In other news today...
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@remi It looks a lot more like a breakthrough when you look at it in percentage terms rather than absolute degree count. The goal is to be able to run superconducting devices under conditions that humans are comfortable with. Let's say 100 degrees (38 for those using weirdo units ) as a nice round number and standard pressure. If the previous record was -4 F and the new one remains stable at 50 F, that's over halfway to the temperature goal, and in an area where diminishing returns apply, making each bit of progress harder than the last.
Sounds like a serious breakthrough to me.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
@remi It looks a lot more like a breakthrough when you look at it in percentage terms rather than absolute degree count. The goal is to be able to run superconducting devices under conditions that humans are comfortable with.
I agree, but that's a human goal. Nature doesn't care about it, and this goal doesn't tell anything about whether there is any specific difficulty around that temperature or another.
Imagine if we were trying to heat water for a shower, and for some reason we couldn't get it hotter than 30 C (lukewarm). Then some research group comes along and they manage to do some trick with the heating element and they get to 40 C (hot). That's a huge breakthrough from a human perspective (now we get hot showers!) but scientifically, there isn't really anything different between water at 30 and 40 C. It would be a very different situation if we wanted to heat water at 110 C, where there is a clear physical change happening.
Sounds like a serious breakthrough to me.
I guess my question then is more "is it a technological breakthrough or a physical/fundamental one?"
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Translation: Tesla had to stop building their new factory because they did not pay their water bill.
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Just another day. Move along.
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@DogsB And this is why I don't join loyalty programs. When people ask, I say "no thanks, I'm in enough databases already." I wonder how many of them realize that they're not the only ones I worry might misuse the database.
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Today's no shit sherlock award goes to.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
I guess my question then is more "is it a technological breakthrough or a physical/fundamental one?"
It's on the boundary between those two, as it's about finding a particular compound and crystalline structure that has the properties we want in a very large configuration space of options. The amount which this is important (given that it still requires operating under high pressure to work, which is actually more annoying than basic cryogenics) depends on how much this leads towards our real goal.
Also, how much current can you actually push through. Superconductors may not have resistance, but they apparently still have limits on how much you can shove through. I don't remember why.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
This is actually from a few days ago, but I just saw it today.
I literally LOLd at the caption under the (fuzzy) picture: "His ethical principles were fuzzy too"
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
Bovine Lives Matter protests?
What a perfect slogan for vegans!
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@dkf From what I remember, it's the magnetic field which makes superconductivity break down.
edit: This looks ... plausible.
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@da-Doctah said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@PJH Just last week, a half dozen sheep convinced me to turn around and take a 1km detour.
Years ago in university, I was doing a geological mapping field trip with a few other students. We were looking at some rocks in the middle of a field when we saw the herd of cows far away in the same field, first spotting us then coming towards us. We very quickly went from "oh look, there are cows over there" to "um, guys, why are they coming towards us?" and "is it normal that they start trotting and running and mooing?" and finally "ok, let's pretend we're done with these rocks and head over the fence? Like... now!!!"
Probably just curious. I once got a flat tire on a very lightly-traveled section of highway, and during the time I was pulled off to the side putting on the spare, several cows in the adjacent field came closer to check out this novel occurrence.
This sounds like a setup for a porn. Did the cows offer to "peek under your hood"?
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@dcon said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
Bovine Lives Matter protests?
What a perfect slogan for vegans!
Long, long ago in a place long sold, some discussion about vegetarianism sprang up. And my friend raised an interesting counter-argument to killing pigs: âif we were all vegetarians, pigš would be an endangered speciesâ.
š In the light of the recent overpopulation of wild pigs around here they'd probably not go extinct, but there would certainly be a lot fewer of them, and that's even more true for bovines. Likely except goats. Goats² survive anywhere.
² After all, they are sheep with brains.
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Customers of the Swedish multinational captured this frustration when they named a street near a new Spanish store Calle Me Falta un Tornillo, or Iâm Missing a Screw Street.
Ikea thought up a clever way to make customers identify with their store in Valladolid, in northern Spain, by asking them to dream up a name for a road beside the store. In a Facebook poll in which more than one thousand people voted, some 54 per cent backed the winning entry.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Imagine if we were trying to heat water for a shower, and for some reason we couldn't get it hotter than 30 C (lukewarm). Then some research group comes along and they manage to do some trick with the heating element and they get to 40 C (hot). That's a huge breakthrough from a human perspective (now we get hot showers!)
I can relate to this on a very personal level. I got a new water heater last week, and yeah, that happened.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Just another day. Move along.
