Posts by DuncanIrvine

Brit soldiers tune radio waves to fry drone swarms for pennies

Shielding.

Skin depth at above 1GHz is below 2um. So, for example a 10um nickel plated enclosure should work. That will weigh hardly anything. It still takes a lot of engineering to fully harden drones, but weight is not necessarily a problem.

Scientists strangely unable to follow recipe for holy grail room-temp superconductor

Meissner effect.

On the video supplied by the Korean team, they push the sample around and it suddenly drops to the surface of the magnet. This could happen with Meissner effect because there is a critical field above which it fails. This does not affect diamagnets. The sample could be a small magnet, but that would be trivial to test by flipping it over.

Given they seem to be competing for the Nobel prize, they do seem to think it is genuine.

We need a third party to test the samples.

A room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor? Take a closer look

Proof

You do not need to replicate. Just give the sample to a recognised superconductor lab. They can easily decide if it really is a room temperature superconductor.

This could be a lot quicker because there may be some necessary trace elements or isotopes or procedure missing from the description.

That it levitates is quite encouraging. Though it does not prove it is a superconductor.

Caltech claims to have beamed energy to Earth from satellite

Can we transmit power from space to the ground? We already do it, see radio communications.

Can we transmit enough power to be useful? Sure, a big mirror in space could light up disaster areas at night, and allow solar panels to power up equipment. It could be very useful in cold dark latitudes. The same mirror could direct solar insolation away from deserts and make them habitable, or simply reduce climate change.

Will it be banned? Probably, far too easy to weaponise it. Even a plane space mirror used in daytime to double solar insolation would be very difficult to defend. If you had several you can just burn out the enemy. Even with massive protections you could still get hacking or space rocks making it lethal.

Scientists claim >99 percent identification rate of ChatGPT content

ChatGPT will be able to take the test itself and iterate results to avoid the tests. Then hand over a result that passes all tests.

Windows XP activation algorithm cracked, keygen now works on Linux

XP?

I have (expensive) hardware that runs DOS. That I want to keep going.

Thanks, Sir Clive Sinclair, from Reg readers whose careers you created and lives you shaped

Spectrums for disabled people..

Thank you to Clive and his company. With their help and approval, while at Possum, I designed variants of the spectrum for use by severely disabled people. I was given access to the Sinclair technical team and all information required.

There were two variants, a large keyboard version and a scanning version.

Sinclair even donated some technical equipment to help. It is a real shame that they took a wrong turn with the ZX microdrive.

Games were always a problem, and still are. Using a slow single switch with poor timing eliminates almost all games. What is needed is character classes that act as "ancestors" which follow and buff the group, but have no time critical inputs.