Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

How low can you go: Tesla's US market share dips below 50% for the first time

Re: Elon Musk is toxic

>t's also where I saw a great way to change roads: down the grass verge of one highway and up that of the next.

It's called freedom!

Re: Elon Musk is toxic

>I don't think Musk's antics are the main reason for the drop in popularity,

Yes, mostly it's that there is now a lot more choice - even here in the colonies where we are mostly prevented from buying foreign cars.

But the TrumpMusk brand doesn't help.

Here on the left coast, where if you drive a pickup truck and you aren't a landscaper you are assumed to be a MAGA hat wearing gun-totting deplorable.

The dense cloud of smug which surrounded every Prius has definitely worn off from Tesla. There are even bumper stickers " I bought the Tesla before we knew about Elon"

Re: I must admit

It's an interesting problem for the supercar crowd.

Your $1M 25 year old McLaren F1 is now worth $25M, a 1960s Porsche or 1970s Lamborghini might be worth 10x-100x the original price

What is a 2025 Ferrari/Lambo/Koenigsegggggg EV hypercar going to be worth in 10 years if you can't drive it because the battery is junk, or the OS is unsupported ?

Or if you have to remove the battery because you can't risk it bursting into flames one day and burning down your collection. At which point it's a sculpture not a car, and you might as well buy a Picasso.

Re: Not much of a market

And Lucas electronics.

Re: Tesla will be remembered

Ironically that was the real founders goal.

Build a demonstrator, the Tesla roadster, and then get bought by one of the serious auto makers.

After all you couldn't build your own car company from scratch, with factories, a supply chain and roll out your own nationwide charger network as a startup

To give the Musk his due, it's down to him that Tesla exists in its current state

Re: New models

>Because you're a smart, cool alpha male?

Definitely an alpha male. Most of my front end is just a mock-up, a lot of the back end functionality isn't there yet and I need a lot of re-engineering work and polish before I'm ready for production.

'Gay furry hackers' say they've disbanded after raiding Project 2025's Heritage Foundation

Re: Snorted my Orange Juice...

I think many of the GOP members would quite correctly object to being described as Homo Sapiens

Re: Christian zealots

Well I'm quite fearful about the whole burning-at-the-stake business so does that mean I'm gay?

I hope not. I don't have the physique, dress sense or level of grooming required.

Not to mention ensuring that the majority of babies born are the correct color.

I believe they have a pithy slogan in slightly more than a dozen words

Re: Snorted my Orange Juice...

>I do agree that the idea of somehow being an animal is disturbing

We can't only pander to fungi and vegetable voters

Trump threatens to send Meta's Mark ‘Zuckerbucks’ to prison if reelected president

Re: UnDeadly to Whales or Wales

>If Abraham Lincoln were alive today, he would be a Democrat.

I thought he would be a vampire hunter ?

Re: UnDeadly to Whales or Wales

> Are there other parties?

The 4th July was a Mistake - reinstate the British Monarchy Party ?

Biden throws $1.7B at automakers to prepare fading factories for EV production

Like how NASA funding isn't a subsidy because it's available to any US based manufacturer of wide bodied civil jet airliners.

With users mostly happy to keep older kit, Macs just ain't selling like they used to

Re: The no upgrade gamble

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have done the upgrade after 6 years, rather than 6 years in advance?

Palantir, Oracle cosy up to offer Karp firm's tech across Big Red's cloud

Why do I get a picture

Of Saruman and Sauron working together?

Babel fish? We're getting there. Reg reviews the Timekettle X1 AI Interpreter Hub

Re: What a useless product

The problem it's trying to fix is that nobody would pay $$$ for an app, while they will for hardware.

That's why a whole bunch of corporate boardroom meeting hardware exists.

I suspect it will become a $/month subscription app on your phone when this fails

America's new Sentinel nukes mushroom 81% in cost. Pentagon says it's all good

Cheap commercial off the shelf alternative

A fleet of bargain priced self-driving cybertrucks with a nuke each.

If we don't know where they are going, neither does the enemy

Tesla parental controls keep teenage lead feet in check

Re: Tesla parental controls

> young conductors with less than 5 years experience should be legally limited to 80hp.

