Posts by vtcodger

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Re: We need the technological progress...

"WE are doing exactly that. ... Distill it. Presto: Fuel from the atmosphere that virtually any petrol/gasoline engine can be run on."

Sorry, I guess I should have addressed that in my post. But it would have made a rather long post. The major problem with your somewhat utopian scenario is distillation. Making fermented corn mash into 190 proof whiskey -- which is what corn ethanol pretty much is -- takes a lot of energy. In the US, that's mostly done with natural gas which is abundant and pretty cheap. Cheap in North America. Not necessarily elsewhere. There have been a number of studies that conclude that the energy budget for corn ethanol is slightly positive in the best growing areas and actually negative in less favored areas. Bottom line -- after one takes into account fertilization, mechanized field work, harvesting, and conversion to fuel, corn ethanol is a relatively inexpensive way to convert natural gas to a liquid fuel. That's not a bad thing. But a replacement for fossil fuel it is not. (BTW petroleum from Alberta Oil shales is pretty much the same story. How to the get the hydrocarbons out of the shale? Steam heated by Natural gas.)

Can ethanol be distilled more cheaply? Maybe. Solar distillation MIGHT work. But I suspect only in lower latitudes. Almost certainly not here in Vermont where corn is grown, but making a crop is problematic some years because of the short growing season. By the time you got your mash fermented, you'd be trying to use solar heat with an eight hour day, a maximum sun angle of about 25 degrees and solar collectors likely covered with ice or snow. The only study I've seen says solar distillation of ethanol is not economic even in the tropics, but I'm not sure that's the final word.

How about ethanol from sugar cane? Maybe. I've never seen an energy budget for that. Maybe it'll work. But Sugar cane is a tropical crop and it won't grow well even in some parts of the tropics. It needs a LOT of water.

How about biofuel crops that don't require distillation? Maybe. I tried once to figure out if it was possible to grow enough oil palms to support modern air travel. My conclusion. Maybe, probably not. Too many unknowns to be sure. BTW, environmentalists loathe palm oil. I'm not sure I disagree. Endless rows of oil palm trees are not my idea of living in harmony with nature.

My point remains. We do not currently have the technologies to feed 7 or 8 o 10 million people and fuel a modern civilization. It might be a good idea to have those technologies in hand before we run out of fossil fuels.

Re: We need the technological progress...

"We could make unnatural petrol with the CO2 from the atmosphere."

WE can do no such thing. At least not at any scale beyond that required to run a demo. Our great, great, ever so great grandkids might be able to do it. BUT ONLY IF "we" plug away at developing the technology and have it on the shelf when we start to run short of fossil fuels. My guess is that we will start to run short of fossil fuels sooner than anyone expects. Yes, the supply of stored hydrocarbons is vast. No one really knows how vast. But don't underestimate the vastness of the demand as billions of goat herders and subsistence farmers/workers in the developing world get richer and demand stuff like heat in winter, refrigeration, tractors, game consoles, vacations in distant lands, and other essentials of modern life.

Musk tells advertisers to 'go f**k' themselves as $44B X gamble spirals into chaos

Re: Delusional narcissist

"Even if they aren't currently buying ads, both companies still have Twitter / X accounts. Why do you suppose that is?"

1) In the case of IBM, they are likely cruising for an opportunity to sue X some reason. Sooner or later they'll find a patent violation. It's only a matter of patience and time.

2) Disney? Who knows? Maybe The Mouse has an untreated Twitter addiction.

Car dealers openly beg Biden to put brakes on electric vehicle drive

Re: I won't be buying one

"For me, any touchscreen is too much touchscreen."

I'm inclined to agree. However, I bought a Garmin SatNav device many years ago, that I still use from time to time. I usually mount it in the upper left corner of the windshield. It needs a tap to switch between displaying time_to_go and arrival time. My experience has been that it is far less annoying to view/use its touch controls while driving than touch controls on the center entertainment console. Maybe "heads-up" is really works better than down and right.

Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

Correctio: 400C, not 450C.

Re: It’s not just the “mark ups”

"Once EVs get old enough we will likely see more of this."

Possibly. Or not. Gasoline fires are relatively easy to start. Albeit nowhere near as much so as Hollywood would have you believe. They are also relatively easy to extinguish. Cut off access to oxygen and they will go out.

OTOH, Lion battery fires require heating at least one cell beyond 450C. Not so easy to do. Once started, they are likely to keep on burning. Cutting off Oxygen has little affect since the "fire" is fueled not by oxygen but by spontaneous discharge of the cell(s). The only(?) ways to put them out are to either break up the battery, isolate the burning cells and let them burn out. Or to somehow cool the whole mass of the battery below 450C.

My GUESS is that EV battery fires are/will be caused mostly by battery manufacturing defects or physical damage from collisions. And that they will decrease over time as battery designs improve.

In the meantime, I possibly wouldn't park an EV next to anything I valued. And I'd expect to pay a LOT for collision insurance because repair shops will likely refuse to repair any damage that might have damaged the battery. And to charge a lot for any work they do. Because THEIR insurance costs will likely go through the roof if they choose to work on EVs.

(NOTE: Not alll EVs are a LIon fire hazard. Older Prius hybrids used NiMH batteries that don't spontaneously "burn")

I can't imagine why you were downvoted. In point of fact, US cars in 1980 were basically the same cars as the US cars of the 1950s without the tailfins, portholes and with automatic transmissions that were less prone to spontaneously shift into low gear at 60mph. They were notorious for poor reliability, awful gas mileage, and, in some cases, a tendency to shed a few parts as soon as they were driven a few miles from the dealer's lot.

When an American carmaker -- Ford -- finally put together a competitive vehicle with decent build quality at a not outrageous price -- the 1984 Taurus/Sable -- it quickly became the best selling car in the US. We inherited one of those in the 1990s. Probably not a car I would have bought. A bit ponderous for my taste. But a perfectly reasonable vehicle and we'd probably have driven it for many more years had a pickup truck not decided to make a left turn through the space it occupied. Vastly better in pretty much all respects than the early 1980s Ford station wagon bought at the insistence of my wife to meet the needs of our family.

AI offers some novel crystal materials that could form future chips, batteries, more

Maybe not always that easy

What immediately popped into my mind was that creating materials to order possibly isn't always as easy as it might seem. Example: Dolomite -- Calcium Magnesium Carbonate (CaMg(CO3)2). Simple enough molecule. One part Calcium, one part Magnesium, two parts Carbonate. Mix (cautiously) and (if necessary) cook. There is a LOT of dolomite on Earth. It is created in nature by replacement of one Calcium atom in the Calcium Carbonate in calcareous sediments by a Magnesium atom. Happens a lot. There are whole mountains made of the stuff.

Turns out to be very difficult to make in a lab.

Here's a reference https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsomega.1c04624

Doesn't mean that this AI effort or its trial and error old-fashioned equivalents are useless. Just means that things are likely to be (as is very often the case) more difficult than they seem.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

Re: Profit on rockets

Actually, there will be one cryptic message from the X to Mars expedition. "Elton John was right. This place is cold as hel..."

Re: Debug Windows

There will be such a feature. But the dump will be binary, in a weird undocumented format and encrypted using a key that Microsoft will not share (Got to think about security y'know). The resulting multigigabyte file will be useful only to Microsoft who will assign an intern to analyzing dumps in his/her spare time while not emptying wastebaskets and cleaning keyboards. It will also be useful to a group of seven hackers in Bulgaria who will somehow use it to obtain admin privilege on internet connected machines that have such a file present.

Google goes geothermal to power some bitbarns

Re: Earth's crust or Earth's core?

