and the keyboard default layout will never change because at this stage almost everyone in the (developed, at least) world uses a keyboard in that layout.

Dream on, Sunshine.

You describe your frustrations with switching between US and UK layouts. Well, I have that fun, because I'm a Brit and the client's laptop includes software (which I don't use, but "meh") which requires a US-ian layout. But, of course, the physical key caps are laid out in the Dutch pattern (about as different from UK and US as they are from each other. But I've got a Russian keyboard layout installed, for when I'm chatting to the wife from the other side of the world. Three month's ago the trainee (uses the machine on night shift) had German installed because she's German. The partner representatives - who also use the machine - had added Arabic and Turkish layouts. And the next job, we'll have Francophones along, so they'll probably go AZERTY too.

I doubt that a USian or British QWERTY layout is even a majority, worldwide.

Are you installing it tomorrow, or opening your veins?

Or both?

Do you think that is what stops us from drilling deeper? I always thought that the biggest problem was the drill strings. After all, a working bit only gets above 150 degrees (Centigrade, of course) if you've fucked your pumps and have a crack head on the brake.

Core catchers? As in the jamming sleeve that stops your core from sliding out of the bottom of the core barrel, after you've cut it?

I've seen dozens of them when I've been catching core (and I just had the lovely news that I'll probably be catching my next series of cores in breathing apparatus. Oh joy!), but I've never seen one that had significant signs of heat damage.

What sort of coring do you do that burns out catchers?

It is Qi so most will work it's pretty much the winner.

Care to back that claim up with some stats?

I've never seen any wireless charging technology in the wild, so I've literally no idea which one of the standards is likely to be the one that wins. From wiki-ing, I get that there are at least Qi,

Open Dots, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Open Dots Alliance
PMA / Powermat, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Power Matters Alliance
Rezence, a competing wireless power standard promoted by the Alliance for Wireless Power
WiPower

All of which leads me to the inevitable XKCD.

I've chosen VL-bus over PCI ; SCSI over IDE ; parallel port over USB (1.0), I dodged the HD-DVD versus Blu-Ray question by realising that neither offered any real (to me) use case. I see no reason at all to dive into another standards war until all bar one of the competing standards are dead on the field of battle.

Just checking if my current phone has a wireless charge capability - it's that invisible a technology ... well, that's a surprise - my phone (Samsung, by coincidence) actually does have an official Qi-charging alternative back cover (or flip case). That's vaguely interesting. Since I'm travelling over the next few days for business, I'll see if I can actually spot the charging places. See if they're common enough to actually be a useful discriminator (i.e. let's coffee there not here, because there has Qi pads available and here doesn't.

It's the same problem as those people who are prescribed antibiotics and don't finish their full course: that's how you get antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Even with a population composed entirely of people who take the full antibiotic course, you'd still develop bacterial resistance, but you'd do it a lot slower. Unless your antibiotic dose is so high that you kill every single solitary one of the bacteria in your body, then the antibiotic will change the structure of the bacterial population by killing off the most susceptible strains first. Since most antibiotics have significant side effects at high doses (trashing gut bacterial populations, skin bacteria, sometimes out right toxicity to humans), the dosage is set at a level that will provide sufficient effect without excessive side effects. That dosage information one of the significant outputs from later stages of human testing.

Fisher and Haldane, and later Hamilton, set up the neo-Darwinian synthesis understanding of evolution with significant amounts of statistics because evolution is a thing that happens to populations, not individuals. You really do need to keep awareness of the underlying population statistics when you're thinking about evolution.

And my Civic coupe (gas) was $13k after all taxes and licensing were paid, and for my style of driving (>90% highway, most trips 40+ miles) I get nearly equivalent fuel mileage (35-42mpg). On top of that, it's WAY more fun than driving a Prius, I can work on it myself, and it'll probably go at least 400k miles before I decide to replace it, and though I may have to replace the battery a couple times, I'll never have to replace the entire battery pack.

So yeah, EVs cost significantly more than gas cars.

More and more, as the hipster commies push their $15/hr minimum wage agenda, these stores will go away and you'll have to get to the suburbs to get your groceries. Have fun doing that on your bicycle.

SPARC and POWER still have a place. There are some computing tasks that can't really be split up among multiple nodes, so they still require gigantic CPU requirements. Usually this is related to legacy databases which cost less to keep on the legacy architecture than spend the time to try to move it to PC clusters.

Another use for SPARC and POWER (and to a lesser extent, ARM) are security applications. In theory (and this is theory, mind you), if another F0 0F bug is found on the x86 platform, perhaps giving attackers remote access to ring 0, having multiple architectures will help mitigate the effects of it.

Of course, with SPARC and POWER, virtualization is an integral component of both platforms, and for some tasks, it just might be the case that slicing off a lot of LPARS and zones may be cheaper than buying a lot of PCs and using a VMWare cluster, due to the license fees involved.

I don't see why accidentally ending up in America because transport messed up should be funny. First day's flight was delayed by about 19 hours by snow. Next airport I missed my connection (unsurprisingly) and the office booked me to continue home through America. Had to book one of those ESTER things online in the half-hour between getting the flight details and having to get through the passport control (did the airport have wired network sockets? did they fuck - had to work out how to set up wifi on the laptop!), then got the third degree from the woman on the passports because I was travelling with my work gear and she thought I was an illegal immigrant or something. Totally stupid. Almost caused me another day sweating into the same clothes.

Very un-funny experience.

Light rail does make sense, but the problem (especially here in the US) is getting right of way and having it be placed where it is the must usable. For example, Austin has light rail proposed every few years... but it would only connects the most affluent communities to each other, doing no benefit where it is truly needed. The places where it could do the most good to alleviate congestion, it never gets proposed, just because there are not the lobbyists to drive it forward.

Depends on area. Here in Austin where tenants actually are forced to bid for their rent price when their lease expires, just having an apartment for under $2000/month is a nice thing.

Until the economy tanks and apartments are extremely desperate to find renters, I really don't see EV charging stations going mainstream. Some "luxury" apartments, sure... it is a good way to have a reason to raise rent. However, there just isn't any incentive in this economy (which belongs to the landlord, especially with mortgages being so hard to come by for most people) for anything to be added to an apartment except more fees.

At the other end, there are Pacific Pride cardlock stations that are a set of pumps and card readers, and nothing else. One pulls up, swipes the card, fills up, and heads out. No attendant on duty. The advantage of these places is that you don't have to wait in line at a pump while someone goes in and grabs lunch.

I can see this being useful for a no-frills way of charging or swapping batteries, where someone wants to be on the road, and not pissing away time in line waiting for someone to stop looking at their phone long enough to pay for their bag of Doritos and their 160 ounce soft drink.

That is not a DC air conditioner. Note that it comes with a 2kw inverter. It's just a regular 220V AC air conditioner. Also, that whole package is sketchy. The stated BTUs don't match throughout the page (title and description says one thing, specs say another). It comes with 4 solar panels, but there are absolutely no specs on them - not even the wattage. Anyway, that package is solar panels, batteries, huge inverter and a regular air conditioner. The efficiency would have to be very low.

before "assuming" fuck no - they're probably from the USA.

Normally a safe assumption on here. Not true in this case though. Been to America twice - once for a fortnight holiday, and once accidentally because of travel problems. Might go back, if someone pays my fees.