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User: bluefoxlucid

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  1. Re:Sorry guys... on $3,000 Tata Nano Car Coming To US · · Score: 1

    At that size, the only thing that matters is torque. Massive actual power fluctuations don't make a shit of difference. This is why, although the Kawasaki Ninja 250R is awesome, the Honda CBR250R has a strong following: better torque curve, and the extra few HP you get off the Ninja is pointless throwing 300lb of metal and 200lb of man around.

  2. Re:What a Joke on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    Hmm, yeah that helps. But now we're at lowest common union (80% of $10 means you can't $9.99 at 70%), but yeah I think you found it.

  3. Re:Typical.... on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    Right. You'd have to bring suit, get your $25, pay your lawyer $400. Bring suit, get your $25, pay your lawyer $400. Everyone has to do this so they have to pay their lawyers a lot of lawyer fees and pay out money. In the end, you wind up battling the for legal fees which you can't always extract.

  4. Re:What a Joke on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26OKE7R7B it's 20% below any other price now. Used to be up to $9.99. Now I guess a $20 book can get 70% at $16, and an $8 paperback can be sold for $6.40 at 70%. The big trick is if you sell your book as a paperback ever, for $8, that's your base price and you need to be 20% below that--never mind that its main distribution is a $25 hardcover! So yeah.

  5. Re:reply on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    Shanghai Shunky Machinery Co. is famous for equipment malfunctions crushing their employee limbs in their factories and we should boycott them for their slave labor practices?

  6. Re:Typical.... on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    Class action suits are raised to punish companies in a case where you can get $25 out of them in small claims. You and ten million other people.

  7. Re:Typical.... on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    Dude gold is dense as fucking hell. A solid gold Audi would be a slow fuel hog.

  8. Re:Not just Amazon, Apple too. on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    So the agencies that are being sued now can sue Apple for causing them to get sued and demand recompense for this bunglefuck. This is why you should just use the Baen Free Ebook Library.

  9. Re:What a Joke on Amazon Kindle eBook Users To Get Refunds After Settlement · · Score: 1

    The publishers are stupid.

    Amazon created a hostile environment for books in the $10-$19.99 range. At $0.99-$9.99, you get 70% of the sale price as royalties and Amazon keeps 30%; whereas at $10+ you get 35% and Amazon keeps 65%. That means that the profits at $20 are equal to the profits at $9.99, and the profits at $10 are equal to the profits at $5. The market effect of a price point of $20 instead of $9.99 is huge: the books cost twice as much, people can buy half as many, and if they're buying from your competitors as well that means they may pass over you. Worse, if your competitors sell books for $9.99--say you have a basic book on AI, a cookbook, or a novel in a genre that's highly popular and thus has lots of options--then people will balk at your $20 sales price and select for your competitor more often, because they get more books for the same amount of money.

    Because of this and the book market in general, it becomes very much preferred to sell books for $9.99. A paperback costs $8-$15 typically; consider you have to raise the price of an ebook to over $20 to make a profit above the price at $10 and you'll quickly realize you're above the market value of your product. That's why Amazon does it this way: the leap across the $10-$20 gap is huge and devastating, and gives no profit; they are keeping ebook prices low.

    And yet I still see $15 books on kindle!

  10. Re:Flowers For Algernon on Stem Cell Treatment Found Effective For Rare Brain Disorder · · Score: 1

    In other words, we're potentially letting the retard babies breed, and in the mean time instead of dying they get to have medically induced AIDS (sans an actual HIV infection).

    I know Eugenics isn't popular in this country, but honestly, when it comes to "you have an inheritable genetic disorder that turns your life into an expensive shitfest," can we impose physical sterilization as a condition of treatment? I mean really, these people are a drain on the monetary economy by way of insurance (insurance pays out, meaning premiums must go up to cover risk--more money flowing out means higher risk in the business overall, which is covered by having a bigger cash reserve); they consume the resource of medical care (there isn't enough of it to cover everyone's needs if we made it free); and by breeding they are passing on genetic code that results in these same disorders, making their children carriers or worse (and because most people breed, it gets around and infects an ever-growing portion of the population).

    Think about it. Remove these people from the breeding pool.

  11. Re:I stopped at water quota. on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    I dunno, I think we could build the desalinization plant like the Bespin HE3 gas mine in the Wolf system. HE3 is only 0.07% of helium gas, a pretty rare isotope; Bespin uses the return gas line as a draw to boost the uptake line, reducing the amount of energy used. Though, also since the mine is on a huge fucking gas giant and the potential is significant, they ground out the upper atmosphere through the gas line and use the potential difference as a driver--as electricity.

    RO returns a lot of the water back to ground. We could use the return as a siphon, giving say 85% return to ground. So you'd need to supply i.e. 15%(ish) of the pumping power, the rest comes from counterbalance via returning the waste water to ground.

