Posts by vtcodger 2029 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2017
Ah yes, the Efficient Market Theory. The problem being that there is abundant evidence that markets are rarely very efficient. Quite possibly that is because virtually no sane seller wants to operate in an efficient marketplace. They want the maketplace skewed in in their favor and are quite good at achieving that goal through advertising, patents, copyrights, lies, legal tricks, illegal tricks or even outright coercion.
.. If HP still made oscilloscopes, the answer is no. The test equipment business was bundled into a subsidiary called Agilent two decades ago. And Agilent in turn begat Keysight in 2014. Keysight makes oscilloscopes. I'm having a bit of difficulty groking why any of that makes sense.
"Is that an actual fact that they can't filter out that signal? "
Could be. Not my area of expertise, but we're basically talking about orbiting cell-phone towers. They need power enough in the downlinks to talk to cellphones with an antenna the size of your thumb that may be inside a building. Including phones that are being held wrong. Gonna need some signal power to handle that. The satellites are presumably talking to maybe a hundred cell phones simultaneously. And there are probably a dozen satellites visible at any given time (A guess, it'd take me hours to work out the exact number assuming that there is enough public data to do so).
So, maybe an order of magnitude or two increase in the radioastronomy background "noise"?
Maybe, and I emphasize maybe, there could be a real problem here.
Surely this was all addressed in the mission planning and the documents filed with the FCC?
Let me get this straight. You're thinking about spending many tens of thousands of Dollars/Pounds/Euros/Yen on an electric car that takes a goodly fraction of an hour to charge at a high speed charger and probably requires rewiring your house if you plan to charge it at home? And you're worried a BATTERY depreciation?
FWIW a replacement Nimh battery pack for an older Prius that honestly gets really great gas mileage only costs a couple of thousand dollars. If you live in a high gasoline cost country and you're worried about minimizing auto expenses, a ten year old hybrid might well be your most cost effective option even if you have to replace the battery pack after a few years.
"What happens to most dead lithium batteries?"
I think most -- especially car batteries-- actually are recycled. The Lithium isn't worth all that much (a few dollars a kg), but the Cobalt is. And the batteries themselves -- even if you believe them to be dead -- aren't really something you'd want a stack of out behind the shed.
I'm sure that Lion batteries are improving. A little bit each year. Just as ICE engines are. Most things seem to work that way. Problem is that we are conditioned (and not just by the Register) to expect revolutionary change rather than evolutionary change. FWIW, modern Internal Combustion Engines seem to be vastly better in every way than the unreliable, gas guzzling monstrosities of my youth in the 1950s.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that by 2050 or so, cheap, efficient, fast charging (not necessarily Lion) batteries will be available at any garage or auto supply store.
I would assume that Tesla owners report what the car tells them about range and charge status. My understanding is that it is very difficult to tell anything about Lithium-Ion batteries unless they are fully charged (the voltage goes up) or severely discharged(voltage starts to drop). The question then would be, can one trust what Elon Musk's software says given that most of the time it very likely has limited or no information to work with?
Here's a link to an article that discusses the issues at some length https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/article/how_to_measure_state_of_charge
"A full power off reboot is needed to resolve the issue."
OMG -- you have to turn the TV OFF?
In this day and age? Inconceivable !!!
... and probably illegal.
(Not that I've ever found anything very smart about "smart" TVs. Unfortunately "they" seem to have decided that there's no market for dumb TVs that just work. Can't seem to buy those anymore. Probably illustrates that marketing folks are even dumber than the products they peddle.)
Bizarrely, the wording of the original IEEE ban also included no IEEE-branded merchandise being sold to Huawei-linked people – including, of all things, coffee mugs.
In case anyone was wondering, Yes, Huawei coffee mugs are available on the Internet. By now you can probably buy Huawei mugs with the Huawei logo superimposed over an Xed out IEEE
I remeber the days when you had to get of your arse, walk over to the TV and press a button on it to change channel.
