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User: Scottingham

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Comments · 351

  1. Re:Good grief on Gizmodo: Don't Buy Anyone an Amazon Echo Speaker (gizmodo.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Presumably though cell phones have a power constraint, the battery. If it were constantly sending full audio and video back to the mothership battery life would nose-dive.

    Plugged in smart hubs though? Buying one is probably considered opting in to full time surveillance.

    1984 seems so quaint now. Relatedly, I'm pretty sure GIFs are the 21st century Newspeak.

  2. Re:We read about battery improvements... on Rice University Adds Asphalt To Speed Lithium Metal Battery Charging By 20 Times (nextbigfuture.com) · · Score: 1

    It wouldn't happen tomorrow, but the demand could be there if the energy/materials were.

    Some combination of sequestration and transmutation (not literally, but CO2->carbon fiber) could be a winning ticket. Not to mention we could try and reforest areas. That'd have a pretty large negative carbon effect. I recall recently reading an article about how in the early 90s in Costa Rica they dumped tons of orange peels onto depleted scrub land. 30 years later the growth was so impressive that they couldn't find their original signs marking the experimental area!

    Am I being optimistic? Of course. I'd prefer to waste my brain cycles on thought experiments like these vs the 'Subject of hate du jour' or 'Look what The Idiot said now' being peddled everywhere else.

  3. Closing one of the last analog holes means that your music an only pass through digital approved devices.

    Soon:
    *Danger, music from an unverified source detected, sound output disabled*

  4. Re:We read about battery improvements... on Rice University Adds Asphalt To Speed Lithium Metal Battery Charging By 20 Times (nextbigfuture.com) · · Score: 2

    You may have said that as a joke, but you might not be that far off.

    There are processes now using molten-lithium carbonate electrolytic cells to pull the carbon out of the air. The real innovate though is the electrode has nucleation sites that allow for the growing of carbon-nanotube whiskers long enough to be harvested and spun into a carbon fiber with not much more processing (compared to current forms of carbon fiber manufacture). The other component to making useful carbon fiber materials is epoxy resin. Resin is pretty much all organic, read-carbon!

    This coupled with cheap PV solar and focused solar heating (for the carbonate cells) we could really be pulling truly significant amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Not just sequestering, but providing true value-added structural materials (ie market driven!!)

  5. Call me crazy... on Judge Recommends ISP and Search Engine Blocking of Sci-Hub in the US (torrentfreak.com) · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But publicly funded research should be available to the public.

  6. Re:/. Your best source for a quick ad. on OnePlus 5, 'The Best Sub-$500 Phone You Can Buy', Launched (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 0

    No you don't.

  7. Re:Explanation on Denmark Is Killing Tesla and Other Electric Cars (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 1

    I bet universal healthcare and an amazing social safety net that (nearly) all citizens seem to approve of and enjoy is part of the equation.

  8. Re:Thank your parrents on 80% of Millennials Say They Want To Buy a Home -- But Most Have Less Than $1,000 (cnbc.com) · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Same. This also (partially) explains why many black populations in the US are so screwed over today. They weren't able to get mortgages in the 50s and 60s, so they never were able to start accruing wealth to pass onto the next generation.

  9. God damn! Who the hell is cutting onions in my office?

    Ow my feels.

  10. Re:Stupid on California Seeks To Tax Rocket Launches, Which Are Already Taxed (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 5, Informative

    NC lost numerous concerts, conferences, NCAA tournaments and other large events due directly to HB-2. None of that counts the individual people who decided not to vacation here. It was easily $1 Billion in economic activity lost. Easily. The NCAA tournament (which UNC won!) would have been held in NC except for, yep, HB-2.

    No impact at all?

  11. Re:Vigorous debate? Surely you jest on Ontario Launches Universal Basic Income Pilot (www.cbc.ca) · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Seconded.

