It's the dielectric that needs to be an insulator ; these are electrode materials, which you want to be good conductors.

Asbestos is just silicate rock. Structure makes a difference..

Graphene is just a sheet of carbon, but it's structure gives it novel properties - it wouldn't be a super-material if it didn't, just because it's all cool and awesome doesn't mean it's also inert and harmless.

There's another approach to this, but it's gone a bit quiet ; they use a novel dielecric and claim that they can get incredibly high voltages out of it which makes for high energy storage.

EEStor

Since the dielectric is one part and the electrode another, I wonder what kind of advantages you'd get from combining the two? (Not sure if hemp electrodes would be compatible with their manufacturing process which uses metal foils as electrodes at the moment, as per traditional capaciptors).

It is. And the license explicitly permits it. Any kind of restriction on it's use and it's not Free Software.

> Who's going to hack your fridge?

If your fridge is tied into your grocery shopping (which would seem to be a major reason to have a smart fridge... really, a dumb fridge is just fine at turning the compressor on and off), then you might be able to hack it and buy neat stuff and get it delivered to a drop location (even the owners own driveway ... "Yeah, I'll be out, drop it behind the paper recycling bin...").

Yeah, they really are more short sighted, they only want *this* sale, which is the reason they cut the quality of things.

Of course, people feed this tendency by buying crappy products. Which sadly, makes the good quality products even more expensive because they can't benefit from the same economies of scale.

Keyboards, for example. When PCs cost $2000 (and $2000 meant something), $40 on a keyboard was barely noticeable.

Now the standard keyboard cost $5 and it shows. Issuing these keyboards to people expected to use a computer professionally is in my opinion, almost criminal, as they contribute to RSI and finger joint arthritis. A decent keyboard now costs even less than it did back then (in adjusted dollars) but they still ship the crap ones because they have to meet that price point.

It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times.

Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.

That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.

Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.

Not for much longer, after the slimy corporate toady bastard Conservative party wankers we have in power executed laws that absolve the state of their responsibility to provide healthcare and break up our NHS (our public property, bought and paid for by our taxes) for the purchase of their moneyed mates, so they can get some of the crumbs from their table.

The voice reco right now uploads your voice sample to Google's server farm where they apply the very best processing they can to it. And it still sucks balls.

It's become clear that it's going to take some kind of revolutionary breakthrough to make voice recognition actually good.

I compose my thoughts better when usnig a keyboard than when speaking as well. I can pause for thought and and change things.

I like the swipe functionality that comes with the standard Google keyboard now, but even that isn't perfect.

"Funny" doesn't count towards your karma score, so some people like to reward otherwise funny posts with ratings that do grant karma.

I would really have liked a PalmOS cart for my Nintendo DS ; the form factor would have made it an awesome little organizer, it had a touch screen, etc, and the CPU power would probably have been good enough to run the original OS ROMs in an emu.

There were rumours of it happening (maybe I even started them by discussing it on BBs...) but alas, it never came to be.

One thing I really liked about the PalmOS stuff, which other software suites took ages to catch up with, was the way they all integrated. Some of the things that make me go "Oh, cool!" in Android apps now are the sort of things that PalmOS had 16 years ago.

Seems to be working just fine...

Syphilis does better, as a disease, than Ebola for the same reasons you win at Pandemic-type games - the slow progression, the low-profile.

Ebola doesn't spread nearly as much, because it's non-airborne and rapidly fatal to a large number of people who contract it. This is why it stays confined to the butt-end of civilization.

Syphilis does more harm overall because it has numbers in it's favour.

People tend to focus more on Ebola because of the high mortaility rate. It has a couple of pretty horrible "What if?"s - principally, what if it goes airborne? I'm not sure a virus with such a high mortaility rate that's been around so long would actually ever go airborne though - from an evolutionary perspective it's a terrible combination.

A virus with high mortaility and rapid spread will rapidly kill all susceptible individuals within it's catchment area, so it's likely that such things have never really gotten off the evolutionary drawing board. The last thing that came close was the Spanish Flu, which was a more fatal mutation of a fairly innocuous airborne pathogen, rather than a more mobile mutation of something unpleasantly fatal like Ebola.

Of course, the above is true of a pre-air-travel world, because rapid spread would kill off everything in the travel radius - because the travel radius was dictated by walking pace, or driving pace... or the speed of ocean liners. In this day and age, it would be much easier for such a thing to have a serious impact.

He is a fuckwit that raises the point ; what if this is just a dastardly plan to get public orgs to pay for an upgrade to Office 2013? It could be regarded as the low-risk option - and lower versions do not support ODF 1.2.

More like ODF is readable without having to buy software. Software that will read ODF is available for free - and without installation either, since you can upload files to a web renderer now.

The theory being that requiring people to purchase software from a particular vendor disenfranchises those that cannot afford it and those that choose not to do business with that vendor.

Yeah, this is because Office reuses so much of Windows, not just limited to basic API calls to get files and use control widgets and such, but rendering of fonts, etc.

LibreOffice has a much better chance of consistent document rendering on multiple platforms.

The Cabinet Office announcement does make a distinction between documents for collaboration and those for viewing ; PDF/A and HTML should at least have a reasonably consistent rendering (depending on how fancy you get with stylesheets in the case of HTML - IE, is of course, still a total arsebasket in terms of compatibility).