Posts by jake 26713 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
"but better sources are gone."
http://jargon-file.org/archive/
This particular mispleling first appeared on Usenet sometime in the late 1980s. Sadly, the gookids destroyed the DejaNews archive, so finding the actual date and original poster's handle seems somewhat unlikely at this juncture ... although nothing posted online ever truly goes away, so there is hope.
Hint: Cow-orker first appears in version 4.1.0 of The Jargon File.
Why on Earth would the Democrats "rig" the election in favo(u)r of their own Presidential candidate ... and yet not bother rigging the Senatorial and Congressional elections while they were at it? Seems kinda pointless to go through all that trouble, only to end up in a stalemate.
Fortunately the real Republicans are learning to work around the anti-American MAGA[0] asshat clowns, and things are starting to move forward again ... if slowly.
[0] Muppets Annoying Genuine Americans
... that nobody has mentioned the op-ed piece that Ken Block published in USA Today on January 2nd of this year.
"Who is Ken Block?" you might ask ... Ken's the owner of Simpatico Software Systems (look it up), which was hired by Donald Trump on the day after to prove widespread fraud in the 2020 elections.
In a nutshell, they found the exact opposite, and communicated this fact to the Trump Whitehouse. (Must have been a fun phone call. "Despite paying my company millions of dollars to show otherwise, I'm sorry to have to report that you're a loser, Mr. Trump".)
Trump and his sycophants and quislings have maintained the lie anyway. It's what they do.
"'the laptop from hell'"
The Biden laptop is a non-issue, a time wasting distraction, and always has been, simply because of the lack of a clear chain of custody. Its contents are not admissible as evidence in any court in the US. Won't stop the anti-American folks in the MAGA[0] faction from babbling incessantly about it, though.
[0] Muppets Annoying Genuine Americans
Let's be clear here ... I am not hell bent on damaging anything.
A drunk stumbling home tripping over your charge cord might be, though.
The difference is the cord is in plain sight (and needs to be disciplined for being a tripping hazard), the radio is out of sight, and out of mind.
I'm waiting for reports of people figuring out how to "siphon" electricity from battery cars. It'll happen. Eventually.
Note that I said "almost never".
They all charge mostly at home, on a dedicated 50A 240V circuit.[0]
All are pissed off at PG&E raising the electricity rates several times recently, and most are looking to off-load the EVs for something more conducive to California's costs and distances.
[0] Yes, almost all houses in the US have that capability, contrary to popular right-pondian belief.
"The more people who pay to have "100% green" electricity, the more capacity will have to be installed if the companies are not to say "oops, sorry, no can do"..."
Unless, of course, the people selling "100% green" are nothing more than legal con artists.
Plan B4: Sell trailers outfitted with diesel generators to tow behind each and every EV, so they can top up anytime they like ... maybe even while driving, which would be handy on long road trips, especially when towing (see what I did there?). Before you pooh-pooh this, consider that trains and ships wouldn't use diesel-electric if it wasn't the single most cost-effective method of transportation.
Take the powerplant WITH the customer, save on transmission losses and operator fees.
"A better solution would be that all EVs have the same design of battery pack"
Because all EVs have exactly the same power needs? Volt owners might not mind your cunning plan (much), but Plaid owners will raise a stink.
"and its a simple 5 min operation to swap it out at a charging station."
Who would want to swap their brand new battery pack with one that has been bouncing along the dirt roads in the Mojave, alternating between freezing and baking from night to day? You think range anxiety is a problem now? Once this daft swap idea becomes mandated (and it probably will, politicians being who they are ... ), nobody but a complete idiot will ever pay for an EV again.
"without worrying over if our antique electrical infrastructure can cope with the extra power draw.."
There are places in the world (including parts of California and Texas, for example) are already living with rotating brownouts. Some even have intentional blackouts when the grid can not keep up with the demand, and/or during inclement weather (including CA and TX ... ) Where are you planning on getting the extra power to charge all those batteries? It just plain doesn't exist. The grid is lacking, and the EV evangelists refuse to see this reality.
We need nuclear power, and the infrastructure to deliver it, and we need to start building 40 years ago.
If you had put out the word, I'd have loaned you a BERT or two of one description or another ... we were (mostly) done with them by 1988.
Had three of them in MaeWest, another four at the Bryant Street CO in Palo Alto, and a couple more at Stanford.
Not my money, I hasten to add ... they were originally BARRNet issue (I think).
But can you actually poison something that is inherently untrustworthy?
And how can you augment intelligence with something that is born of incorrect, incomplete and incompatible data which are more often than not also corrupt and stale?
Garbage in, garbage out.
"And to think we saw it here first."
I'm pretty certain amfM has been using the interrobang here on ElReg for years now, on and off.
The ligature itself has been around for over 6 decades. I can set up my Linotype machine to generate it.
Sadly (?), globally destructive nanobots are the work of science fiction. If they weren't, Shirley we would have discovered a half-chewed galactic spiral arm or two by now.
On the other hand, perhaps so-called "dark matter" is made up of lots and lots of paperclips ... be afraid, be very, very afraid.
Here at chez jake, the only thing we worry about in the barrel rooms is excess CO2, and then only during crush and fermentation, and in cases where we know we'll get some secondary fermentation after moving barrels around. Needless to say, we have sensors down there to tell the fans to augment the natural ventilation if the percentage of CO2 is seen to rise. The small amount of alcohol that escapes the barrels as the plonk ages is nowhere near enough to catch a buzz by inhalation, even if the fans don't kick in for a few weeks or months (right now, the computer says the fans haven't run since mid November). In fact, idiot Yuppies pay me good money to have sleepovers down in the wine caves. It's perfectly safe, if a trifle chilly & humid for my taste in good napping spots.
