Posts by jmch 3802 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Mar 2017
"the potential customer base for satellite internet will shrink every year so the price gonna increase over time."
No, the price would only increase if *actual* customers went down, not potential ones. While fiber / 5G expand in more developed countries, other people in developing countries will start to get rich enough to afford it (even if it's group ownership eg at a community centre). There's also the possibility, recently tested, of making connections to Starlink directly from a smartphone, which could compete more directly with 5G as a sort of 'global roaming'. So the potential customer base will anyway never dry up.
And there will always be certain places on Earth where it would anyway be economically unfeasible to install fiber for direct access or for 5G backhaul (and the economic justification for rolling it out to remote areas is actually decreasing exactly because Starlink exists). So I'm pretty sure it would eventually reach a near-steady-state where the cost of new satellites and maintaining the network is just about covered by a stable client base.
"More likely it will collide with some piece of space debris and be reduced to atoms long before it gets anywhere near an inhabited star system."
As you say, space is VAST. The chances of it hitting some space debris are essentially as zero as that of it ever being picked up by some alien. In fact, even the chance of it hitting a pretty big-ass star or planet are infinitesimal, given the sparseness of the universe. My bet is it will still be travelling at the heat-death of the universe....
(or it will go around the universe's edge and start approaching the Earth from the opposite side!!!)
"I feel like in 99% of cases in Europe, it's too late to redesign the network to accommodate such a system. The cost to retrofit such a design would be massive, so unfortunately we have to live with what we've got"
Either building a high-speed rail network or refitting the current one for high-speed rail would be a massive massive undertaking in cost, time, and land area swallowed by new rails. It would probably be cheaper (and possibly occupy less space) to just build giant solar-powered reactors to convert water/CO2 to hydrocarbons for use as aviation fuel. Air travel already is faster, safer and cheaper than rail for long distances.
"there are lots of pictures of Russian soldiers taking selfies "
There are various 'find the view' competitions online, eg one i know of is 'view from your window' on the daily dish. The simple premise is to find where a photo was taken using just the photo visual, no metadata. Types of architecture, vehicles, road signs, trees and foliage, satellite dishes, skylines and much more can be pieced together even by someone not local, especially when they can be compared to a wealth of other online aerial photo / streetmaps type of photo. For someone who is a relative local it would probably be even easier.
For my part I remain astounded that anyone can derive even a town, let alone a specific window in a specific building, from a photo!
"...why are NASA still dealing with Boeing at all?"
NASA wisely kept a door open to a second supplier because if SpaceX were a monopoly supplier, Musk would have them over a barrel. Unfortunately for NASA that second supplier is Boeing, so they're sort of screwed either way.
Although given they're funding Starliner by the billions, a serious startup competitor to SpaceX would be a more viable alternative in the long run.
"... started BO as a tax write-off."
I understand that being able to write off failed ventures as a tax expense encourages risk-taking and entrepreneurship, however large corps are abusing it as a deliberate strategy. This shit needs to be limited to, say, a million or 10 million a year max, enough to give entrepreneurs and SMEs a safety net without it becoming a platform for abuse for billionaires
"So whats reasonable?"
There is NO reasonable way to protect user privacy AND monitor abuse. Police forces and 'intelligence' agencies need to cure themselves of their data addiction and get back to the basics - using old-fashioned detective work to identify and go after the endpoints.
As to what constitutes 'abusive material', or even 'fake news' - We all know it starts out with "think of the children" and "everyone is against this" issues like terrorism and child porn. We also know, because it is literally happening right now, that this is rapidly expanded to whatever targets the government decides, and 'fake news' can be whatever the current government or media establishments decree it to be, even if it's debatable or actually true.
"Is it absurd to expect the owner to make an effort to prevent abuse?"
It IS absurd to expect that a platform that facilitates users' end-to-end encrypted communication has the slightest notion of what's in the communication. Governments making that expectation are implicitly saying that any company providing end-to-end encrypted communication is illegal.
By definition if anyone can see illegal content they are party to the chat or group, and therefore can identify at least by a phone number the author / poster of the illegal content. So the trivial answer is "report the info to the police".
It's been repeated ad nauseam on these pages - there is no technical way for encrypting that allows only specific parties (aka 'good guys') to decrypt without anyone else being able to. And even if there WERE such a technical possibility, we have only the 'good guys' own word that the power isn't abused (an assurance that isn't worth shit let alone printer paper).
