Single thread...
...for 92 years and now shuffles off to the parallel plane.
132 publicly visible posts • joined 2 May 2007
Elsewhere in this excellent journal we've had articles wondering why women find IT an uncomfortable profession, then we have this headline "Alexa show you a good time" and a fantasy image getting her kit off...
Even as an egalitarian I normally let this sort of thing slide, but this one seems crass even for a Friday.
They're getting 12KW of electricity out of 40m^2 of collector (the area of the mirrors) so that's still 30% efficient using the rule of thumb that there's 1KW of sun energy per square meter.
The extra 20KW of hot water is interesting, but how useful is that on a hot sunny day?...
NPAPI in Chrome has been killed in Linux since chrome 35 - http://blog.chromium.org/2014/05/update-on-npapi-deprecation.html - which kills Java! Without an alternative way to access sites with Java plugins I've seen various comments of people moving back to Firefox.
Google seems to be shooting itself in the foot with this, I can't see this being a good way to force Go onto websites....
Morgan Stanley are scare-mongering that cheap batteries will destroy demand for incumbent energy utilities due to everyone making their own power, but there are others scare-mongering that the increase of electric cars on the road will mean that the utilities won't be able to cope with the load!...
In fact cheap, grid-scale energy storage is the only thing that can make the whole system work: wind energy only becomes useful if you can store it until needed, along with the excess energy from nuclear power in the low-demand periods. Add in some bog standard Rankine-Cycle Energy From Waste burners for peak demand and Bob's your uncle.
Instead of having all those cat5 cables in forest from these NAS boxes to the switch it would be great to have some kind of enclosure or tray with its own switch to slide the disks into and have just one or two network cables per tray.
...then perhaps aggregate the NIC and processor onto the tray and maybe add some kind of RAID logic
...of course that would require a faster processor but that's amortised over the disk bundle
...connect the disks to the tray with a fast interface that's already a standard perhaps and put the disks into caddies so you can hot-swap them
...add some memory too and a general api that's also already a standard
Hmm, what did I just invent?
So, you can buy some patents from another company and then act all hurt and pouty-faced 'cos someone else copied something you did from before you even existed.
You know, the US patent system seemed so perfect up until now but this appears to be ever so slightly out of kilter.
Gosh!
A "currency" that's "not meant to last"? Ooh, that sounds stable and worth investing in...
Bitcoin is an artifically limited asset that has no actual value and only perceived value. Apart from early miners who were effectively just handed cash, it's only worth now is to speculators who will buy, hold for a bit and then sell to the gullible.
Soon, when no-one wants to buy, there will be a crash when bitcoin's perceived value will match its actual value and a lot of mugs will be left holding nothing.
Harold Lewis makes the careful and accurate distinction that it's the global warming movement that is corrupt (and therefore possibly mistaken), not the issues around global warming.
The use of the word "incontrovertible" in an issue as complex as climate change is of course repulsive to any decent scientist.
I think Prof Lewis would be quite happy if global warming is proved to be true - he's a scientist, he doesn't care either way - but he is obviously insensed by the way a single point of view is being steamrollered through a supposedly scientific organisation. He wants the debate to be open and treated the same way as any other in the APS.
There's an important distinction between standards - particularly in representation, filing and API - and an implementation of those standards.
IBM is saying that open standards are good and that they'll use the best implementation of those standards. Firefox just happens to be the best implementation at the moment. The benefit of focusing on open standards rather than implementation as that one can always switch to a better tool/program if one comes along. There's a reason why MS has always dragged its feet about making their API and filing "standards" open...
It's atmospheric pressure that powers siphoning and obviously so.
The pressure at the two liquid surfaces are equal, but now imagine travelling "up" the long pipe - the higher you go the lower the pressure will be due to the weight of the liquid below you acting against the surface pressure. When you're level with the end of the short pipe this difference in pressure is what drives the siphoning.
Mark, if you want to advance the cause of science how about starting with some simple maths:
1. Given the collision energy at the LHC what is the diameter of the event horizon if a black hole is created?
2. How does that compare to the diameter of electron orbit around the proton/neutron core of an atom.
3. Therefore, as the blackhole oscilates from one side of the earth, through the centre, to the other side just how much matter is impacted by the event horizon?
Clue: it's very, very, like you-know *very* small...
Now the cat's out of the bag, like spam, this isn't going to stop. The exec's at the top of ISPs won't understand what the issue really is - they can only see the internet as the web and think this is a great idea to make money from <ahem> I mean "help" the users.
So DNS needs to come up with a 3rd way - a response that includes a NXDOMAIN but also an address of a "useful server" to redirect some protocols to.
With 3 hours till the budget comes this is all speculation... but IMHO this would be a crazy idea!
Forgetting the worsening (if possible) civil "service" by having it done thousands of miles away in a foreign language there's a distinct Total Cost of Ownership benefit to keeping it in-country: for every local job you outsource you have to add in the extra cost of paying job-seekers and other benefits to the sacked person, plus the lost revenue of those ex-earners no long spending cash in local shops and entertainments etc.
This is the one bit of protectionism that the Yanks have got right. It is *much* more expensive to spend tax money abroad than it is to keep it in-house, even if the local wage costs are higher at first glance.