mikevp

7 ms·

1.
by mikevp 3y ago
sigh I met him briefly at one of the West Coast Computer Faires, in the early days of AutoDesk, or maybe pre-AutoDesk. His name was familiar to me from the infamous "Pervading Animal Game" on the Univac mainframes. "Introd
2.
by mikevp 6y ago
That's what I want -- I want all political anything, left right and center, expunged from my FaceBook. There's a browser plugin "Social Fixer" that can do this really well by all accounts, but alas, almost all my faceboo
3.
by mikevp 6y ago
One analysis I read ages ago showed that an electric car (even of that time) was enough more efficient than a gasoline or Diesel car that even if the electricity to charge the batteries came entirely from coal, it was a net CO2 win.
4.
by mikevp 6y ago
"People need to place more effort on maintaining factual reputation. If someone spews bullshit once, they are on probation. If they do it twice, I don't listen to them anymore." Bingo. Michael Moore has been on my personal _
5.
by mikevp 7y ago
Heh... Recalling a demonstration by an EE prof way back when. He had the bank of capacitors charging up on his desk, and was writing on the blackboard the equations of how much energy was stored. Hand raised in the back of the room. &quo
6.
by mikevp 7y ago
Agreed. Stories like this keep popping up, because this is something the whole world desperately needs. EEStor was one of the previous claimants to the title, but they flew by night. After so many disappointments, I'm down to "L
7.
by mikevp 7y ago
Talk about what if something magically dissolves the concrete casks betrays that the person bringing that up has no idea what they're talking about. The wastes are not in any liquid or soluble form inside the casks. They're soli
8.
by mikevp 7y ago
But always keep in mind Gene Spafford's observation: Debugging is twice as hard as programming. So, if you write a program as cleverly as you can, you are by definition not smart enough to debug it.
9.
by mikevp 7y ago
Talking about reactor waste with an image of 55 gallon steel drums with the radiation trefoil on them... Sheer ignorant incompetence. "Near-infinite" power source from decay of Carbon 14. In some low power applications this would
10.
by mikevp 7y ago
Every now and then over the years, I've considered designing The Perfect On-line Discussion Group software. Every time, I've gotten a half hour or so into the process and realized I'm re-inventing trn 4.0.
11.
by mikevp 7y ago
The anti-nuclear self-proclaimed environmentalists simply do not seem to understand the concept of "Base Load." They believe, or pretend to believe, that industrial civilization can be powered by "sunny days when the wind is
12.
by mikevp 7y ago
That's why all my passwords (including my Ring password) look like this: c3Ve*w^ZHKmq1SQK&gGVQCezROLgZy Individually generated, unique for every site I log into.
13.
by mikevp 7y ago
But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.
14.
by mikevp 7y ago
cf. XKCD -- "Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves."
15.
by mikevp 7y ago
Miracle battery breakthrough du jour. I've been watching this soap opera for years. These announcements keep coming, but nothing I can pop down to Fry's and pick some up. Let me know when they're on the shelf at Fry's o
16.
by mikevp 7y ago
I feel this way about git itself. https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/
17.
by mikevp 7y ago
Adding backdoors would lead to the Huaweization of American tech companies -- Sales of US tech products outside of the US would drop drastically. And the non-stupid bad actors (however small that subset is) would use something open-source
18.
by mikevp 7y ago
"Ross Ulbricht, convicted of various crimes associated with launching the dark web site Silk Road, was sent away in 2015 for life without chance of parole. In his case, the government purported to believe that websites that allow peopl
19.
by mikevp 7y ago
I was thinking about switching over to it since Roadtrippers keeps cranking down the number of legs you can have in a trip for the free version. I guess I won't, now.
20.
by mikevp 7y ago
Ten minutes? How long does it take to type a user agent string into the curl command line? In my case, a user agent string pretending to be Firefox is already part of my .curlrc, so it's no time at all, just grab the PoC code and fire
21.
by mikevp 7y ago
It's not like anyone could ever change their user agent in their curl config. Oh, wait... cat ~/.curlrc user-agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:64.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/64.0"
22.
by mikevp 8y ago
People who buy hoity-toity "designer fashion" items are paying for those D&G or whatever letters on the item. I find it impossible to work up any sympathy. I get Flexon frames. Actually, I haven't bought frames in years
23.
by mikevp 8y ago
The reason you don't try to make bombs from power reactor plutonium: The long fuel cycle of power reactors produces too much Pu240 and Pu242. It's dang near impossible to get a nuclear explosion if there's much of those iso
24.
by mikevp 8y ago
"Editor's note: KVUE is not identifying Precopia's accuser because she hasn't been charged with a crime." Seriously? Seriously!?!? I think the public needs to know who this CRAZY PERSON is so they can keep a far, f
25.
by mikevp 8y ago
I think he's predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions.
26.
by mikevp 8y ago
Interesting... At first, I thought nominating Carson for head of HUD was a very strange choice. He's a neurosurgeon. Why??? But then... He was Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, so he had some administrative experie
27.
by mikevp 8y ago
In the case of Rose Bird, at least, it wasn't "overturning too many death penalty cases", it was policy of a blanket rubber-stamp "overturned" on any and all death penalty cases. She was opposed to the death penalt
28.
by mikevp 8y ago
Germany's shutting down all its nuclear power in favor of "sunny days when the wind is blowing" energy. And people are surprised that this doesn't work out so well? "I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-arithme
29.
by mikevp 8y ago
Oh, Hell no. And I'm old enough I can just retire if they were to push it.
30.
by mikevp 8y ago
Tom Wolfe's old book "From Bauhaus to Our House" took on some of these issues. In particular, modern architecture's alleged "form follows function" taking some bizarrely twisted thought processes to end up bui

More ›