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Comment Re:How electricity is produced? (Score 2) 206

While true, power plants are vastly more efficient then cars, it's just basic physics. The transmissions losses of an electrical grid are nothing compared to the losses of burning fuel to get it to the gas, the fuel you burn to get to the gas station, and finally the straight up losses of burning fuel period.

Moreover, cars cannot run on hydropower, wind, biomass, nuclear, or even coal it we go that way. Electricity generation can, and there is a lot of more coal in the ground than oil.

Submission + - Twitter blocking non-registered viewers (theverge.com) 7

quonset writes: Over the past few days, people have noticed a new change to Twitter. If you are not a registered user, you can't view postings. From anyone. Not even elected officials.

Twitter didn’t immediately make a public announcement, making it unclear if this was an intentional update or another technical mishap. Later on Friday, however, Twitter owner Elon Musk tweeted, claiming in a reply that the change is a “Temporary emergency measure,” blaming “data pillaging” for degrading the service for all users.

In a reply to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney complaining about how pay and account walls break the internet, Musk claimed, “Several hundred organizations (maybe more) were scraping Twitter data extremely aggressively, to the point where it was affecting the real user experience” without providing any more specifics.

This may be an attempt by Musk to get more eyeballs on Twitter since advertisers have substantially pulled back on spending. In some cases, high profile accounts such as Ben & Jerry's have stopped any ad spending on Twitter due to the increase in hate speech since Musk took over the company as well as uncertainty over the company's future plans.

Comment Re:How many are in scalper's basements? (Score 1) 25

The important thing about the PS5 is that it also is a complete PS4, and with the vastly reduced loading times thanks to its SSD-based architecture, it is a much better PS4 than the original and its fragile, noisy optical disk system.

This means that when a PS4 start to show wear and tear, it is a valid choice for owners who want to continue to play with their games to buy a replacement PS5 instead.

Comment Re:And nothing of value was lost (Score 1) 48

With its 900 mA.h battery, a Nokia 7110 can stay 260 hours in standby according to the manufacturer's specifications. But it can only last 4h30 in voice calls. If we were using those old devices with the same intensity we use the modern ones, even the old ones would be depleted after two days.

Comment Re:Oatmeal (Score 5, Interesting) 55

After pouring, there are remaining granules of quicklime in the concrete, called free lime. If cracks develop, the humidity entering will react with the free lime turn into lime plaster, which takes a much larger volume and blocks the crack. The calcite-filled cracks reported by the article are examples of this type of reaction. The interesting thing is also that this reaction seems to prevent further deterioration, compared to iron expansion from corrosion which will hasten the degradation of reinforced concrete.

Comment Re:Missing info (Score 3, Interesting) 114

One seemingly efficient way of CO2 capture is to use volcanic rock such as basalt. When exposed to CO2, the calcium, sodium and magnesium in the stone react and capture the CO2 into stable molecules, as in this example in Iceland. Basalt is an extremely abundant rock, and the transformation already occurs in nature, only slowly. The CO2 should not be able to leak in this kind of scheme.

Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 94

At least you have the option of changing providers for one that better matches your needs (or if you really find that no such provider, the option to setup a new one covering this unaddressed market) when there's no monopoly involved. No such option with the monopoly. You need to lobby the provider, and if it does not care you're stuck. Clearly, for this to work, it also requires regulations to prevent the natural inclination of telecom markets toward monopolisation. Given how people prefer pay more for fiber, I believe that your fear of a race to the bottom is in warranted as well. In my country, the fiber providers usually have two brands, with a low-cost, low service version, and a more expensive version that caters to those who want a more polished experience.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 2) 94

In places where there is competition, the providers offering the cheapest and poorest quality service tend to be the most widely used. They will massively over subscribe the service, its slow and unreliable, there are very few if any value-adds, routing is poor, equipment provided by the isp is poor quality, support services are poor or nonexistent.

There are no monopolies on most European markets, and yet it appears that the quality of service is not markedly worse than what you get in North America. In fact, In fact, as companies try to optimize their benefits, a monopoly will be able to provide the bad service you describe and get away with it. If a company in a competitive market provides bad service to its clients, they will just change providers.

Comment Re:other inputs (Score 4, Informative) 76

Calcium oxyde: CaO
Limestone: CaCO3

CaCO3 -> CaO + CO2

At best it is neutral, but if If you produce CO2 to generate the energy necessary to make this reaction, it's clearly negative in terms of CO2. You need to find a way to get CaO from something else than Limestone to do something interresting from this reaction.

Comment Re: Patents? (Score 1) 112

No reliable source on the topic, sorry. But it is quite possible to patent the principles of CDMA - using orthogonal codes to provide multiple users access to the same frequency band - without patenting the technical means to do it with a good power efficiency. If those methods are hard to detect through reverse engineering, it may be a good idea to keep them secret.

I believe that it is not a coincidence that when WCDMA was introduced, one big complaint from early adopters was the very short standby time compared with 2G only models.

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