lankiveil

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• Commented on The gathering crisis
  If you allow the reactor to be brought down in power at very short notice, how quickly could you bring it up to 100%? Are we talking minutes / hours / days? Just wondering how much on site battery capacity...
• Commented on The ends of education
  Just FYI but in the UK it's not necessarily cheaper to employ one 40hr worker as opposed to 2 20hr workers due to the employer's NI and pension contributions which are payable on marginal pay above the relevant thresholds. Splitting...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Not a million miles away from the Satanic Temple's flavour of Satanism: One should strive to act with compassion and empathy toward all creatures in accordance with reason. The struggle for justice is an ongoing and necessary pursuit that should...
• Commented on So you say you want a revolution
  Firefox has a nice add-on called 'HTTPS Everywhere' which forces an HTTPS connection (if available) for every website. Might solve the problem of occasionally being served a login screen over HTTP....
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  I can probably guess the response from some posters, but we solved our bedside reading illumination problem using Phillips Hue bulbs (with compatible-ish 3rd party equivalents available). They are indeed expensive and mean you have to faff around with an...
• Commented on Countdown to Crazy
  The polls haven't really been giving a double digit lead to Biden that I can see: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/ It went above 10pts briefly but has been in single digits for the whole campaign otherwise. Besides, these are all popular vote figures...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  Thanks for this. I'm no epidemiologist so I hate to weigh in, but there's a lockdown so I've not much better to do..... Even if those things are true, surely herd immunity requires 90-95% immunity in the population and given...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  The following has been doing the rounds recently: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.09.20059451v1.full.pdf It states: "the epidemic should almost completely finish in July, no global second wave should be expected,except areas where the first wave is almost absent." and has some nice graphs to...
• Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
  Sorry Greg, caffeine not kicked in yet and I immediately see that you qualified it with "ASSUMING the question(s) were agreed easily....
• Commented on The Inevitable Brexit Thread (1)
  But it will be difficult. In a general election you don't have to get agreement on the question beforehand. In your proposal the leave vote would be potentially split between options 2 and 3. Even if 'Leave' as an umbrella...
• Commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  A lot of modern cars (including mass market stuff like my Golf) now have adaptive cruise control as standard which is significantly more useful than standard cruise control. I drive almost exclusively on A/B roads and it's probably managing the...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Could we test whether we're in a simulation by looking at the mortality rate of physics undergrad students or is that just a surefire way to increase the mortality rate of stats undergrads?...
• Commented on Unforeseen Consequences and that 1929 vibe
  Do you end up with a worst of all options kind of moral calculus? Essentially you instruct the car to average risk of death across all participants in the crash. That way, you are not placing the value of one...
• Commented on Excuses
  I don't disagree on the end-point and the necessity of removing humans from control of the 100mph death boxes, I just think that the convenience of a self-driving car will only be compelling for a certain type of driver. The...
• Commented on Excuses
  I'd go further and say it'll take a long time for them to be properly 'rare'. Sure, the hordes of reps carving up the motorways will probably be quite eager to trade their dismal diesel boxes in for a shiny...
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  I do understand you but from reading your comments I believe we just have vastly different experiences of this. Yes, card transaction may have more failure modes but if those failures are much more rare an occurence than the few...
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  Aren't those same other people the ones who will be scratching around trying to coax change out of their purse, dropping coins, paying for things in low denomination coins etc? When I'm queuing at a self-checkout I groan inwardly when...
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  "it's a real pain being stuck behind a queue of people each paying a few quid with a card" Interested to know in what situations you find queues quicker with cash? In most shops I use contactless payment and there's...
• Commented on We get mail (contd.)
  As we're past 300 comments, hopefully this isn't too off topic... My good wife was driving home yesterday listening to Radio 4 when the afternoon drama came on and, as a Laundry fan, she was surprised and delighted to hear...
• Commented on Empire Games sneak peek
  Big fan of the previous trilogy / hexology (?). It's been a while since I read them though and my memory is not what it used to be. Would I benefit from re-reading MP from the start or is everything...