dingaling

I don't think that the new era of 'EV appliance culture' will have any positive impact on urban planning compared to 'car culture'.

There are more vehicles on the roads than ever before, and each of those distracted travellers demands a direct route from home to destination whether they're driving or being driven by a robo-taxi.

I just can't come to terms with letting a public-facing web server write arbitrary data from the network to disk.

Have you ever encountered portrait photos? They're orientated vertically because the human form, either head, bust or full body, fits better and excludes distractions.

Vertical videos, if they're focused on a human, work fine for the same reason.

*lying around

Laying is transitive and requires an object.

Yes, especially in work where information is hard to find and when someone sends a URL in an email it's like gold dust. I spent 15 minutes last week trying many permutations of search terms to find our internal job site and in the end gave up and just asked someone else if they had the link.

Less so on the public web because search engines are so effective.

> A digital camera is a no-brainer

A digital camera might be straightforward but the magic is in the lenses. You could make the most fabulous CMOS sensor known to man but if you put it behind a 3mm-thick, hugely aspheric plastic lens like a phone uses then you might as well not have bothered.

Pity they can't correct themselves to "spelling checker".

Would you ask someone to "check my spell"? Not unless you're a wizard, I suppose.

The XB-1 doesn't have any boom reduction shaping. That's the NASA X-59, though that aircraft is pretty much a dead-end in that it's not scalable to a passenger configuration.

The XB-1 made use of an atmospheric trick to minimise boom propagation to ground level on one test flight, so well-known in fact that Concorde sometimes used it to accelerate as it coasted-out without an audible ground-level boom. Unfortunately that trick runs out at about M1.17.

It's also largely PR guff. The first privately-developed supersonic aircraft was the Northrop N-156F, forerunner of the F-5, that first flew in 1959. Funded entirely from company funds with no military contract. And it went supersonic in its first flight with no drama.

In fact the chase plane for the Boom XB-1 is a T-38, derived from the N-156F. It can outrun the XB-1.

> And you can hedge your bets [ with multiple vehicles ]

In many countries that's unaffordable. In the UK I pay £350 per year car tax, £480 insurance and £50 mandatory roadworthiness testing. Best part of a grand before I've even driven a mile - and the UK is considered cheap in Europe. In Ireland the tax alone would be over £1000.

My partner pays about the same for her 20 year old petrol Honda SUV. Ironically if she chose the filthy, carcinogen-spewing diesel model she'd pay just £40 in tax, so it's little wonder that people compromise.

Passkey is a catchy but vague name for ssh keys used for website auth.

Everything else about them, such as HSM, is industry overlay motivated by their own motivations and aspirations.

Which only holds true if you don't care much about the result.

I've seen people trying to take photos at an airshow using their phone camera. A small black dot in the centre of frame, rendered as an Impressionist oil smudge by post-processing. Was that worth even trying?

The best camera+lens combo is the one suited to the scene. Anything else isn't.

You can still change the channel, it turn it off.

However the uncomfortable truth is that many people enjoy what they see in social media, just like they enjoyed the manufactured bait of Jerry Springer and Jeremy Kyle on TV.

They're just DE shells, not DE-9

Given the paucity of electric kettles in the USA, I wonder how that term became so widespread.

Ironically in Europe where the IEC cables were familiar from kettles, they've largely been superceded by cables hardwired into a base pad onto which the kettle is set.

> A public library delivers value to a community.

Well, a subset at best. I've moved to a new town where the sole library is available to normal 9-5 workers for three hours on a Saturday morning. I don't even know what it stocks because it just isn't open when most people would be able to use it.

Isn't the general employee at higher risk than the CEO? Entire departments can be RIFfed at the stroke of a pen and the employees don't have a Golden Parachute or a revolving door to the next corporation.

> Imagine a world where the entire European continent is a single political entity - we'd be unquestionable superpower

Why would that be a good thing?

Probably shouldn't have your decoder in the attic anyway, as they aren't well suppressed in terms of EM interference which will seep into the antenna. Particularly a cheap AC-DC wall wart, they're basically broad-spectrum noise-jammers.

I shunt the USB output of the SSR dongles onto Ethernet and pipe that to the PC downstairs.

Retail inflation is based on the prices of goods, including new cars.

So it's pointless to compare car prices to inflation because they are part of the basis of the measure. Hence why they track closely.

The RAF tankers can't just "switch out" the boom, they're operated by a civilian company on a contract that runs to 2035. They're not UK sovereign airframes.

Likewise, ysterday I was reading about Chuck Yeager's first jet flight, in a P-80, and how most of his time was spent manually juggling the fuel flow to prevent the engine either overheating or flaming out. He barely had time to think about actually achieving anything.

A decade later, automated fuel flow was standardised and aircraft were flying twice as fast and high.

But if Microsoft drops support for old PCs, it means removed; de-released. That's why overloading words is a bad idea and should be resisted.

Turkey, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Finland and even Switzerland* are all assessed as having the capability but having refrained for political reasons.

* the Swiss nuclear weapons programme ran for over four decades during the Cold War

The MOP isn't particularly 'advanced', it's basically refined version of the Korean-vintage Tarzon guided earthquake bombs. It's just too heavy for most military aircraft to carry.

The IDF has the F-15I which has a centerline hard point rated for 5,000lb load. That's immense for a fighter but a magnitude too low for the MOP.

There are a variety of smaller US penetrating bombs that the F-15 can handle, but they don't have the mass and structure to penetrate as deeply.

I don't think YouTube should get further into the dangerous spiral of chaperoning the content of videos. If there are too many sponsored segments in a video, take it up with the creator or stop watching that channel.

It lacks the range and, most significantly, low-observability of the F-35.

Gripen is a 1980s design updated with the latest software, just like Typhoon and Rafale. The F-35 is a 2000s design, there's just no way to close the stealth gap with it.

A week isn't long enough. Just wait for the official report.

> Engines are actually changed fairly frequently

A modern turbofan can run for 20,000+ hours on-wing before removal for overhaul. That's longer than many car engines last in total.

Yet telling someone to open regedit, find some deeply-buried branch, create a new binary key, rename it to SetFocusRefreshTimeout and set its value to 0xFFFF is... desktop usability.