Posts by bombastic bob

Re: Trolling

patent trolls typically patent something that's not necessarily real tech, but looks good on paper and in a courtroom. get in first with your "design".

if you built one you were actually "inventing" or at least that's the story they're telling

IANAL - however this is what patents are supposed to cover, an actual invention you might have had along the way in your development work

First patent I was involved in was used for demos and was worked on for a year or so. never sold, though, but it definitely worked. Tech changed around it and it was just not enough to make its own niche in the market. (it was related to wifi and has my name on it). At this time there were a LOT of things getting quickly obsoleted and/or replaced with newer/better

Re: Trolling

apparently (according to the article) he made a prototype, A bit more inventing than your average patent troll at least.

Re: Rik, you're just trolling us now

" plant life requires an abundant CO2 content, in fact higher than we presently have.."

Not exactly but you are close on this point.

At CO2 levels bnelow about 2%, plant life flourishes. At levels below about 0.02%, plant life dies. As far as I can tell, CO2 GHG effect SATURATES below about 0.02% but it is difficult to read from a chart. Increase CO2 to about 0.2% (10 times as much) reaches the peak for "diminishing returns" for plant growth, with little (if any) effect on climate. So at 0.04%, the current equilibrium level based on ocean temperature etc., plants do ok, but they would do better at 0.08% . And the climate would NOT CHANGE.

Re: Rik, you're just trolling us now

The whole idea of man made climate change from CO2 is a COMPLETE HOAX, from the assumption that 0.04% of the atmosphere being allegedly increased by 3% per year by human activity (when it is at chemical and biological equilibrium between the oceans and plant growth, meaning that if you add more CO2 it will be depleted quicky back to the equilibrium level) to the assumption that its greenhouse effect is anything significant (95% from water, and about 2% from CO2, which has already saturated, meaning that if you were to increase the level of CO2, even doubling or tripling, the additional effect is NEGLIGIBLE) and anyone who casually observes the REAL science would REALIZE this and not fall into the TRAP of DOOM-SCROLLING and being MANIPULATED through FEAR to give up your freedom, vote for EVERYONE ELSE to give up THEIRS, and irritate everyone else's life through "just stop oil" protests and various OTHER forms of virtue signalling while so-called "important" climate activists FLY IN PRIVATE JETS.

And when you add more CO2 to the atmosphere, you get more PLANTS.

(someone had to say it)

Re: Energy Conversion Inefficiencies and Better Ways

It also is wasteful to convert energy forms, as the conversion process is inefficient

2nd Law of Thermodynamics and entropy are big reasons for this. It even limits potential efficiency of solar cells, thermocouples, and peltier devices, as well as any kind of engine, though conversion to pure heat energy is most likely 100% efficient.

Thermal, friction, and other losses are tiny by comparison.

Re: Nuclear is dirty! Cope.

nuclear physics. been there, done that. I still like to study it from time to time. And health physics is very important in the industry. "Time Distance and Shielding"

Nuclear fission reactors are an excellent idea. I think we need more of them. And CO2 is not the control knob of climate (the Sun is), so we should go ahead and cleanly burn whatever carbon-based fuels we can extract from the ground. There is a LOT more carbon in the mantle causing hydrocarbons to be created in the Earth's crust (so only a portion is actual 'fossil' fuel). After all, carbon is lighter than silicon so it 'floats', then works itself up through the crust into oil and coal deposits, as well as CFCs HCs and CO2 belching out of volcanoes.

Either that, or enrich the CCP after they cornered the market on the materials needed to make batteries, and use slave-wage labor (often children) to mine it. Ya think maybe if we followed the money you'd find the CCP funding a LOT of this anthro-climate-change NONSENSE...?

Re: Yes. Nuclear is soooo dirty!

a falling blade of an exploding wind turbine

The materials they make those things out of are

* Impossible to recycle

* brittle, not ductile, and become weaker from cyclic stress

Therefore wind turbine blades will need to be regularly replaced

(as for the old ones, maybe we can grind 'em, up and mix with coal for making electricity...!)

Remember that mini sub made from carbon fiber composite materials? A few too many stress cycles visiting the Titanic and it added itself to the wreckage site (along with the occupants)

Re: Gigabequerels per Tonne...

unless fissionable material comes from the sun

It does. Well maybe not OUR sun but one that went supernova a few gazillion years ago

It is extremely likely that molten Uranium etc. exist in the center of the earth's core, possibly enough to keep it molten. Stratification over 4.5 billion years would make the heaviest stuff go there

But in asteroids the incidence of Uranium would be higher. Heavy elements in Earth's crust were deposited by meteors after the crust hardened.