So far as I know, the heat is thought to be generated by the decay of a variety of radioactive isotopes diffused throughout the planet. I don't think we currently know for sure what isotopes, nor in what quantities, nor or how they are distributed throughout the mass of the planet. Ask again every few decades. Someday you'll get an answer.

Google Drive misplaces months' worth of customer files

Fireproof

A Fireproof container might help, but I have some doubts it is really adequate. Computer media do not like heat, and building fires are nothing if not hot. I recall seeing pictures of a bag of silver dollars melted together by a California brush fire. The melting point of Silver is 916C. The ignition point of paper -- which is probably what a fireproof box is intended to protect is -- 233C. The maximum storage temperature for computer media seems mostly to be around 70C or less -- a number that I personally wouldn't have all that much faith in.

If your data is important to you, I'd suggest a backup someplace offsite as well as backups on site. Even the trunk of a car might be better than anything on site. And a backup in the cloud as well won't do any harm if doesn't cost too much and if one's internet connection is fast enough.

Sadly, storage media are not completely reliable. Neither are web service providers. Encryption (if you need to use it) can be slow, And there's a real risk that you may not be able to decrypt the files for any of dozens of reasons. Saving all your data can be difficult without a fast data link -- which is not an option for many people. and attempting to update only altered files gets complicated if you encrypt.

Truth is that many of us probably need multiple backups done regularly ... and a bit of luck.

X's legal eagles swoop on Media Matters over antisemitic content row

Re: Reputation management via lawsuit

It's not like things seem to be going all that well in the Grand Duchy of Twit. Maybe this is just a "What the hell, how can things possibly get worse?" action.

Re: Venue Change

Is this filed in the same district that patent trolls love to use?

I'm not (and would not want to be) an expert on legal matters. But i believe the Troolheim is(was?) the Federal District Court in East Texas. This sounds like a suit filed in a Texas state court.

Boffins claim invention of rechargable, biodegradable, supercapacitor drug pump

Re: Implant where??

that is requiring around 4cm incision at least to implant under the skin and rather larger surgery to implant anywhere else.

large? ... invasive? Especially if you are a rat -- maybe 20cm long and weighing maybe 400g. I think that before moving on to humans, someone should interview the rats and see if maybe they would have preferred a different treatment. Or maybe just living with the yeast infection.

How do you interview a rat? AI of course. AI can do anything.

Ex-IBM sales veteran sues for access to health benefits

Re: The answer is very simple

All capitalist companies care about is money...

Nonsense. They care about all sorts of important stuff like the design of the corporate logo, and executive perks and who who gets the parking spaces next to the door.

Re: Oh look

..like breathing?

Exactly. If you insist on continuing such practices, you really can't expect your healthcare provider to pay for the consequences of your actions.

(I'm not sure whether our US healthcare system more closely resembles something by Orwell or something by Kafka. I'm sure that both would find it vastly entertaining. If you live in America, it is an excellent idea not to get sick.)

Is America's chip blockade working against China? So far, our survey says: No

A bit shallow I think

If you think that China alone will be able to duplicate, let alone surpass, what the whole of North America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are able to achieve in chip manufacture, then I have a bridge to sell.

You might want to think about that a bit more deeply. There are a great many Chinese. About 1.3B. That's about the same -- maybe a bit more -- than all the developed countries put together. The Chinese work very hard. They are literate., Probably as much so as the developed countries (They claim a bit higher. Maybe that's true). They have a great respect for education. Certainly more than the US which largely thinks that a college is a football/basketball team attached to a few buildings full of very odd people. One expects they can do just about anything they set out to do although there is probably a limit to how many goals they can work toward simultaneously.

I expect the Chinese interest in chipmaking is primarily in producing chips for consumer products for themselves and that they can peddle to the rest of humanity. That wouldn't seem to require the latest and greatest technology -- just something good enough. Military? I used to know a little about that. Maybe things have changed, but my experience was that military hardware has long development cycles, and a number of features, supply chain requirements, training requirements, wide operating temperature range, modest radiation hardness, ruggedness -- that mitigate somewhat against the very latest technology. In general, military gear isn't pretty, and not all that nifty. But most of it will likely work about as well as ever after being pitched out of a truck in the Arctic in Winter or a desert in Summer and driven over by the next truck in line. And whoever picks it up and dusts it off may well be able to operate it and might even be able to fix it when it eventually breaks.