Either we are willing to accept that there will be some level of criminal behaviour / content on comms networks while the rest of the world goes about it's business, or we criminalise every comms user and middleman to have the theoretical on-paper possibility of catching all criminals (which will never come to effect in real life). In a free liberal society, only the first option is any option at all.
"...the fuel was drunk to keep warm..."
ah, that lasting fallacy! Alcohol is a vasodilator, increasing blood flow close to the skin (where the heat-sensitive nerve endings are), so the fuel was drunk to *feel* warmer, but actually having more warmth closer to the skin / in the extremities results in quicker heat loss.
"Chuck in a compliant/oppressed populace and you don't have quite so many worries about whether you'll be allowed to build something."
Not so much compliant/oppressed as having different priorities. If someone has to heat their home / cook on an indoor wood stove without electricity, then a few pylons coming their way will be seen as a blessing. Different perspective to the armchair warrior who as like as not wouldn't even notice a new pylon in their neighborhood because they walk around with their nose glued to their phone, or don't walk the neighborhood at all.
Clean is relative.... next to wood, coal and oil, natural gas is extremely clean.
Given that it will take a while to move to a completely decarbonised grid (many many new nuclear plants, + vast technology improvements and implementation of batteries/other electric storage to make solar/wind supply predictable), it makes sense to at least use the least polluting of available hydrocarbons.
(meanwhile of course, increased use of gas in Europe drives the price up so India and China continue to build coal power stations at an even faster rate than they are deploying nuclear and green power plants)
updating for context to add this, (from 2023, so the current figures might be even higher):
"The importance of the ICT sector to the Irish economy has increased steadily over time and today it accounts for just under one-fifth of Gross Value Added (GVA), 9.6 per cent of the economy-wide wage bill, 6.4 per cent of employment and just under one-quarter of corporation tax revenue"
(https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/quarterly-bulletins/quarterly-bulletin-signed-articles/the-role-of-ict-services-sector-irish-economy.pdf)
So the ICT sector is accounting for 20% of GVA and 25% of corporate tax, for around 20% of electricity consumption.
(Granted not all of the ICT sector is linked to the bit barns, but probably quite a large chunk)
Thinking about it a bit, there is nothing that wrong in withdrawing or not making planning appeals in return for cash *as long as there is a real material interest*. Whenever there is any new project, there are local people who are materially going to be negatively affected by physically having a new development in their immediate neighborhood. Then there are other people or groups who will just object to anything and everything out of principle, general pigheadedness or, as you describe these 2 shakedown artists, simply to scam some cash, even if it won't really materially affect them (In practice any brown/greenfield development will have environmental objectors because of some unique species of worm, spider, bird etc that happens to live in that very specific square mile of land. Giving in to these objections would mean we never ever get anything built).
Simple solution is to limit the people or organisations who can register planning appeals to anyone living within a couple of miles in rural areas and a quarter mile in urban areas*. If these people can be 'bought off', what it really means is that the compensation the locals receive (either in cash or in concessions around redesign of the project) is of at least equivalent value to the negative externalities generated by the project. If the project is still viable after those additional costs are accounted for, that's a win-win for both the neighborhood and the developers. If the project is not viable after those additional costs are accounted for, it simply wasn't a good project anyway.
*just an example, I'm sure it would need to be a bit more complex than that
"governments should mandate the use of green power sources for all data centres (existing and new ones)"
I agree with the sentiment, not with the practicality. Electrons are electrons, it's not like you can know that the ones powering your datacenter came from solar not from oil. And why should one type of industry be singled out? Should chemical or pharmaceutical industries not also use green energy? Heavy industry? Construction? Shipbuilding? Chip manufacturing? It would be unnecessarily messy, (not to mention uncompetitive) to single out one industry for 'punishment' because they are heavy electricity users. Because, and maybe some Irish readers might correct me here, but I think that while these datacenters consume 20% of Ireland's electricity, they are directly or indirectly responsible for an even bigger chunk of GDP
Far better to simply promote and invest in no or low-carbon energy supply and availability across the whole power generation and distribution infrastructure. And in case it's not 100% clear, there is only one way to have a vast and reliable no-carbon supply, and that is a big nuclear baseload capacity.
"...total metered electricity consumption by datacenters in the Emerald Isle..."
I noticed this phrase, assuming it to mean consumption drawn from the grid. Does that mean that if a datacenter has it's own eg solar farm, that this consumption would not show up on the stats? In any case, it seems that the trend will be for datacenters to generate their own power through eg SMRs
"The lane keeping has to be turned off every time you turn on the car. I'm guessing there's some safety regulation insisting on that."
