Posts by Black Betty

Re: Only 96 batteries

Strangely enough, water is exactly what you put on a large lithium fire, provided you have enough of it.

On the one hand, it's swapping one extremely bad tempered reaction with an at least marginally less bad tempered one. However, the true advantage is in the thermal mass of the sheer amount of water involved, which is capable of carrying away a huge amount of heat, which at least takes care of the thermal runaway problem.

Now it just has to be kept wet until water has seeped through any and all containment breaches and fully reacted with any exposed lithium. Unburnt hydrogen simply needs to be managed like any other flammable gas at a fire scene.

Re: Govts needs to get a grip on it and now

Cutting off the internet connections of the buyers until the offending devices are removed and subject to extreme percussive maintenance is what needs to be done right now.

Re: Gigabit not needed, what a load of crap!

Really? 15 Mbits/sec will just barely see out one DVD quality video, with enough bandwidth left over for a couple of browser connections. The only way to get 4K video down existing pipes is massive compression which makes a mockery of the format. 8K (already a thing) will be worse still.

And while few would fully utilise a gigabit pipe 24/7, games and their patches are constantly growing in size. I've already run into one 20 GByte, day zero game patch (4 hours+ over ADSL2).

You broke it. You bought it. EOM

The post is required, and must contain letters.

Re: The d*ckhead who bought it is your average punter.

He simply bought a consumer product marketed as a way to make his life more convenient and plugged it in. Nowhere on the box does it tell him that actually using the product for the purpose for which it is sold, is the online equivalent of hanging the door key on the gatepost.

It's simple enough to identify what brands/models of devices. Hit the manufacturers for the cost of mitigating attacks. Let the worst idiots figure it's cheaper to pay up than fix the problem, third time it becomes habitual behaviour. Goodbye LLC status, ALL the assets of ALL the principles are up for grabs.

IOT was a ludicrous concept from the very beginning. Billions of "smart" devices that can outperform the first true supercomputers by orders of magnitude ALL directly connected to the internet. What could possibly go wrong?

How about one hardened smart controller and a host of utterly stupid devices that know their own function and no other. What additional utility is there in light bulbs that can be tracelessly hacked to become a wireless keyboard sniffer? Or security cameras that make you (or perhaps your children) internet famous, without bothering you with pesky little details like consent, or expectation of privacy?

Re: Ear Worm Central

Spend a few moments to contemplate the exact meaning of "Shoot the bucks, grab a gin, cut her hair, Break her in."

This upgrade to Shai-Hulud class, courtesy of a shitty day on the internet.

Share and enjoy.

A few hundred thousand malicious damage charges might get...

...the message through.

Re: too technical for me

I think you're referring to the old water gas/syngas method of passing steam over a bed of hot coal in an oxygen free environment. C + H2O --> CO + H2. It was the CO which both killed and left behind a pretty corpse when ovens were the go to suicide method for housewives.

Today hydrogen is generally made from hydrocarbons for a much higher yield. CH4 + H2O --> CO + 3H2 being the simplest.

Biggest problem with driver "assist" systems is human complacency.

The in your face extra brake light initially reduced rear end collisions by 40 odd percent, but eventually settled at 4%, still worthwhile, but a poor comparison to the initial results. ABS braking was huge until the yahoo in us, figured out how much closer to the line it let us skate. US airbags are overpowered because they are designed to stop an unrestrained occupant. High visibility clothing somehow goes unseen.

To the degree that they work it's all too often despite the driver.

Re: FOV. F35 doesn't have one.

Could very nearly bolt the helmet to the seat and not affect the pilot's field of view significantly. He's supposed to use his HUD and something akin to Hololens.

It's a bloody single function legacy adapter.

I believe something called Bluetooth is a workable alternative, and for those who like to flail, an adaptor or suitably terminated lightning headset fill the bill.

The problem is, that the 3.5mm jack has served a function which hasn't changed in well over a century. Apart from the occasional proprietary repurposing, nobody has monkeyed with the 3.5mm plug, because it's done its job, but only its job, so admirably for so long. It's as small as anyone wants to hand wire and large enough to be physically robust.

However, when it comes to a package the size of a school issue FX-81, jammed with the best part of a thousand Cray-1s , that real estate can be put to better use. There's room for a good 200 to 300 mWh there. Or as they apparently chose an extra camera. Even a housing for a frigging lens cover would be better.