Yep; got an email from B&N about that late last night.
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I saw this and thought of hereâŚ
âTo give you a sense of just how preposterous the situation was, some of the recovered notes were stained with faeces,â
Many suggested that the find would be remembered âin the anals of historyâ.
Rodrigues offered no immediate explanation for the contents of his underwear, but denied wrongdoing, hinting that rivals were trying to sully his name. âI have a clean background
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
Customers of the Swedish multinational captured this frustration when they named a street near a new Spanish store Calle Me Falta un Tornillo, or Iâm Missing a Screw Street.
Ikea thought up a clever way to make customers identify with their store in Valladolid, in northern Spain, by asking them to dream up a name for a road beside the store. In a Facebook poll in which more than one thousand people voted, some 54 per cent backed the winning entry.
And so next time they'll remember to take suggestions on wherever, have a jury identify the top 10, and only put the output of those to vote.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Yep; got an email from B&N about that late last night.
Huh. I didn't. I wonder if I created my account there so long ago that that email address is dead? (looks in keypassx) Nope, they've got my real address.
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I've never gotten a free GPS tracker.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
I've never gotten a free GPS tracker.
Reselling returned electronics is a yuuuge security risk, so I can understand why that isn't done.
The same kind of applies with other stuff, they could be tampered with and since everything is minimum price, there is no financial room to check items for tampering before resale.
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
The same kind of applies with other stuff, they could be tampered with and since everything is minimum price, there is no financial room to check items for tampering before resale.
Tampered with, as in having an added GPS tracker?
Even if somebody were checking these manually and deciding ... they find an unknown object in/attached to a return. What do they do? Tagging that returned item for disposal is an easy and quick "solution". They're already disposing of tons of items, so no point in waffling about, gotta reach those performance targets.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Carnage said in In other news today...:
The same kind of applies with other stuff, they could be tampered with and since everything is minimum price, there is no financial room to check items for tampering before resale.
Tampered with, as in having an added GPS tracker?
Yeah, or adding surveillance or other fun stuff. There have been psychos that tampered with food in stores, do that seems possible too.
Even if somebody were checking these manually and deciding ... they find an unknown object in/attached to a return. What do they do? Tagging that returned item for disposal is an easy and quick "solution". They're already disposing of tons of items, so no point in waffling about, gotta reach those performance targets.
Yeah. That's the only safe way to deal with tampered items. And for electronics, finding tampering is hard. Really hard.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Useful for people in small apartments. Instead of a tree that sticks way out into the room with the back half against a wall where it takes up space without providing any additional decoration.
My stepfather saw those years ago and his first thought was "you could stick two of them back to back and get a whole tree". His second thought was "you could stick one on the inside of the front window and the other on the outside and it'd look like a tree going right through the glass."
So that's what he did.
Decorating the two half-trees had some tricky details. You'd start hanging a garland or a string of lights, think "and then it goes to that branch there" only to realize that "that branch there" was on the other half, on the other side of the glass. Took a little revision of thought to get past that kind of thing.
Every year, the mailman, Mormon missionnaries, relatives visiting for the first time in years, anybody who had occasion to come to their front door would ask if they had to take it down every night so they could close the window. One year he had a fall in the bathroom bad enough that they called the paramedics, and after seeing to him they refused to leave until he told them how he did it.
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@Carnage said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
I've never gotten a free GPS tracker.
Reselling returned electronics is a yuuuge security risk, so I can understand why that isn't done.
The same kind of applies with other stuff, they could be tampered with and since everything is minimum price, there is no financial room to check items for tampering before resale.I was thinking it would be too much price competition to what is normally sold. But seems like donating to a thrift store would be better.
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This is all inside a $499 box thatâs quieter and far easier to use and maintain than the $3,000 gaming PC I built a few weeks ago
Ăre you fucking mental? You're a tech correspondent! You should be up to date enough to know that once amd announced that it had two shows scheduled for this month all pc purchasing decisions should wait until November at the earliest. I stopped reading after that.
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@DogsB He's a writer for The Verge, which suggests that every day he struggles with the critical decision of whether to eat crayons or paint chips
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Wow that man is an idiot. How do people that stupid get jobs like that?
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Thereâs a reason the Xbox Series X looks like a PC â itâs because it often feels like one.
Ah yes, the old It Looks The Same Way It Feels rule of hardware.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Ăre you fucking mental? You're a tech correspondent! You should be up to date enough to know that once amd announced that it had two shows scheduled for this month all pc purchasing decisions should wait until November at the earliest. I stopped reading after that.