Re: Nuclear Power and Regulation Thereof

having spent 6 years in the Navy, nearly 4 on a nuclear sub, and having operated the reactor plant, I have to disagree with your assessment.

Re: Fusion vs Fission

oh one more thing

Traditional Fission reactors only use ~2-3% of their fuel before it is considered "spent".

Not actually true. Burnable poisons (like Boron) are typically added with the fuel so you can greatly increase the fuel load, and poison chemistry control is used in part for the same reason. As the fuel ages you adjust the poison level in the coolant accordingly. There are also other ways to increase fuel load, like core geometry, different control rod configurations that change during core life and so on. You should be able to get 50% or higher utilization with a properly designed core, even low enrichment cores.

Not sure where you got your numbers. Thorium is interesting but apparently impractical.

But yeah I'd like to see more nuclear energy. It makes too much sense for the greenies to want it, though.

Re: Fusion vs Fission

fusion produces its energy in the form of Neutron radiation, which destroys and makes radioactive almost every material there is

Well, not entirely. And neutrons are just one group of the radiated particles. I would expect gamma to exceed neutrons due to momentum conservation, even with 2H + 3H -> 4He + N reaction.

Even so collecting neutron energy is relatively easy. 1 meter thickness of water should absorb about 90% of it, 2 meters about 99% of it. Some materials can withstand very high neutron flux without significant activation (or depletion). So it's a problem, just not an unsolvable one. Just surround the reactor (protected by a metal shell) with the boiler water or a pressurized water vessel.

The sustained fusion reaction seems to be the biggest hurdle. I think they need higher fuel density. How about 'heavy oil' i.e. oil with heavy hydrogen? With carbon maybe you get CNO cycle too?

In any case the fact that the same people who want to reduce "carbon footprint" are ALSO trying to stop fission reactors from being used tells me that their agenda has NOTHING to do with climate. More than likely it is political, i.e. power, control, and money.

Re: Its pretty easy to

drill 2 miles down into yellowstone park, plant a tsar bomb, and standby to see the fireworks and cooler temps

The snark is STRONG with this one!

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

how long would the climate take to recover naturally?

The climate is already recovering from an ice age. About every 100-150k years or so we go through an ice age, which lasts for most of that time period. CO2 increases because it is actually too low and the oceans are apparently still warming, which causes the equilibrium concentration of atmospheric CO2 to increase as well. Humans' 3% of total CO2 every year, combined with the TINY fraction of effect CO2 has on GHG [2% vs 95% for water] means that even if it WERE being affected by accumulating human CO2 it would only increase temperature by:

(15C - -15C) * 2% * 3% or 0.018C per year, or roughly 1.8C per century. That is nothing to panic over, nor do eco damage to block the sun for. And CO2 does not accumulate because of plants and rain, so basically CO2 isn't the control knob for climate. The SUN is.

Re: What could possibly go wrong...

As for that rhetorical question 'What could possbly go wrong'...

How about these "scientists" being JUST PLAIN WRONG about the "settled science" - and then doing so-called "corrective" things that actually DO make everything worse...!

25,000 scientists know that if they say the right key words and tricky phrases, and then DEFECATE the right "analysis" to the right people, they'll get LOTS of FUNDING for their labs to do what they REALLY want to do. Get while the getting's good, right?

Dear "scientists" - do NOT mess with *MY* SUNLIGHT!!!

(Regardless, I happen to LIKE hot weather, CO2 is good for plants, and COLD WEATHER kills WAY more people than HOT weather!!!)

CO2 is responsible for around 2% of GHG effect (as opposed to WATER, which is around 95%). Given that the effect of CO2 has been saturated for quite some time (and is limited to a VERY small band of IR radiation, unlike WATER) and only about 3% of CO2 is put into the atmosphere by humans (which is at chemical and biological equilibrium ANYWAY as rain depletes the added CO2 and it winds up as carbonates in the ocean with atmospheric CO2 driven by water temp and NOT the other way around, and also algae and plant growth increases with increased CO2 and helps deplete it faster) and so for the 3% of the 2% "they" want to spend $ZILLIONS of OTHER PEOPLE's money to BLOCK THE SUN.

*FACEPALM*

dual open source licensing

FYI - if you are the original authotr of code you own it. If you have not added GPL contributions from others, it remains yours.

I often do "dual license" for that reason. Often I say things like "GPLv2 or BSD-like license at your discretion". Anyone who contributes would have to agree to this distribution method. It would allow for anyone to use it under BSD-like license which includes closed source and commercial use. And it would include GPL licensing to avoid any GPL-related incompatibility.

Open source with "paid for" licensing needs some kind of value added. Customization and support are traditionally the two best things you can charge money for.