My guess is that chip bans may have some affect on some research efforts and maybe on the Chinese intelligence services. But the impact likely won't be that great. At least that's been the story with prior technology bans intended to hinder China's space program.

The only example I'm aware of where technology export bans do seem to have been effective is jet engine technology. Probably there are others. But not many? Mostly they don't seem to work very well.

Control Altman delete: OpenAI fires CEO, chairman quits

Re: Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society

"He was partially right though : some people will end up losing their jobs because of AI. As he has now proved."

So, the world's first AI refugee?

White House hopes to power up American battery factories with $3.5B fund

Not oppossed, but ...

Compared to paying for development/procurement/deployment of dubious weapons systems (B-1 bomber, F-35, Littoral Combat Ship, etc), funding rural broadband that never happens, and proping up a variety of unsavory governments because ... well I'm not sure why we do that ... this is cheap. And Lord knows, ANY improvement in battery technology is probably a good thing. But I would point out that the US already spends a lot of money on this very thing. The Internet tells me that $92B (!!!!) has been spent on the "battery supply chain" since Biden took office 3 years ago. And I'm by no means sure that's all the government spending in place for batteries.

Use AI to accelerate adoption of central bank digital currencies, says IMF head

Benefits to you

POSSIBLE advantages to you.

CAVEAT: AFAICS, a CBDC looks to be more or less like a government guaranteed prepaid credit card. Assuming that's true and assuming that the potentially huge problems of security and counterfitting can be controlled, the advantages to us as individuals might be.

1. No more wallet full of plastic? (Fat chance of that -- as an elderly US citizen I have no less than 5 cards of various sorts that need to be perused just to get medical services, plus a library card, a couple of different, park "passports", three credit cards because you never know for sure which will be accepted by the merchant and occasionally any one may be arbitrarily declined by the electronic gods, etc, etc, etc).

2. No need to input name, rank,credit card number, date(s) and mysterious codes into idiosyncratic, cranky, often horribly designed software when purchasing stuff on-line.

3. No need to have anywhere near as much personal data stored by various online agents in an electronic communication system that is currently so sloppily constructed that occasional data theft from one or more of the way too many agents holding your data is virtually guaranteed.

4. Anonymity for small transactions. (Well, that's what the Chinese -- who seem to be furtherest along with CBDC are promising. They might mean it).

5. (Near) universal acceptance. (I'm not sure your corner drug dealer will take CBDC but most merchants likely will).

6. Lower transaction costs (Well, that's the claim. And, of course, the government will never take it into its head to tax CBDC transactions ... absolutely not ... never ... well except maybe for the duration of the current emergency).

7. There may also be be some advantages at the level of people who buy and sell commodities in 100,000 metric tonne quantities. Beyond my pay grade. Wouldn't know. (Actually, I think that's quite possible and its not impossible that some of the benefits might filter down to the end user.)

Re: We've left port and are now on the high seas

One wonders where we find these people, and why we, having found them, persist in putting them in charge of things.

Airbus to test sat-stabilizing 'Detumbler' to simplify astro-garbage disposal

Certainly cute and maybe useful

It's cute and maybe useful

1. For other Americans, 100g is about 3.5 ounces. Assuming it works (and I do assume that), it seems quite impressive

2. I doubt it'd work with spin stabilized satellites. (Spin stabilization was used in some early satellites to keep them in a known orientation) But I don't think there are very many of those nowadays. And it wouldn't be needed anyway? Their orientation is stable. Although collecting a spinning satellite for deorbiting might not be so easy.