AFAIK, if the manufacturer allows it to be permanently disabled, it scores lower on safety test scores. And since manufacturers care more about those scores for their marketing than they do about what customers actually want, you will continue to have to turn it off every time you turn on the car, for any and every vehicle produced between now and whenever the regulators see sense (ie presumably never)
"Most national economies are, wait for it, retail driven. For the U.S. its economy is 70% retail driven."
How much of that retail is 'needs' vs 'cheap crap i saw advertised that I *have* to buy'?? A large part of US (and to a lesser extent, 'western') economy is a consumer cycle of vapid crap that just spins the money wheel round and round while adding very little actual value
"...dude worked out that technological development would put the masses out of work..."
Our technological development is far far beyond anything Marx could ever have imagined, and yet generally speaking, far more people are in employment now than there were in his time (even in relative-to-population terms, considering very few women were in paid employment in those days).
There are serious issues with a system that is built to accumulate more and more wealth to the top tiers, but it has little to do with technological development.
Universal healthcare doesn't need to be UK/NHS-style, and indeed NHS, while working great for a lot of people, still has a lot of inefficiencies and dysfunctions. What would work better is...
- a system that *isn't* totally free (to avoid hypochondriacs overwhelming the system), but you want a very low entry threshold (copayment) that won't discourage poorer people (or have social assistance for poorer people that will cover the copayment
- a system where the public hospital system has to be at a very high standard, and have short wait times that means there is little incentive to pay more for better/faster service. Having rich elites being participants in the system means its more likely to be properly funded. If all the rich elites get their healthcare at private clinics anyway they have zero incentive to fund the public system. One way to achieve this is to oblige any healthcare provider to serve everyone participating in the national system o the same terms as any other hospital. Or charge a hefty fee (you could call it a license) for exclusive clinics to work only with privately-paying clients, and use that to subsidise the public system.
- All emergency care and basic healthcare and medicine including reproductive and psychiatric has to be covered
- allow the system generally or individual hospitals / clinics to get additional funding through extras eg patients can pay more for a room with less people or a private room instead of a ward, or for better standard of (doctor-approved) meals
- Stop dicking around with central IT systems that hoover up everyone's data. Instead, allow every clinic or hospital to use whatever IT system they want, as long as it works with a standard API / data format for patient records. People would have their master record at their GP. If they need to visit a doctor somewhere else or a hospital, the record can be sent there, and any updates sent back once finished
- All of this requires money, and it has to be properly funded. It IS expensive, but it's also worth it. Taxpayers should be aware of what it really costs and understand that their taxes are going into a system that works for them. It should not be a political football.
I've said it many times before, it's a sad state in the US when the only 2 leadership options are an 81-year old and a 78-year old, before even taking into account that the 78-year old is a narcissistic fantasist dictator wannabe. That's before even noting how one's cognitive abilities seem to have declined rapidly in the last few months, while the other one is also showing signs of mental decline (maybe less steep, but from a far more unstable baseline). The presumptive nominees for either party are literally demented*, and the independent candidate needs a tinfoil hat and dried frog pills.
*suffering from dementia, not having their souls sucked out by a dementor
"need to be cheaper"
Part and parcel of "tech enhancements" is that current tech becomes cheaper as newer tech gets on the market. So better range and faster charging on the next generation of cars will mean cheaper versions of the current generation. A big part of e-car cost is the battery, and that's an area where there is a lot of room for price reductions, particularly with solid-state (which somewhat sacrifice capacity/weight for stability, long life and cheaper price ).
So yes, they need to be cheaper for higher adoption, and they will be
I can't remember the exact details now, but there was a time when some legal bods decided our team couldn't access the data we needed, so we were twiddling our thumbs for a few days before it got sorted. I'm pretty sure that there will be a vast number of IT pros working with financial or government customers who have similair stories.
The other issue I came across but didn't impact me directly was location-based. Due to some legal minutiae, offshore team members from certain countries were not allowed to work in our base country at all, and to be on the safe side, our legal team banned them from coming to the office. So when we had our onsite team meetings, they would travel as tourists and we had our 'team days' at the nearest pub.
It's fine to be able to manually set a limiter to a preset value. It's a CHOICE the driver can make. I also have no problem with cars flashing some light and beeping if the limit is exceeded by a certain amount and/or for a certain duration, as long as it's not distracting. What I DO have a problem with is, the car doing that while it has no clue about what the speed limit really is. If it's using GPS, the GPS isn't always up to date (indeed my car GPS, motorbike GPS, and Google maps all have disagreements about limits in various locations, and sometimes all 3 of them are wrong). Not to mention that typically a dealer won't automatically update your car's GPS, nor do it for free. If this system is to work by GPS, there has to be free, over-the-air map updates guaranteed for at least 20 years included as part of the package.
