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User: Jumperalex

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Comments · 390

  1. Re: No one overlooked this on MIT Says We're Overlooking a Near-Term Solution To Diesel Trucking Emissions (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    Don't forget slowing down for traffic, getting cut off, keeping speed on down hills ... and then the reverse of those. Batteries sized right to store that energy can be useful; they can also just be straight up charge on the long straight while the motor/generator is operating at peak efficiency.

  2. Re: No one overlooked this on MIT Says We're Overlooking a Near-Term Solution To Diesel Trucking Emissions (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 1

    This^^^ and then use batteries for when you DO actually stop/start, accelerate to pass, and for pulling up a hill so you don't have to ramp up the engine RPM too much to generate the electricity needed to power the electric motors only up that hill.

    Hint: even long haul trucks don't run full throttle all the time. So the question is, how do you recover the massive amounts of energy when they have to slow down/ hold on the down hill and then use it when you need to accelerate again/ pull back up the hill.

    Which part of applied thermodynamics don't the rest of you understand.

  3. You, him, and the R's don't get off that easy. The No True Scotsman argument holds no water. He calls himself a Republican, the Republican party accepts and supports him, and probability theory says at least one registered Republican voted for him; if not two.

    Citation: 1856 case of "If it walks like a duck and quacks like a Duck ..."

  4. So I know there are some NFC security factors what probably need to be tightened up before I want something pushed to my phone, but isn't this a perfect opportunity for NFC on the pay terminal? We already have CC terminals with touch to pay. As a first step, well before we start mandating and/or banning anything, what about passing contactless payment receipts back to the customer's device and then displaying it? Second step, even for CC contact payments the customer would hold their phone to the terminal and get the receipt.

    Just an idea of how to do it without giving out email addresses, which take time, rubs me the wrong way, and does seem like a bigger add to the terminals than NFC.

  5. Re:You want to stop climate change? on Ethereum Plans To Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption By 99 Percent (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    If you don't understand the difference in the War on Drugs and the War on Cryptomining it isn't worth explaining it.

  6. Re:You want to stop climate change? on Ethereum Plans To Cut Its Absurd Energy Consumption By 99 Percent (ieee.org) · · Score: 1

    No need to ban mining. Ban use in transactions and you make it worthless. Boom, no one will mine it except for the darkest of web transactions and even then probably not. But if they do it'll be so few as to not matter AND have enough of a power density footprint it'll be easy to detect like grow houses. Then just start jacking up their electricity rates until they stop. Not even a need to raid or fine just keep collecting via their electric bill >;-)

  7. Re:In other words, Dallas and Virginia. on Amazon Plans To Split HQ2 Evenly Between Two Cities, Report Says (wsj.com) · · Score: 1

    Crystal City is the opposite of affordable. I mean yeah the actual literally named area of Crystal City has semi-affordable apartments, but not a lot of them and if you want more than the basics you're going to have to look into even pricier areas or endure a horrid commute (and still pretty high prices). Living in the greater DC metro area is cheaper than NYC, but not that much. https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of...

    Still ... yeah ... NYC seems like an odd choice. Frankly looking at Northern VA I'm surprised at Crystal City other than the cheap vacant office space and metro access and proximity to DC proper and literally walking distance to the Pentagon, and .... OOOOOOhhhhhh I get it.

  8. Re:Heh on Do Businesses Really Need to Hire CS Majors? (cio.com) · · Score: 1

    Thank you for a very accurate, non-car, analogy.

    When I'm interviewing for certain roles there are many times when my feedback to the recruiters is, "this person will get bored on project X ... send their resume over to Billy Bob who's doing some more exciting almost 'new-science' stuff"

    Bottom line is I'm not gonna ask (or pay) a CS to spend their entire day coding up basic web pages using a nearly 10yo tech stack ([cough] federal [cough]). Instead, go find me someone who just finished a coding bootcamp that wants to build their resume and while showing me how they can take the client's aging tech stack into the modern era.

