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hacker234on Walmart’s $10 Smartphone Has Better Specs Than the Original iPhone

Huh? Works fine for me...

hacker234on Show HN: I spent a year making an electro-mechanical prototype of a liquid clock

> Ferrofluids are fundamentally unstable

But not if you are constantly stirring them up. The Ferrorfluid used in loudspeakers for instance doesn't seem to degrade.

hacker234on Gravity-Powered Solar Tracker

Yes, you must size your panels for the worst case, not the best case.

When it's overcast, the best position is pointing straight up, eg fixed at the correct angle for that latitude.

To put it another way, a tracker optimises your panel in sunny conditions, which is not worth doing. That's when you have a surplus of charge.

hacker234on “On Accident” or “By Accident”?

Likewise.

And I remember the first time I heard an American say "I'm really pissed!" and my mate said, "what have you been drinking?"

I won't even mentions the confusion when an American lady mentioned that she had a sore fanny.

hacker234on This New Water Wheel Pump Does Not Require Any Electricity to Pump Water

This new water wheel pump "was was first created back in 1746".

It's called the Archimedes Screw and is hundreds of years old. Is very common in third world countries even today.

https://www.google.com.au/search?q=spiral+water+pump&tbm=isc...

hacker234on The FCC Might Ban Specific Operating Systems

Chicken and Egg. If you can modify the radio (hardware/software), you can modify the protection device.

Adding a protection device merely shifts the problem (being discussed) from the radio to the protection device.

It achieves exactly nothing.

hacker234on Reverse Engineering Ahmed Mohamed’s Clock and Ourselves

So he found a wrecked clock in the kerbside junk, got it running, then tidied it up by stuffing it into an old pencil case.

Maybe he even wrecked it himself some time earlier.

Sounds like a reasonable project for a teenager. Why are you making such a fuss?

hacker234on Hawaii First to Harness Deep-Ocean Temperatures for Power

> There is a whole lot of pressure at greater depths. That by itself can bring the water up.

The pressure inside a deep pipe will be the same as that outside the pipe. Where will your differential pressure come from?

hacker234on The Solar Sunflower

I don't have a link, but combined Solar Electric / Hot Water panels are relatively common Australia. My neighbor has them on his new house. I'll go ask him for details.

hacker234on Wi-Fi and LTE in Unlicensed Spectrum Bands

Part 15 says (amongst many other things) that if a service causes (or suffers) interference it must go of the air.

Nothing to do with Amateur Radio.

hacker234on Compasses don't work on Mars, so how do you navigate?

Does having "no strong magnetic field" mean no Ionosphere and thus no Shortwave Radio?

hacker234on Alcatel-Lucent sets record of 10 Gbps over traditional copper telephone lines

The problem will be getting regulatory approval. A high speed digital signal at VHF is going to radiate like blazes and wipe out FM Broadcast and hundreds of emergency services.

This system will face the same problems as BPL, only much, much worse.

The truth is that you can't reuse the (all ready full) radio spectrum, especially over copper.

The only way you can do it is with well shielded Coaxial Cable (eg Cable TV) or via light (eg Optical Fiber).

It's a triumph of Sales people over Engineering. Or to put it another way, the laws of physics will always win.