heated seats no longer work unless the new owner also pays again for those same heated seats. Or you pay-per-month on a subscription model, the preferred way as far as BMW are concerned as they want the regular income after the one off sale of the vehicle. They are all at it or heading that way. Even the sale of the car is falling out of favour as lease companies are targetting private individuals these days rather than corporate fleets.
Yeah, the sory on not reaching national house building targets is currently in the news this week, but I didn't seen any mention of infrastructure to support all that development. I mean, we *STILL* have the situation of new builds only being provided BT ducting for phone/broadband, no one else seems to get the opportunity to provide fibre/cabling into a new build. There's probably old legislation still in place mandating "Post Office" telephone cabling but other providers have to pay, and so don't bother.
"From the 19th century right up to privatisation, it was routine for the municipal water companies for coastal areas in the UK to discharge raw (untreated but filtered for solids) sewage through short-outfall pipes. Those of us old enough should recall seeing the pipes at the beach - they were still there in the 1970's and 1980's."
Oh yes, I also have clear memories of those too. Most noticeable when there was en especially low tide.
"It's interesting that you note that within a few years, there was sharp drop - did water leakage rates then stabilise (not continue to improve) at that point?"
Good question. It would make sense to set an achievable and properly enforced (with significant fines!) leakage targets and then adjust the targets downwards when everyone is meeting the original targets. It's a diminishing returns calculation, obviously, you can never reach zero leakage, but I'm sure there are experts who can reach a consensus on what is a reasonable end goal, eg 2% or 5% or whatever.
"The idea of a combined sewer and rain water drainage is something we need to get away from."
On the other hand, those heavy rains help flush all the crap through the sewers and give them a "spring clean" every now and then. Agreed though, capacity is the major problem. Maybe the run-off water needs a diverter at the entry to the sewage system so excess gets channelled elsewhere. Where that "elsewhere" is I leave as an exercise for the reader :-)
"I too would be interested in how water is used and contaminated during the cooling process in DC's these days?"
I would assume that because it's an evaporative process that the "waste" water has far higher concentrations of minerals etc than the original source because the cheapest way of doing evaporative cooling is to vent the vapour into the atmosphere. Even in a closed loop, I'd assume the evaporator fins/riffles/whatever get a mineral build-up that has to be properly maintained and probably isn't.
"This bizarre standing charge concept that an entire street/town is charged on the basis of everyone's usage combined divided by the number of homes in it is mad."
Whether you use only a small amount of water as a single person compared to family 6 in a larger house, make little to no difference the cost of providing the pipework to supply your home. That's what the "standing charge" is for. You are correct in that the use of a water meter would almost certainly mean you'd pay less overall than a large family but, on the other hand, water is a necessity so why should it not be paid for "socially"? You as a single person in a small property are not paying the same as someone in large house with a large family since water bills are based on rateable value of the property, ie if you can afford a big house, you pay more for your water and for the majority that works out relatively fairly.
On the other hand, pension funds are more likely to be in for the long term with consistent and ongoing returns, not asset stripping for a quick buck and moving on to the next victim. If they don't have the regular income, they start to look like a Ponzi scheme with contributors cash going straight out to pay the claimants, a bit like State pension schemes.
It sounds like you are saying, in effect, that we can't just replace bits of current electronics with superconductors to improve things in a meaningful way but might have to effectively develop a whole new range of components to take advantage of the effect, reinventing electronic circuits, which sounds entirely reasonable.
If it can be made economic to use in mobile phones and laptops, manufacturers will be falling over themselves to invest if they can offer users and an extra hour or two between charges. After all, that's one of the primary driving forces in developing better batteries :-)
On a slightly more serious note, I'd not be surprised at all if that was the driving force to mass production of room temp, ambient pressure superconductors, assuming the science actually is good and reproducible. Doing the science is the "easy"[1] part. Commercial and economic production and "killer app" use case is the "hard" part, ie convincing industry to invest in something new.
[1] Comparatively :-)
Yep, bulk manufacture to bring costs down requires an economic industrial use case to drive the development. After all, the very first lasers were little more than expensive scientific curiosities with some applications in the research environment. Now, you can buy throwaway laser pointers and cat toys for pennies :-)
"You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible."
That turns into a materials science problem. Few would probably have believed flexible glass fibre was an economic possibility not that many years ago, let alone a world spanning network of them :-)
"If your method can't be followed to reproduce the data, fabricated or not, you did not conduct your science properly."
Or, maybe, just didn't write it up properly so there's a missing step, or something. Benefit of the doubt until confirmed, IMV. The author should be able to clarify and/or help others to replicate who can then check if the process is actually correct. If he can't then yeah, bad science.
"Many millions world-wide expecting a FREE service to remain usable forever is pretty fucking stupid[0], "
Is it? Do you really think these "free" services are a) actually free and b) philanthropic activities? And who said anything about "forever" apart from you?
"don't you think?"
Yes, I do. Do you?
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