Posts by John Brown (no body) 28765 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
It sounds like you are saying, in effect, that we can't just replace bits of current electronics with superconductors to improve things in a meaningful way but might have to effectively develop a whole new range of components to take advantage of the effect, reinventing electronic circuits, which sounds entirely reasonable.
If it can be made economic to use in mobile phones and laptops, manufacturers will be falling over themselves to invest if they can offer users and an extra hour or two between charges. After all, that's one of the primary driving forces in developing better batteries :-)
On a slightly more serious note, I'd not be surprised at all if that was the driving force to mass production of room temp, ambient pressure superconductors, assuming the science actually is good and reproducible. Doing the science is the "easy"[1] part. Commercial and economic production and "killer app" use case is the "hard" part, ie convincing industry to invest in something new.
[1] Comparatively :-)
Yep, bulk manufacture to bring costs down requires an economic industrial use case to drive the development. After all, the very first lasers were little more than expensive scientific curiosities with some applications in the research environment. Now, you can buy throwaway laser pointers and cat toys for pennies :-)
"You'd probably want to bury black stony cylinders of lead/copper apatite rather than hang them as wires but that doesn't seem impossible."
That turns into a materials science problem. Few would probably have believed flexible glass fibre was an economic possibility not that many years ago, let alone a world spanning network of them :-)
"If your method can't be followed to reproduce the data, fabricated or not, you did not conduct your science properly."
Or, maybe, just didn't write it up properly so there's a missing step, or something. Benefit of the doubt until confirmed, IMV. The author should be able to clarify and/or help others to replicate who can then check if the process is actually correct. If he can't then yeah, bad science.
Exactly. If the US wanted an expensive boondoggle multi-State pork barrelling employment project, why spend $billions on a throwaway rocket you can only launch once ever year or two if you have alien spacecraft to back-engineer? I'm sure they could have gone with something just as impressive and created more jobs, like, I dunno, trains capable of an astounding 100mph across the whole country, nationwide broadband for all that's faster than 25Mb/s
"Also, why are people here weirdly puritanical about how icons can be used?"
Are they? They are commonly repurposed meanings based purely in the graphic, despite what the mouse-over text may say. On the other, sometimes they just mean what they show/say :-) ----------------->
"Strange that these sightings occur almost always in the US, Land of Neurosis. Could there be a connection?"
And have you listened to the recorded commentary of pilots seeing "something strange"? They are almost invariably cool, calm and professional at all times. Then you get these two "surfer doods" flying multi-million dollar US fighter jets screaming about "UFOs" and sounding like university football jocks at a toga party from Animal House, ie the so-called "tic-tac" video :-)
Several? Only two were named in the article. Do we know who the others are or has that information not been released yet? The Beeb report listed the same two Ambulance Services but only said two were affected, no hint of which, if any, others might have been affected.
"Many millions world-wide expecting a FREE service to remain usable forever is pretty fucking stupid[0], "
Is it? Do you really think these "free" services are a) actually free and b) philanthropic activities? And who said anything about "forever" apart from you?
"don't you think?"
Yes, I do. Do you?
Is americium-241 genuinely useful and the best option in this case and the element name is a serendipitous coincidence or have we got a bit of flag waving tech here?
Despite the facetious wording, it's a genuine question. I have no idea what might make the best radio-active fuel cell.
Not so sure about that specific article. MS don't really use X on it's own and Meta's is described as white and blue, so no real issue there. It's important to remember that it's not the X being trademarked since it's nigh on if not outright impossible to trademark a letter or single common word in all aspects. It's the stylised X, colour and graphics, ie the whole "look and feel" and the scope of usage, eg Windows as a GUI frontend/OS can't stop people advertising and selling generic "windows" in every other field. I still think Twitter are on a hiding to nothing with this and will inevitably be sued over this specific trademark, but not by MS or Meta, simply because their logo is too simple and generic.
Governments still want to access to encrypted messages on social media and I doubt they will connect the dots and see that this Tetra "problem" might be related in some way to the fact the not only is encryption hard, but it's not possible to design secure encryption that can be monitored the way they want. Their "solution" will probably be to pass yet more laws making it illegal to snoop on Tetra comms instead of solving the problem.
" XP64 felt not merely usable, but good: fast, responsive"
I wonder how much of the apparent speed up is because XP doesn't have the mitigations for the various CPU hardware flaws discovered since then, such as Spectre, Metldown, Rowhammer etc.
I somehow doubt they will ever need them since their plan is for multiple gas generatorsand a grid connection. If they ever have a power cut bad enough to require "more than 150 diesel generators", it's going to be a wide area outage AND problems with their gas supply and unless they are prepared to have them "on call", ie paying monthly to ensure availability, then they will not only be paying high prices to get them but be competing with every other business in the region. And deep pockets might not be enough to get them if it means hospitals or other essential services losing out to MS greed or other companies paying retainers for contracted access to gennies.
"The short time I spent in the UK, I was impressed by how much the Queen cared about her people - unlike our leaders here."
She did. But the monarch has so little power, calling them a "leader" is a pretty long stretch. You probably mean the Prime Minister and/or Cabinet if referring to a "leader[s]" in the UK and they are not that different to those in your country in terms of caring about "the people". Maybe not as extreme as in the USA. Yet.
"What are the rules for data acquistion in FISA?"
There don't appear to be any. At least none that are enforced. The defence seems to be that so long as a human doesn't "look" at it, they're in the clear. So by extension, using a computer to analyse it and only looking at the results also seems to keep them in the clear too. If data relating to a US citizen then indicates potential wrong-doing, it becomes ok due to "probable cause". NB IANAL, least of all a USA one :-)
Back in the day, we had to have a special, locked and secure room with, at least ion our case, only two authorised people allowed to access it. The PC in that room had to be specially locked down, no network access. It was used for generating Windows key as we were an OEM. All this security was closely monitored by MS and they did surprise inspections pretty much monthly. It was highly secure and we could have been stopped by MS at any time if they decided we weren't adhering to their very strict security protocols.
Clearly they don't eat their own dog food.
"It isn't incredible that a key gets compromised. It's inevitable.
But no matter how much I keep on banging this drum, mostly I'm ignored."
Current governments, especially UK, still trying to convince the world that E2E encryption is bad for stopping child abuse/child porn and so must only be enabled if they can see and monitor the data contents without compromising the security just because they say it's possible.
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