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Comment Re:Visions of a privacy nightmare (Score 1) 154

the cost of the equipment is not what businesses are paying for in the cloud.

consumers are much different, but there are successful cloud pc services that have pricing oriented to consumers. The entire cloud gaming industry, for instance. Some of them like Shadow encourage and provide for the use of the system as a regular cloud PC. There is a value prop, but it does require a massively great Internet connection, which is where it honestly falls completely apart. Consumer ISP's are nowhere near delivering quality of service sufficient for this product.

Comment Re: Just Bought It? (Score 1) 72

Nonlinear accoustics is a thing; there's not technically an upper limit for the amount of energy you can drive a transducer with though I would assume it would be extremely difficult to couple enough energy through to cause any real damage. I know personally that it can sound quite loud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I also have little confidence this sort of thing is involved here; Occam's razor says it's a big nothing burger so I'm gonna stick with that until someone brings something concrete forward

Comment Re: I thought batteries could only charge, or disc (Score 2) 143

Yeah how much is it gonna cost? BMW already make you buy a subscription just to get "connected charging" where you can see and control your charge session from your phone. Bet you anything if you want V2L/V2H you will have to be paying. I was a very loyal BMW customer until about 10 years ago. It's a total clown show today.

Comment TF are these toasters *doing*? (Score 1) 53

Every time they talk about this damn thing it's a different size and works by a different mechanism. Explanations given vary from this magnetic field mumbo jumbo to essentially just being a near perfect dead reckoning integrator.

Anyone have links to any actual papers or journalism on the subject that hasnt been oversimplified to the point where it is just nonsense?

Comment Brute force approach (Score 1) 154

It's clear the brute force approach works and is sometimes the best way to advance. Once you see the path to getting the job done, take it. I see projects like ITER and ChatGPT4 in this category. Can you learn to do these things more efficiently given a few extra years of R&D? Obviously. But you are also a few years behind, and you have probably spent a lot of effort prematurely optimizing.

Comment The color of LEDs (Score 5, Informative) 124

Gas tube signs have a very unique spectral emissions that makes them appear the way they do. Very little effort has been put into LED lighting to properly mimic the appealing spectral emission of incandescent filtered or gas tube colored lighting.

Almost exclusively phosphor coatings have been tuned to cause blue and near UV leds to emit (sort of) broad spectrum white light and nothing more, though it would certainly be possible to develop a phosphor that could more closely approxmiate neon, for instance.

As for direct emission, red green and blue LEDs are mostly now only available at certain wavelengths for tricolor mixing applications. Due to economies of scale, LEDs at other visible wavelengths are extremely underdeveloped technology.

Comment Re:Copper is good enough... really. (Score 1) 66

You are very enthusiastic, but you have forgotten about critical current. The more current you put down a superconductor, the higher the magnetic flux. At a certain level, the magnetism will disrupt the material's ability to form cooper pairs. In most superconducting materials the critical current is quite low, which is why things like MRI magnets and ITER magnets have historically needed to be very very big. Only very recent advancements in state of the art superconductors like REBCO tapes are finally achieving critical currents that touch the lower end of what is needed for grid-scale transmission. My point is this isn't so clear cut; the materials and systems still need lots of additional development to become broadly useful in these applications.

Comment Goldfish brain (Score 1) 278

If you have access to be able to call up Trump, you call him and tell him what you want. You call him as much as he will talk to you. You'd be absolutely stupid not to do it. The guy has the memory of a goldfish; if you have talked to him in the last day, you are his whole world. After a week, he doesn't even know who you are.

Comment Your payment processor is not a bank! Surprise! (Score 4, Insightful) 14

I cannot imagine a more business destroying move than to be a payment processor that collects money from the customer and stiffs the vendor.

It's not even possible to do this in the current us regulatory environment unless your business is doing some horribly shady shit like comingling customer funds with operating accounts.

Imagine if one day Visa just said, oh we are gonna keep the funds from these 750 million daily transactions to ourselves for 3+ months.

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