Posts by that one in the corner 5494 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Nov 2021
My theory (which is mine) is that IKEA have been stripping back the IVAR range to a shadow of its former self because they made it *too* good: despite my best efforts (overloading the shelves with books, drilling random holes to hang yet more stuff...) the stuff just works, decade after decade.
Really wish I had bought more of the large IVAR cabinets when they were available.
From the video where Meta show off their ideas for goggles, one of the goals is to accurately track the pupil.
There are good technical reasons for this, mainly rendering in full detail only the part of the image that will hit the fovea, using lower res for the rest of eye (both in pixels rendered and in colour detail) - and maybe even not rendering at all the bit of the image that lies in your blind spot. Doing this obviously reduces the amount of computation and bandwidth needed for the video (and isn't a new idea, VR creators were trying to do the same in the 90s).
Meta are even playing with changing the apparent depth of field of the image presented, as determined by measuring the pupils, including how dilated they are. Again, using the data to improve the results.
Now, if they just happen to "accidentally" happen to also deduce whether you are enjoying what you're looking at by the pupil response and that "leaks" out to the advertisers...
(PS if you've got various light sensors looking closely at the User's face and eyes, you can use them to, say, determine the heartrate as well. No need to try to tap into the User's heart monitor watch, which is just doing exactly the same trick - and having to do it on a tougher target, the wrinkled, tanned, hairy and dirty back of the wrist).
"biotic materials – non-living materials derived from living organisms"
As in - wood?
As in - the laser cut plywood used in oh-so-many small robots (well, hobbyist robots at least)?
Or the paper in plotters - which are just robotic draughtsmen. Ok, that is probably stretching the point too far: the robot plotter isn't actually made of paper. Although there are some paper robots, robo-origami using nitinol wire. Aaaaaah, that's taken my mind off spiders.
Dolby audio made to better quality standards than medical devices!
You'd really like to hope it was always the other way around, wouldn't you? But then you see stuff like this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2o8MDCIlOEk
EEVblog #822 - World's Worst Tablet Computer Teardown
Picosecond aligned clocks? I hope none of those are in the Penthouse trying to talk to systems down in the basement. Or sitting on a particularly dense piece of Earth.
https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/articles/z0508_00097.html
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EDirgdlPEuA
If they are getting this worked up over handling leapseconds with any luck their systems will just lock up completely when they are confronted with relativistic effects of just being in orbit.
So the O'Neil Colony will be a rugged frontier but blessedly free of Facebook!
> the moon recedes at about 3 cm/year, and the earth rotates slightly more slowly.
So if we attach a tether to the Artemis missions, lasso the Moon and pull it back towards us, we can remove the need for any more leap seconds *and* ensure that our descendants will still be able to enjoy a proper Solar Eclipse?
> it might be worth asking why nobody has ever tried to spin a space station in reality
Perhaps because we haven't actually built that many space stations yet and the ones we do have are all too small to be usefully spun up?
Ok, the main truss of the ISS might be long enough but all the living area is concentrated in the middle, so without an extreme amount of reconfiguration...
One brief websearch later:
https://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/Cosmic_Muons.htm *
Average energy at ground level 4GeV. Overall, muons have minimal energy loss due to ionisation (which is where the safety aspects come in), the use of 10GeV is for extended lifetimes giving more time to penetrate materials, rather than using higher energies to bash their way in. 10GeV lasting for approx 63 km in the air.
If you happen to see a faint beam of Cherenkov light flashes coming at you, DARPA is watching you.
* other URLs on the subject are available
The trees are already being cut down - and replanted to ensure a continuing supply - in order to make paper (Swedish-Finnish paper products company Stora Enso). Lignin is removed from the pulp in that process (otherwise you get rubbish paper).
This new process aims to use that byproduct lignin as a source of carbon to make batteries - batteries that likely wouldn't use carbon, but something less eco-friendly to collect, as the carbon anode tech is still in development.
The process to manufacture completed batteries will release CO2 - as any manufacturing does - but the claim here appears to be that this will be less than if non-carbon-anode batteries were made instead and that moving towards a more battery-powered world, as well that using up someone else's byproduct, is generally a Good Thing.
