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Comment A little irony for ya (Score 1) 74

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.myarkansaspbs.org%2F...

Arkansas PBS is excited to announce that former State Rep. Carlton Wing has been selected as the agency’s new executive director and chief executive officer. Wing brings more than three decades of leadership experience in broadcasting, media and public service to the state’s only public media network. The Arkansas PBS commission and staff are looking forward to his first day in the office, on Tuesday, Sept. 30.

Maybe they should have been a little more nervous.

Comment Re:Hopefully they can survive that long (Score 2) 28

Their total # of vehicles sold are actually expected to decline in 2025.

I guess you mean their annual car sales?

Specifically:
Overall Guidance: Rivian adjusted its 2025 delivery target down to 41,500 - 43,500 vehicles due to retooling for the next-gen R2 platform, impacting production.
(vs about 51K in 2024)

I guess I'd call that a blip if the numbers play out and they get R2 up and running - which I'm looking forward to.

Comment Re:claims (Score 2) 48

Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

Comment Re:claims (Score 4, Insightful) 48

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

Comment Re:Linus is right, but this is really not news (Score 1) 82

Before NT, Windows was an absolute mess. I think the only reason most people put up with it was that they didn't know anything better was possible and since Windows was so widespread it was a misery everyone shared.

I think that many of those people were also recent DOS users. Given that DOS systems would often simply freeze up several times per day and require a reboot (easy to do since any bug in the user's application could do this), once they added a protected mode pseudo-kernel to Windows (maybe starting with Windows/386 2.1), it was actually a slight improvement over what they were used to since DOS crashes could sometimes be isolated to one virtual terminal.

Comment Re:There are 5 former Warner employees... (Score 2) 73

"Employee bought company ABC's stock after hearing that his employer is planning to acquire ABC" is already against insider-trading laws, which I imagine is part of the training for Warner (I had to retrain every few years when I worked at a public company). Whether ABC was a former employer is not really relevant. The enforcement of the laws is an open issue in the current administration.

Comment Re:Fungus vs plant (Score 4, Insightful) 47

It's kind of a suprising to me that it was a fungus and not a plant that developed this ability. After all, plants already feed on elecromagnetic radiation.

The chlorophyll in plants is finely tuned to absorb specific wavelengths of light. It already has a hard time with green light compared to blue light, and it's simply not going to work at all with radiation that has wavelengths that are orders of magnitude shorter. Chlorophyll acts like a little antenna that gets excited by certain light frequencies, but ionizing radiation would just blow the chlorophyll molecules apart and destroy them.

Taking advantage ionizing radiation is going to require a completely different mechanism than plant photosynthesis, just like you can't use glass lenses or parabolic mirrors to focus X rays or gamma rays. Plants probably have no more chance of having such a mechanism than fungi do.

Comment Re:Not surprising to me... (Score 3, Insightful) 56

Those mitigations could cause other problems down the line, so it makes sense that Microsoft didn't want to deal with those for Windows 11.

IOW: "We've only got $3.5T in capital to work with, so this is just too hard for us to figure out. You'll have to switch to an OS made by unpaid volunteers."

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