3. Many (most?) satellites need to be slowly rotated once per orbit in order to keep the bottom of the vehicle (where the sensors most likely are) pointed "down". There are various ways of accomplishing that. Presumably this gizmo doesn't generate enough torque to interfere with active three-axis control if it's present during the platform's active lifetime.

4. Rather to my surprise, there already seem to be some somewhat similar devices in use. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_attitude_control#Types_of_stabilization -- the section headed passive attitude control.

5. I agree that mounting one of these things mechanically on a dead satellite while in orbit using screw/bolts/rivets looks to be quite impractical. Assuming one could catch up with an expired orbiting platform and work on it, I guess you could attach this damper to a prepositioned plate of magnetic material. Or velcro. Or maybe glue if there are satisfactory adhesives that can set in a vacuum. I doubt any of that would be practical

Meta, YouTube face criminal spying complaints in Ireland

Regulators

"Regulators have let us down ...

Claims that there are regulators who somehow control the behavior of the fine christian, capitalist IT pioneers who have brought us the modern internet are known to be specious. Yes, there have been reports of internet regulator sightings ever since DARPA net days. But upon investigation these invariably turn out to be honest mistakes (e.g. malfunctioning pop-over ads) when they are not out and out scams. It is long past time to move regulators from the endangered list to the extinct list.

Musk thinks X marks the spot for Grok AI engine based on social network

TakeCare

He drinks tourists visiting Cornwall?

For God's sake man, do NOT put new ideas into the Elon's head. The world already has more than sufficient problems.

(Are there really tourists in Cornwall? Are they soluble? In what? Is the resultant mixture tasty? Is there a profit to be made by peddling it on the Internet? What's the, obligatory this season, AI angle?)

As NASA struggles to open OSIRIS-REx's asteroid sample can, probe heads off to next rock

If a bigger hammer won't work ...

There's always that old standby -- a Dremel with a carbide cutting disk. That'll cut/abrade most anything other than diamonds. But most likely it'd contaminate the environment more than just a little.

BTW, has anyone seen a picture of the balky connector(s)? I'm curious what they might look like. I've searched for an image, but haven't found one. How DO you seal a container in zero gravity without introducing contaminants into the container? Apparently NASA found an answer that almost works.

Just one in ten UK orgs have significant AI investment plan

Plan for ... what?

What, exactly, are businesses supposed to plan for? It's not like AI currently does anything much that is actually useful. Presumably all the simple routine automatable tasks were computerized two decades ago. You're probably not going to use AI to replace HR, or accounting, or procurement. Not if you hope to be in business a few years from now. AI can write computer code? So can I So can any man. Will the code actually do anything useful? Will it be bug free? Will it do what you need done? Will it be secure?. Certainly none of those today or in the near future. I suppose some companies could be figuring out how to use AI to provide (even more) atrocious customer service very cheaply. AI may well be able to do that .... in a few years ... probably.

Odds are that can be outsourced if/when the time comes. Why not wait?

No more Mr Nice DoJ: Tesla gets subpoenas over self-driving software claims

Re: I've got an idea

As I understand it, the competitors like Waymo and Cruise which seem to have decent safety records (although both apparently do weird and annoying, non-lethal things at times) use a much broader and much more expensive array of sensors than Tesla. Including Lidar. Lidar is basically radar at optical wavelengths. Tesla seems to be betting on computers someday being able to figure out their environment from very limited sensory visual input. Just as humans do. Given Tesla's history of running into large stationary objects, the company's system would seem to have a way to go. But Elon continues to promise that any day now, they'll get it right.

Re: Musk, the Trump doppelganger, knows what to do.

Hey, The Donald isn't all bad. Just think of all the lawyers and similar riffraff he has put in jail. (I think the current count is eleven or so with more being added every day) True, they were (mis)representing/(mis)advising/working for him. But still, it's a public service and he deserves some credit for it.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: 2G is perfect for this

2G carries better because it uses the original lower frequency bands, not because of the way data is handled. ...