> I suppose I could look for a webcam with a zoom lens.
The Raspberry Pi can be used as a webcam; with the newer camera module you have a wide choice of C/CS mount lenses, bound to find one that'll fit your needs. Though the aesthetics of a Pi bolted to camera module aren't to everyone's tastes.
> a food bank in the north west of England, called Tynside CommunitEE pantry
That would be the Tyneside CommunitEE pantry in the North East of England.
Otherwise we'd be seeing the bosses treating the workers fairly and that really would be looking glass logic, wouldn't it.
and make the car sound like it is reving hard and going like the clappers; feed this into the cabin interior (CK even included the roar of jets) as well as the outside speakers. Give the boy racers the feeling they're pushing the limits as they reach 25 in a 30 zone.
While we're at at, put in random noises of clattering and bottoming out when going over a speed bump too fast: encourage pedestrians to point and laugh as well as being warned that they in the presence of The Driving Morons.
Can we get some concrete examples of what these bits of "basic modern functionality" are and how, say, systemd (or PulseAudio or whatever) does them better?
In all honesty, looking at the boxes around me, the newest tech I see is USB that actually works (all wired LAN btw, anyway WiFi is hardly new) - everything else is just "the same as it was decades ago, only more of it and it goes faster". I now need 64 bit addresses to use all the RAM, so that is new-ish, I guess?
Now, this is probably just because I'm simply not hip and with-it, but if you don't actually clearly give some examples of what I'm missing then comments like this are about as useful as "'cos I say so, no takebacksies".
That isn't PS causing the problem, it is down to whoever is writing the specific objects that you are attempting to use.
So, yes, overall the entire system that you interact with via PS *is* designed by committee. Quite possibly by people who don't even want to be exposing stuff to PS and really don't give a monkey's whether their stuff is self-consistent, let alone works beautifully with everything else.
Your ISP knows who you are because the first hop, from your VPN endpoint running on your PC, is sending all of the traffic, encrypted, to your VPN provider. What the VPN is doing is to prevent your ISP connecting their knowledge of your identity to any services you access via the VPN provider.
The VPN supplier can, of course, track where it sent your traffic and this data can be correlated with your ISP. Which is why you want to choose your VPN supplier carefully.
Consider: you can use the VPN the old-fashioned way, with an endpoint in your LAN and an endpoint in another LAN you have access rights to, say at work, and then just share resources between the two without anyone in the middle eavesdropping. Both ISPs are fully aware that the LANs are talking to each other, and for how long, they just can't read the actual content. You can even go from your work LAN onto the rest of the Internet and, tada, your work is now behaving exactly like the generic VPN supplier; so does your work have the ability to track your access to the Internet? Then so does the generic VPN supplier.
The value of a VPN for general browsing is at the furthest end from your ISP, where the Big Website Provider only sees lots and lots of traffic from the VPN supplier and trying to apply tracking techniques to that means your small bit of the traffic gets lost in the noise. Hopefully.
But all of the bytes are always going via your ISP. And they know where you live.
(Bit late to the party but never mind)
Deuterium, tritium - the usual for fusion.
Tungsten - the projectiles aren't going to be reusable, are they? Mining and fabrication costs?
And reading the above, there is talk of gunpowder!
How sustainable are projectile based systems compared to magnetic confinement that is just consuming some of its own output?
Thanks for URL.
That article headlines the use case that comments here are suggesting - using the FDH to feed into existing power stations' turbines - before covering the more important topics, such as Kaiju.
Although it is a bit worrying - they say that this tech isn't what destroyed Krypton, but the picture at the top clearly shows a chunk of planet blown off and flung up into the clouds!
But which rights would you be signing away?
You don't have a right to be able to run Excel, you are being offered the chance to give it a go and if it does work, yay for you.
The Ts&Cs are more concerned with telling you what you mustn't think you can do with Windows (so no more using it on a medical device which is being used to drill for oil in a nuclear powered digger).
Even if you go down the route of merchantability and "a reasonable person would expect to be able to" print a letter on A4 paper, the obvious reply is "What, haven't you been reading the support forums? Nobody can get that to work!".
