Posts by Rick Brasche 522 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Aug 2007
eBay is practically right down the street, tied into the same utility grid as my office. How do they know what power comes from coal and what doesn't once it enters the grid?
Electricity doesn't come in flavors. Or have identifying packets.
this is too much witchdoctery and straight up propaganda.
I'm already playing modern games across their GRID service using the Nvidia Shield handheld and a 4G WiFi hot spot. Plays reasonably well and I'm definitely not on a gigabyte pipe here with this setup. Seems the system is smart enough to degrade graphics a little to cope with lag issues.
86K of British money, on site, for an ATM, in a department store? That's a whole lot of $USTP!
Most ATM's are filled with less than 5K (US) and if more is needed, it is delivered from the bank the morning it is loaded.
Do they have 16 fully stocked ATM's in one store?
Something smells dirty to me.....
the dirty "secret" is that it's almost true.
whomever has the most bitcoins under their control, IS essentially bitcoin. Unlike the USD that takes the entire weight of a nation like China or a hundred billionaires to manipulate a few percentage points (not counting the US politicians who can do so as part of their jobs), one or two controlling agents can bomb or build BC's value. And are doing so. It's a lot easier to herd cats than millionaires, but either way, herding one or two is a lot easier than a hundred or more
now they do a lot of bleaching with oxygen. Pure O2, cryogenically stored on-site (Weyerhauser, early 1990's) at significant energy cost to produce, transport in large dewar bottle trucks, where a significant portion is lost due to venting while stored and travelling through pipes.
Not sure there's a net savings there either.
people are trying so hard to eliminate the tried-and-true fact that there ARE actually crazy/evil people out there in the world, that do real bad things for no logical reason that the rest of the world can understand.
All these special theories of fires that somehow overwhelm absolutely everyone in seconds after the pilot has made a deliberate course correction, while simultaneously shutting down almost all telemetry from the aircraft, and activating absolutely no indicator or sensor prior to this 3-5 second window stretch things a lot harder than repeated proven historical precedent of deadly acts by insane individuals.
It's a huge world out there, and for those who disparage religion, it's important to remember that also means the world is not somehow required to make sense. Bad sh*t happens, at random. To believe there is always a "reason" other than this, is to actually be participating in the same "crutch" that the religious depend on.
so no more gaming point in my brother-in-law's 55 inch 3D capable telly that the PS4 is plugged into?
This sort of technology could be very disruptive to the "Upgrade your Telly Every Tax Return" business model. Way too many people not playing games or watching TV with friends or family, and paired/multiple headsets would satisfy the gaming crowd.
For those who do not interact with the real world whilst imbibing their virtual entertainment, the need for uber screens will fade.
Zuckerberg and many of the Silicon Valley elite are among the largest financial contributors to the DNC. Not to mention their propaganda functions and media saturation that don't "count" even though they'd cost millions if paid for that exposure.
Prez answers the phone because he knows who gave him his seat.
is Where TF is the last piece of Starcraft II? Is the WoW cash cow and D3 auction house all there is to Blizzard anymore, where an expansion using the same game engine and many of the same assets, with only "balance" tweaks and a few new units, takes two years? We're 4 years out from the original release, so let's get this over with. then we'll leave Blizzard alone to milk their WoW players.
as was explained on the box of a toy helicopter:
"these are basically 1/40th scale helicopters. Full-sized helicopters can't fly well in high winds-if a full size helicopter has difficulty in 50 mph wind,your model will have difficulty with 1-2mph. There's nothing to be done about it."
A lot more power and wing area that can be used to fight wind than a robofly and they're useless at anything stronger than the flatulence after Taco Bell. Turn on a decent fan (or hell, the A/C) and these "drones" are at the mercy of the system.
Increase the power through some sort of future-wish battery and motor tech? People will hear the flying dentist drill from two closed doors away.
AAA-CHOO! and the latest snooper pastes itself against the wall...Hopefully not carrying some sort of antipersonnel chemical agents when ya swat it.
until they said it was only a tour of the LA headquarters. I've seen all sorts of offices already. I want to go where the real magic happens. No one is assembling Merlins in LA. No one is doing airframe work, getting their hands dirty and making dreams actually perform in the real world.
Seen enough dreamers. Want to hang with the do-ers.
is it fair US Citizens who have NOT murdered several people and are NOT incarcerated in the middle of Texas have less rights as well?
thought not.
But if we executed the multiple murderers or didn't treat them as poor broken victims and make sure they didn't feel "disrespected", how much whinging from your side of the pond would we get then?
Meanwhile all of us here who have been working our entire adult lives to support those on the dole and in the System, get it from both sides.
we have always been warned against depleting a lithium based chemistry battery. Problems with cell balance and "venting with flame" were significantly reduced when our speed controllers automatically shut down before any cell in a battery gets too low.
