* Posts by Lars

4256 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2007

Nokia brainwave turns cell towers into cash cows with backup batteries

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Re: This makes some sense, I guess.

"Must be a lesson or two there somewhere."

I would suggest "company greed" as they had been varned about not having enough outside electricity for an emergency but they decided not to do anything about it (yet).

ESA's Mars Express continues to avoid retirement home

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Re: No Martian would dare invade earth

The thing is that if it's twenty years old it was made twenty years ago and that is the big difference.

And we don't talk about them now.

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Re: No Martian would dare invade earth

@Tom Paine

Yes, and if you think about it, light is rather sleepy too. It take about 2.5 million years to reach us just from our closest galaxy and our precious sunbeams are lingering for about 8 min and 20 sec before hitting our sunny side.

Happy new year.

Last Vega rocket launch delayed over fuel tank vanishing act

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Re: One-off risk?

Calm down Justthefacts Britain has not left or been kicked out of ESA.

Britain takes part with about 9% of the budget.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Space_Agency

Europe inches closer to insisting gig workers are treated as employees

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Joke

Re: Not difficult

@andy 103

Your comment sounds very English.

Swedish Tesla strike goes international as Norwegian and Danish unions join in

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Meh

Re: Det är jävla rolig

@ecofeco

No I don't agree with talking about "boot licking morons", that is just silly.

The great majority of Americans are all for affordable healthcare and education and housing for all but they just don't seem to understand it's possible in the world's richest country for reasons I really don't mentally understand.

Claiming stupidity on the individual level is not helpfull.

Kids are not born stupid in any country, but the system might leave them stuck in lack of knowledge,

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Re: The right to demand a collective agreement ?

@t245t

A link about that company please.

This is not to claim unions never make misstakes, the do at times naturally depending on how you look at it. Working against automation is not common however.

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Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

@AC

What you list there are things that happened to other European countries too.

After the war Britain was the second biggest car manufacturer in the world.

But eventually Germany, France and other got their industry running while the opposite happened in Britain. I would add to your list a very militant lady too.

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Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

@SundogUK

"collective bargaining" is about equal treatment and minimum stamdards, longtime advantages for working people and such, so what ypu are claiming is that Musk is a cheapscate, but "collective bargaining" is bigger than one company.

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Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

One thing to remember is that lots of big American companies operate in the Nordic countries and I would claim they adopt to the systems without much of a difficulty.

And it wpuld not surprise me if they tried to take something home too.

Also trade unions are not often company specific but "Metal" and "Transport" and such.

More clout that way and when you change company you don't change union perhaps.

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Re: Who is being reasonable in the conflict?

More like 300000 actually, but that question is much beyond anything of importance.

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Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

i am sure you know it's about a comparison to numbers years ago and ownership of brands and factories today.

The difference is stark.

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Re: Exactly what destroyed the UK car industry

It's actually called the "Nordic model" and is one of the reasons Norway, Denmark and Finland have joined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

"The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden).[1] This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining[2] based on the economic foundations of social corporatism,[3][4] and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy[5]...".

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Re: I'm actually on Musk's side on this

One of the reasons the Nordics earn more per capita than the British I would claim is due to unions and rather stable work conditions.

Regarding Musk and his opinion on trade unions I think we have to remember he is a white South African who emigrated first to Canada and then to the USA.

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Also Finland

Also in Finland has a transport union joined in the same manner as in Denmark.

I hope one of the end results is that less Teslas will be sold in the Nordic countries.

Tesla sues Swedish government after worker rebellion cripples car biz

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Re: Tesla should deal

@jmch

Speaking about GDP per capita, a look at it can surprise some readers here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita

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Re: Tesla should deal

One thing to remember is that unions aren't that often connected to some specific company and Tesla is not a big company in Sweden. I am not sure about what this is about among people working for Tesla.

Perhaps Musk is living in the age of Henry Ford equally keen to send gifts to the "Hitler" of today like Henry was.

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Heja Sverige

And regarding you Brits you would all do better if you had guys like Mick Lynch in government rather than trash people like Boris and Mogg and more or less the rest of them.

And you would earn more per capita too, most likely.

German budget woes threaten chip fab funding for Intel and TSMC

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Re: Optimistic currency conversion

@b0llchit

60 billion euro is indeed 65.4 billion dollar these days.

But I agree about the correction submission.

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Re: Neither settlements are secured

@Justthefacts

I wish you understood to write about socialdemocracy and not socialism.

Social security and social behaviour are not socialist security ...

What we have in the Nordic countries (including Denmark) is sometimes referred to as the Nordic model, and a lot of it you find in many other countries too.

It's more or less only the Americans and many Brits who are mentally stuck in that socialist/communist swamp.

