Viewing profile — technothrasher

I assume the reference was to the Jevons paradox, as described in Jevons' 1865 book, "The Coal Question". Watt's steam engine massively increased the efficiency of coal in steam en…

I loved my Amiga 2000, but AmigaOS was pretty late to the party with their trashcan. It came from the Xerox Star software in 1981, was ripped off by Apple in 1983, and by 1985 Comm…

Your Miles Davis comment triggered a memory of college radio. In school in the early 90's, I had a 3-6am show Wednesday mornings, and mostly said and played whatever I wanted, as n…

Hmm, really? That's interesting.... [time passes] ... I found more information than I really needed on how to kill one's self with helium, and I saw some places making suggestions …

Working in process control, this is an everyday thing for me. But I prefer to use pulse frequency modulation, which is what a lot of dedicated DACs use.

> Take Europe for example: nobody dies of hunger in Europe. Nobody? France, as the most extreme example, has a rate of 1.52 per 100K. That's about a thousand people a year. That is…

I cannot ever manage audiobooks, because I tend to wander while I'm reading, thinking about what I just read, processing it, mulling it over, or exploring it in some other way. Wit…

> But if you're not desperate and you took money from someone else and can't pay it back? Theft. Bankruptcy is a civil matter, not a criminal matter. Charging somebody with theft, …

Hard to be unexpected for the many of us who lived it. It wasn't that long ago. I remember first seeing a ColecoVison, which shipped with Donkey Kong, and being amazed that, unlike…

What kind of timekeeping do you consider "junk"? I'm currently wearing a $50 Chinese watch with a knock-off Seiko automatic movement in it, and I just now timed it out of curiosity…

Wikipedia has an entry that lists a few court cases, mostly showing that this strategy, as you surmise, fails to stand up in court. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

I noticed that when I used one of these OSM based nagivation apps (I forget which one now), it suggested I leave my house by heading over my retaining wall, driving down a wooded h…

The title doesn't match the paper though. People had already decoded the bird calls. What the paper was giving evidence to was that the birds themselves are cognitively decoding th…

It means exactly what I expected. The wireless connectivity has been removed (for regulatory compliance in situations where wireless isn't allowed), but wired connectivity is still…

My 2025 Audi A3 is pretty good with buttons and knobs. The only time I need to touch the screen (other than for CarPlay) is to tell it, "no, you still cannot steal my data" every t…

> we don't end up having 12 children a day die from gun violence Note that this definition of "children" includes ages up 24 years old. Not that the US doesn't have a gun violence …

The scanner manufacturers proudly advertise that their systems dump the scanned IDs to a back-end database for storage and later use.

I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."

Well, heck, why not? The more typical modern usage of the word henge means an earthwork consisting of a ring-shaped bank with a ditch in the middle. It was taken from Stonehenge, a…

> These kids entire futures are impacted by these scores. Has that changed since I was in school? After I got my degree, not a single person or entity in the workforce ever asked f…

> DRM-free classics that are out of copyright. I started down this road with a few books about two years ago, and I have so many now on my list to read that I hardly ever get to re…

> Upper deck, perhaps a different story. I only ever flew on the upper deck in coach configuration, and the last time I did that was about twenty five years ago on SAA. It wasn't a…

Somewhat apropos today, the solstices/equinoxes are by their nature celebrated at the same time of year universally. Granted, not everyone celebrates them, but you couldn't ever ge…

I also have a gay porn doppelganger who didn't show up. Must be a conspiracy against gay porn.

I was told I had a roll on "The Walking Dead". Interesting that it decided I was an actor, but didn't list the one adult film that somebody with my name was actually in.