Yes, the lower transmission frequency surely helps considerably, but I should think that the lower bandwidth of 2G (200KHz?) vs 4G/5G (several MHz?) would result in lower signal to noise ratios exclusive of lower attenuation due to lower frequency. That's probably simplistic. What am I ignorant of/overlooking?

Re: 2G is perfect for this

It should never be phased out.

A problem no one seems to mention: 2G in general provides higher signal strength than 4G or 5G. A quick internet search leads me to believe that the difference is typically about 10db. So, even if all the meters are replaced/upgraded, it's likely that some of them still won't work. That's consistent with my experience here in the US. When 2G was turned off early this year and I was forced to switch to a more modern phone, my cell phone service at home went from marginal (i.e. only in some places outdoors when the phone was held just right) to non-existent. Walking and driving around the neighborhood and checking 4G signal strength suggests that most of the homes probably aren't going to have a usable 4G signal without directional external antennae and maybe, in some cases, ampliifiers.

Not that I think it matters much. As far as I can tell, no one seems to actually know how to use "smart" metering to any useful purpose.

SEC boss warns it's 'nearly unavoidable' that AI will cause financial crash

Re: Relief

It's hard not to be at least a bit fond of economists. At least many (most?) of them admit that their projections are often seriously flawed.

Re: Relief

There are things that could be done to discourage either or both algorithmic and AI based trading assuming that doing so is desirable. For example every trade on an exchange could be delayed for a random time (seconds? hours? days?). That'd certainly have some affect. Maybe positive.

If it were my call, I'd probably want to run extensive simulations before I "fixed" anything.

Winklevoss twins back in hot water after NY AG sues over $1B cryptocurrency fraud

Re: Crypto Currency

Can anyone explain, in words a simple Pure Mathematics PhD can understand, how they work?

The Reader's Digest condensed version: They don't work

The Full Version: "Assume an infinite population of greedy and not especially bright entities known as investors(=Greater Fools--GFs for short) who have a property known as wealth. Assume that some investors can be persuaded to exchange wealth for entities called magic beans(MB for short) based on the premise that MBs (which can be, but are not required to be, tangible) can always be freely interchanged with wealth at an attractive rate. i.e the quantity ((1+MB/W)**time) is continuous, and always greater than one. Or, in lay terms, "There will always be a greater fool who will buy your MBs for more than you paid for them". Doesn't work. The problem? The supply of Greater Fools is large. But it is, everywhere and always, finite.

British boffins say aircraft could fly on trash, cutting pollution debt by 80%

Re: Betteridge's Law of Headlines

Of course a sustainable aviation future is possible although one doubts it will happen. Has everyone forgotten the zeppelins? The Hindenburg came to a spectacularly bad end of course, but the Graf Zeppelin made hundreds of flights in the 1920s and 1930s including regular mail and passenger service between Germany and Brazil in the mid-1930s. Puitting on my green glasses which make the improbable possible and everything look far easier than it is, It is easy to envision lighter than air aircraft built with modern materials and fueled by "green hydrogen" driving hydrogen-air fuel cells replacing hydrocarbon fueled jets on all but the longest routes. Of course, they'll be a bit slow, -- maybe 30-40 hours across the Atlantic, Much longer between Australia and just about anywhere And it'd be a good idea to keep them away from strong storms. But they can (on paper at least) lift and move a lot of mass cheaply and move it fairly quickly. Especially compared to ships.

I suppose that they might occasionally incinerate a payload. But airliners do that from time to time. And current EVs and large scale grid storage batteries spontaneously combust every now and then. No one seems to care all that much.

Will that happen? IMHO -- Two chances -- slim and none.

But it COULD happen.

You've just spent $400 on a baby monitor. Now you need a subscription

Re: "the sudden imposition of subscription fees"

Our electricity supplier wouldn’t accept the next reading as it was less than the previous one and used their estimates for our usage (based on history).

