
Eclipse
And all that is now
And all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon OpenAI
6971 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Apr 2007
Oh, hi, Elon... can you give us a good price on some of your smaller rockets please? Don't worry about the payload, we'll do that bit, just some guidance. Doesn't need to go orbital, no need to worry about landing them...
Though on a more serious note, I wonder if cruise missiles aren't a better bet? At least you can turn those buggers around if someone decides it's all been a big mistake.
So we've got this non-polluting, non-radioactive, non-carbon fusion power plant, right, and it's clean energy! Says so on the label, so it must be true. And frankly, I'm all in favour.
But... I can't help wondering about _heat_ pollution. Every Watt that comes out of that plant will, sooner or later, end up as heat. Is there perhaps a potential issue, given that this is going to be 'too cheap to meter' power (right, we've heard that before!) that the amount of heat we're generating becomes itself a problem? History suggests that if a resource exists, it _will_ get used.
It's probably already an issue with a carbon-fueled generator; heat when you burn the primary fuel, heat losses between there and the generator, and resistive heat losses in the final uses (ignoring transmission losses), and I'm sure the accountants have some pretty formulae to evaluate the overall efficiency of the system, but is that power ever accounted for as _heat_? Somewhere, everywhere, is getting warm... Consider people living in areas which are uninhabitable without at least some air conditioning, the output of which makes the local environment warmer. It's a vicious circle.
(I suspect it's a lot less of an issue with wind or solar systems; they take heat energy from the environment and (eventually) put it somewhere else. So at least things are constant.)
Like you, this is the antithesis of Linux for me... on any OS the first thing I do is turn off the special effects and sounds, which here would be rather missing the point.
The good thing is not that it is done, but that it _can_ be done. One of these is definitely deserved --->
One ring to rule them all? No thanks...
I make data. I choose a program to generate it; I choose a program to process it. Those two programs may or may not be the same as each other; there may be more than one choice in either field. But _I_ choose...
I have to admit to a certain fascination with language learning: even with four years total immersion in German, I am still unable fully to express myself with anything like my fluency in English, nor to follow a complex program - say, a detailed news item or a political discussion - on the TV or radio.
I note the difference between the Duolingo course (it's not English->German, it's American->German and they're _not_ the same) and tutored classes: the first has you learning long lists of answers mostly by wrote with zero feedback except 'right' or 'wrong' (for example, when I did it, a single incorrect letter in an answer (including using a correct English spelling rather than the American) would make it wrong with no explanation); the second teaches you not German but German grammar... fine for an academic but not so good for someone who just wants a pound of tomatoes or to know who's Chancellor this week.
Surely there must be a half-way house - German As She Is Spoke? - that I have not yet discovered. Duolingo certainly isn't it; in its beginnings, when they _promised_ there would be no adverts nor charges (hah!) it wasn't too bad, but once they started that idiotic 'gamifying' of the courses it became silly - and very irritating.
Depending on the overheads - assume around 50% - and the average salary - is thirty grand a year enough to get sufficiently skilled people? Probably not... then you're looking at around a thousand people.
Oh, and this is government, so you'd need to budget for two thousand middle managers, too.
Perhaps that might have been because people didn't _want_ to use digital channels?
Anything to do with the tax office beyond the very simplest query is a descent into madness. Even what may be a simple query (e.g. why is my tax all screwed up for the fifth year in succession?) which may have a very simple answer from a practitioner knowledgeable in the art, is emphatically _not_ simple for the person on the street who needs an answer. If it were, they wouldn't be asking... and a robot script doesn't cut it.
People, on the whole, need to talk to people, not machines. And if the tax office needs more people to answer the phones, it should hire them. It might even be able to get their income tax right.
You are not alone in this lack of ambition.
Indeed, my German house has no direct thermostats wherever, apart from those integral to the Fernwarme district hot water system; there are individual thermostats on each radiator, mostly set at zero for the rooms we rarely use.
Old-fashioned, I know, but it suits us.
So, you remove fuel that's already bought and paid for and replace it with HVO? That sounds less then economical... why not wait until you've _had_ the power outage and burned off some of the existing fuel? Yes, you're going to get no immediate CO2 benefit from the old fuel, but it's a one-off cost.
Last time I drove a US automatic rental - admittedly, twenty years ago - it was clear that the engine, gearbox, and cruise control weren't talking to each other: a sudden drop of two gears to accelerate 5mph while cruising, or gears suddenly changing half way around a corner. It's clear that I don't drive in the US style.
(But then, my local service garage is always amazed at how little brakes I wear out: I don't drive German style of roaring up behind someone doing 100kph faster than them on the autobahn, and then jam my brakes on at the last second...)
I've used Thunderbird for years but to be honest the latest changes - Gnome effects, I surmise - leave me unhappy. I could live with - though not particularly enjoy - the change to hamburgers instead of menus, but replacing text in context menus with cute little pictures (e.g. for print or delete) with no text alternative really does my head in. So I tried Evolution again, but that seems to require a manual population of the contacts list, instead of doing the obvious addition of every received non-spam mail address (or even offering a menu option to do that). Maye I'm missing something obvious; I like the general look of Evolution.
But that said: I don't want a lot from an email client: a way to view mail without clustering mails into 'conversations' - I don't like that threading - and a way to send mail using a contacts list. I don't need or want all the bells and whistles of integration with office suites. I appreciate that my requirements may not those of other users, but I prefer the 'do one thing and do it well' philosophy rather than 'include the kitchen sink just in case' approach.
It'll be an interesting situation (in the sense of the old Chinese curse) when/if the judiciary jails people for breaking the law - as in this case - and Trump immediately pardons them.
Oh, wait, he's done _that_ before.