As long as the same thing applies to people with more than. 50years experience. It's not 20 year olds driving the wrong way on the motorway or crashing through shops

Re: No this one is Fair

Argued here on the left-pond that I should get a discount for driving manual/stick.

My car is effectively unstealable and I'm going to argue that years of only driving a manual is better experience.

Raspberry Pi OS airs out some fresh options for the summer

Re: Sunshine

You wanted independence, no cricket, scones with cream , miserable grey weather or divinely chosen monarchs for you!

Fraud guilty plea flies from Boeing to swerve courtroom over 737 Max crashes

Re: "a lot of businesses"

>Our local waterways are being pumped full of disgusting raw sewage,

Surely it was pumped full of locally produced home-made organic raw sewage? Why do the LibDems hate the people of Reading ?

With the introduction of the new "Cessna 172 Max" sticker pack, there is no need to retrain GA pilots before they start serving our airline customers.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

Re: "To this day he's pretty sure no-one knows what really happened."

>there's an almost unbelievable amount of empty space in parts of the Australian outback

It's just unallocated for now

Re: DC power is used in solar batteries as well and it is dangerous

48V DC is considered "safe" as it's too low to cause a grip reflex. For DC you generally need more like 500mA to lock up muscles (as opposed to 10mA for AC) and you are going to need a fairly exciting voltage to push 0.5A through a person, at which point a bigger concern is going to be barbecuing them.

Obviously you can't get a defibrillation type shock from DC.

Switching DC, especially at very high voltages and currents, is 'interesting' and particle accelerators powered by a room full of capacitors can cause a certain pause for thought

Re: 48V

For non-phone devices. If you were building a low power gadget and didn't want a wall-wart you could pull a few 10mA from a nearby phone line and power an 8bit micro

Re: DC power is used in solar batteries as well and it is dangerous

But harder to electrocute yourself with DC

Re: 48V

When people had phones wired to the wall there was a power supply chip that could power devices from the phone line.

The rules were that you could take as much current as you wanted from the phone line as long as you didn't take it off-hook, the chip monitored this.

Re: 100Amp

Worked on some high energy physics toys were the fuse was a metre long glass tube of copper sulphate wrapped with explosive cord. Only way to switch off a few Mega volts quickly without creating an arc

I think the emergency backup was length of wood to swing at it

Texas court blocks FTC noncompete ban, and you can blame SCOTUS

Re: Contradiction

>I doubt all but a small minority want any of those reinstated.

Really ?

You get cricket, scones with Jam and Cream and you get to keep your bizarre measurement systems.

Of course you might have to move the capital to Charleston and rename some of those terrorist cities and states. But we know you are a forward looking nation that doesn't hang onto monuments to historical mistakes.

Re: Good!

>Which you can do in any Western country, except in USA, because of non-competing clausules. What was your point again?

Woosh ....

Re: Good!

But you can also quit in the middle of an important project and are free to go and work for a direct competitor, taking your entire team with you. Nothing is going to stop you because that would be anti-capitalist

Re: Silicon Valley

Back in my day (when computers were steamed powered and 640k was enough for anyone) there was advice for anyone at MIT not to intern for a local company because MA enforcement of non-competes was so strong that Silicon Valley companies were rumoured to be wary of any new hires that had worked in MA.

This might explain why we still speak about "Route 128" and the continued dominance of DEC, Wang, Prime, and Data General

Re: "Robust freedom of contract"?

@see "internship"

Lifetime internships in the cotton picking industry combined with free immigration policy from west Africa ?

Time Lords decree: No leap second needed in 2024

Re: It could be worse

>Then some clever person suggested running the machine in UTC and applying al time offset to the users workstations….

And was beaten around the head by the workers who got to sit around for an hour

Re: The negative leap second

> but it's far too late to edit now

Ironically !

Re: SEP error

>It's like those clocks on the Swiss railway that always make sure the trains leave on time by shrinking and stretching seconds. It's just wrong!

Not quite. The famous Swiss railway clocks run slightly slow and then wait for a 1/min sync pulse to start the next minute.

