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Comment A silly idea (Score 1) 243

Besides the mentioned error in estimated reserve energy capacity:

Back in the days of carbon-zinc batteries, you could safely run them down to "near-dead" (~0.6v) and they would keep their physical integrity, for up to a few months perhaps, before the zinc outer casing ate through and exposed the corrosive electrolyte paste to the insides of your hapless electronic device.

If you do that with an alkaline battery, they tend to start leaking a corrosive liquid much more quickly, in days to weeks. And their liquid leakage gets everywhere and is more damaging.

This "Batterizer" idea isn't being promoted by someone who understands battery physics.

Comment Same setup, no issues (Score 1) 405

Comcast business subscriber here and have what appears to be a very similar config to yours. No problems with mail, checked mxtoolbox anyway and all is green. As many others have said, it's probably something your network did. I've had folks get into mine over the years and cause similar problems for me.

Comment Re:Is there at least some kind of vault storage (Score 1) 197

The FDA and other regulating bodies have meticulous requirements for the archival of all medical device records, software, design history files, test reports, etc. Compliance with these requirements is one of their favorite things to audit, and medical firms typically have an entire document control department on hand to look after these things. Implantables have archiving requirements which can exceed 100 years.

Comment Re:The code is going to do you a whole lot of good (Score 2, Insightful) 197

^THIS

Implantable pacing devices, cardioverters, and pumps (life-sustaining devices) depend on complex custom hardware designs as their platform, and that hardware is *highly* interactive with the software. Many of these devices can only achieve their miraculous longevities on a primary cell by deferring functions to hardware. If you don't have access to the information re: the hardware, the code itself might as well be inscriptions in Atlantean glyphs. You'd have to bust trade-secret protection to get a public viewing of everything needed to review the code, because you'd have to see, *everything*.

Comment Just having the source wouldn't help you much (Score 1) 247

Implantable pulse generator firmware isn't written for a standardized platform. These devices all contain highly customized hardware, very complex ASIC's with lots of hardware-assisted power savings functions, sleep timers, bidirectional control registers, etc. and the designs vary greatly from model to model, company to company. Without at least a working understanding of this hardware you will only have a cursory and likely somewhat inaccurate view of what's really going on inside an IPG just from looking at the source code. I'm quite familiar with this, I design automated test systems and test code to validate and perform quality test on IPG's!

Space

Is a Laser Data Link 1.5 Million Kilometers Feasible? 304

An anonymous reader writes "On the Canary Islands last week, a team from Oerlikon Space demonstrated the feasibility of a laser link across a distance of 1.5 million kilometers for the first time ever. In the future, laser links like this one will be able to transmit data across huge distances through the universe far more rapidly and efficiently than is possible using conventional radio links today."
Power

Pentagon Urges Space-Based Solar Power 552

eldavojohn writes "The Pentagon issued a report indicating that space-based solar power 'has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power to provide an essentially inexhaustible supply of clean energy.' The report, from the Pentagon's National Security Space Office, calls for funding the development of space-based solar power culminating in 'a platform in geosynchronous orbit bigger than the international space station and capable of beaming 5-10 megawatts of power to a receiving station on the ground.' The Pentagon's interest in such an effort stems from the need to acquire energy on the battlefield, which today often comes at a painful premium."

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