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Comment Re:There isn't any land (Score -1, Troll) 99

We needed to stop it in America in 2024 by electing Kamala Harris but we didn't.

Yeah but she had a stupid laugh. I mean she wasn't found by a court of law to be a rapist or racist. And she wasn't using the system to massively enrich herself. And she wasn't both ancient and going senile. And she wasn't going to appoint such incompetent people that Hillary's emailed paled in comparison.

But her laugh. Also Benghazi for some reason. And maybe pizza or whatever.

-1 Troll, here I come!

Comment Re:200 million angry, single disaffected young men (Score 2) 99

It cares about it's citizens. Except the ones who criticise Xi. Or the ones living somewhere where it's convent to pollute. Or the ones who have the wrong religion. Or the ones it's using for slave labour. Or the ones it's actually committing genocide against.

Sure, "most" might be happy with that but most Brits were pretty happy with going around the world, invading places and stealing their shit.

Comment Re:Read the Text (Score 1) 89

"Things hooked in parallel (Figure 1.1) have the same voltage across them."

Ah you mean the entire premise of the OP's question?

So no the source of the EMF is not shown but it is clearly there as the text underneath states. Thank you for proving my point.

At this point I have to wonder if you know how capacitors work. If those two floating wires are unconnected to an EMF, the two capacitors will still have the same voltage across them, due to whatever charge/energy is stored in them.

You don't need an external EMF to have a voltage across them.

And in fact it'll be behaving like one capacitor with the sum of capacitance in that regard.

In fact it's really easy to imagine using switches to convert a parallel circuit to a series circuit.

No shit, sherlock. But I'm not talking about switched capacitor filters or supplies or Marx generators or anything like that, but something much, much simpler.

You have a battery. Connect it to a resistor, then that to a capacitor then back to the battery. R1 and C1 are in series. A basic RC circuit. Now connect another capacitor in parallel with C1. You now have a pair of parallel capacitors, in a way we both (I assume, who knows) understand.

Now replace the resistor with a switch. Are those capacitors still in parallel?

User Journal

Journal Journal: Antiques being melted down 1

A restoration expert in Egypt has been arrested for stealing a 3,000 year old bracelet and selling it purely for the gold content, with the bracelet then melted down with other jewellery. Obviously, this sort of artefact CANNOT be replaced. Ever. And any and all scientific value it may have held has now been lost forever. It is almost certain that this is not the first such artefact destroyed.

Comment Re:Ha ... well ... (Score 1) 239

In the UK, which (I think that's like consumer reports in the US) has basic high performing models for £30, so 40 bucks?

With that said, it'll get near daily use and probably last a decade. Even at $200, that's 2c per slice toasted. Though apparently often the expensive toasters aren't that good.

Comment Re:Ideal Capacitors not the Problem (Score 1) 89

The literal definition of a parallel circuit is one where the circuit divides and the current is split between two components - look it up.

You know I actually reached behind me and grabbed Horowitz & Hill off the shelf just because.

Looks like someone has h4x0rized it so you can look too:

https://kolegite.com/EE_librar...

Page 2, Figure 1.1, "parallel connection". See the lack of an EMF in that diagram?

When the OP said "capacitors in parallel", that's exactly what he means. Those wires on the left and right? They're not connected to anything. They can be sure, by implication, but need not be. They're just floating there in diagrammatic or real space.

If there is not more than one path for the current the circuit is not parallel.

OKey dokey, since you keep dodging this question I'll ask again. I'm beginning to suspect you're dodging because you don't have a good answer that also is consistent with your definition.

So take two capacitors connected in parallel, yeah with one end connected to + on your battery the other end connected to -. Cut the wire to +. Are they no longer in parallel? What if you remove the wire completely? Now replace the cut wire with a switch. Turn it on. Turn it off. Do they change from parallel to undefined as you flip the switch?

This is not a physics vs. engineering definition, it is THE definition of what parallel means.

So you say, but that sounds like a definition with holes in. Somehow I've got this far in life without ever having a super precise, pedantic definition that fails when you flip a switch.

Comment Re:I have tried to like GNOME. (Score 1) 22

WTF is wrong with UI designers these days? I have my fair share of 'get off my lawn' moments, but I really don't think my hatred for new UI paradigms falls into that category. Designers today seem to have no familiarity with the 'form follows function' concept.

My guess would be that it's kind of reached if not an optimum, a deep local minimum. A huge amount of the awkwardness of early GUIs has been thoroughly hammered out, and the WIMP idea has generally settled into a number of core interaction mechanisms, but with a lot of similarities. The problem is that most of the big variations have been done, and we've kept the ones that worked.

But the only way for a designer to do something to make their mark or stand out is to do a big variation. Trouble is there's not a lot of options left for big changes that improve things.

Also, see Zawinski's CADT: people in their zeal for newness forget all the very hard won lessons of the past. Like GNOME bringing back bits of MDI. MDI was an interesting, but ultimately (IMO) failed experiment. One might argue tabbed interfaces are a remenant of MDI, but in firefox, I can make multiple toplevel windows and move tabs between them, which is somewhat outside of the scope of MDI. I suspect the GNOME people never lived in the Win 3.11 era where MDI was somewhat popular, so never got past the stage of "hey this is cool grouped things move together" to see how that can fundamentally defeat the point of windowing in the first place.

Comment Re:That's right (Score 1) 53

As far as I know most any adult mammal loses their taste for any kind of milk or dairy upon becoming an adult. It's an anomaly among European humans to tolerate lactose into adulthood, an artifact of living in a cold European climate where long winters left adults without a source of vital vitamin D but the milk extracted from cattle.

Kiiinda but more likely it was also a good source of calories. Cows can eat stored, human inedible food such as hay and make useful calories (for humans) out of it. Plus cheese can be stored for long periods of time without spoiling.

Eating eggs is also an artifact of domesticating animals for food. Do lions eat eggs? I know raccoons do, but they are vile creature

Your personal hangups are completely irrelevant here. Many many animals eat eggs.

I cry when I see raccoon roadkill as I didn't have the chance to run them over.

You sound like a psychopath,

I remember hearing something about how many potatoes the typical Irish farmer ate in a day before the potato famine put an end to that. It was something like 40 potatoes.

Kind of depends on the size of the potatoes. Maybe the baby new potatoes at the beginning of the harvest but not the 200g ones at the end.

Didn't Joe Rogan cover this theory at some point?

Joe Rogan doesn't "cover" things. He invites people with dubious opinions on to his show then "just asks questions", to give plausible deniability. His show is not a source of useful information.

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