natermer

If GNU decided tomorrow that all utilities need to have a --json output argument then that would make me a very happy person.

When perl came along it killed the 'Unix one tool philosophy' dead as a doornail. And since then and people have just kinda ignored the smell coming off the rotting corpse.

I don't write complex scripts in shell anymore because it's insanity. But ad-hoc loops and crap like that... hell yeah. At least a few a day. Sometimes dozens.

People need to be reminded, I think, that shell isn't a programming language first. It's a user interface. And when I look at Powershell scripts and other things of that nature and think about living in Powershell day in and day out I don't see the big pay-off over something like fish.

'Is this going to make it so I can get my work done faster?'

'Is this going to be more pleasant to use as a primary interface for a OS?'

When I go into fish or zsh and use curl to grab json and 'jq' to get a idea of how to use the API in python or node...

versus running 'curl' in powershell against some random API I have never used before..

I get the distinct impression that 'This is fucking garbage' in that It would take me a lot longer to figure out how to use powershell in a useful way then the time I would save by doing so in the long run.

There is no need for laws for this stupidity. Unless you want to consider the laws of economics.

Namely: Create a shitty business model that depends on treating your customers like shit and you can expect to out of business as soon as your venture funds dry up.

This is the sort of problem that solves itself.

Either that or people can keep giving these jokers money, wait for some lawsuit to happen and then in 7 or 8 years after the lawyers take their cut you can expect a check in the mail for 4 or 5 dollars.

I'm a lay person somewhat familiar with the terminology. I am going to be wrong on several details.

What they were talking about is phase weakening.

Think of voltage as 'electrical pressure'. Like PSI or Bar.

Think of amperage as 'volume per second' or 'amount of electrons (equivalent charge) per second'... like liters per minute.

Combine the volume per second by pressure and you get total energy per second; watts. Hence 'voltage * amps = watts'

Electric motors are also generators. When they spin they create their own 'reverse voltage', sometimes called 'Back EMF', that creates resistance in the windings of the motor.

The faster the motor spins the greater this 'back emf'. It'll increase until the 'back emf' creates enough resistance that it effectively negates the voltage coming from the power source. At that point the motor has reached it's top speed. This is why DC motors don't try to spin infinitely fast.

The strength of the motor, the torque, is directly related to the amount of amperage flowing. When the motor is at it's top speed it's generating only enough torque to overcome the resistance of the bearings and other parasitic drag. So very little actual current is flowing, especially in a very efficient motor.

Field weakening is a technique that you can use to overcome some of this limitation.

What it does is change the shape of the voltage wave. Most of the time on a oscilloscope it would show up as a sine wave or trapezoid... But if you can change the timing and peak of the wave then you can effectively weaken the magnetic field at the right time that the 'back emf' isn't as strong. Sort of flatten out the peak and make the pulse wider then it normally would be.

So you end up flowing less peak amperage, but overall more amperage. Depending on the type of motor and speed the amount of extra torque/amperage you can generate can be very significant. The trade off is reduced efficiency.

A simple motor surface mount magnet may only see a 20-30% increase in top speed and decrease in torque at the low end. A more modern interior mounted magnet (were magnets are embedded inside of steel laminates) that combines the strength of the rare earth magnets with reluctance of the magnetic field flowing through the steel.. (think of the magnets providing their own force at low end and then providing a guiding path for magnetic flux as the motor speeds up) Can see many multiples boost in top speed while still maintaining significant torque at low end. Field weakening on some motors can produce increased torque across the entire RPM range.

This is going to be very strongly taken advantage of in EVs like the Tesla Model 3.

Although in the case of most motors this field weakening is done electronically, by changing the shape of the waves sent to the motor.

This design does the same thing, but by moving the drum's magnets out of phase with the magnets on either side. So it's mechanical field weakening.

It's not a super-new concept or anything. I expect their patents have to do with the 'H' shape of the spindle and the math behind how it is supposed to work.

I don't know if mechanical field weakening really provides any real benefit over electronically controlled one.

The penicillin moment happened because penicillin actually came into existence and became widely available pretty rapidly.

Research and speculation is awesome stuff, but the hard part isn't discovering new concepts. It is actually making those concepts into a marketable and affordable good.

