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Comment Re:This is a bug not a feature (Score 1) 328

My bike light is a seriously bright LED headlight (and tail light). The headlight is as bright as a car's headlight, and I ride on quite a few unlit roads. Once I've been out of streetlights for a while in the very white pool of light the LED headlight gives me, whenever a car comes the other way, their lights look as orange as sodium lights. Normally I'd see the lights of oncoming cars as more or less white.

Comment Re:I'll never give up incandescents. EVER. (Score 1) 328

The system as a whole is far from 100% efficient. Once you add transmission losses and generation losses, electric resistive heating will be probably below 25% for the system as a whole, as most of the heat will be getting made outside of the building that's being heated.

Gas heating would be far more efficient as a system, since the losses in shipping the gas to your house to burn will be less than shipping the gas to the power station, burning it there to make heat, turning that into electricity, transmitting the electricity, then turning what's left back to heat in the building.

Comment Re:Slow Down (Score 1) 117

That's surface temperature. This ocean is deep under the surface.

So the follow-up question would be: if it's deep under the surface, how will sunlight get there?

The answer is that sunlight isn't what's needed, it's the right amount of energy that's needed. The energy can come from a lot of other places. Tidal forces for example can heat the interior of the moon, radioactive decay can heat the core of a moon etc. so there may be quite a bit of subsurface energy. For example, if you look at the bottom of the oceans on Earth where there is no sunlight, there are oases of life around volcanic vents on the ocean floor (which are spewing all kinds of useful chemicals into the environment). So while the surface might be cold and lifeless, it's possible that there are significant amounts of subsurface liquid water at a temperature that's compatible with life of some description.

Comment Rockstar, meh (Score 3, Informative) 145

I feel that any developer who calls themselves a "rockstar developer" is probably suffering a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

All the really competent developers I've ever known have had anything but "rockstar" like qualities. They generally don't boast, they are generally frugal, they are generally the exact opposite of a rockstar.

Comment Re:That's because (Score 1) 201

And this is why such services actually exist. For example, in the nearest town (pop. ~30,000) there are two shops that will do repairs on things like iPhones/Android phones (the usual stuff - repairing broken screens, replacing dead batteries, removing the SIM lock from any locked phones, replacing home buttons that have stopped working and the usual other wear-and-tear failures that smartphones suffer over time).

Comment Re:someone explain for the ignorant (Score 1) 449

I lived in the US for a few years. We all knew it was the richest country in the world (and much richer than the country I'm from) but I was astonished by how common obvious poverty was. I thought our inner cities were bad, but I'd never seen things like trailer parks and some of the small towns in the south that look like they belong in the third world.

Comment Re:someone explain for the ignorant (Score 1) 449

We've had chip&pin here now for over a decade, and people still forget their cards.

However: in nearly every system you can put your card in while the cashier is still ringing up your goods, you don't have to wait for the total to come out. When the total does come out the wait for the transaction to complete after entering the pin is normally well under a second on any remotely modern system.

Comment Re:Another silly decision (Score 2) 480

You look at the probability of that happening. Renting just means you're certain to lose.

Probability that I have no equity after 25 years of renting a property: 100%
Probability that some great disaster means I have no equity after owning a property for 25 years: less than 1%

I'll take the second odds.

Of course you should think of the "what ifs" before making financial decisions, but concentrating all on just the risks and not at all on the upside is every bit as silly as thinking of only the upsides and ignoring altogether the risks. A depression is a terrible time to not own property too by the way - you're pretty much just as shafted if your work sector has collapsed whether you rent or own.

Comment Re:If it ain't broken ... (Score 2) 716

It is generally easier, more error resistant and more portable. Java makes my day job of writing boring back end business software much more rapid and productive.

I do C and asm too. One of my current projects is for embedded ARM (in C). I've also done a significant amount of 8 bit asm (very recently) and also asm for an OpenRISC SoC. Those I'd never dream of letting Java or even C++ get near.

Right tool for the job. Sometimes, that's C or even in some niches, asm. But the vast amount of software people are writing isn't system level - some business application with a GUI is much better done in java or C# etc.

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