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Comment Re:A random thought (Score 4, Informative) 65

No. Syringes and sample bottles are commodity equipment and are produced in high volume injection molding equipment. It's extremely cost sensitive unless there's a reason to use something else. It's especially important since most are intended to be single use.

PEEK and PAEK are expensive and extremely hard to form (both require much higher temperature than standard injection molding machines are capable of producing; they also tend to chew up the molds faster). Syringes will mostly be made of PP, PE or rarely out of glass, some kind of elastomer for the seal and some metal (most likely 300 series stainless steel, for the needle, depending on if it's required). Sample bottles will almost always be PP, PE or glass.

The elastomer for the seal is the tricky part. The elastomer for the seal COULD be Viton, which is fluorinated but it's more expensive and hence unlikely to be used unless necessary. Most syringes that do use Viton use Viton O-rings; which is a considerably more expensive way to build a syringe. The vast majority of syringes today use what's called a Themoplastic Elastomer or TPE. A TPE is a plastic that has some flexibility. Usually the performance isn't quite as good as a true elastomer, but the advantage is that it can be overmolded onto the piston. Overmolding is a technique where plastic is injection molded over a preexisting part. The part could be plastic or metal. It could be the same material (for example a part all in PP in two separate colors) or a different material (such as a TPE seal over a PP piston). The finished part is a single composite part that can be made to good tolerances in high volumes, cheaply.

In something like 99.99% of medical applications, the syringe body will be PP, the needle will be some kind of Stainless steel, and the seal will be a TPE. The sample collection jar (and lid) will be PP. No fluorinated materials in the needle. But it can be (and should be) qualified as part of the testing procedure.

Comment Re:Travelling away from home (Score 1) 117

Sharing your password with friends who don’t even live with you is an abuse.

How so? They used to actively promote sharing passwords. "Love is sharing a password."

Changing your mind, then getting uppity at your customers for consistently giving them less and less for consistently increasing fees is abusive. Using the service in the manner they advertised is not.

Luckily, when Netflix finally folds, nothing of value will be lost. They're burning out all the good will and positive memories they created over the last 20 something years.

Comment Re:Not the MAX (Score 2) 123

United Airline 585. USAir 427. Eastwind Airline 517 had the same issue but the crew was able to recover. All 3 were hydraulic issues on 737s that led to a loss of control without redundancy. And there were several other cases where this was suspected to have occurred.

All the 737 MAX issues were due to an undocumented function, that was misrepresented to the FAA, and had a single point of failure (lack of redundant angle of attack sensors).

If you want a non-737 example, Alaska Airline Flight 261 is a good one. Again, control failure.

Let's wait until the CAAC investigators issue their findings before rushing to judgement.

Comment A lot of similarities to USA-193 (Score 1) 176

I see a lot of similarities to the anti-satellite incident with USA-193. Both it and Kosmos 1408 were spy satellites, and were obviously carrying sensitive equipment. In USA-193's case, the US government claimed it was shot down to to worries about the onboard hydrazine tanks.

I suspect Kosmos 1408 ran out of fuel early, and was running out of electrical power, making it harder to track later, so the Russians decided to shoot it down before it crashed down to earth like Kosmos 954, another reconnaissance satellite of the same era that spread radioactive debris over northern Canada.

Comment Re:I've been doing this 30 years, AMA (Score 1) 84

Largely a lack of truck drivers. It's yet another field with high stress, high workloads and is notoriously severely underpaid. If you get an accident (no matter who's at fault) in your first few years, your career is basically over (the big trucking companies are basically cartels). It's been very difficult to train new CDL drivers up, and not cheap. Add in being away from home for months on end, and it's no wonder it isn't so popular anymore.

Comment Re:Oh, there were so many (Score 2) 101

I came here to say the Timex Sinclair 1000. Same computer as a ZX81 (and NTSC for the US market), but an even worse keyboard. I haven't touched one in decades, and all I remember is how bad it was to type on (and you had to retype programs every time, my tape drive was busted).

Comment Re:But of course... use cautiously. (Score 1) 47

Lion is the last supported version for a 1,1 Mac Pro or a 2,1 (or earlier) Xserve. So if you want to bring back some legacy hardware, you're going to need them. Even if you upgrade, you usually need Lion as a starting place. During the lockdown, I built up an old Mac Pro1,1 to be the best it could be. Getting a copy of Lion was the hardest part.

Comment Re:Finally, some sane energy policy (Score 1) 241

Wind doesn't blow all the time. And wind isn't able to throttle up to meet increased load (unless you massively overbuild wind farms... then subsidize the heck out of them; several orders of magnitude more than what the USGov currently does for fossil fuels). There are ways around this (ex. pumping water uphill, then flowing it downwards through an impeller connected to a generator... or you could use batteries if you want lower efficiencies), but they have significant costs associated with doing that. Also, wind tends to blow more consistently at night, when demand is typically lowest; you don't need as much power for AC at night as you do during the day (It's windier during the day, but the wind tends to shift around more, making it less useful for power generation). Also, because of the loading variability, wind turbines tend to have extremely high maintenance requirements. Plus, the windiest spots (where the power is generated) aren't typically close to where it's used.

Hydro could do it all, but there are almost always heavy political costs for doing hydro, even compared to nuclear; and you can only do it near a river that isn't too heavily populated. Geothermal only works well in a few places on earth (ex. Iceland). Solar typically isn't very efficient, at least from a bang for the buck perspective, and panels aren't very environmentally friendly to make. Future improvements in solar towers could change this, and more research should be done into solar driven Stirling engines; but neither is there yet.

Which leaves a need to include something with more flexibility into the power mix. Right now, it's either fossil fuels (oil, coal, NG) or nuclear. Between the two, nuclear is cleaner (taking into account the nuclear waste issue, production cycles and mining related issues). Nuclear could be much, much cleaner if reprocessing were taken more seriously.

Comment I don't think I would either (Score 5, Interesting) 349

If I was shown the figure from the article, I don't think I'd get that it's log scale; at least at first glance. Usually, I look for logarithmic grid lines. Without them, it doesn't exactly jump out at you. And the title of the graph is probably the worst place to put relevant information.

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