  12. Re:Based on experience on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    Nothing about installing infrastructure is cheap--and face it, replacing your water heater, your AC, your furnace, and running the plumbing for a rooftop array is infrastructure. I still want to know how the utilities will function when everyone generates their own. I'm betting on a huge mark-up on electricity so the baseline is expensive.

  13. Re:Sad but expected on Firefox 16 Pulled To Address Security Vulnerability · · Score: 1

    and what about JavaScript hijacking keystrokes and context menus, resizing and moving windows, etc?

  14. Re:Sad but expected on Firefox 16 Pulled To Address Security Vulnerability · · Score: 1

    So, a Java emulator with a QuickSave binding at F11 or ^s you would rather hit F11 and Firefox wanks to fullscreen? What about arrow keys? I can't scroll up/down a page (or left/right for that matter) when a plug-in OR an input box has focus! So horrible when I'm trying to play Pacman flash games, jamming up/down/left/right on twitch reactions, and the page just SITS STILL AND WON'T SCROLL! That's a total bug, must fix it.

  15. Re:Firefox *16*!? on Firefox 16 Pulled To Address Security Vulnerability · · Score: 1

    Yeah that's what I was thinking. FF50 will be out by the time I'm old enough to date.

  16. Re:Returns... on Counterfeit Air Bag Racket Blows Up · · Score: 1

    Well how about you buy this plastic spoon I 3D printed? In fact I'll give you 3, a $60 value, all for $14.99 plush shipping!

  17. Re:I stopped at water quota. on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    It's a lot harder to recover salts than desalinate. Desalinization is reverse osmosis; 10 gal 3% salt water runs by, 1 gal freshwater comes out and 9 gal 3.3% salt water comes out the other end.

  18. Re:Based on experience on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    Supercapacitors are inherently a bad design. They're basically just capacitors that are broken--the dielectric doesn't exist, rather conductors are slapped together and by virtue of not being an actual solid piece they won't get any electrical flow below a very low potential. That means they only run at pretty low voltage.

    PROPER capacitors built with nanomaterials will work better, but they'll also require higher grade of technology than we have.

  19. Re:Returns... on Counterfeit Air Bag Racket Blows Up · · Score: 1

    When I read the summary, I was thinking "far below the PRICE you stupid monkeys! 'Value' is not 'Price'!" Airbags are such worthless shit. (The statistics on airbag "lives saved" works like this: if you have a collision and the airbag deploys and the collision theoretically could be fatal and you didn't die, airbag saved your life. On top of that, seatbelts are often crippled--slow locks, no centripital lock, etc--so while a no-airbag standard from the 90s might save you, an airbag failure to deploy in a 2011 will kill you. QED.)

  20. Re:Based on experience on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    Yeah, gas should be good for 100 years; but even beyond that, look at Europe and look at some one-off US projects. Europe has fields of parabolic reflectors basically doing a miniature SAPL at a sterling engine to drive a dynamo--looks like a satellite dish with a big metal brick at the antenna focal point. The US has one or two large-scale molten salt generators that do the same, just on a giant penis-shaped tower that's easier to take out if you want to down the grid (yeah dropping a plane in a field of collectors won't do much overall).

    Solar heating systems shouldn't be using the ground as a heat collector. What you should have is plumbing circulating through a collector on the roof, with a water pump (not heat pump) circulating antifreeze (polyethylglycol, food grade, non-bactericidal below 20% concentration, low toxicity) past a heat pipe that's soaking up sunlight (getting boiling hot). That hot loop can circulate through a coil, or you can heat the hot water tank and circulate THAT through a coil; either way, blow air through it into the HVAC and you have forced air heating. If the water pump fails, a new one is $40, a really good new one is $120.

    Thing about PV panels is they're "becoming cheap" but it takes exotic process and materials to get a split triple band panel, for example manganese-tungsten-tellurium crystal with oxygen forced into it. That'll get you 20%, maybe nearing 25% efficiency; current tier 1 solar panels are 16%-17%. By comparison, a collector tube captures 100% of what lands on its black surface, and from there it's loss to radiation--hence why they use an evacuated tube (hint: it's a thermos), stainless steel line (poor thermal conductor) wrapped in insulation, etc. The sterling engine can reach 50% efficiency of conversion of what reaches it--if that's 80%, then so be it, 40% efficiency which is better than exotic PV. more likely you'll get about 30% efficiency, 25% off 80% collection efficiency, which is just as good as a real solar panel--ignoring the 100% efficiency of a hydronic furnace and a solar water heater themselves, along with the mind-bending concept of using heat to cool your house.

