Viewing profile — mikevp

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 Anim…

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 a…

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 batt…

"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." Bi…

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 ene…

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 nigh…

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 liqui…

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 e…

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 Car…

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 …

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 ca…

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.

But before Prop 13, people on fixed incomes were getting taxed out of their paid-off homes they'd lived in for decades.

cf. XKCD -- "Bury it in the desert. Wear gloves."

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 kn…

I feel this way about git itself. https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

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 (how…

"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 governm…

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.

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, s…

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/2010010…

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. Act…

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 nuc…

"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 P…

I think he's predicted 12 of the last 3 recessions.