jhallenworld

>Some heads up in the UK Bureaucracy created this regulation out of the desire to protect children

More likely: Ofcom is seeing traditional media dying, so the bureaucrats needed to come up with something to remain relevant and employed.

Ofcom is supposed to be funded by fees charged to the companies that it regulates. There are no hints of social media having to pay them yet, but in the future?

Think of all the work that OSA is creating: age verification companies, regulation compliance consultants, certifications, etc.

Once private companies in the US figure out how much profit they can make off this, they surely will follow..

Awesome, this is creating an opportunity for a new text editor. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.

Yes, check out BYD's hybrids. The petrol engine is 46% efficient, which is pretty damn amazing. This is more efficient than most power plants (combined cycle plants are better- but most power plants are not combined-cycle).

So what is the well to wheel efficiency of this vs. pure electric? There are fuel transportation losses in one, and transmission line losses in the other. In many cities electricity is quite a bit more expensive than gas so hybrids are a better deal financially.

On the private symbol issue... there is probably a solution to this already. You can partially link a bunch of object files into a single object file (see ld -r). After this is done, 'strip' the file except for those symbols marked with non-hidden visibility- I've not tried to do this, maybe 'strip -x' does the right thing? Not sure.

I went looking for such a better list. One thing I found is this, for drinking water contaminants:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240584401...

It would be nice to have a list like this for the Group 1 substances, I mean something that shows the amount vs. the risk and the number of cases caused by the substance.

For benzene in drinking water it has 0.15 μg/L corresponding to 10e−6 lifetime cancer risk. Estimated number of cancer cases from benzene in drinking water in the USA is 1 vs. 43500 from arsenic.

CRTs are very forgiving- 512x342 vs x384 would have made very little difference. You could still get square pixels by minor adjustments to vertical and horizontal size.

My question is what is the htotal and vtotal times in pixels and lines? Maybe there was a hardware savings to have vtotal exactly equal to 384 (which is 128 times 3). Perhaps they saved one bit in a counter, which may have resulted in one fewer TTL chip.

I went looking for Rudy Rucker on this list, and am satisfied. He's wild, highly recommend. Enjoy some merge with someone: "the drug "merge" is a key element in the novel "Wetware". Merge is a drug that causes users to soften into a puddle, experience oneness with the universe, and fuse conscious entities. "

Also: the big company "thought leaders" need something new to talk about every year at conferences like "Microsoft Ignite" or whatever. These people will push funding into things like quantum research just for this. I'm sure they're getting lots of mileage out of LLMs these days...

I'm maybe a little jaded having worked on whole products that had no market success, but were in fact just so that the company had something new to talk about.

Mug? Well I got a Cubic Cyclonium- annoyingly no current tools support it and even the last version which did is no longer available.

https://datasheet.octopart.com/CUBIC-CYCLONIUM-Altera-datash...

Yuck, I have recurrent kidney stones and have had many CT-scans. It seems to have become the standard procedure when you complain of abdominal pain at the ER. Years ago I remember just getting an X-ray.

What's interesting is I needed surgery to remove the most recent stones, and I've not had a CT-scan since- the urologist uses ultrasound.

On the other hand, I've had fluoroscopy.. probably worse than even CT-scans.

I had to do this in the 80s when I made a mistake that resulted in the file being erased. The fun doesn't begin until you start debugging it.

Actually this happened twice: once, someone else's code but I had the listing. Another, my own code but no listing.

I think it was a floor planer. Jordan was awesome.

Mitch: "..um, I can't start." Jordan: "Weird."

The cavalry point reminds of one of David Brin's Uplift books: on a far away planet the humans agree to give up their horses as it is an unfair advantage over the other alien races they are trying to cooperate with. But there is a statue of a horse that human teenagers climb upon to remember this powerful synergy.

Obvious advice for students: Human brains are neural networks- they have to be trained. If you have the already trained artificial neural network do all the work, it means your own neural network remains untrained.

You are tremendously better off getting a bad grade doing your own work than getting a good one using ChatGPT.

Never mind the story, the audio equipment was awesome :-)

https://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=vintage&m=224226

Famous 16-bit computer from the 1950s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whirlwind_I

A interesting 12-bit microcontroller I just learned about is the "Toshiba Transistor Works" TLCS-12 for Ford's engine control module (1973). I'm trying to find a full datasheet for it:

https://www.shmj.or.jp/english/pdf/ic/exhibi739E.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_EEC

https://www.cpu-world.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=304576

The other early 16-bit CPUs include:

National Instrument's PACE- I've never seen one used in anything: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_PACE

but its bit-slice precursor, the IMP-16 was used in Aston Martin's Lagonda https://sprague.com/peter-sprague/aston-martin/

https://opposite-lock.com/topic/90934/lagonda-dashboards

General Instrument's CP1600, used in the Intellivision (a video game console yes, but there was a home computer keyboard attachment).

http://spatula-city.org/~im14u2c/chips/GICP1600.pdf

Its co-processor, the CP1640 is famous for evolving into Microchip's PIC microcontroller.