The evidence for this is that even though there is essentially a new 'breakthrough' discovery every other week for solar panels, or electric motors, or batteries.. We are still using what amounts to cutting-edge tech from the late 90's.

In the modern era this means we generally have to wait till the patents expire and market competition kicks in in order to get the price low enough and the product perfected enough to see widespread usage. If it goes anywhere at all.

It's also worth noting that Florey, the man who is largely responsible in making penicillin practical drug, refused to patent his early innovations to make it widespread as possible.

No. Not a F-22 or F-35 are unlikely to actually be invisible. A B-2 bomber has a better chance.

The talking heads from the military may talk about 'invisibility', but they are full of shit. Just propaganda for the tax payer.

The problem is the physical size of the jet. In order to absorb the radar the material needs to be the proper size in relation to the wavelength. A B-2 bomber is large enough to absorb useful radar frequencies, but F-35 or F-22 isn't.

What the F-35/F-22 stealth does get, however, is invisibility in the XHF and higher frequency ranges, which is what is used for radar guided missiles. So they will have a major advantage against ground and air launched long range missiles.

The F-22 also has good infrared suppression, which protects it against infrared guided missiles. F-35s have a large IR signature, so they are probably not much better then other US jets. Traditionally speaking it's IR weapons that have caused losses for USA airplanes in modern times.

At VHF and lower frequencies the F-22 and F-35 can be detected, but those radars don't offer enough resolution to make them particularly useful for missiles. People suspect that with multiple angles and computer algorithms it may be possible to target a jet that way, but who knows.

So if you were Russia and you detected something with VHF long range radar and then you pointed a shorter range XHF radard at it... and nothing shows up then you can be reasonably certain that it's a American stealth fighter jet. That doesn't mean they can do much about it, though.

To combat this it is suspected that Americans use a technique that involves 'ghosting' commercial airliner traffic to mask the signatures of their jets against the lower frequency, longer range, radar.

I really don't think that this is a accurate statement at all.

There are a few dangers to vaping.

The biggest one is having a vaporizer that is malfunctioning and is burning things instead of heating them up. The complex chemical reactions are difficult to predict. But it has the side effect of tasting like shit.

The second biggest danger is the flavorings. However the community has been very good at self-policing and eliminating flavors that are found to pose a risk.

The last danger is a sort of being a idiot and using way too much nicotine.

On the flip side you can have zero nicotine. So peer pressure isn't really even a problem as you can get zero nicotine juices.

Sure. If you are willing to torpedo the economy you could accomplish a lot.

At least until people start showing up with pitchforks and torches.

And by 'torpedo the economy' I mean raise energy costs up to the point were all this energy pipe dreams becomes viable.

Of course if people were interested in actually solving the problem then we would be building nuclear power plants left and right and wouldn't have to worry about insanely long transmission lines.

Scale and time matters. How many of those cities have lost over 60% of their population since their peak?

The general decay in France is going to be at a much slower rate then some place like Detroit. This means that the increasing tax burden, crumbling infrastructure, and financial crisis not only are much less noticeable, but governments have more time to react and mitigate the issue.

The reason why places like Flint are impressive in their decay is because the rate of change in population is so extreme.

This is just a microcosm of problems governments are going to face with shrinking populations.

Another, related problem, is the issue of maintaining state pensions and other entitlement programs.

Social Security in the USA, for example, has a negative ROI. For it to work the government has to take money from younger working people in order to pay for older retired people. As the population shrinks you have less and less young people being forced to support the larger number of retired people.

All these sorts of programs have the same problems. They were designed in a era were it was assumed that people died off as a higher rate and people were born at a faster rate. As those trends gradually reverse then all welfare/entitlement programs are becomingly increasingly insolvent.

....

This sort of stuff is why the Soviets had to institute travel restrictions and a sort of passport system in the USSR; you can't have effective long term government planing with a rapidly shifting population.

You would just shift the costs away from maintaining pipes to treating massive amounts of water that would never get used by anybody.

And you will still have to maintain the pipes. Your solution would reduce costs per mile, but you still have a lot of mileage to maintain with a shrinking population.