Depends how many weeks ago a "few" is. And how far before that they ordered the parts.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Sounds like a decent way to charge extra for a tree which really didn't develop all that well on one side.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
Sounds like a decent way to charge extra for a tree which really didn't develop all that well on one side.
Hey, don't be such a critic. Think of the tree farmers, there must have been a lot of damage in the Christmas tree fields due to wildfires. This way they can still sell a half-molten tree!
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Some of this is idiotic but for the most part I think he's Ă goddamn hero.
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The most important development of the COVID pandemic:
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Bacon-scented masks.
What about beer-scented? Or do you prefer whisky-scented?
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Canât decide which of all of this is
Also, they offer âautomatic parkingâ which is not suitable in âpublic parking lotsâ? That seems to be a general theme with their features. They offer stuff that is premature and they probably could not get officially licensed, advertised in a âdonât use that in public wink winkâ way.
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@topspin There's no way the app lets you purchase $4k addons accidentally.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
@topspin There's no way the app lets you purchase $4k addons accidentally.
Considering that there are multiple persons reporting similar problems, I can see it.
Also, this (though almost all of the screenshots seem to be gone):
So the software was added to my shopping cart without me actually adding it. You still have to click the purchase button.Oddly, there was some text that doesn't even look like a button ... but is actually the purchase button!
After adding $4,000 worth of software to my shopping cart automatically, what does Tesla's validation screen look like. Am I required to authenticate as per standard practice in such situations?No! There is no validation other than the click of a button!
What about refunds?Musk implied that the issue was ease of refunds.It turns out there is a policy. To deny refunds.Please note the additional dark pattern here: the refund denial text is dark text on a blackground. The hardest to read on the entire screen.
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@loopback0 Although I'm not excusing Tesla's app retardery...
put phone in pocket without locking it (which I never do)
Also
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@Rhywden said in In other news today...:
Oddly, there was some text that doesn't even look like a button ... but is actually the purchase button!
Itâs called flat design and itâs modern! Get with the times you
Also, why would people even have their credit card (or whatever is used for payment) registered with this app?!
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
Also, why would people even have their credit card (or whatever is used for payment) registered with this app?!
From TFA.
He linked a credit card to his Tesla account, he said, to pay a monthly fee for âpremium connectivityâ in the car. (That service enables features like live traffic visualization, satellite maps, video and music streaming over cellular and wifi networks.)
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@loopback0 in contrast to that, I always lock my phone when putting it into my pocket. But in recent weeks I failed at that several times (not sure if I forgot or if I tried to push the power button but didnât do it right). Must be getting old or something.
Anyways, quite surprised when I got it out and had some WhatsApp conversation open. Didnât butt dial any garbage, but looks like I wasnât too far.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
in contrast to that, I always lock my phone when putting it into my pocket.
I make sure the screen goes off, so it's definitely locked.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
Imagine if we were trying to heat water for a shower, and for some reason we couldn't get it hotter than 30 C (lukewarm). Then some research group comes along and they manage to do some trick with the heating element and they get to 40 C (hot). That's a huge breakthrough from a human perspective (now we get hot showers!)
I can relate to this on a very personal level. I got a new water heater last week, and yeah, that happened.
A couple years ago, my dad cleaned out the water heater at his house for the first time since we had moved in back in 2002, so I don't know how long it had been since the previous cleaning (if ever from the time it was originally installed). He dumped/scraped out several gallons of mineral deposits â so much so that the volume somewhere between doubled and tripled the capacity for the heater. Clearing it out also made the hot water temperature more consistent for much longer.
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@Stefan Peterson tweeted:
put phone in pocket without locking it (which I never do)
It's not clear to me whether "which I never do" applies to locking the phone or putting it in the pocket unlocked.
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@topspin said in In other news today...:
@loopback0 in contrast to that, I always lock my phone when putting it into my pocket. But in recent weeks I failed at that several times (not sure if I forgot or if I tried to push the power button but didnât do it right). Must be getting old or something.
Anyways, quite surprised when I got it out and had some WhatsApp conversation open. Didnât butt dial any garbage, but looks like I wasnât too far.I use my phone for grocery lists at the store and put my phone in my pocket when I go to get stuff off a shelf or whatever. Occasionally I fail to hit the power button and it's done some random thing in the meantime shifting around in my pocket.
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In other news: I don't have any of these butt-dial incidents. Even when my phone is unlocked my butt does not activate the screen.
I guess I'm just not juicy enough...