You probably CAN do that now. Except that the button is the same color as the TV and is indistinguishable from the inactive plastic frame and any adjacent buttons. If it is labeled at all, the label is not in any known human language, but is instead a "icon" resembling a grasshopper splattered on one's windshield and is equally incomprehensible to speakers of all languages everywhere. On the TV in our living room, the button panel is on the BACK of the TV. That same device has a bright red LED that is ON when the TV is OFF and goes out if you can manage to turn the TV ON.
(And in that distant past you didn't push buttons to change channels. You rotated a dial that had channel numbers inscribed. Back then, you could scan quickly through the channels because new signals synched and displayed in a few tens of milliseconds instead of needing a few seconds.)
Ah progress ... But Progress toward where?
"they submitted professional photographs relevant to the article..."
You've got something of a point there. If "they" (North Face/Obnoxious R'Us Tailor Made) had submitted classy photos with a tasteful -- "Image contributed by North Face Clothing under Creative Commons License" statement along a margin, would that be objectionable?
The driver is also responsible for the car at all times and after all the 'Press' about the 'Autopilot' that does not work I would expect the driver to be very wary of the claims for the 'Autopilot' and therefore would have tested the usefulness/effectiveness of the facilities provided *before* attempting to trust them in a potentially dangerous situation.
Yes, OK, Sure. But one thing that bothers me every time Tesla assures me that everything that goes wrong is ultimately the driver's fault. Some hazardous situations are forseeable, detectable, and easy for the driver to avoid. Yeah, he or she probably should do that, although I wonder why he/she needs an occasionally incompetent digital assistant if constant situational awareness is needed anyway? But some problems are not so easy to foresee. How do I know that my autopilot is about to cut off that nice lady with the car full of toddlers and puppies, or isn't going to proceed down the clearly marked lane having developed an unhealthy affection for that bridge abutment up ahead?
Could it be that the basic problem the Tesla drivers have with autopilot is getting behind the wheel of a Tesla instead of a Toyota or Ford?
Bad/inadequate software is nothing new. It's been around ever since computers started interfacing with people. And it'll probably be around for centuries into the future. Writing non-buggy software is really hard.
But this is stuff that can kill or seriously injure people and not just people who own Teslas. The rest of us have to share the road with Teslae and their mates. IMHO, NHTSA and its equivalents elsewhere should seriously consider banning ALL computer assisted driving technologies until they have passed rigorous, independent, safety tests.
(And let me add that over the air updates are a REALLY BAD idea for safety related features. As Microsoft demonstrates with great regularity, continuous "improvement" is very hard to test. It may not be a big deal if the user interface to the GPS or FM radio changes without warning. But for safety related stuff, getting things right is IMPORTANT.)
Do keep in mind that this is part of a $5000US package that Tesla owners paid for months or years ago. Do you expect the Tesla operation to refund the money because what they promised turns out to be hard to do? Of course not. This looks to be much the same as a lot of other modern technology. Do the best you can. Ship it. Blame the user when it doesn't work very well.
"The whole point of the higher production rates was to be able to meet the massive backlog of existing orders."
There's a missing phrase there. "to meet the massive backlog of existing orders before the federal tax subsidy drops from $3750 to $1875 on July 1
A few points.
- Customers can, and sometimes do, ask for their deposit back and back out of the deal. Not every order will become a sale.
- July 1st is only 5 weeks away
- The subsidy goes away entirely on December 31st. (Let's don't go into the sanity of subsidizing expensive electric luxury cars. Right up there with subsidizing corn ethanol that typically requires almost as much energy to produce as it yields when burned.)
- For a public company, Tesla's finances seem to be remarkably opaque.
- And it's founder ... Some questionable judgment there at times.
There is a lot of 'good ole boy' stuff that goes into every Airbus plane no matter where it is made so Trump could easily stop Airbus from operating in China.