In other words, "Never Go Full Discharge". :)
I run Google Maps on my iDrone..errr..iPhone as a GPS, the device mounted in a cradle. I use it for realtime navigation just the same as if I were able to afford some newer car with a corporate subscription plan navigation system.
It's "hands free" by every definition.
So bite off, nanny state. Some of us aren't so defective that we cannot process instrumentation and external conditions at the same time.
What's next? gonna force us to cover the gauge clusters so those needles and displays telling us vehicle status aren't too "distracting"?
CA needs to quit legislating to the lowest common denominator. This "Idiocracy" thing is getting very old.
we can blow trillions for banks to buy up their competition, millions to fly presidential families to vacations around the world (with their multiton armored vehicles, royal retinues and security/military personnel. We can throw away more in foreign aid and to people who haven't contributed anything to society other than crime statistics in three generations.
But we can't find money for our own supercollider, or a Mars mission or a deep solar system probe.
It is what it is. green(I hate that term, I prefer sustainable") energy, like electric cars, CAN stand on its own merits and even continue to command premium prices-but NOT if its sold with vapor, unicorn f@rts, well-wishes and lies.
All that does is p*ss people off and disappoint those who are truly giving the technology an honest go. It's better to sell a program truthfully, so people get what they expect, than to hype it up and have all your early adopters being disappointed.
Don't sell sustatinable programs as being "cheaper" if they're actually not-forget about long term and intangible future promises or breakthroughs. But you CAN sell on a history of improvement and use that to draw a possible breakthrough as a selling point.
But if after all that, you can't show any benefit, then government subsidy is NOT the way to go. However I don't believe this to be the case-we just need to get the profitteers and "true believers" off the podium.
For example, try something like this: "Wind power-it's not for everyone. When it works, it produces power with minimum emissions, but don't expect it to work all the time. We're working on improvements-last year our best turbine produced X kilowatts over the year, while our newest one today produces X + Y kilowatts. Our testing, financed by the admittedly expensive rates we're charging, lead us to believe next year's unit can generate X+Y+Z and reduce maintenance costs as well- you can see our research at nosmokeandmirrors.com"
Be honest, and people WILL pay. Not all, but enough. Blind us with brilliance, don't baffle us with Bullsh*t. companies like ZAP promised us the world with their golf cart EVs, hiding the flaws behind greenwashing and advertising. Nissan says "here's an electric car, run it and see if it works for you."-and I've personally witnessed dozens of Leafs while Ie seen TWO Model S's in the wild (and I live less than 20 miles from the factory!) Tesla seems to be losing sight of that with the NYT debacle-they created perception about the Model S that isn't being met, even though the technology performs as designed. Had their marketers and shills been open up front and honest about "you're gonna have issues in the cold" with as much fervor as "rich movie stars and moguls say their Model S will save the planet", then the NYT article would have offended and surprised nobody. Jus like no one expects most cars to run far if there's a hole in the gas tank.
computers, cell phones and even gas cars were crap when they first came out. They didn't get better because their producing companies claimed they were already perfect and needed no improvement. People knew the limitations of being an early adopter. Now look where we are.
Sustainable energy needs to follow their example.
so "normal use" is to sit on your @rse for hours to do what any normal car does in a few minutes?
And doesn't require the use of a monopolized charger whose very technology is controlled by a single entity?
Does anyone but me worry about the amount of telemetry Musk was able to get from both the car and charging stations?
Big Brother Musk is watching you. Correcting the "truthiness" of your narrative.
Having the lead character hating, not admiring, previous Enterprise captains.
The defining moment of the series? Where Q shows up and challenges Sisko to one of his little "games". They're in a virtual old school "smoker" (boxing match) and Q uses his typical goads and challenges to try to get a reaction, like he did with Picard. Sisko throws a punch and lays the demigod out on the canvas.
Q: "You hit me! Picard never hit me!"
Sisko: "I'm not Picard."
@ Kharkov
glad to see someone else remembers this movie, full of white folk poorly disguised as Chinese...and the pneumatic tube travel system..
can't forget the Heroic Male Lead warning the Professional Yet Attractive Female vulcanologist to stand away from barely-cooled molten rock after the laser test because she wouldn't possibly know it was still dangeously hot. :)
I can get lasers in red, blue and green. Most of them are capable of extremely rapid switching.
why not simply write the entire image with laser resolution? Are there no MEMS scanners that can move fast enough?
I know televisions were patented demonstrating this exact scheme, but the patents appear to now be owned by companies still making money on LCD and LED panel systems.
Is there actually a technical reason full laser projection can't happen?
and this old machine is *still* mostly what the lion's share of the workforce needs even today.