Oracle's cash on hand is presumably irrelevant- I think they are on the receiving end of the money, in return for servers. No wonder Larry Ellison was so fawning.

Is this is a good investment by Softbank? Who knows.. they did invest in Uber, but also have many bad investments.

>you're just making the price up based on what you think I can pay

It should be based on the email address used. If, for example, your email ends in @google.com, you get charged more. If it ends in @aol.com, then they take pity on you and you get a discount.

My co-worker's grandfather owned a TV repair business. The price was entirely based on the appearance of the person and had nothing to do with the actual problem. This way rich people subsidize the repairs of poor people.

Same, now I'm listening to "Machines of Loving Grace: Butterfly Wings" which I've not heard in a very long time..

A sometimes useful thing is to treat the pool as a stack and provide a call to free all recently allocated items up to a certain index. So you make a bunch of deep subroutine calls that use the pool allocator, and then on return free them all. It's like a secondary automatic storage class.

Also sometimes useful to provide another call to promote an automatic item to a more permanent one so that it is excluded from being freed like this.

I tried to track down the reasoning (I mean you would think a right-leaning pro-business president would support the Metric system), this came up:

https://themetricmaven.com/terminating-metric-with-extreme-p...

He did sign the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 into law. The measure declared that the metric system of measurement to be the preferred measurement system for U.S. trade and commerce.

But he also defunded the US Metric Board.

I suspect he didn't care about metric enough to fight other conservatives over it.

"Reagan’s education advisor, Roger A. Freeman stated, “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go through higher education].” This belief has shaped higher education to become a privilege of the upper class, with tuition serving as a barrier to those from working-class backgrounds.

When Reagan became president, he continued his efforts to dismantle the public education system, targeting federal aid to students. "

from: https://newuniversity.org/2023/02/13/ronald-reagans-legacy-t...

I think it was also retribution against college kids deferring the Vietnam war draft. The student deferment was supposed to be a rich-only loophole..

OTOH, Carter pardoned Vietnam war draft dodgers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proclamation_4483#:~:text=Jimm....

(I foresee a similar decision needing to be made in Russia soon..)

Actually I'm amazed that a gun CEO hasn't been hit yet. Some depressed person kills your daughter in a mass shooting then kills himself.. where would you go for justice?

I don't see why we should care:

https://www.foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/leaked-video-sh...

I understand that they are trying to fight greed in the rest of the healthcare system, but really their profits do nothing for anybody's health.

But there is more: IBM basically stole the entire CP/M software ecosystem by using the 8088: assembly language CP/M programs could be more or less just recompiled for MS-DOS.

Yet, it extended CP/M by allowing you to use more than 64 KB vs. 8080/Z80.

There should be a hardware product version of this, you software people have no idea.

- Have endless arguments about what to name the product

- Have industrial design team enforce the latest design language

- Create product variant SKU numbers, get them loaded into ordering system. Get buy-in from sales on these variants.

- Create part numbers for the FRUs and CRUs.

- Create multi-level BOM for all the variants.

- Buy replacement parts and push them into parts depots

- Calculate reliability so that warranty department knows how much to charge you

- Get agency approvals

- Create packaging

- Test packaging

- Translate any words on the package into french (for Canada)

- Get vendors to sign your big company environmental requirements document

- Write legal notices and get it translated into many languages

- Work with documentation team to get printed (usually short) manual translated into many languages

- Get safety engineer to sign off on products, usually means you need to make a bunch of stickers and include them in the BoM.

- Figure out the part numbers for the power cords needed for each country

- Figure out the part numbers for the rack mount rail kits for various types of racks that you support

- Write announcement letter

- Create videos and documents for sales team training

- Write troubleshooting guide

- Train repair center

etc..

Do you mean AFT (automatic fine tuning)? This has nothing to do with a PLL-based demodulator. Older receivers with ratio detectors or discriminators also had AFT- there is a low frequency feedback path from the demodulator to the local oscillator to make this work.

The 19 KHz pilot tone is interesting: it's not filtered out and is often reproduced by the speakers if you have good ones. You can verify this by using an audio spectrum analyzer application on your phone.

I've wondered if FM stereo drives pets nuts with its constant high-pitched tone.

Google News directly linked to this page (on Hacker News)- I've not seen that before.