You might want to google Comac C919. It's not clear that China's home built commercial airliners are quite ready for prime time, but they are probably close. They have pre-production versions flying. Who knows, they might even make their scheduled 2021 first deliveries to (domestic) customers.
Nothing here is really Huawei’s fault
Probably true. Huawei are probably just collateral damage in the inevitable socio-economic conflict between the US and China. The US is used to running the world (not especially well if you ask me). China with four times the population and an economy about the same size as the US that is growing much faster doesn't actually seem to have that much interest in running the world. But since the US is run by folks with no principles, poor memories, few useful skills,and no planning ability whatsoever, I have to guess that the Chinese will "win" in the long run.
Welcome to the Chinese Century folks.
This isn't necessarily a stupid idea. However, it's complicated and if there is one thing Comcast is not good at, it is anything complicated. In fact simple often seems well beyond their capabilities.
I think perhaps if the endpoint systems at both ends are provided by some organization capable of dealing with patient and medical provider needs and Comcast just does the interconnection, the idea MIGHT have some merit.
So, I did the arithmetic and found that using the rates NASA will be paying to SpaceX in 2020-2024 and today's exchange rate, two million English pounds will get about 55kg (41.7 of them pressurized) to the ISS. I also checked -- Neither Donald Trump nor Theresa May weigh less than 55 kilos although Ms May is only 5kg over. I put all that in a post nicely laid out in case anyone wanted to check the arithmetic, pressed Preview, and the Register/Opera/the CIA/Google/Microsoft/Huawei/Julian Assange or something ate my attempted post.
BTW, on your rather tight budget, I'd look into sharing a Rocket Lab launch from New Zealand. They are quoting $5.7M for a launch. More that you folks have of course. But maybe Rocket Lab will dicker. Or maybe you can take up a collection to raise the difference. Do any of your politicians play the accordion well enough to hustle some cash on a street corner?
I'm not a big fan of AI which IMHO too often turns out to be Artificial Stupidity (AS). But assuming the cost is reasonable, this seems me to be a reasonable supplement to human interpretation. Presumably subsequent human analysis will catch false positives. And false negatives -- the radiologist says cancer, the AI says no cancer -- will be very carefully evaluated before carving the patient up. I don't think the world needs incomprehensible technology that, for example, occasionally fails to identify a stopped emergency vehicle. But this seems potentially useful.
Two things that would discourage me:
First: Air conditioning. My vague recollection is that even "small" computers back in the 1960s needed impressive amounts of cooling and were kept at really nippy temperatures.
Second: ICs. My belief is that IBM used custom ceramic ICs in the 360 products. Where are they going to find spares for those? Earlier computers from other manufacturers used, I think, either industry standard discrete transistors or off the shelf RTL(?) ICs.
The 1401 dates from 1959 and was a pretty decent mini-computer -- a term that hadn't been invented yet. The 360 dates from 1965 and is mostly remembered by those of us who were around back then for its badly botched operating system and Job Control Language. A friend described 360-JCL as "The world's first syntax free language" -- which seemed (and still seems) to me to pretty well sum it up. It didn't help that the JCL documentation was late, hard to follow, and none too accurate.
If MCAS is activated in non-normal conditions, it will only provide one input for each elevated AoA event.
What are "non-normal conditions"? What's an "elevated AOA event?" I understand that every statement has to be vetted by lawyers who are (quite reasonably) concerned about the eventual lawsuits for one hundred gazillion dollars ... per death. But does this actually promise anything meaningful?
Someone more knowledgeable can correct me, but I believe Canada uses manually counted paper ballots in national elections. I live about 150km from Montreal and actually watched the results of their 2015 election on cable TV here in Vermont. They seemed to have no problem getting reasonably complete results within a few hours of the polls closing.
"Tesla, SpaceX, etc. are Musk's toy projects to spend his billions on."