  9. Its also Google. They are more likely to be spearphished than anonymous cowards ;-)

    So they get more of them and better ones.

  10. Re:Apples to Oranges Comparison on Ask Slashdot: Why Do Popular Websites Add New Features So Sparingly? · · Score: 1

    Effective conversation threading ... major win
    Tagging system instead of folders ... major win (FOLDERS NEED TO DIE)

  11. it is. As another poster said, I use it daily to get around the fact that I can't have my phone with me at my desk.

  12. Re:the weak link again on California To Become First US State Mandating Solar On New Homes (ocregister.com) · · Score: 1

    Hmmm serious question (and I'm about to go on a google adventure) but if you can put a flywheel in a car why would earthquakes be an issue? I mean that in the context that the vibration and acceleration involved in an automotive application (especially in F1 and Le Mans) would seem to be mostly solved science. No? I'd think some relatively basic damping, maybe even active damping like used in skyscrapers if you're talking about critical storage like hospitals etc; otherwise a home based system could just use passive damping and isolation. And then at some design safe-factor you call it "good enough" and accept that any earthquake big enough to damage your flywheel is big enough to level your house so who cares if you've got a functioning flywheel? Well other than having power to tap from might be nice ;-)

    I'm mostly just really surprised that the idea of a home based flywheel, sitting outside, maybe buried to reduce the need for ballistic shielding, or on a roof to protect against flood waters, hasn't come up more often as a viable solution. And let's not forget that earthquakes and flooding aren't issues everywhere.

  13. Re:Hidden Advantage of Direct Booking on Hotels Now See Online Travel Sites as Rivals (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 1

    As it happens i did get the confirmation really quickly. So I felt good about it. Had I know I would have just called the hotel directly or even just walked in the door. But doing it online from the coffee shop was much easier. But yeah, won't be doing that again still.

  14. Re:Hidden Advantage of Direct Booking on Hotels Now See Online Travel Sites as Rivals (marketwatch.com) · · Score: 2

    I'm guessing this is exactly what just happened to me 48 hours ago in Prague using Booking.com. I needed to change hotels last minute so I booked the room at like 11am, we showed up around 2pm and were told with a smile, "We didn't have that room so we upgraded you. Here is our card. Call us next time and we'll also give you better rate." Ummm hey all I know is I paid for a Junior Suite and you gave me a Deluxe WOOT! But yeah it could have gone badly especially since we had already checked out of our other room which was going to be at ground zero for a Rammstein concert we didn't know about :)

    So I'll be sure to keep this in mind.

  15. Re:I'M OUTRAGED!! Oh wait, no I'm not. on New Wyoming Bill Penalizes Utilities Using Renewable Energy (csmonitor.com) · · Score: 2

    Actually yes we are and should.

    What is the alternative? Sit back and do nothing and then act shocked when it passes? How do you think stupid laws get passed? Conversely how do you think stupid laws get don't get stopped? The answer to both question is, by doing nothing.

    As for the sources and motivations ... again ... without some level of "hair on fire"-ness no one will even know or be motivated to dig deeper and mobilize if needed.

    Also, motivations don't really matter, execution does, so the only thing you need to "find" that is "unbiased" is the language of the proposed law. The actual text. That should be easy enough to find. Here you go http://legisweb.state.wy.us/20... One google search for "wyoming bill bans solcar" including the typo led me to the first link by for the Billings Gazette article in which the second sentence had the words "Senate File 71", A google search of that leads to the very first link pasted above.

    There you go, there is your unbiased source of information.

    You want to know why this matters even if "no one thinks the bill is going anywhere anyway"? Because it even exists at all !!! Legislators that waste time writing, proposing, and making others have to work and vote against it are bad legislators that should be doing actual work vice wasting theirs and everyone else's time.

