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Mircea Neacsu wrote: Maybe you shouldn't fill your pool daily; you know, it's not a bathtub
My mother-in-law once got a water bill that was the equivalent of filling her pool 10 times daily for an entire month! The water company then compounded the mistake by crediting her account - twice!
They never corrected the account. I told her that when she moved away from her old house, she should have asked them to close out the account and pay her the sum. 
At least the local paper got an amusing article out of it showcasing the incompetence of the water company.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Correct. And I have made the point that we don't have a pool. The general attitude I'm picking up is (a) oh elephant, I don't know anything about these meters... or (b) yawn, just another local whining about their bill.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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This sounds like a broken pipe.
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If it was continuous you would be correct. But what we have then is a "self healing pipe" which in all my years I have never seen.
The fact that on Monday morning Sunday's usage was *exactly* 412 gallons for 7, 8, 9, and 10 pm each - really? I don't think so. Monday had an issue so when I went back to Sunday, those numbers all changed. using Smart Meters in departments that might not be as technically adept to pay attention to this stuff is a recipe for nonsense.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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My sympathies. We had a similar problem with "smart" meters here in Israel. It took a few billing cycles to fix, and IIRC, the meter itself was faulty.
The biggest problem was getting the pen-pushing, ![Elephant | [mastadon]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/elephant.gif) ing bureaucrats in the water company to accept that this was a problem with the meter, and not an intermittent leak in our pipes.
At least we were reimbursed for the unusual bills (they used the last billing cycle from before the erroneous bills to charge us).
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Whilst I was perusing another article in the MSN info world (that another member had mentioned) I stumbled across the following article "Scientists have found 'evidence' of advanced alien civilisations". The article relates to a scientific study of a combination of star surveys (roughly 5 million stars) and a methodology to filter the stars looking for specific emission markers that make the star unusual and possibly a Dyson sphere under construction. In the article there is a link to the official paper that the group produced (haven't finished reading it yet).
My own feelings are that Dyson spheres sound cool, but the amount of physical material that would go into making one would be prohibitive. Stars are big. Even red dwarf stars. Surrounding the star with technological material (all of the support devices to convert, control the flow of energy, store and forward it to the area of need). Would require the literal conversion of several star systems of every bit of matter in them (planets, moons, asteroids, every spec of material left over from the star formation) to provide the raw materials for the build. We might want to look for star systems surrounding a suspected Dyson sphere that have no planetary bodies associated with the star.
Of course, an advanced civilization might be able to capture the solar wind and also convert a large part of the radiant energy directly to usable matter.
In any case, here is the link. Have fun.
MSN[^]
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I suppose one way to do it is to cannibalize the other planets in the system. Like hit each planet with a giant spatula to flatten it.
The difficult we do right away...
...the impossible takes slightly longer.
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Here's a question, how do you maintain gravity in a Dyson Sphere (assuming you do not have "artificial gravity")?
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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I would suggest spinning it. You'd wind up with only a ring world's amount of living space but (like 640kb) that should be enough for anyone. It would probably make for an interesting typography in that "down" might not be perpendicular to the surface, but hey, you've already solved the hard problem of making and spinning it. This is probably a minor issue, comparatively. On the plus side there's no need to worry about artificial gravity failures sending the atmosphere and other loose material, like people, into the sun.
The "unused" sides, the axis poles as it were, could be for energy harvesting and such. They'd also make fairly good access points for ingress/egress of the sphere.
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From the CP newsletter
Astronomers are on the Hunt for Dyson Spheres - Universe Today[^]
Gary Stachelski 2021 wrote: but the amount of physical material that would go into making one would be prohibitive
There are all sorts of engineering problems, economical problems, and political ones as well. Those are pretty standard constraints on all fantastical theoretical constructs. Even much smaller ones.
Consider this - lets say one claims that the material in the solar system is enough. How do you dismantle Jupiter without destabilizing the entire star system.
Or what political system must the world have in place such that it would remain stable enough for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years while this was happening.
Those who want to believe often rely on yet more fantastical stuff to avoid such problems.
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Surely if you pointed a telescope at a star with a Dyson sphere then it would not be emitting any detectable radiation. Much like Dark Matter.
Wait... so that is what dark matter is?
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Startups will claim anything...
Hogan
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When I see any article where a startup is making tall claims my mind goes straight to Theranos, FTX, Nikola and such.
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The problem and solution reminds me of analog computing but using light instead of electricity.
Interesting that both quantum and this light method both look for minimal energy states to define the best possible solution to the problem.
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I've come to understand quantum computing to be a bit like Plinko on the Price is Right.
You set up your equation which can metaphorically be represented as placing the pegs into the board and then setting all the dividers for the troughs the chip may eventually fall into.
As a chip dropped in plinko settles to the lowest entropy of a trough. "Execute" is dropping a bunch of chips into the board and letting them settle entropically, then your answer is in counting the troughs.
There are some ways this metaphor doesn't play but some ways it plays really well.
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John F. Woods once said : “Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”.
There should be a similar saying in regards to writing (non unit) test cases.
"Always write test cases as if the person who ends up testing your software is a 5 years old without any knowledge of the software"
I'm going through some test cases on a large software and the tests cases are just a description of what I need to do.
In reality, I have to do about 20 different steps to get there and go through thousands of records (SQL) to find one record that will work.
Seriously, do you know of any good white paper on how to write good test cases ?
groan.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Maximilien wrote: John F. Woods once said : “Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.”.
This... this right here... is gold. 
Maximilien wrote: In reality, I have to do about 20 different steps to get there and go through thousands of records (SQL) to find one record that will work.
Sounds like someone who wrote those tests didn't know squat about writing tests (which is a lot of people). A unit test should never connect to a live resource. Not only is that non-deterministic, but you can't run 1,000s of tests quickly that way.
Maximilien wrote: Seriously, do you know of any good white paper on how to write good test cases ?
Wish I could help with that buddy. For me, it was a combo of coworkers helping and trial and error with Stack Overflow Googling.
Jeremy Falcon
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we're not running unit tests; I don't know how I could integrate that in our ancient/antiquated codebase 
We're doing functional and integration testing and acceptance testing.
It's just hard to change the inertia; that's why I would need some good resources to help me suggest some changes.
Thanks for the moral support.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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Ooops. Totally missed the non-unit part. 
If these are integration "test cases" they sound more like documentation for manual steps than anything else then. Probably could've achieved the same thing in a README.
Jeremy Falcon
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Would test automation help?
Had used Selenium framework, for a web application, some years ago, and our test scripts automated all the steps. There must be a similar framework for desktop apps.
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My Sr. partner is the best when it comes to breaking things:
0: Entering non-numeric chars where numbers should go or invalid numbers such as 1,1.2 or 1.1,2 (fun fact, letters up to f will happily identify as numeric)
1: Extremely long text/numbers, special characters, 0s as divisors
2: Leaving 'required' fields blank
3: Using the back button in web apps
Of course, there are some situations you can't predict. That's what users are for! 
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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and/or
- cancel dialogs
- close app (with click on "X") while db is in edit mode
- kill app with task manager while someone is editing something
- use special - non ascii - chars where it is not expected
- simulate high load with endless read/write operations
- change screen size/resolution to unusual values
modified 18hrs ago.
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