Despite frequent claims to the contrary, government aerospace is and almost always has been basically a cost plus (modest) fee business. As long as you sell product, you will generally make (some) money.
Automobiles OTOH ...
"Those industries than can will move"
Perhaps. But mostly not to the US one suspects. Those with long memories will perhaps recall that the original arguments against NAFTA focused on the cheap labor available in Mexico. The initial result of NAFTA was the construction of numerous factories (Maquiladora) along the Mexican side of the US-Mexico border for the manufacture of consumer goods for the US. Maquiladora can surely return.
BTW, anyone have any good recipes for soybeans? I'm told they are going to be real cheap in the US this year.
I'm not sure that we're even helping the Vietnamese/Taiwanese economies that much. I can't help suspecting that all that's being accomplished in many cases is to cause Chinese produced goods to make an short stop in Hanoi or Taipei on their way from Chinese factories to the port of Wilmington-Long Beach.
If you haven't Googled "Moon Base Cost" I suggest doing so. The answer, of course, is that no one knows what putting a research station on the moon will cost beyond the obvious "lots". The research station will likely be called a "colony", but my bet will be that it'll be more like the US South Pole Station -- permanent staff 45. But probably much smaller. Maybe 10-15. Cost estimates are in the $30-$50 billion range, but that's likely low because no actually knows the costs. An underrun of only $20 billion might be possible, but an equal overrun would be $80 billion. The James T Webb Observatory (a product of the 1990s "faster, better, cheaper" era) where every possible thing seems to have gone wrong is now 14 years late and total cost of 19.6B vs an initial estimate of 500M. That's a 1900% overrun. Further slips and overruns there are certainly possible.
My question is not whether a return to the moon can be done. It almost certainly can. I just wonder whether it is a prudent use of resource. $50B would probably pay for 30 or 40 lunar rovers. Mars rovers cost about 2.4B, but getting them to Mars safely is extraordinarily difficult. Lunar rovers should be much cheaper? My contention is that a few dozen lunar rovers and maybe a couple of quick trips to return rock samples will tell us far more about the moon than a dozen folks burrowing in a cave in some crater or other possibly can.
"Have I understood this right? In the USA citizens who wish to do their legal and moral duty and pay money to their government have to use a third party commercial company to do so."
No, it's not that bad. Even in the US, you can download the forms, print them out, and mail them with a check or money order. You may still be able to get blank forms at libraries. The forms are PDFs. Some at least are "fillable PDFs" and maybe by now those actually work in some PDF readers. Personally, I downloaded the forms, converted them to jpgs, used an emacs org mode table to compute the taxes, and filled them out using image magick to overprint the values onto the forms.
I am shocked ... shocked ... to find that some capitalists are lying scumbags.
If you are looking for links to free filing, try https://www.irs.gov/filing/free-file-do-your-federal-taxes-for-free The link is even in the instruction manual for US Federal Income Tax (albeit on Page 8) ... well, actually, it's not a link exactly ... but if you read it and it causes you to type "irs.gov free file" into google's search engine, you can get a link.
My opinion: Any understanding that may have existed has been breached. The IRS should proceed to build a free tax filing site for all taxpayers. The politicians responsible for preventing the IRS from having already done this should resign and spend more time with their family. Sorry to inflict that on their families. But sacrifices must be made.
"There's a reason that most meteorites that are found on Earth are of the metallic type"
I'm absolutely for sure not a meteorite expert. But my understanding is that the reason most reported meteorites are metallic is possibly selection bias. Metallic meteorites are relatively recognizable, magnetic, and pretty durable whereas stony meteorites tend to look more like just another rock, laugh at magnets, and some decompose fairly readily in wet environments. I've read that in Antarctica where all the rocks on the icecap are assumed to have arrived by air, the percentage of metallic objects is quite low.