In a two party country everything becomes just left or right.

Some quotes from the Wikipedia on the Nordic model.

"The Nordic model comprises the economic and social policies as well as typical cultural practices common in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden).[1] This includes a comprehensive welfare state and multi-level collective bargaining[2] based on the economic foundations of social corporatism,[3][4] and a commitment to private ownership within a market-based mixed economy.

"All the Nordic countries are however described as being highly democratic and all have a unicameral legislature and use proportional representation in their electoral systems. They all support a universalist welfare state aimed specifically at enhancing individual autonomy and promoting social mobility, with a sizable percentage of the population employed by the public sector (roughly 30% of the work force in areas such as healthcare, education, and government),[8] and a corporatist system with a high percentage of the workforce unionized and involving a tripartite arrangement, where representatives of labour and employers negotiate wages and labour market policy is mediated by the government.[9] As of 2020, all of the Nordic countries rank highly on the inequality-adjusted HDI and the Global Peace Index as well as being ranked in the top 10 on the World Happiness Report.

I think this lady has a point.

"American author Ann Jones, who lived in Norway for four years, posits that "the Nordic countries give their populations freedom from the market by using capitalism as a tool to benefit everyone" whereas in the United States "neoliberal politics puts the foxes in charge of the henhouse, and capitalists have used the wealth generated by their enterprises (as well as financial and political manipulations) to capture the state and pluck the chickens."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

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Writing about debt (silent "b")

We have to write about investments too.

Investing in tax cuts for the rich I think the Letice proved not to be a good investment, but investing in the industry could well be a good investment.

In this German case, who knows. Personally I would invest a lot more in Ukraine now.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/u4dza4cSrnA

Windows users can soon ditch Bing, Edge, other bundleware – but only in the EU

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Re: Err no

"Using it is a different kettle of ball games"

That goes for using Windows too luckily.

Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships to sail the Atlantic

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@ScissorHands

"the Turbosail used on Jacques Cousteau's Alcyone"

Is exactly the same Flettner sail or Rotor sail we write about here.

I suppose they called it super sail to make it more selling and it seems to have worked with you quite well.

https://www.cousteau.org/legacy/vessels/alcyone/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

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Re: I would be willing to agree that ...

@John Sager

That was stupid.

What did the VisiCalc fairy bring you for Spreadsheet Day?

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I had VisiCalc on a Apple II+ then, as some say, long ago.

I was impressed and I think it was the simplicity in it, clearly a new neat solution, that impressed me.

In between, I also had a chess program that I impressed showed to a few chess players, and that still makes me blush, regretting ever mentioning that program.

Many years later I had to help a few Windows customers with their spreadsheets.

Among them there was at least two who never quite got it. Both complained that when they run it the first time the result was wrong but when they run it again it was OK - and what is wrong with the program.

Trying to explain that you should not use a field before it's calculated and that the programm calculates from left to right line by line never seemed to reach them.

I am sure there are those who have similar experiences.

Birmingham set to miss deadline to make Oracle disaster 'safe and compliant'

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Re: I'm confused by this

@Doctor Syntax

Not much logic in that claim, in my opinion, because if SAP was running why the problem, why lost at sea.

It sounds more like they gave up on SAP very much too early, to save money one could guess.

And perhaps they should have remained with SAP.

Beethoven and Brahms move audience members to synchronization symphony

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A silly use of the word "synchronize". We react to music in a similar way, and that is all there is to it.

ESA funds space weather satellite swarm to understand and combat orbital debris

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Joke

I don't think a vaccum cleaner would work in space.

If the Linux Foundation was a software company, it'd be the biggest in the world

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Re: Wrong

@FF22

I am sure if the world's stock exanges could find something more efficient they would kick out Linux right away.

And I am sure you know that all top 500 supercomputers run Linux since several years ago.

And I am fully convinced that if Google & co could find something more efficient for their millions of processors running Linux they would also swith.

You live in the past with opinions from the past.

Linux is Unix done well (and constaltly) and by a large amount of competent people. More people than any company alone could employ.

Perhaps it's surprising but I have had a look at it from the very beginning and I am not all that surprised, perhaps.

ESA gets the job of building Europe's secure satcomms network

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Re: "relying on disruptive technologies like quantum encryption"

What made you write that rubbish. Niin

Meet Honda's latest electric vehicle: A rideable suitcase

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Re: Dignity isn't the only thing at risk

I would recommend "Not just Bikes" for bicycles. It's about how towns are designed, built.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOc8ASeHYNw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aESqrP3hfi8

US Air Force wants $6B to build 2,000 AI-powered drones

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Re: When did they become Drones?

