sitharus

I was shocked when I saw the price of heat pump installation in the US, even with an existing ducted system. There’s no reason a reversible heat pump system should be significantly more expensive than a cooling only one.

I (well, my landlord) replaced a similarly old refrigerator last year. The thermostat was fine, it had developed a very slow gas leak and the charge had dropped enough that it was freezing rather than cooling.

It was using around 29kWh/month before the leak was noticeable, the new one uses 12kWh/month. The new one is slightly larger than the old. The old model was freezer-on-top style, the new one is a less efficient freezer below model.

Hopefully the new one lasts as long as the old!

Nobody did

I've never heard of OnlyOffice, but that really looks quite promising. I'll have a deeper look at it later, but even though it's all webapp based it can't really be slower than libreoffice...

The pandemic helped the banks push contactless which they love, because it’s not EFTPOS.

EFTPOS is our national post of sale system, it has very low or no fees for any party involved. Merchants pay a fixed machine rental per month which can include unlimited transactions, or may have a per transaction fee of up to $0.20. Most individuals do not pay a fee for using EFTPOS and there’s normally no card fee, though some banks have accounts with fees that have other benefits (eg higher deposit interest rates to encourage saving).

Contactless goes via the standard card network extortion. Since 2022 the interchange rate has been capped by legislation which has helped merchants a lot, but the per transaction fee over the card network is still far higher than EFTPOS.

Contactless EFTPOS does exist in Australia - we share a lot of the underlying tech - but the banks won’t activate it here because they’d lose the interchange fees.

Online EFTPOS is starting to gain market share though, which is nice.

Since always. EFTPOS was designed with offline support (signed receipts) as an emergency fallback when the network is down. It’s been like that since the 90s, I know because I’ve been using EFTPOS since then and experienced many outages.

It is capped at $300 per card used and 200 transactions stored (I believe some large merchants can vary this, but not by much), it’s only for temporary failures not multi-hour outages.

You can quickly find information with your favourite search engine.

We hardly use cash in New Zealand, over 85% of transactions are electronic. There’s a lot of places that don’t accept cash anymore because cash handling is annoying and risky.

That said, nobody thinks of cash as dirty, just annoying. Also our payment system has always been able to work offline, because it started rolling out in the 80s.

yep, that's the most important thing about his operation of Boeing.

Both the 707 and 747 were "bet the company" projects, in particular the 747 pushed Boeing to the brink of bankruptcy. However both were major successes because they took a gamble on the future of the aviation industry.

In these days of "fiduciary responsibility" it's difficult to imagine any public company taking that kind of risk. Risk is what should make returns.

He initially turned down the job because he felt that a lawyer wasn't the right person to run an engineering company, and from reports of people who worked with him he knew his knowledge limits and listened to the engineers. He took serious risks with the 707 and 747 projects because he trusted the people who understood the technology.

MBAs and final-gasp lawyers concentrate on making the reported number go up in the short term, they won't take a hit now for a payoff in ten years.

Yes, but with the combined effects of food reducing the absorption rate and the small quantity of alcohol present your liver can easily process it all.

These reports always highlight the relative risk, not the absolute risk.

Over the course of the study the absolute risk was 2.5%.

While this reinforces the dangers of alcohol consumption the actual increase in risk is significant but small.

The article uses terms that are known to biologists which can be easily searched for.

There are genes called "selfish genes" which cause a negative impact on the organism. Normally they would be selected out by evolution, but the "selfish" part means the gene is propagated to descendant organisms far more often than a regular gene would be. There are several mechanisms that can cause this, wikipedia has a summary.

In this case the ants have a "selfish gene" which greatly increases the probability of an egg being a queen, which makes it much harder for the colony to thrive.

As for the mixing of the species? You'd need a time travel machine to find out for sure, but the researchers noted that the species live in proximity and do mate together when in the same area. This would allow the queen to produce the needed workers. Evolution drove forward and somehow created a mechanism that allowed the ants to maintain the DNA required independent from the origin species. That's what the researchers are looking for now.

I hadn’t dug that far in to it, thanks for sharing! I assumed my rather old SD card or the adapter I keep stuffed at the bottom of my bag was the issue as I’ve only seen it on a couple of photos.

I’ve used Olympus cameras for over a decade. Well, the same camera to be honest, a PEN E-PM2. This has only appeared in the past couple of years.

I haven’t seen it on photos from my Canon EOS 80D yet, but I guess it’s time to change my workflow. And maybe OS.

I’m pretty sure I’d rather remove the dirt from my vegetables, but you do you.

You can also read the studies that show mechanical action (brushing, rubbing) under running water effectively reduces the bacteria count https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0362028X2...

It’ll never be sterile, but it doesn’t need to be for a healthy human. Probably shouldn’t be either.