If it's using road signs, it has happened very often that my car is showing me that it thinks a highway speed is 60 kmh because it detected the 60 limit sign on the offramp.
However much both GPS and sign-detection improve, there's always going to be differences between the 2, and between both of them and reality. So I am very much against any haptic feedback that cannot be switched off, and the car autonomously intervening should be absolutely not on the table at all (to be fair, that's what it says at the moment, but seems that's the direction of travel).
And of course, are we to expect that once all these safety systems are in place on all cars, it will be safe to universally raise speed limits everywhere except villages and town centres, right?
"I wonder for how long America has known Russia/USSR was basically a paper tiger ?... I guess contracts for $140B need a real enemy"
$140bn of nuke deterrents is foresight for China. There's plenty more pork left in the rest of the $800bn US military budget (by the way, the $800+bn 'defense' allocation is annual. The $140bn sentinel costs, while not clearly stated, seem to be a total project cost, not annual)
Ever since the cold war ended, the US has needed other wars, preferably of the hot type, to sell military hardware. The bulk of that $800bn would not be needed if even a small fraction were dedicated to diplomacy and foreign debt relief, but 'arms dealer' is a tried and trusted way of getting rich, and peace isn't as profitable. Of course having US boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn't such a hit, politically. Sending US weapons castoffs to their 'brave allies' while the US military stocks up on the latest hardware is an amazing trick to pull, especially when pretty much 100% of the $$$ 'aid' being 'sent' to Ukraine is actually going to US military contractors, while Ukraine gets mostly older hardware. Same BS as the strings attached foreign aid which compels the vassal state to spend the 'aid' cash on selected friendly corporations in the donor country - just a PR-friendly way of funnelling cash to said friendly corporations.
No wonder the US are so strongly against a resolution to the war (of course publicly they say they want it over, only acceptable conditions being ones that will never exist IRL)
" the automatic was the one that always got stuck in the lightly snowy carpark"
My experience is automatic + ABS + traction control makes snow driving a doddle, as long as it's combined with proper snow tyres. And, not such a doddle, but it has handled Alpine roads in blizzard conditions, even without chains.
" is it really that difficult?"
Clutch operation isn't that difficult IF you know how. When starting to learn to drive, it IS difficult, and can be an unnecessary complication. On the other hand, it DOES ensure that newbies behind the wheel have a low level of risk, since they can't just jump behind a wheel, press the gas pedal and go - They are stuck to an enforced cycle of low-speeds and stalls until they work out the gears..... hopefully by the time they work out how to get into 3rd gear and beyond, they will have more experience with braking, handling, cornering, lines of sight.....
It certainly helps to know the physical principles of WHY the clutch is there, and why it has to be released gradually. When learning to drive it took me a couple of weeks to get to grips with the gearshifting. When I learned to drive a motorbike, even though the clutch/gear mechanism is physically different, I had ingrained the 'steps' of the manual change from the car for a couple of years, and it took me about an hour tops to get the basic operation.
One other way in which he isn't wrong - there's a new generation that is going to have to pay for the collective selfishness and overconsumption of their parents and grandparents. I wouldn't call it 'penance' though, that's taking the consequences for your own actions. Rather they will have to take the consequences of other people's actions:
1) Massive debt in all western countries, accrued like there's no tomorrow, helped along by the assumption that low interest rates will last forever. That debt will have to be repaid by future generations, whether by taxation or inflation.
2) The continued ignorance around the looming social security disaster. FFS France just torpedoed the only adult in the room who was willing to face the facts that if your population is living 10 years longer, you have to increase retirement age by 6-7 years. But they couldn't stomach even a 3 year increase. But that's just the extreme case, social security will be bankrupt everywhere in a decade or so. Bonus idiot points for those who are against immigrant workers - whose taxes are going to pay your pension when you're retired? And who's going to take care of you and nurse you when you're too infirm to take care of yourself?
"I would have hung around just a wee bit longer though....."
If I had been hired to just take out the wires, I would have had the job signed off the second I cut the cables, then hung around to enjoy the fun. And, as a bonus, possibly charge an extortionate rate to put the wires back in right there and then.
"A thousand dollars is nowhere close to enough."
