m-i-l

Char.gy (referenced in the link) seems to be in just 2 or 3 London boroughs[0], whereas Ubitricity seem to cover more boroughs[1]. Looking at the photos, it seems Char.gy add a box to the lamp posts w…

Thanks for the link. Certainly sounds feasible. FWIW the credit card used for the purchase was a Mastercard. This would definitely go beyond what is described in the article though because (i) I'…

Pretty sure that wouldn't be the case - neither of us have any interest in football, to the point that if we ever saw anything football related in a news feed or advert or whatever we'd have…

Anecdote time. Short summary: I received in my Google news feed a story about something I would never expect to see in my news feed. The only rational explanations I could think of were that (i) Googl…

It seems the drones are simply spraying insecticide, rather than anything more sophisticated such as plucking the caterpillars off the plants or shooting them with high pressure water jets. The advant…

There was a 40 year waiting list for allotments in some parts of London 10 years ago[0], and 6 years ago the number of allotments had remained the same but the waiting list more than doubled from 800 …

At the time I did my AI post-grad, there were broadly speaking 3 schools of thought on how general AI would be achieved: via (i) symbolic AI (or "classic AI"), (ii) connectionist AI (i.e. n…

Anecdotal I know, but when my first was born and I was outside with them for the first time, I got a weird sense of extreme overprotectiveness - exaggerating somewhat to make the point, but it almost …

Vacuum airships have a long history: "First proposed by Italian Jesuit priest Francesco Lana de Terzi in 1670"[0]. The O-Boot project referenced in some replies aims to fly its first prototy…

One of the "selling points" of the Sinclair C5 was that its electric motor was built by Hoover and would be serviced at the existing network of vacuum cleaner service centres[0]. [0] https:…

Some elderly people who live alone like the TV on for company - in many cases they aren't even watching it properly, they just have it on in the background to feel less lonely, like there are oth…

The idea of a supranational currency goes back to at least 1940 and Keynes - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bancor .…

"Given an 'experience machine' capable of providing whatever experiences we desire, in a way indistinguishable from 'real' ones, should we stubbornly prefer the truth of reali…

Bats eat mosquitoes: https://www.mosquito.org/page/faq#Do%20bats%20serve%20as%20a... ?…

Within my current organisation, two main search options are Solr and Elasticsearch, both based on Lucene. Generalising a bit, Solr is more targetted at enterprise search and unstructured content searc…

Children will only say they want to be things they are exposed to and understand. Looking at the list for nowadays, it still includes teachers, athletes and musicians, which they see in the media and …

My favourite quote from the article: "no one needs a billion dollars". Wonder if that's a reference to "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion doll…

I propose a simple "smell test" for "new internet" projects. A project would need at least one of the following two (not necessarily both given the maturity lifecycle): 1. Would th…

Yes, only ever seen phonics taught in the UK - wasn't aware there were alternative approaches, let alone any controversy on the topic. It might not be clear from the original article, but it isn&…

Yes, by "band asking the bar to play for free (i.e. the producer going to the advertiser)" I mean the band are the producers of the product, and the band are initiating a transaction with th…

The difference is in who tries to initiate the transaction - the producer or the advertiser. In the case of the band in the bar it would be the band asking the bar to play for free (i.e. the producer …

> where does it all come from? The UK doesn't have a lot of sunshine, nor do I see a lot of wind farms compared to other EU countries For Scotland at least the stats are: - Onshore wind 7.8G…

Would you be happy to give a bunch of pre-school children some weapons of mass destruction and "let them launch and see what happens"? I admit that we can't be sure what would happen, b…

In the very early days, you didn't need a search engine because there weren't that many web sites and you knew most of the main ones anyway (or later on had them in your own hotlists in Mosa…

Unless there's a significant change in human behaviour, convenience is always going to trump everything else including privacy - we have seen over and over again that people will happily hand ove…

That's Occam's Razor. There are all these complex theories that people in positions of power who come across as idiots must in actual fact be master manipulative geniuses given they can so c…

I think this may be conflating individuals with corporate entities. Certainly from a corporate entity perspective both have significant capital requirements. But from an individual perspective, to be …

Yes, they would be doing something they would be doing anyway, e.g. exercising at a gym, with the electricity generation just a useful byproduct. Wasn't thinking along the lines of something like…

> If Libra is an oligarchy, closed financial systems are dictatorships Given the global financial system is not controlled by one individual, it isn't a Dictatorship (power of one) but is mo…