    Part of it, I think, is a huge farce about how electricity is "safe". Electricity doesn't "leak," it doesn't "ignite," it doesn't "burn." Think about how your home insurance is affected by owning a wood burning stove or (god forbid) gas lighting. It's not like electricity can cause a fire. Similarly, running high-pressure 300 degree hot water would be nuts; it's not like electricity can injure someone. I think we could functionally come up with safety systems to cut off and blow pressure or seal gas in the event of a power loss or a fault; the issue is people don't believe safety in these systems is functionally possible. As such, imagine the insurance market's reaction to people having hot, pressurized, super-boiling water plumbing through the house and exposed in the basement.

    PV will catch on, but there are better ways to do this. Remember 100% of what you collect becomes heat in a solar heating system. Electricity generation and use are both difficult and lossy; most of what we do (cook, refrigerate, space heat, air condition) is just moving heat around.

  21. Re:Based on experience on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    PV is on the whole stupid. Expensive and dirty to manufacture, low-efficiency, overspecialized use of space.

    We have natural gas air conditioning units. We have solar hot water heaters and hydronic heating systems. My house is going to get a solar hot water heat upgrade, followed by a hydronic system. The hot water system usually switches off halfway through the day, so there's excess heat. The tank is 160F-190F, with a thermostatic mixing valve following to add cold water to set 135F household water temperature--which means it multiplies the volume of the tank (less actual hot water goes into the hot water lines) and gives it resistance to fluctuation down to 135F (if the tank is 140F, I'm still getting 135F just like when it's 190F).

    Hydronic heater pulls tank water (NOT heating loop water) through a coil in the main furnace. A blower then cools this water. This means my (at least) 130F water tank heats my house. Failing that, a gas furnace (or heat pump, if you want--there are combined water heater and space heat heatpumps, so it's not inappropriate as a water and home heat backup) kicks in to heat the water tank itself, thus providing hot water to heat the house. Mainly though, sunlight heats the house. This eliminates most gas usage or electricity usage to drive a heat pump if the tank is big enough and the collector array is sized for the tank.

    In the summer, the hot loop (at around 300F!) diverts to circulate past the air conditioning unit. This is an absorption system basically identical to modern natural gas AC units: sealed unit containing water, ammonia, liquefied hydrogen. Moving part is a pump to heat exchange to a standard refrigeration coil in the furnace, again just like modern gas AC units (they really do just drop outside, rig up to gas plumbing, and plug into your existing furnace). Again, gas or heat pump back-up. Hot, sunny days drive the AC harder.

    Above a certain operating (hot loop) temperature AND (water) tank temperature, the hot loop also diverts to a sterling engine. This engine drives a cooling pump to cool itself, and also a dynamo. Thus when the system is generating heat beyond what is needed to get hot water and heating/AC, it heat dumps into an electricity producing dynamo somewhat smaller than a gas back-up generator stuffed into your basement. Importantly, this doesn't waste a ton of roof space for photovoltaics that have low efficiency and constantly degrade, nor does it convert that power back (with even more loss) to drive heating or AC (heat pump). Instead, it drives a teflon-lubricated heat engine (teflon is used rather than grease to lubricate drive train bearings in cars now) which needs almost no maintenance (probably: seals, which will be high-temperature teflon O-rings anyway--I use these in beer brewing, actually...) and will last decades without an efficiency drop.

    Steel. Glass. Normal forging. No excessive use of toxic chemicals (teflon sparingly, and it's not toxic but its production may be?). Long maintenance cycles. High efficiency. Maximum flexibility in minimum space usage (tank, thermonic furnace, and AC, all same size as standard; dynamo is an addition). Flexible stainless steel piping in insulation for the hot loop, rather than copper, to minimize energy loss (bare stainless has 40% of the energy loss of copper; insulated stainless has much less).

  22. Re:Based on experience on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    Based on experience, a day in my life 15 years from now will look a lot like a day in my life now. Except, hopefully, I won't still be working on my second master's degree, and I'll wish I didn't have kids.

    Fixed that for you.

  23. Re:I stopped at water quota. on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    It's only 5%-15% more salty than the input (more correctly, about 85%-95% of the water that goes in leaves). There's only so much production, so much flow. There's tide, which yanks water out to sea. If it did become a problem (hard to do), we could cycle water towers by drawing and desalinizing just before peak tide so the tide overwhelms the impact, then pulls back to take the salty water out into the ocean and diffuse into a negligible impact (within normal variation).

  24. Re:I stopped at water quota. on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    Doubt it. Dump the salty water back into the ocean. It's only about 5%-15% saltier and it gets dumped into a mass body that, yeah, isn't going to give a shit.

  25. Re:Really? on A Day in Your Life, Fifteen Years From Now · · Score: 1

    A thermostatic mixing valve is cheap.