I hate to break it to you, but the loose produce in store isn't clean. That's why you must wash produce before you eat it.

I've been doing that since before anyone cared, it just seems wasteful to use a bag for a handful of things. I use bags if I buy more than a few of something, or if it's something with dirt on like potatoes.

Huh, today I learnt about continuous automatic car washes. Never seen one of those, the ones over here you park in and it moves around you, they’ve been that way since the 90s at least.

What is the neutral issue? It sounds annoying to switch in to, but when do you even need neutral in an EV? The reasons I’ve needed it while driving ICE cars aren’t there in an EV, because it’s the same as the car being off.

Come to think of it, I have no idea how to get my car in to neutral.

It’s been that way for years now, it’s all on their website https://www.plex.tv/plans/

If you want to stream from outside your local network you need to pay. Hardware transcoding is also paywalled now, along with a bunch of other things.

These days? Not very. However a lot of systems created in the 2000s, particularly enterprise software because XML was seen as the thing for enterprises, depends on it.

It’s not (and never was outside of corporate webapps) very common on the web, but there are still legacy things that need it.

Yeah I can't see it tearing down the message pipe, that would exit the app.

But what it is doing is first posting a message that will call `[NSApp stop]` then calling `[NSApp run]`. Which is odd, because `[NSApp nextEvent]` exists, but even if that doesn't work it's not the way I'd do it. However I'm sure there are very good reasons to do it this way when you know the emacs source.

> Unless we want a carve out for payment processors. Treat them as a utility of sorts?

Given that there are two payment processors that have about 90% global market share (excluding China) and your bank chooses the payment processor for the most part, yes we should regulate them and force them to process payment for any legal business.

They have the ability to effectively determine what we can spend our money on when we can’t get cash to the vendor in person, and almost every alternative processor has to deal with them and is also subject to their rules.

The only way around this is via informal networks. Cryptocurrency isn’t an option for many as it’s very hard to obtain, due to the duopoly coercing banks and governments to keep people on their systems.

I don’t live in the US, and where I live has a local electronic non-credit card payment system which has been around since the 80s. It’s less popular now because only the card networks support contactless payments instead of swipe/chip and pin. All the systems support contactless use, but banks won’t enable it because it has no interchange fees.

Wow that’s wild. I never touch minibars anyway, but I have been known to look at the contents! Guess I won’t now.

Though here in New Zealand most hotels I’ve gone to over the past couple of years don’t even stock the minibar anymore, it’s just for milk and optional extras you book with the room.

And that's why you don't trust AI.

As another commenter said the Airbus engine start/stop controls are located behind the thrust levers, and according to the A350 operations manual which I got my hands on there are two conditions required for the FADEC to command engine shut down: Run switch to off, thrust lever to idle.

So if that's correct on an Airbus aircraft you can't just switch off the engines when they're commanded to produce thrust. This also seems to be backed up by the difference in the guards for those controls in the Airbus cockpits.

Or you simply interlock the engine cutoff with the thrust lever position, any position other than idle prevents shutdown. This all goes through the flight computers already.

If there’s a fire or similar problem the fire handles will cut off fuel without the normal shutdown procedure, but the normal switches only need to be used at idle thrust.

I wonder if Airbus has this logic, since their philosophy is to override the pilot commands if they’d endanger the aircraft (which has its own issues of course) where’s Boeing will alert the pilots and still perform the action. I don’t have access to that information.

That literally defines it as a word from the PBF comic I cited? Nothing on that page defines it as a slur, just as a word used to mock people who argue about inconsequential things.

No it isn’t, it’s a reference to a Perry Bible Fellowship comic https://pbfcomics.com/comics/skub/

(This one is sfw, not all of the comics are)

Even urban dictionary doesn’t contain a definition for skub as a slur.

It definitely can’t. Either you had to put your script in cgi-bin, use an extension like .cgi in a directory with that feature explicitly enabled, or a magic sticky bit on the file if that was enabled.

You could configure the server to be insecure by, eg, allowing cgi execution from a directory where uploaded files are stored.

The main security issue I recall from CGI was caused by the web server having to execute the binary. This meant either executing as www-data, running the web server as root so it can call setuid, or using setuid binaries which have their own issues.

These were real issues on multi-user hosts, but as most of the time we don’t use shared hosting like that anymore it’s not an issue.

There were also some problems with libraries parsing the environment variables with the request data wrong, but that’s no different from a badly implemented http stack these days. I vaguely recall some issues with excessively log requests overflowing environment variables, but I can’t remember if that was a security problem or DoS.

XSS-as-a-service. It lets people drop in random JavaScript to be injected on to the page without any oversight.

It’s used by marketing people to add the 1001 trackers they love to use.