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Comment Re:Damn, I'm old (Score 1) 62

I remember building a bunch of Cyrix boxes for in-house use at my second job out of uni. It was an interesting time for x86-compatible processors, it seemed like the x86-compatible ecosystem was going to expand with a whole bunch of manufacturers getting in on it, some with very different approaches (remember Transmeta?). Didn't really work out that way though.

Comment Zipline (Score 5, Interesting) 86

Do Zipline have a patent on their system or something? Otherwise I don't see why everybody doesn't just copy that. Keeping the drone quite high up and then winching the package to the ground avoids several of the issues seen in these videos - the drone stays too high up to blow stuff such as other packages around, also reducing the noise experienced at ground level, and winching the package down until the line goes slack ensures a soft landing. It seems like a totally superior way to do it.

Comment Well... (Score 1) 75

I've noticed a trend on Reddit these days, now when someone doesn't like your comment, they say it's an AI post as a way of dismissing it. It would be kind of handy at those times to be able to say "Ha, no - verified human!" I guess that may not outweigh the downsides though.

Comment Re:Movie (Score 2) 41

The average major movie is a bit longer than that; in many cases I wish they were only 90 minutes, but blockbusters these days are usually well over the 2 hour mark, and in many cases heading to 2 and a half hours. E.g. Avengers: Endgame - 181 minutes, Oppenheimer - 180 minutes, The Dark Knight - 152 minutes. So if they were to tend towards the epic end of the scale, as you'd kind of expect for a Game of Thrones movie, it might be more like three episodes long, almost a third of a season.

Comment Re:How much storage is planned in that? (Score 2) 86

Dunno, but we spent £1.5 billion last year paying for curtailment (i.e. paying wind farms to stop generating because we can't do anything with the power), so I'm guessing the answer is "not enough". 13% of the total potential wind generation was curtailed last year. Eventually I guess grid capacity and storage will catch up, but for the moment, I'm guessing the amount of curtailment is only going to go higher.

Comment Re:This is a MAJOR problem (Score 4, Insightful) 130

There may be no easy solutions, but if the peer-review system worked as intended, a lot more results like this would be picked up before being published rather than after. At the moment, there are few incentives for people to spend their time peer-reviewing others' papers or reproducing others' experiments, and thus there are not enough reviews or time spent reviewing to pick up a lot of errors. Surely it's not beyond the wit of man to find some way to fix that?

Comment Update (Score 3, Informative) 21

Not this time. The rocket failed to land, I saw it on the news ticker hours ago. "An abnormal combustion event occurred during the process, preventing a soft landing on the recovery pad" the report said. "The recovery test failed and the specific cause is still under further analysis and investigation." Of course, LandSpace could still become Chinas first company to land a reusable rocket, but not with this attempt.

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