matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Guns bought through credit cards in the US will now be trackable
matt_attack's comments
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Cloudflare Warp
Indeed. I just remembered I was using their DNS service and disabled it because clearly they can't be trusted.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: New Offshore Wind Design: 20% the weight and 30% the price of conventional
Australia does have some geographic and climate advantages when it comes to solar installations. Most of the interior is basically desert. It also helps that it has one of the lowest population densities of any continent.
It's also important to note that plans to phase things out do not indicate success. See California right now.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: New Offshore Wind Design: 20% the weight and 30% the price of conventional
Reminder that you'd need either equivalent backing storage and overprovisioning (not yet feasible except in the rare cases where pumped hydro can be built) or backing fossil fuel plants for each unit of wind, even more so than solar. The LCOEs are not directly compatible.
Dependability has value to society and LCOE does not account for it whatsoever.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS
Only dual frequency? Triple frequency for L-band corrections is all the rage these days. If you have that you can get close to RTK accuracy anywhere (with good sky view).
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: iPhone 14 Pro comes with dual-frequency GPS
Well most offline devices don't take minutes now except for the first fix in a long time. It's generally around 30 seconds to a minute.
Usually the almanac is stored in non-volatile memory so additional startup fixes are much faster.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
That's not necessarily true. Fuel taxes and registration pay for road construction and most railway construction is heavily subsidized by governments.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Project Fugu status – Web apps should be able to do anything native apps can
Rather they should only do what you let them. It's nonsensical that mobile OSes don't let you fake certain permissions being enabled (for example having a location spoofing option).
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
Except busses and airplane flights tend to be much cheaper than train tickets there (excluding subways/local trains). If trains were so efficient that would likely be shown in the pricing.
While in Spain for several months it was only economical for me to take a train a single time. It was several times more expensive than the alternatives in every other case. This left me either flying or bussing.
In Stockholm it's actually cheaper to take a bus to the airport than the train, and that's just local travel.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: The Middle of the Square
For some reason I thought this was about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond-square_algorithm
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
One fix would be to have the owner pay for heating/cooling costs of the structure. My apartment pays for the heating so as a result the place is very well insulated even though it is older.
I'll note that it's not always worth it to further insulate or replace functional though inefficient equipment. For example my apartment has an electric bill of about $50 a month, half of that is a fixed infrastructure cost. Even if I could bring my electric use to zero, it could at best save $25 a month. Replacing my AC with a more modern one could probably at best save $5 a month of that, taking many years to pay off even if you pay nothing for labor.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
I'm not sure fusion is the breakthrough most think it will be. https://www.science.org/content/article/fusion-power-may-run...
It seems like for it to even have a chance we need to go big on fission fow now.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
Irrigation water is only cheap from a demand perspective. There is no subsidy in that case, simply the lack of a free market and poor resource allocation.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
Unless they get a tax refund from it, it absolutely is not a sum of money granted to them.
In reality the government is simply just punishing all other businesses that can't take the same deductions.
You might as well consider it a subsidy to you if your neighbor gets mugged.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: H.R.2184 – End Oil and Gas Tax Subsidies Act
Plenty of people use rail in the US just for carrying goods instead of people. It turns out trains are most efficient at hauling large loads with high tolerances for latency, which humans are not and do not have.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Why UML “Really” Died
If only it was dead. It's still alive and kicking in military development environments pushed down from above by management.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Google pays ‘enormous’ sums to maintain search-engine dominance, DOJ says
If they knew most people would pick them, then why are they paying?
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Flat-to-curved screens have an identity crisis
Rolling your wrist to scroll and just accepting the poor visibility on part on the screen could still be pretty good.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: A hacker bought a voting machine on eBay. Michigan officials are investigating
It's just as easy for a machine to throw away and not count your vote. Most machines actually print out encoded paper ballots that have all the same vulnerabilities but are usually harder to verify on the voter's side that they recorded your votes correctly.
matt_attack | 3 years ago | on: Emergency SOS via satellite is included for free with iPhone 14 Pro for 2 years
Phone manufacturers didn't offer services before. In this case Apple is the carrier (much like a MVNO) for the service.
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Additionally you can use certain attachments or rounds with guns for breaching doors. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breaching_round