Re: Interesting but impractical

Except the offspring of that technology now allows us to use the scattered light of a laser pointer to see around the corner into the whole bloody room. http://phys.org/news/2015-12-amazing-camera-corners-video.html

OR

Slow a pulse of light to a crawl. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fSqFWcb4rE

No. 1 is entirely practical, and 2 is so damned cool it needs no reason. Just a repeat with a mirror under the cap to catch the beam reflecting back on itself.

As for what's on the screen, an advanced hobbyist level device has, for many, many years, been perfectly capable of reproducing a nearby screen's contents from the EM emissions of its yoke and electron gun with sufficient fidelity, that special fuzzy fonts were designed to counteract it.

@AndyS Where's the return path?

The manual specifically states that it's safe to use water any time the vehicle is not connected to an external supply.

Next issue: It's already isolated to the confines of the vehicle. The only possible danger is coming into contact with exposed wiring and the chassis simultaneously. If there's a short to chassis the battery manager should have already fully isolated the battery. furthermore If it's physically disrupted, chances are good it's already open circuit. Even cutting a live wire is mostly a non-issue, except for what the sparks might ignite before the BMS cut in.

Perhaps a magnetometer in the "wa-wa" wand they already have to see if an AC cable is live.

Confronted by a relatively small hazardous materials fire they acted like a bunch of nervous nellies.

Re: Where do you want to go today.

Shades of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Re: sooner rather than later.

However soon it fell into the hands of script kiddies, a halfway credible rumour of the existence of such a key would have half of all competent black hats in the world hammering the FBI servers into scrap iron via the TCP/IP ports.

Re: All change

You forgot to mention all those tiers of mass storage exist for the purpose of emulating (as best possible) the infinite memory space of a proper Von-Neumann machine. This just flattens the topology slightly.

Funny thing about record keeping, it's pathological. It doesn't seem to matter how much capacity we develop to record information, the amount generated soon grows to fill and exceed that capacity. I don't see this changing anything. It's just more room for cats, plates, and homages to idiocy. Given the infinite nature of the later, no amount of capacity will ever suffice.

Re: Meanwhile, in the lab next door...

Except like with the second, metre and kilogram, the point is to get as fundamental as possible, and that means counting actual electrons, rather than accepting a number that falls out of an equation.

Re: The good news is

The point and origin of these professions is that they do something on behalf of a large number of individuals who would could not do that thing themselves, or do it only with considerable difficulty or risk.

ie, Bargaining collectively as for insurance, or doing a complex once in decades task like buying and/or selling property.

The problem does not lie in the professions you list, but the manner in which the industries which employ them have changed from servicing their clients to being profit mills for shareholders.

Re: "a million-degree gaseous fog permeating our galaxy"

It was baryonic matter that was missing. We now know that's because it's too hot and diffuse to see with the instruments we'd been using. Yes it's a million degrees, but it's still a good approximation of a vacuum, you'd soon freeze to death in the middle of such a hot plasma.

Dark matter for now remains stubbornly dark.

Re: Security by obscurity

A low tech handful of thrown mud is a lot more deniable.

BTW AFAIK those IR reflective coatings are a film, not a spray.

Re: My pet gripe is

Cosmetics. And as pointed out by others, easily fixed by creating a formatting template.

If working with time data is your thing, then shouldn't decent time and date arithmetic be topping your wishlist? Not to mention a proper time storage format. FFS compacting them into a REAL to save space stopped making sense the day computer memories breached Bill Gate's infamous 640K limit.

Hey this ain't the Simpson's universe.

Ten or no cigar.

Oooh yeah! Electromigration FTL.

Mine was the IBM knock off, by the time I was finally able to replace it, my FSB was down to 25 MHz from the 40 the part was supposedly rated for.

Re: Life's hard choices

So, security by obscurity.

Re: "A bigger hammer was employed" [...]

Tapometer.

Percussive maintenance.

Re: When is it surgery?

Strictly speaking, even splinter removal or lancing a boil qualify as surgery. Ditto bone setting and reducing dislocations.

It's one of the reasons why the standard First Aid syllabus has been gutted of everything but the most basic of palliative care.