Magnetostriction. Your monitor, your old Amstrad CPC etc. usually will have some small switch mode DC-DC converters inside them, which will have at least one inductor. The frequency or at least duty cycle of the switching in the DC-DC converter will change as the load it is powering changes - for instance, as a CPU starts processing more complex instructions, or a circuit starts transitioning states frequently (e.g. to change pixel colours) - CMOS circuits draw more power when they go from one state to another.

The inductors often "sing" quietly (magnetostriction) and the frequency and/or timbre will change as the load changes. You can often really hear it if you put the device up against your ear.

We have a bit of a problem with electric vehicles here: about 50% of the housing stock has no off-street parking (let alone a garage). A huge percentage of our housing was built decades before cars were even invented. The thing is I live on an island and the most miles I can possibly do in a day would only be 60 or so, and an electric car would be ideal. I'd love to own one, but I can't because I have nowhere to charge it - there's no power anywhere near the car park at work, there's no power anywhere near the nearest place I can park to my house, and houses with driveways/garages command an incredible premium.

Until we get charging stations in enough car parks, then electric cars are a non-starter. Perhaps in 20 years time there will finally be charging points in my nearest car park, but it's going to involve the government having to spend a lot of money to get this infrastructure available (the car park belongs to them).

In the UK at least (and many European countries), 0 lbs of coal. The UK has had increasing numbers of days where no coal fired power station has been running at all. Coal is on the way out and will be gone completely within the next 20 years. An average of something like 50% of the UK's power is from low/no CO2 generation (nuclear, wind). The rest is CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine) which is very thermodynamically efficient especially when compared to a petrol engine in a car.

So at least here, you should be thinking of uranium and natual gas per mile, not coal.

He writes with an American accent, so I don't think he's in the UK.

My (Euro model) 2007 Honda Civic uses 5.5L/100km which is >50 Imperial MPG while having a large interior (fold the seats back and it makes a good compact van, it's a hatchback and a lot more space efficient than the US models - I have no idea why Honda doesn't sell the good version of the Civic over there).

If you're going to boil it down to "investing in metals gives you something with intrinsic metals", they don't. The only thing that has true intrinsic value is food and shelter.

No, they meant 1 : 0.461538461538.

Yes.

Big companies are often not at all joined up and often consider different divisions as competitors, not part of the same company. Quite often large companies are internally highly dysfunctional.

For instance, when I worked for IBM some years ago, we needed a display (basically a standalone monitor) for a system we were selling to an Extremely Large Competitor. IBM made just the display we needed itself, but they would only sell it to us - another IBM division - at full retail price, so we ended up using a competitor's display instead.

Good job I live in a small island jurisidiction where the data roaming charges would be ruinous for such a device, or no cellular agreement would be available for such device :-)

Why make these lists? Just put price labels on things like they did before barcodes were widespread. In some small stores, price labels are still used.

A sealed container of petrol (gasoline) is not explosive if it is full or nearly so. The fuel/air mixture will be far too rich to combust. For a sealed container to be explosive, it would need to have a somewhere near 15:1 mixture of air to fuel. We generally don't store fuel like that, it would be very inefficient.

...FTP just needs to die. The two port requirement and worse still, people who don't get it still insisiting on 'active' FTP, is a pain in the backside for firewall admins (we had one vendor insist that passive mode was 'insecure' and active mode was somehow 'secure' but after some browbeating and the threat of the wire brush of enlightenment accepted they should use this new fangled "sftp" which didn't have any of the drawbacks of ftp, passive or active).

FTP's day was done over ten years ago.

Date backward? That's the One True Date Format (ISO format), of which others are inferior (DD-MM-YYYY and worse MM-DD-YYYY). ISO dates will even sort without needing a date specific sorting function.

The thing is this won't be very useful for that kind of thing - far too many false positives.

It's estimated that about 5% of the population is gay. With this thing only having an 81% accuracy rate, this means there will be many more false positives than actual gay people - if you took a room with 100 people in, it would misidentify approximately 19 of the people as the sexual orientation they are not - meaning there would be roughly three times as many people mis-identified as gay than actual gay people. In other words, it's not actually very useful.