I'm pretty sure it's the cats & sighthounds snoozing in the sunbeams that are sleepy, not the light itself.
And said cats (and sighthounds) donlt care when it left the Sun. It's here now[0], which is all that matters.
[0] Not now, to be perfectly honest. It's raining here in Sonoma ... the heat-seeking critters are buried under blankets.
"or it would have to be magnitude more expensive"
In the RealWorld, the "lasts the lifetime of the user" toaster is only about twice the price of a "throw away in a couple years" model. Or you can buy one that's cute, in the cool crayon colo(u)r of today's marketing geniuses, for about four or five times the price of the cheap one, secure in the knowledge that it'll die before you get tired of the look of it.
One wonders what Japan does with all the dead Hello Kitty toasters ...
"Who would want a toaster that could last a hundred years ?"
Me. Thus I purchase my small home appliances at restaurant supply stores, not a main-street department store.
My Waring 4-slot "bagel" toaster is nearly 50 years old and still works like new. I just checked, and all parts are still available (including a kit to rebuild the heating elements), should I need to fix it.
Humans have been talking about and writing about so-called "generation ships" since the early 20th century. A lot of thought has gone into the problem. I rather suspect that we could do such a thing now, with today's technology ... but the overall cost would likely outweigh any perceived benefit, and thus the will to do it is not there.
The other problem, of course, is where do you point the silly thing?
"where getting three years out of a modern washing machine is difficult."
Two words: Speed Queen.
A few more words: Speed Queen are the folks who make bullet-proof laundromat coin-op equipment ... but they also make home machines, sans the money slot. Hand made in the US, and the price reflects it, but they last forever in a household environment. And no fucking computer to go TITSUP[0] on you after getting blasted by static from the dryer. Most of the TC5/DC5 machines here at the ranch have been abused and battered for well over a decade, with no sign of slowing down. And no fucking lid lock; either. Recommended.
The old Roman phrase caveat emptor has never rung truer than for today's large and small appliances.
[0] Total Inability To Select the Unmentionables Program
In this case, the vacuum isn't the issue. The issue is radiation. Your thermos is mirrored to keep heat out (for martinis) and in (for soup).
There is an awful lot of vacuum between the Sun and the Earth, but the cats still argue over whose turn it is to snooze in the sunbeams coming through the windows. Without the Sun's radiated heat, the earth would be a very cold place indeed.
To cool a space-born data center, simply point the radiators at a cold spot in space ... which from Earth orbit is pretty much anywhere but at the Sun. Getting the waste heat to the radiators is left as an exercise for the reader.
As a side note, a good deal of the electricity still available to the Voyager spacecraft goes to keeping their electronic systems warm enough to function. They would have radiated all their heat away and frozen to death long before leaving the inner solar system without the built-in heaters.
Now, about that latency ...
The T-shirts that were considered munitions were the PGP-in-perl shirts in the early 90s, the DeCSS kerfuffle was late '90s and early '00s.
I wore the PGP-in-perl T-shirt out of and back into the USA on maybe a dozen flights from '91 to '93 without anybody even blinking at me funny. Later, I occasionally carried a copy of Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" book containing source examples in the text (which did not fall under the export restrictions) and the disk containing the very same source, which was bound into the cover (and very definitely did fall under those restrictions).
This kind of security theater may be worth the paper it is printed on, but not much more.
I stopped trying to get arrested on principle when I grew up after having a kid of my own to take care of. Priorities & all that. Today, she tells me I shouldn't have wimped out ... but she did wear the shirt and took the book into "show and tell" occasionally, as examples of governmental stupidity.
My Grand daughter (not quite 11 yet at the time) wanted to do the same show and tell, with the same shirt and book ... and then snip off a corner of the shirt to turn into gun cotton to demonstrate how easy real munitions are to make. I nixed cutting up the shirt (too many memories), and recommended snipping a bit off of another T-shirt instead. Her school nixed that option[1], because children aren't supposed to know such things, and IT WOULD BE DANGEROUS!!! (the school's CAPS and punctuation). Model rocketry has been banned for the same reason, much to her deep dismay.
At just ten years old she was already on the "watch list" for her school district because she knows too much. What kind of useless milquetoasts are her generation going to become, anyway?
[0] That CD is still bound into the cover; I never bothered to take it out because it is available for the download online.
[1] Surprisingly, the hand-wringers & namby-pambys didn't try to have her arrested for bringing weapons to class.
"I wonder what they are thinking."
They are not thinking. They are reacting to a story that is playing out in their heads.
Plate and camo and dress-up bits on a rifle (how cute! They've found a Barbie substitute!) are not requisite tools for surviving the apocalypse, regardless of what the doom & gloom marketers tell them.
"Probably better to throttle Microsoft."
FTFY.
For the record, I've been slowly, one at a time, re-introducing friends and family to email since roughly the middle of Covid. They are taking to it. Common comment runs along the lines of "OMG! I'd forgotten how easy and useful and fast email is!".
Probably doesn't hurt that I run the server, and I'm rather draconian when it comes to spam ...
Want "digital detox"? I haven't even seen my phone in about ten days. I know where it is, mind (hill-top pump house), I just don't care.
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