Just enforce the existing license

The existing GPL is sufficient, In My Bombastic Opinion. What we need are some clever attorneys to take on IBM and get some judgements based on the INTENT of the GPL, and to clarify that preventing end-users from distributing the software (under contract or by other means) violates the end-user rights granted by the license. It would require a summary judgement against IBM and others that exploit this particular loophole. It only needs to happen in one jurisdiction, which would then allow the world to view the source.

Re: My way or the highway

If your kiosk applictions have web interfaces, you should be able to port them to linux pretty quickly.

I recommend doing that. Chromium has "kiosk mode" and there may be something similar in Firefox. Worst case you can write a webkit-based browser in just a few lines of Python code. Good denough for a web-based touchscreen hierarchy, run Apache+PHP stand-alone on Linux. On an RPi even...

Re: The MS Model demands

seeing the penguin icon confirmed your intent of what "on message" meant.

II'm done with "The BORG"

I have already anticipated that Micros~1 is proceeding over the cliff while going in the wrong direction, and I have allowed MSDN (or whatever it's called now) to EXPIRE. All of the old tools etc. will still work along with WIndows 7, and so I won't concern myself with 11, 12, or even 10 except for when I need to do taxes. For less than the $800/year subscription renewal cost I can get a low end PC with no monitor if something like tax software MANDATES it.

I'm DONE with Micros~1 *WRONGNESS*, from the 2D FLATSO TIFKAM interface, mandatory updates, strong-armed "cloudy" login and ADVERTS on MY computer, to their general attitude of "The BORG is always RIGHT and you will be ASSIMILATED"

Re: Just let us use Windows as an operating system

OS's should get out of the way of the user and prevent the user programs from doing their job.

I think you meant to say "get out of the way of the user and NOT prevent the user programs from doing their job."

Understandably a bit too "festive" when posting... ?

Re: No imagination any more

comoputer science: theory

software engineering: practical application

Re: No imagination any more

"They've been replaced with identikit programming graduates taught to code by numbers."

In short, the indie developers have been replaced with "sweat shop" operations. Micros~1 is one of those.

Look at what happened to Windows starting with 8. All appearance of artistry and common sense VANISHED from the UI. Micros~1 went with re-arranging and re-designing and taking AWAY functionality that had been there since 1993 (like personalization). It's all "minimalistic" 2D FLATTY FLATSO FLATASS with "Settings" instead of Control Panel, "CRapps" with ADVERTISING built in that you download from "The Store", a cloudy login that I am *CERTAIN* helps them identify your computer while you are on the internet, FORCED "UP"grades and the BSOD's that come with them, and so on.

The entire ATTITUDE of innovation is *DEAD*, at least at Micros~1. It's more like THE BORG now. USERS WILL COMPLY. YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED. etc.

At least Apple products use shadowing. If they must draw everything in the UI all 2D FLATASS like Windows 1.0, at LEAST put a shadow under it to make it TRY to look nice.

[they should have just fixed all of the bugs, and streamlined the existing code base]

Re: Where are the Pythons?

Are you asking us to 'spam' Eric? (or maybe his pet fish)

Re: So, Voyager 1 is reaching the end of its useful life

not quite ready to do 'The Parrot Sketch' for V'ger

Re: A repeating pattern of ones and zeroes

you know it is worse when the binary response is: 00100 00100

Re: Have they tried

the Ministry of Edgy Terms and Acronyms

Re: Excelent design - aliens must be proud

and don't forget 2FA if you have not sent commands in a while. For something out where V'ger is, it could double (or maybe triple) the delay as it sends a code to a phone dedicated to receiving text messages from spacecraft, and then you send the code back up to the spacecraft to prove it's you.

Re: If it looks like a job, and is supervised like a job, it'll be classified as a job

"gig" work is what I have mostly done for the last 30 years, usually through my corporation. In engineering and IT (as we all know) the demand is often short term, and mucking about with "that other stuff" is most easily done by just paying a higher rate and letting the gig worker manage it himself. I actually prefer that.

"Between gigs" is more than enough vacation for me and I can better manage my own "HR crap" thank you very much.

Re: Not difficult

" blanket rules like this just catch people like me who are quite happy running a business and working for someone for 3 / 6 / 12 months at a time."

Exactly.

Dear Gummints: I do not WANT your "help" I do not NEED your "help" and as Ronald Reagan said, the 9 most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."

Fortunately I also have a corporation which helps me sort things out better (expenses, billing, taxes, etc.).

Re: What if they use heavy oil instead?

I'm thinking more in terms of inertial confinement and the idea that oil is dense, contains carbon for carbon cycle, and if hit on all sides by simultaneous lasers, would form a oressure wave to compress itself before vaporizing. THAT, and it would be sustainable, passing the droplets through the "laser guantlet" into a reaction chamber. Probably would not need a shell.