Give it some wifi, a Raspi or similar, SD cards for memory, and power it off of AAs and you've nailed the OLPC. communications and education can still be handled through simple text and audio, the way it was done for generations.
the whole culture of "throw it away because it's old" needs to end sometime
a spongy neoprene mouse pad with the printed keyboard on it to absorb shock from the fingertips. waterproof or not depending on requirements and appearance, disposable and cheap or customizable as giveaway swag. Problem is that might make it so the vibrations are too muffled to use.
watched the Quatermass eXperiment last month after hearing about it on El Reg earlier.- it was as sci fi is supposed to be. Cheesy effects were ignorable as we watch humanity treated as less than ants.
Then I realized Id seen it before....tho I gave the credit to someone else. In Russel Davies' last Torchwood episode, Children of Earth, I though finally this guy was able to write something besides gay club scenes and a shagging clubhouse series. CoE was brutal, brilliantly acted, and awesome.
And it was thematically identical to the Quatermass outing. Children being harvested for trivial alien use, humanity powerless to stop it, government in league to suppress the whole thing while hoping to benefit from it, and no real reason on humanity's part to "save" ourselves if the aliens really cared to try again with a little more effort.
why does the BBC not throw its weight behind it's best ideas and writers? Can't an entire national system do something with the likes of Peter K. Hamilton for example, so we're not stuck with Star Wars: Dead Horse Beaten XXVII?
Please! we promise to drink more tea! Or we'll keep Eddie Izzard here as a hostage until you comply? :)
significant overlap between the "gun control uber alles" nutter set and the "already serving time for felony assault/theft" set too. Not to mention even more overlap when you add the "spent most of their formative and adult years under perception and mood altering chemicals" crowd.
a legacy that actually makes a difference, as opposed to direct wealth transfer to health *insurance* lobbyists? I'd support that!
but I fear that if they can't attach huge entitlements rider (more of "the dole" for you across the pond) it won't be more than lip service to get positive obsequious press coverage and nothing else.
need a "tentatively hopeful" icon
I obsessed about the BD5 as a child, then upon getting older learning that Bond's jet was in fact a real aircraft made the movie all the better. I for one would pay for a version with the original "nausea inducing" flight scenes intact. Blu-ray too please.
finding out now that the gas station scene had a basis in reality..priceless!
once upon a time A123 made batteries for cordless tools and did well.
then they decided to get into electric cars and politics.
now, they're bankrupt.
there is no step 4. while the media/political complex makes money, it seems the political/industrial complex doesn't work so well after the politico has gotten his election contributions.
Flame, in irony. A123 cells were hard to kill, and if any vented with flame, it was under epic stupidity or deliberate.
how about we just cover everything we build with white paint, all our rooftops, parking lots, highways and roads. Change the albedo of all the ever increasing human habitation infrastructure.
Sure it'll be toxic and use up trillions of tons of petrochemicals, but if I can get some politicos to invest in duPont, I'm sure we can green..err..whitewash the public to pay for it.
And unlike screwing with weather, the effects will stay local and can be reversed a lot easier when it's shown to be a bad idea, like controlling pest populations in Australia :P
beer icon because it takes intoxication to understand WTF these 'geoengineers' are thinking and how they get paid such big bank for it.
"we're painting the roses red, we're painting the roses red...."
or something else sci-fi.
They create some particle to save us all from evil pollutants. The particles, however, cause dangerous and fatal allergic reactions in most of the human population.
So it's dangerous to be outside whenever these savior clouds are around, and for a while after they've left. Creating a much more hazardous condition than the unspecified "pollution" they were released to clean up.
Of course the company that owns the patent on these magic particles becomes the most powerful corporation on earth, subverting all governments openly....
when it comes to government help, I look to HP Lovecraft: "I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up Somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shal not wish to Answer, and shal commande more than you."
Because not only do you have to worry about what Big Government does to "help", you have to worry what that "help" can bring about.
so can we do something about me having to donate a few months' salary to DeBeers in order to get married in America? Not to mention the obscene cost of *flowers* of all things? :P
Traditions should not be considered "backwards" unless they are as Law. Then it's a backwards LAW that needs to be addressed.
If everyone involved is happy with a tradition, then it's good. If one isn't, then deal with it by not following tradition. If there is no third party forcing that tradition down your throat, then any disagreement should be addressed as part of the arrangement. If you can't agree on something like this, you're not gonna get by being married either.
we're already adjusting the balance of small RC cars in midair by using torque on the rear wheels. Hit the electronic brake to nose down, cram the throttle to nose up. Works really well on those self balancing RC motorcycles with gyroscopes in the rear wheel.
That being said, a properly designed tail can also help compensate for roll, so a tail unit can help in both pitch and roll axes. As well as help physically right a vehicle that borks the landing.
Of course if they can manage both strong and flexible in a tail appendage, they should be able to do it for limbs and eliminate the need for wheels or tracks completely.
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