As to whether living critters can by blasted into space from Earth. I dunno. Too many variables. For one thing, there's that whacking great initial acceleration required. Because of drag during exit, initial velocities well in excess of escape velocity of 11.2 km/s would be needed. OTOH, algal cysts ("acritarchs") are really durable. And they've been around for billions of years and presumably many Earth-bolide encounters. For large impactors, there may be some possibility of single celled organisms riding along inside rocks. My understanding is that variety of living creatures were found living deep in the Kola super-deep borehole despite the great heat and pressure. Maybe some of the creatures living deep in the Earth can tolerate cold and millenia in transit as well.
Crichton was well aware of climate change and gained the emnity of climate change fanatics by writing "State of Fear" which used exaggerated claims of sea level rise as a plot device. The fact that the book was actually about constructing phony crises (e.g. Saddam Hussein's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction) completely escaped them. I don't recommend the book unless you need to occupy a few hours and the only alternative is something by Dan Brown or James Patterson. It's readable. But ... Thin plot. Too much polemic. Crichton wrote some good books, but even if you agree with the premise, State of Fear wasn't really one of them.
Crichton's concerns about politization of science are probably better (and certainly more concisely) stated in his 2003 Cal Tech lecture "Aliens Cause Global Warming" https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/Crichton2003.pdf
"They can start with solar panels at the roofs of those bit barns."
They probably could. And the PR folks would love it. But would the panels do much good?
Pass me one of those cocktail napkins. The all knowing internet tells me that data centers can consume in excess of 10kw per square foot of rack space (...or more). That'd be about 100kw per square meter. My GUESS is that "rack space" is maybe 10% of the data center floor space -- the rest being emergency generators, mysterious telco equipment, a janitor's closet, and some offices for resident folk. (The manager gets the corner office). So -- the building needs maybe 10kw per square meter 24 hours a day. 10*24*X = 240KwH per square meter of roof space. A solar panel in the tropics will receive about 1kw per **SUNNY** hour of daylight. If we give the panel 20% conversion efficiency and six hours a day of usable sunshine -- allowing for clouds, low illumination at dawn/dusk, ice, snow, dust, etc. a meter of panel will generate 1.2kwhr per day. That's 100*1.2/240 = 0.5% percent of the building's power needs. (Before lighting, air conditioning, powering all that mysterious telephone company equipment, etc.?)
Seems hardly worth the trouble. But maybe I'm overlooking something.
I wouldn't mind having the arithmetic corrected by someone who actually knows something about powering data centers.
Canada is larger area wise than the US with about 12% of the population (Winters up there tend to be on the nippy side. Oddly enough, a lot of folks prefer to live and farm in places where there isn't snow on the ground half the year). I'm having a bit of trouble finding numbers for the US, but total hydro power generation in Canada (324Twhr in 2016) looks to be in the same ballpark as here in the states. Ignoring a relatively small amount of power exported to the US, the result is that Canada is able to get a lot more power per capita from hydro than the US. More power from hydro means less from nuclear, coal and natural gas. Also, most folks in Canada live in Ontario and Quebec which are mostly far enough from the great Eastern North American coal fields to make alternative power sources attractive. (Canada does have significant coal in Alberta,BC, and the maritimes)
They mostly invested in it because of the initial(-ish) success of Bitcoin. ...
One suspects that they have invested mostly to avoid the embarrassment if it turns out that blockchain actually is good for something and they are the only kid on the block without an in-house blockchain "solution". Keep in mind that these are largely the same folks that crashed the world's economies a decade ago because they believed that something called Li's cupola allowed them to predict financial risks with hitherto unachievable accuracy.
Barracuda claims: "A recent analysis of account-takeover attacks targeted at Barracuda customers found that 29 percent of organizations had their Office 365 accounts compromised by hackers in March 2019."
Ulp ... 29 percent? Really? If that's true, the cyber-security situation would appear to be pretty much hopeless.
Perhaps it is time to find an enemy and surrender.
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