Yes that is a god question.

We have unmanned aircraft called drones and also unmanned helicopters called drones and they are so very different but still still called drones.

I actually think it was the unmanned aircraft that were first called drones.

Personally now, I think a drone should be able to hover and move slowly and vertically, land and take off and so forth.

But the drones we now discuss do none of that.

Putting my back into the pocket.

Lars Silver badge

Not about Ukraine

As the USA has no land border to worry about, one has to assume, these "drones" are designed for a very different attack on the USA, (or used by the USA somewhere else).

They would fitt NATO too in certain scenarios.

I don't think there is any good reason to compare these "drones" to the ones used and needed in Ukraine today.

Criminals go full Viking on CloudNordic, wipe all servers and customer data

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Re: Where are the backups?

I don't think this article included all information, and the backup part is certainly important.

While I have no experience of clouds I must admit i have assumed a cloud provider always have backups.

Germany to cut Huawei from networks 'irrespective of costs'

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Re: Lapdogs

@chololennon

We all know that lapdog number one in Europe is Britain, proudly.

It's called the special relationship that Brits boast about and rely on for good reasons or not.

But I would add that Americans don't have the same view about the Germans or the French as many Brits have and assume are shared with other countries.

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"I wonder what kit they'll be "guided" to spend on..."

There is Nokia and Ericsson like before.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

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Re: "Luna 25, by contrast, tried to make the trip in nine days"

@Pascal Monett

Kleptocracy is the word you were looking for.

Rising labor and component costs lead to UK product and service price hike at IBM

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Re: Culprits

And there is that word that a foreign company dear not mention.

TSMC and pals chip in for €10B German fab

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Re: Hmm

@codejunky

No doubt, reading the comments.

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Re: At least Germany has water

@Charlie Clark

You are clearly thinking of Britain then, one has to assume.

China's great CPU hope – Loongson – may be only four years behind Intel

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Re: Tienanmen

@Zolko

What you don't seem to grasp is that should it collapse it would most likely be replaced with something worse.

But Americans seem to have some ability to self heal so I am not all that pessimistic.

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@Tuto2

That was a very odd comment, mad in other words.

Vladimir Pentowsky was a Soviet/Russian diplomat, Ambassador, professor in history, politician and writer.

I cannot see him having anything to do with this story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Petrovsky

And about Spark try this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC

PS. Andy Grove was Hungarian not Russian and escaped to the USA, and while he did work for Intel the history goes behind him.

Deutsche Bahn stands to lose €400M if it has to do Huawei with Chinese kit

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Re: Germany's state-owned rail operator Deutsche Bahn...

@abend0c4

I doubt there is one countrry not suffering from a serious lack of investment in infrastructure but your link referes to the "world competitiveness ranking".

And that you can ponder about here.

https://www.imd.org/centers/wcc/world-competitiveness-center/rankings/world-competitiveness-ranking/

Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan

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Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

@ blackcat

(didn't realise the French did such things!)

Who do you think builds the EPRs in Britain, France, Finland and China then.

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Re: Hmm

"Now we have Lynch"-

Not really.

You would need guys like Lynch in government and not guys like Mogg and similar.

And you would need strong unions "with a high percentage of the workforce unionized and involving a tripartite arrangement, where representatives of labour and employers negotiate wages and labour market policy is mediated by the government."

To quote the Wikipedia on the "Nordic model".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

But instead you have an outdated defunct idiotic political system with a two party system and a one party government kept in place with fptp.

And still a class society, the last in western Europe, with an ever growing wealth and income inequality and poverty.

But you will not all get it, apparently.

PS. Labour here doesn't referre to a political party.

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Re: Technical marvel, but it's the economics, stupid

@LogicGate

The French have this for electricity production. Nuclear is of course stable.

https://www.rte-france.com/en/eco2mix/power-generation-energy-source

The GB grid here.

https://grid.iamkate.com/

The Swedish plus other Nordic countries and Baltic countries here, sadly with no separation of solar power.

https://www.svk.se/en/national-grid/the-control-room/

The Finnish here:

https://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/

Countries are different and that affects the electricity production too.

After fears that Europe's space scope was toast, its first images look mighty fine

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Calling it "dark" is a very honest way to express we don't know.

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Euclid

There is a very recent video about it on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SOLoPxlXJA

Euclid Just Opened Its Eyes, and This Is What It Saw

(note: the words terrifying or shocking is not in the title - a good sign)

NASA mistakenly severs communication to Voyager 2

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Re: What's 2 degrees away from Earth?

It's exactly 2 degrees out of 360 degrees at any distance.

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Re: Off topic

Baud rates and pictures, anybody who remembers Bullitt and how modern that was then.