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Comment Re:How is this a remotely useful product? (Score 1) 139

Why do you need it as warm as 60F when you're out of the house? Unless you're drying clothes, the only reason for heating while you're out is to avoid frost damage.

Even when I'm at home, I don't want my house to be a constant temperature. I want the living room to be a nice temperature between 6pm and 11pm and frost-protected the rest of the time, when nobody's there. I want the bedroom to be cold most of the time, warming up a bit ready for bedtime, cooling down again while I'm asleep, getting toasty warm for getting up time, then cold while I'm away.

And I want different schedules at weekends.

Comment Re:Themostat (Score 1) 139

I live in the UK, where most houses central heating works on the KISS principle: there is one mechanical thermostat in the hallway. That thermostat switches on/off your boiler and pump, which sends hot water around a loop through every radiator in the house.

It sucks.

It sucks a little less if you manage to "balance" your radiators by adjusting their valves just-so, so that the first radiator in the loop doesn't get all the heat. Otherwise you get situations where your spare bedroom is like a sauna, your living room barely gets any heat, and the hallway where the thermostat is never warms up. Or perhaps the radiator in the hallway gets all the heat first, so the thermometer trips off before any other room warms up. Getting this right is voodoo.

It sucks a little less if you have Thermostatic Radiator Valves on each radiator. These control flow into each radiator individually, so you can set the temperature you want for each room. But one radiator must have no TRV, otherwise it's possible to damage the boiler when it tries to pump against a closed system. So you get situations where the TRV-less radiator is blasting out unwanted heat; or where the main thermostat clicks off, so the boiler isn't on, while rooms are cold. So it still sucks.

All I want is a system where every radiator has a TRV, and the boiler knows to run unless every TRV says it's warm enough. Should be simple. Can't seem to get them. The closest I've found is a range of WiFi TRVs that rely on your boiler detecting that returning water is no cooler than outbound water, and your system having a safety circuit to avoid excess pressure when all the valves are closed. I don't think that's standard.

But if I were to be greedy, I'd also want to be able to set schedules for individual rooms. And hey, why not have stuff like, "when my phone notices I'm leaving the office, turn on the home heating"?

Comment Re:OK, I'll bite (Score 1) 190

JS is like Perl. You *can* write clean code in Perl. You *can* write clean code in Javascript.

But both languages made it very easy to write a huge mess if you don't know what you're doing.

Crockford et al have come up with a bunch of nice conventions which, if you follow them, facilitate clean JS code. But browsers don't enforce those conventions; most programmers don't get exposed to them, and they end up writing horrible code.

There's a sweet spot between a language being too restrictive, and being so loose that it steers you into writing badly structured code. JS is too far into the loose side.

But I agree, with discipline, or the right tools, you can write great JS.

Comment What does "fail" mean? What does "succeed" mean? (Score 1) 537

We have no idea what Satoshi's success criteria were. so how can Bitcoin be a failure?

Perhaps the aim was for Bitcoin to be routinely used by almost everyone in the world -- in which case, yes, it'll probably fail, but that would have been an outrageous target.
Perhaps the aim was for it to become useful to a few thousand niche users -- in which case it's already a success.
Perhaps the aim was just to see what happens -- in which case it can't fail.

Bitcoin is what it is -- and it's interesting to watch.

Comment I'd use it... (Score 2) 54

... if I worked from home or had a private office.

As it is, in an open-plan office, I don't want to disturb my colleagues, or feed them a constant stream of what I'm searching for.

However, I've only just started using voice on my Nexus 4. I'd simply assumed it wouldn't work well enough, but I gave it a go when I wanted to send a text in a hurry -- and was astonished to find that it *faultlessly* transcribed "I'm on my way. If I'm not there in ten minutes avenge my death", spoken at full speed.

So since then I've checked out the full range of voice instructions, and plenty of them are useful.

Comment Re:But what about my trash (Score 1) 470

Well, I don't know about you, but I hardly need bags for general waste any more.

All food waste either goes into my own compost, or into the green wheelie bin for composting by the council -- my council now accepts meat and cooked leftovers.

Paper, cardboard, metal, glass and plastic packaging goes in a recycling box for kerbside collection.

That leaves a very small amount of other waste, to go in the grey wheelie bin. It's seldom a quarter-full when the fortnightly collection day comes. There's just no need for bags, because it's all dry.

If you feel you need trash bags, you should pay for them. You can either pay for carrier bags, which you then re-use as trash bags, or (cheaper) buy a roll of actual trash bags.

Comment Re:UAV's vulnerable to directed-energy weapons? (Score 5, Insightful) 153

Beautifully put, and correct.

However:

New Zealand security researcher Stuart MacIntosh told delegates at the Kiwicon 7 conference in Wellington that some vulnerable drone technology designed in the hobby space had trickled down into use by police and commercial operators.

Which makes it notable. Before you use a consumer-oriented item for more serious use, you need to evaluate its fitness for purpose.

Of course, you might go ahead and use it anyway - that's what risk assessment is all about.

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