    I've been on this site since about 2001. The 'This site has gone to shit' arguments have been around that long too. However, in the past 2 years (since around the /. Beta fiasco it seems) most of the quality comments have all but left. 'Conservative echo chamber' kinda hits the nail on the head. The libertarian dog whistle / talking points get trotted out so often it's just boring now to read. Arm-chair economists with such deep insights as 'Don't like your job, move and get another one, dummy!' seem to be about the best the site has to offer now.

    Why am I still here then? Habit mostly, I gave it up (and read Soylent) for a good while, and now I come back, thought not as often as before. As for reading comments, I guess I still do out of some hope that they might get better again...though my tolerance is lower I spend only a fraction of the time trying to sift through the Randian garbage.

  12. I think you forgot to tell us to get off your lawn.

  13. Re:Test Static Fire on Falcon 9 Explodes On Pad (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    I considered the static firing a test fire. However, recent news suggests that it was the fueling that caused the explosion. It'll be interesting to see what they determined to be the cause.

  14. Test Static Fire on Falcon 9 Explodes On Pad (npr.org) · · Score: 1

    Isn't this pretty much WHY they do static fires in the first place?

    I'm sure they didn't expect the whole damn thing to explode though. Either way, the data they got from this is incredibly valuable. Whatever happened I'm willing to be won't happen again.

  15. I'm sick and tired on MdSolar posting these anti-nuclear propaganda pieces!

  16. Re:Exchanges are not good for storing coins on Bitcoin Exchange Bitfinex Says It Was Hacked, Roughly $60M Stolen (reuters.com) · · Score: 1

    Wow, this almost reads like a joke. I had heard of 1/2 of the exchanges you had coins on that got hacked.

  17. I see you've played knifey-spooney before!

  18. What a fucking nightmare!

    I wouldn't do this even if it made the phone completely free.

  19. Ha your sig caught me off guard! I'm heading to the Chapel Hill one today to pick up some cat food. Great stores! The NC showing on /. is always higher than I think it should.

  20. Re:Better Idea on Let's Drug Test The Rich Before Approving Tax Deductions, Says US Congresswoman (theguardian.com) · · Score: 3, Informative

    That is exactly what they think. They know somebody who's cousin is like that. Therefore all poor people are lazy bums!

  21. Velocopter on Larry Page Is Secretly Working On a Flying Car (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The article briefly mentioned a few of the competitors.

    My favorite of this whole new 'class' of flying machines is the Velocopter.

    It has 16 outrunner brushless DC electric motors on fixed prop blades. All flying is done essentially through the software and a single joystick (no rudder pedals or separate throttle).

    The fact that it has no actuated flight surfaces, and the blades are in a fixed position, the build complexity of this machine is waaay simpler and to lower tolerances than just about any other flying machine out there.

    Of course, right now on battery alone the range is pretty poor (prob like 15-20 min of flying time, tops), but with a gas turbine generator it should be extended quite significantly.

    While it isn't exactly the most efficient at flying compared to even helicopters, I think its simplicity, safety (very redundant), and relative quietness makes up for that.

  22. Hmm, I wonder if solar molten salt storage could serve as a hedge against the cells solidifying. Or grid backup.

    That is a great insight though, thanks!

  23. Okay, then Aluminum reduction for the spent Al-air batteries.

  24. Aluminum on Chile Has So Much Solar Energy It's Giving It Away for Free (bloomberg.com) · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Why not create some aluminum recycling factory? Those are pretty energy intensive. They could scale their operations based on excess demand. Perhaps even solely to create aluminum-air batteries.

  25. Re:Soon... on Samsung To Roll Out In-TV Ads To Legacy Displays Via Software Update · · Score: 2

    I'm with you on the lost tolerance for ads. Whenever I go to my parent's house they all they a kick out of how repulsed I am at the TV commercials.

    As for telemarketers, especially for Time Warner who try ever few months to sell me a cable package I love pointing out how much of a ripoff it is. 'So you're telling me for $100 dollars a month I get to watch TV with 5 minute commercial breaks every 15 minutes? If I watch an 'hour long' TV show 15 minutes of my life was wasted on ads. And I have to pay for that?' I'm usually met with 'wow, yeah when you put it that way...um....have a nice day'