You are perhaps fortunate. Back in the 1960s when digital computers first started being used in the US to process meter readings, the software was likely to assume that meter readings less than the previous (due to error by the meter reader) were due to wrap around of the 5 digit readout space and to present the consumer with a bill for around 100,000 kwhr of usage. And yes, this actually happened from time to time ... think in terms of a rental or vacation cottage that is unoccupied for a month and a meter reader who had trouble interpolating the alternating backward reading dials

From vacuum tubes to qubits – is quantum computing destined to repeat history?

A Promising Technology

The thing about 1950s computers is that they quite clearly worked. And they produced useful results. No one doubted that they worked. The issue back then was that it wasn't clear that digital computers would be a cost-effective solution to most real world problems

Despite huge investments and massive amounts of hyperbole it's not clear that ANY of the current crop of Quantum computers actually work. ... Or that the next generation will work. --- Or that their great, great, ever so great offspring won't be a really promising technology just as soon as the techies conquer the last few practical difficulties -- a state that can probably endure damn near forever.

Watermarking AI images to fight misinfo and deepfakes may be pretty pointless

Re: Guarantee

"I am a little bit of an artist. I don't get paid for it, I'm not very good at it, but I really enjoy it ..."

Thanks, I've been looking for even one example of a use for AI that isn't on the ongoing criminal activity side of shady. Yours is the first I've seen.

iPhone 15 is too hot to handle – and not in any good way

Re: From "you are holding it wrong!" to "you are holding it."

From "you are holding it wrong!" to "you are holding it." in 11 generations.

The next step is When it is running, you can't hold it and you'd best not try? (But for a paltry $125, you can buy Apple's patented, high-tech insulated glove which will allow full access to all phone controls. And for another $67 you can have a head shield that will allow you to hold the phone near your ear without threat of permanent injury -- assuming that you hold the phone right).

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

I strongly suspect that you can deactivate your X/Twitter account any time you want. But you can never leave.

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

Re: Requiring drivers in autonomous vehicles should be for safety reasons only

Although I largely agree with you, let me assure you that driving in Boston is a unique experience. The problem is that almost everywhere else in the world traffic operates either on a relatively universal set of rules or on an "every man for himself" basis. In Boston however, the guiding principle is "He who has the least to lose in a collision has the right of way". And yes, I think that is likely to be a problem for autonomous vehicles.

Re: Requiring drivers in autonomous vehicles should be for safety reasons only

A reasonable compromise might be that Level 3 certified and below vehicles require a safety driver who is actively monitoring the environment and vehicle at all times. Level 4 requires a safety driver who can be napping studying or working on something else during normal operation, but is expected to take over if the vehicle alerts him/her or if it comes to a prolonged stop. Level 5 (if it ever comes about) can operate without a driver. Probably needs some additional nuances. Who does the certification? Is it valid in all states? And provinces? Worldwide?

BTW, Waymo and Cruise are currently Level 4. For cars anyway. Would trucks be different? Tesla is claimed to be level 2 (But Elon continues to promise "Full Self-Driving" any day now.)

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Re: Will Not Miss Plain Old Text Mail - I Still Have It!

YOU don't use gmail. But other people do. And they will be sending you yet more, and more complex, HTML email. Their email will be a problem for the visually handicapped. And for those who use text browsers like MUTT or ALPINE. And, of course, HTML emailis are wildly insecurable. Which may be a problem when the day comes that people actually become worried about internet security.

I'm not sure whether the problem at Google is utopian thinking or dementia or maybe something in the drinking water. But I think this is probably yet another bad idea from our digital masters in Mountain View.

BTW, I think that if the secure internet ever comes about, the rule for those who send email will be "If you MUST email HTML, put it in an attachment", and for users, the rule will be "Don't EVER open an attachment unless you need to and you trust the source."