The Swiss deal with late running trains by simply renaming whichever station the train is currently at, to the destination.

We've banned Chinese telco kit and drones. Next: Mountain bikes?

Re: Its our loss

>So I'm left wondering what sort of US economy you have in mind? Cheap Chinese goods for the middle class and wealthy, and an underclass scratting around in low wage and insecure jobs

I don't think the plan is to pay US workers at all, or at least a significant minority. On the bright side the southern states will be offering "jobs for life", and for your children too !

ITER delays first plasma for world's biggest fusion power rig by a decade

Re: constraining mini-suns

While it's not really comparable to ITER on scale it does have advantage that it can run continuously, unlike a tokamak, which is quite handy for a potential power plant

Re: UK

UK was in ITER as part of Euroatom, the Eu is arguing that the UK can only remain by re-joining Euratom rather than becoming a regular member like all the other none-European countries.

This seems a little disingenuous, since one of the reasons for building it in France was that it was suitably politically neutral that, like CERN, you could have members that were effectively at war with each other.

At one point the UK was a vital member since JET (in Oxford) was the only source of Tritium available to anyone outside a couple of weapons labs. Since JET shut down, I'm not sure where they are planning to get the Tritium from

Don't worry - the energy is only stored temporarily in the magnet, you can always get it back later. Rather more quickly in the event of a quench !

Re: Meanwhile at Wendelstein...

It also shows why you really need German supervillians.

A French Dr Evil would end up building "Une Grande Machine Apocalyptique" while the Germans build something to bring limitless pollution-free power to the world and call it the "Wendelstein Sieben Ex"

Re: constraining mini-suns

The best solution looks like simply making a magnet so fiendishly complicated that the plasma gets confused trying to escape.

Anyone who has tried to service a fancy German car will appreciate the Wendelstein_7-X

Re: World's largest tokamak?

>Zeppelins ended up being filled with hydrogen as the US wouldn't supply the preferred helium.

That's kind of the problem with ITER. Each member country decides which bit they want to build - rather than just paying into a pot like the infrastructure parts of CERN.

There are some cool technologies that everyone wants to develop, so you have more potential makers for these bits than you actually need.

There are other bits that only a country with an advanced weapons program knows how to do, but they don't necessarily want to build those and show what they know.

There are some boring parts that nobody wants to build

To further complicate matters, there are some parts that have to be built on site. If you are eg. a Korean company, whats the politics/economics of building a factory in France and staffing it with Korean workers (and their families?) for 5years to make superconducting coils and then tearing all that down on delivery? Do your workers get French labour protection, do spouses get work permits?

If you could solve the radioactive waste issue then coal fired plants might be possible. But removing radio-nuclides from the flue gases is extremely expensive and not 100% safe

Re: World's largest tokamak?

Tokamaks are a dead end when it comes to power generation, this was a Tokamak because it's the only thing we knew how to build on this scale when the project was agreed.

In many ways ITER is the maximally suboptimal setup. It's a massive multi-government operation, but with every government contributing the part that they want to build, not just putting in money.

It's an experiment, but built on power station scale, and to power station regulations.

The best analogy is if in 1930, the world had come together to make intercontinental air travel possible and decided to build a mile long Zeppelin - because that was the safest technology.

Japan's digital minister declares victory against floppy disks

Re: The next....

>Vellum or generally parchment, goose quills and oak gore ink - the proper way to record matters of importance. :)

My complaints to Ebay are written on clay tablets - we'll see what that Babylonian seller says about sending me fake copper

Re: The next....

>early Latin is practically impossible to understand

Surely there's an Emacs mode for it ?

Re: Discs into gold (or beer)

That's silly why don't you just connect all your industrial machine tools directly to the internets ?

EV world in serious trouble if China cuts off rare earth materials

Re: Another attempt at monoploy.

Yes China loses out on the USA, Japan and Europe markets but gets to sell its Tesla clones to Rwanda, Mozambique and Venezuela

Re: Another attempt at monoploy.

China bans export if rare Earths, rest of world bans import of Chinese cars.

Result:

Rest of world starts up RE refining in other 3rd world countries

China has to find another planet to export cars to