  16. Re:"Likley grow" - Bullshit on 6 Major Countries Have Recently Announced Plans To Phase-Out All Coal-Fired Power Plants (electrek.co) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No thanks. I'd rather we have public policy that favors low / no carbon energy sources. Believe it or not, we DO get to pick winners in that regard so long as we don't pick WHICH low/no carbon source and don't pick which company is going to do it. But we 100% can decide to incentivize environmentally friendlier options that have longer term viability than pulling it out of the ground. Especially when there exists an entrenched system actively resisting competition and resists the internalization of external costs.

  17. Re:Oil and internal combustion are not the problem on A New Process Turns Sewage Into Crude Oil (newatlas.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    True, which is what makes this process attractive.

    Atmosphere -> Plant -> Fuel: More plants need to be grown using more fertilizer and possibly replacing food crops

    Atmosphere -> Plant -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel or
    Atmosphere -> Plant -> Animal -> Human -> Sewage -> Fuel: means there is no point in growing more plants because humans are only going to eat so much of it to produce the sewage waste needed for the process.

    That is the benefit of this, over other processes that claim to leverage current waste as the feed-stock. It isn't practical to generate more sewage to feed the beast ... unless you envision a Matrix like poo farm ;-) Put another way, the sum total of all human digestive systems can be counted on to produce sewage feed-stock without fail (it just needs to be collected) but it isn't subject to scaling it up beyond how much we all poop.

    The counter example of course being Cellulosic fuel processes which can be fed by the current remnants of human activity BUT ALSO by intentionally growing more cellulosic fuel crops (like sugarcane, switchgrass, etc) using more fertilizer and possibly supplanting food crops. It would be silly to not leverage cellulosic waste, but there needs to be effective policy to make sure we don't do more harm than good as farmers start deciding what crops to plant.

  18. It is a known problem, that for which there is a lot of research going on. If you're really curious, and need to spend some time not working ;-), go on a google journey using "biometric template revocation".

  19. Double check your help|troubleshooting page to see if acceleration / directX is disabled. I had the same problem, found that an old buggy driver had caused FF to disable all acceleration (despite the setting being checked) because of crashes. Now google maps is much faster and smoother. Probably not up to chrome standards but it was a non-usable to usable transition.

  20. Every time they make a decision to buy their next phone and have to consider if they want to buy yet another application specific accessory.

    Or if they have a split household (technology wise) and have to deal with not being able to share peripherals.

    Or want to loan / borrow from a friend

  21. Re:Cheap? on Ask Slashdot: Alternatives To "Atomic" Clocks? · · Score: 1

    I was only talking about batter life with regards to old phones / tablets serving as clocks.

  22. Re:Cheap? on Ask Slashdot: Alternatives To "Atomic" Clocks? · · Score: 2

    A great idea actually. I like it. Lots of old phones in my desk and cheap tablets online.

    BUT, horrible battery life necessitating constant plug in. In fairness, battery life is likely the reason nothing other than the shortwave signal is viable at the moment except maybe some Bluetooth LE and a BT transmitter in in the house :(

  23. 100% success with a sample size of 3

    50GB Vertex 2 spent time in my PC, my laptop, my unRAID server as a cache, and now sits in a an enclosure but never really used

    60GB Vertex 2 spent time in my PC, my laptop, and my unRAID server as a cache, but is no longer being used as it was replaced with a 512GB Crucial

    120GB Vertex 3, sitting in my PC right now

  24. Re:Don't let perfection be the enemy of good enoug on Test Shows Big Data Text Analysis Inconsistent, Inaccurate · · Score: 3, Insightful

    All models are wrong, some are useful.

  25. Re:Good data first, then maybe big data later on Cutting Through Data Science Hype · · Score: 1

    "Data cleanup will take twice as long, cost twice as much, and you will lose at least 10% of your data when you decide to finally give up scrubbing the data."

    I like this. I will use this from now on with my client. I will be sure to give proper credit to a Registered Coward :)