Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Meaningless numbers (Score 1) 114

How do they get the figure 621 miles without knowing what the rest of the car is? How do they get 7 minutes without knowing what the rest of the car is? Depends on a large number of factors like drag coefficient, weight, regen, rolling resistance, motors / power draw, BMS, wiring / bus bars, thermal management etc.

And clearly one figure refers to an NMC battery where energy density is better but it costs more and you do NOT want to frequently charge it up to 100%. And the other refers to a LFP battery where the energy density is lower but can be charged to 100% and the battery is cheaper.

But all the same, it's clear that battery tech is improving all the time. Charging networks need to catch up with it.

Comment Re:Took You Long Enough (Score 2) 92

I honestly don't even understand what the point of your argument. I could totally kill somebody with a butter knife but the chances of my success are FAR less than if I had a bowie knife and tried the same.

UK law allows fixed blade carry with a "good reason" as a defence but that's the key word. A chef with a roll of knives on his way to work is a good reason. A sailor carrying a sheath knife is a good reason. A guy out camping is a good reason. Even so cops could totally hold and charge you all the same if they think you're bluffing and you might have to prove it in front of a judge. Fortunately cops exercise common sense and judgement, but good luck with your hypothetical.

UK knife law also requires folding blades to be less than 3 inches. It limits their utility to be used commit assaults and on the consequences of the assault. The reasons for this are obvious.

Comment Out of all the AI startups (Score 1, Interesting) 28

Anthropic is the one that seems to deliver something more useful than just a lame chatbot. I will not be surprised when the bubble bursts and herd is thinned that that it will be the likes of Grok and OpenAI that die first - they're useless outside of themselves and neither has other products & services that could cushion the cash cost required to sustain them.

Comment Re:Burying the lede (Score 1) 92

In Ireland people get a PPSN (like an SSN) when the birth is registered. The PPSN isn't frequently needed but it might be asked for when registering the kid for a school, applying for a passport, applying for benefits on their behalf

In the UK, people get a national insurance number at the age of 16 for tracking tax / pension contributions & social security payments. I assume the measure is intended to issue the number at birth for similar reasons.

Comment Absurd (Score 1) 139

Anyone who knows 3d printers would recognize the sheer absurdity of suggesting a printer infer it is making a part for a gun. By the time a model reaches a printer it has been sliced and turned into GCODE from hundreds of parameters and there is NO WAY that any printer could tell what the hell it is printing. Nor could the software which does the slicing, since parts could be oriented any way making it extremely hard to recognize a part. And even if there was a database to search against matching shapes in 3d space is hard. And even if there was some code which attempted to align and check a part it could be easily circumvented - wipe the DB, alter the source code, negate the test, alter the part etc.

If states want to ban ghost guns then make the penalties for doing it so severe that it discourages people doing it. And start improving ways that ghost guns can be forensically matched back to the printers that made them so that if someone was suspected of making parts, that it could be proven in court.

Comment Re:Getting out my popcorn (Score 1) 91

Metaverse was such a predictable failure that there is no way anyone with a creative or gaming head on their body would have shat out what Meta produced. It is the product of market studies, and demographics, and committees with final say by Zuckerberg. Something so boring, and without reason to exist, that people who Horizons rarely ever went back. They didn't even need to spend billions to know it was a terrible idea because Sony had already proven the point with Playstation Home which was arguably better than Horizons but still boring and pointless.

If Meta had instead chosen to make a fantasy RPG where people can make interesting characters and go out into the world and progress, explore etc then it would have had way more success. Or a Battle Royale style game. Or a bunch of well formed leisure pursuits - tennis, chess, sailing, arcade shooters, racing, pinball etc. Or all of the above over time. But they didn't. It was complete intellectual bankruptcy and lack of imagination.

Slashdot Top Deals

I am here by the will of the people and I won't leave until I get my raincoat back. - a slogan of the anarchists in Richard Kadrey's "Metrophage"

Working...