VR headsets to shift 30 million units a year by 2027, vastly behind wearables

Re: Still too expensive

Maybe the small, but stable, market for VR headsets will be training programs, not games. Maybe headset price isn't so critical if you're trying to teach folks to fix nuclear reactors or land aircraft at night on an aircraft carrier. My guess is that even at a few thousand per unit, time on a VR simulator is a lot cheaper than time on a real flight simulator. Or a real aircraft. Or, God help us all, on real nuclear reactors.

That assumes that VR is actually effective in training.

30 million a year? Maybe. I suppose. If they start being used in schools. And they aren't all that durable.

Lawsuit claims Google Maps led dad of two over collapsed bridge to his death

Re: So answer this.

Welcome to rural America. Unpaved roads are far cheaper to maintain than paved roads. And as long as traffic is light and the town runs a grader or bulldozer over the ruts and washboarding every now and then, the dirt roads are often far smoother than their potholed paved cousins. Of course, there IS that week or so in early spring when the road, thawing from the top down, turns into an endless river of mud. But the locals take that in stride. They've even been known to close schools for a few days if the roads get so bad they threaten to engulf school buses.

Re: So answer this.

Not sure it's relevant, but my understanding is that commercial map producers throw in a few deliberate errors in order to discourage their competitors from copying their maps without travelling the roads in question. And in fact a few years ago saw a road on a map that looked like it might be a shortcut. I took it and about a mile in, I ended up in someone's dooryard face to face with a barn that looked like it might have been there for a century or two. I doubt the rest of that road ever existed beyond that point. Certainly not for a great many years.

Moral -- maps, Google's or anyone else's -- aren't completely trustworthy.

Authors Guild sues OpenAI for using Game of Thrones and other novels to train ChatGPT

Re: All authors started as readers

Indeed, if parody is OK -- and it seems to fall under the category of "Fair Use" -- then using other people's characters, style, and plot line would seem to be something that you or I or that monster computer over there are free to do. (So long as we don't misrepresent who wrote the text).

'Small monthly payment' only thing that stands between X and bot chaos, says Musk

Digital Town Square

So not quite the world's digital town square ..

More like a digital biker bar methinks.

Lithium goldrush hits sleepy Oregon-Nevada border

Re: You can never have too much Lithium

@Adair: That's an entirely reasonable assumption. But I think it's somewhat flawed. For example, metal-air (Zinc-air, Aluminum-air) have significantly higher energy densities than Lithium-ion and aren't (anywhere near as) subject to thermal runaway. So why are we messing around with Lion? Simple. Currently practical metal-air batteries are primary cells -- not rechargeable. Pretty much restricted to hearing aids and a few similar applications. Lion OTOH is not only rechargeable, if not abused, it can be recharged a lot of times before performance degrades significantly.

Choice of battery chemistries involves juggling a bunch of considerations. Energy density, temperature range, self-discharge rate, tendency toward thermal runaway, outgassing, toxicity, number of recharges, etc, etc, etc.

I'm not an expert on batteries. Probably others around here know much more than I and might tell us more.

FWIW, my impression is that the holy grail of transportation batteries would be a metal-air battery (possibly Aluminum-air?) with mass, range, safety parameters comparable to fossil fuel. The vision is that you'll haul into a service station, make use of the facilities, buy an overpriced snack, pull out your old degraded Aluminum anodes, throw them in a recycle bin, insert new ones, and be on your way. "They" have been working on that for 40 years. They can't even run a demo today. ... Maybe in another 40 years. ... Maybe never.

You can never have too much Lithium

You can never be too rich or too thin or have too many Lithium reserves.

Seriously, Lithium batteries have some problems -- especially their lamentable tendency to, on rare occasions self-immolate, often destroying not only themselves but everything remotely combustible nearby. But they are the best we currently have for many applications where energy density is important. They are likely going to be around for a long time. 7 or 8 ir 10 billion humans are probably going to want/need a lot of Lithium. Discovery of deposits is almost certainly a good thing even if the aren't currently economically viable.