Absolutely this. Any taxi service has the same operating cost as a private car owner, usually with extra insurance costs required, AND they have to make a profit on top. The general idea seems to be that I'm only using my private vehicle part of the time, and if multiple people can 'share' the time on one car, total ownership costs go down. This overlooks some important things: (1) most people want to use their cars at approximately the same times, so there is a hard limit to how many savings can be made if everyone is going to use their car exactly when they want to. (2) a big part of costs (especially of ICE cars) is fuel plus service on 'wear-and-tear' items, which increase with consumption and cannot therefore be 'shared'. (3) There is high value in starting your journey when you are ready to leave, not when your driver turns up.
Getting down to raw numbers, $1000/mth is $33/day. Only very light car users would be able to supplement their travels by uber and public transport for that little. In contrast, there are car subscription companies where for $1000/mth you get a brand new car every 2-3 years, with fully paid licensing, registration, insurance, service (including replacement vehicle), tyre replacement..... basically unless you have quite an expensive car, a newly bought car amortised over 5-6 years plus all fuel, services, taxes, insurances, tyres etc will cost less than $1000. Considerably less if you bought a 2-year old car second hand, or if you're keeping your car more than 6 years.
"... a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space."
Parking is a very mechanistic process, far different from driving. A car can easily predict it's trajectory whether forward or reverse. I know that reversing a trailer or semi is very tricky, but if you always follow the exact same steps for the same outcome it can be easily automated. The major issue is probably that different trailers have different reversing characteristics, so the car would either need sensors on the trailer itself (making it far less flexible since effectively the trailer becomes part of the car and can't be swapped), or else the car needs to be pre-programmed with a variety of different trailer types/sizes, and that information needs to be entered to the car when the trailer is hitched.
I would guess that with this being an edge use case, so "nobody has yet come close to releasing a driverless car that can back a trailer into a parking space" is because no work has been done on the problem at all rather than because it is very technically difficult.
.... that any discussion on Assange turns into 2 groups of posters metaphorically shouting past each other.
Putting aside discussions about Assange himself* and focusing on the Wikileaks allegations:
- he was engaged in a journalistic endeavor to publicise whistleblowing accounts.
- even if he did technically assist whistleblowers to extract data, this is not much different to what many respectable journalists at established news outlets do.
- this type of journalism is of enormous public interest and should be encouraged.
- governments have rarely gone after established news outlets that do the same thing (clearly they would like to but don't want the backlash)
- the best disinfectant is sunlight - government operatives should be the first to uphold national and international laws, and are not above either
There is a strong argument to be made that Assange irresponsibly handled the information given to him, endangering the livelihoods and lives of informants and their families. BUT note that this was not the argument made by the US in prosecuting him. They went after him because he made them look bad.
*Yes, Assange comes across as a bit (a lot?) of a prick in the whole saga.
The truth is that passengers like having shorter queues, more legroom, more luggage allowance, decent in-flight meals etc. And back when EVERY airline and airport offered all of those, a 2-3 hour flight across Europe could cost E400-500 return. The reality is that in the end, passengers vote with their feet, and it turns out the majority of passengers actually would rather pay <E100-200 for a ticket, and then complain about being gouged for E50-100 for luggage and another E50-100 for meals, priority boarding or a decent seat.
The companies raced to the bottom happened because that's where the majority of passengers already were
"Meteorologists get it wrong most of the time...."
Actually modern metereology is practically voodoo magic - temperature variations over the whole day are pretty accurate over a week forecast, and rainy days / periods are very accurately predicted in a 3-day forecast. My local weather app showing patches of rain throughout the day seen on the same morning is usually correct to within about an hour. It gets things badly wrong maybe 1-2 times a year.
"dragging it out into an 18-month circus"
Absolutely! Most civilised countries manage to run an election campaign and election in around 6 weeks, and that's more often than not when the current government have to choose an election date. It *should* be even easier when you already know the election dates in advance
Base unit for energy is (as far as I can work out) kg.m2.s-2. Per volume (m3) would make it kg.m-1.s-2, which helpfully is the same as for pressure
Sadly there is no official Register unit for time (suggestions???), but we DO have a unit for Force - kg.m.s-2
Reg Unit for volumetric power density would be something like Norris per nanoWales
That sounds all sorts of wrong (so it might be correct)
Re deprecated features..... it now works the opposite way - moving from on-Premises SQL Server to Azure SQL server is mostly OK (which it should be as it's the same SQL server running on Azure). But once you start looking at 'dedicated pool' / 'Azure synapse' / (whatever name Microsoft marketing come up with every six months to describe a product that is almost but not quite the same as its previous self) , a lot of features / commands / constructs that are being used in decades-worth of development of SQL code are now no longer recognised.
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