I'm on the mobile site, as I usually am, reading/. on my phone while having a cig (no judgments please).
Look, what you choose to do with a welder is your business, but for the love of god get off Slashdot whilst you're doing it. Cig welders can cause some serious injuries if you're not careful.
You must also realize...they don't care. You are an infidel to them. Christian, agnostics, atheist, secular humanist...it does not matter. You are not a true adherent to their particular strain of Islam so you must be killed or subjugated.
You must also realise, that most people do not believe in their religion to that degree, in fact that is a big part of why people are fleeing into Europe, because they're sick of dealing with extremists and simply want a normal life, with a normal job so they can have normal kids in a normal house.
It also does not help that Europe and America are bombing their homes.
Rather than carry why not buy on the spot in the country you're travelling to? Every airport should have a duty-free shop of some sort. What you'll probably find are power strips with surge protection rather than something specifically marketed as a surge protector. Look for one with a fuse or a mini circuit breaker. If you're worried about the quality, then you can try daisy-chaining two of them.
Personally I carry one socket adapter and a powerboard.
That way, I can charge all of my devices from one power point. I've also got a powerboard with universal outlets so that I can plug in Australian and local electronics. Useful if the only useful power point is being used by the TV or what not.
However I dont bother with surge protection. I've never had any of my electronics fail on holiday and if the power is regularly that dirty, the hotel will have surge protection installed at the mains as they dont want to replace all their TV's, computers, set top boxes and alarm clocks every time the power surges, let alone get complaints from their guests about dead laptops.
If you are somewhere third world, and the nominal 220V line goes to 260V and stays there for a while (fractions of a second to many seconds) the kind of surge suppressor found in power strips is useless. Your adapter will probably fry - and with luck fail in a way that blows a fuse inside without sending any damaging over voltage to the device it is powering. Better quality power adapters have added parts on the output that clamp the DC to safe limits even if the upstream parts in the adapter are being overvoltaged to failure.
That being said, I've travelled all over the third world from Colombia to Thailand and I've never had to use a surge protector. Most devices are solid enough to handle dirty power and most hotels, coffee shops and what not will have surge protection installed at the mains if power is that dirty (They dont like replacing all their electronics when the power company screws up).
Surge protectors are just another thing taking up space in my bag... so I dont bother carrying them.
A surge protector for 230-240 volts is what's needed.
Actually what is needed is a voltage converter/step down transformer, surge protectors don't downvolt 220-240v to 110v.
Or the US could just admit that 110v is a bad idea and follow the world onto 220-240v.
However for laptops, it usually doesn't matter as most manufacturers make one auto-switching power supply for the entire world. Check your power brick to see if it supports up to 240v, it should say something like "AC 100-240v". As for the rest of your stuff, just make sure whatever you get a step down converter/transformer, then just bring a powerboard/powerstrip from home.
As an Australian (240v), I only have to worry about getting a plug adapter. Most Europeans are in the same boat.
Libertarians will never come to agreement as to whether not there is a duty to ensure that ALL people are equally free. This of course allows for Authoritarians to gain and keep power simply by promising to enforce a Conservative Libertarian agenda on Social Libertarians or a Social Libertarian agenda on Conservative Libertarians. Perhaps someday we will all agree to live and let live, but I fear that day is a long, long way off.
Libertarians are naive in the extreme (like the bunch that invested in the "Galts Gulch" in Argentina a few years back). On the up side, there's a business opportunity in New Hampshire with the best kind of clients happening pretty soon. Anyone with a silver tongue and no qualms about ripping people off should be rubbing their hands with glee at the moment.
Why do those drivers continue to drive for Uber? Do they all want to drive for other people as a hobby?
Because it's still new enough that there are plenty of starry-eyed suckers who are ignorant of the fact they wont make money.
Plus a lot of costs are obfuscated. An Uber driver who isn't very good with numbers (because the app does everything for them) goes home and see he's earned $X, the ones with two brain cells will figure out that fuel costs $Y but still think the rest is profit... However they fail to take into account the costs of maintenance, insurance, repairs, so on and so forth.
Eventually the shine will wear off and Uber will end up with the worst of the worst. Drivers who literally cant get a job doing anything else.
Complain to your municipal government. Taxis here are clean, the drivers have to conform to a dress code and a service code, and there are dedicated inspectors to make sure that standards have to be maintained. When a taxi enters service, it cannot be more than 5 years old, and has to be retired when it it 10 years old, no matter if it's still in great condition. Rusty cars aren't allowed. Heck, there's even one cab driver driving a tesla because the extra initial cost is offset by the lower running costs.
This. Its the same in my city (Perth, Western Australia), the government does a fairly good job of vetting taxi drivers and taxi companies. Taxis are clean, drivers are presentable and all of them speak at least passable English (most drivers are Australian, but that reflects the demographics of Perth).
I've lived in places with unregulated taxi services, the end result is that they operated like criminal gangs. Turf was carved up, enforced and fought over. Every tuk tuk driver carried a gun. When governments tried to set up municipal transport, the drivers were dragged out of their buses (which were retrofitted Isuzu D-Maxes) and beaten. The west went though this generations ago, that's why we ended up with taxi regulations. Whilst Perth is expensive, our wages compensate. In Phuket, a taxi wont even switch on it's engine for less than 200 baht (US$6) and that 2/3 of the daily minimum wage there.
Having seen what happens when taxi services regulate themselves, I'd take the "terrible" regulations any day of the week.
A 25 mph speed limit is unrealistic on any public road I've ever seen, with the exception of roads made of cobblestone. It's difficult to drive a modern vehicle that slowly--it takes concentration on your speed that frankly makes you have much less attention to pay to obstacles and hazards... like children.
Odd. My car drives at about that speed idling in third gear. It takes no effort at all. If I want a slower speed I pick a lower gear. It is a high volume production car with no mods.
Gears? most steering wheel attendants will have no idea what these "gears" you speak of are.
Most of them have trouble moving their slovenly fingers to flick on the indicator (turn signals).
That does not mean anything if we do not know what happened or the layout of the street. Perhaps that car was speeding, but by how much? Perhaps the kid was jumping in front of the car and would have been injured anyway.
Right, it was the kids fault. Great logic there.
In Europe, they do this think called "enforcing the law" which is why you get people in civilised nations driving at sensible speeds in town centres.
Two things about this, one, slower vehicles are much easier to avoid for careless kids and two, speed kills, every extra ten miles an hour exponentially increases the likelihood of the pedestrian being killed when hit.
So set speed limits at 10mph, or 5mph, or ban cars entirely if decreasing fatalities is always a justification for decreasing a speed limit, because if it isn't then you need a more credible case.
Sigh, not this red herring again. Speed limits, especially speed limits in built up areas are a balance between practicality (getting somewhere) and safety (reducing the chances of a fatality in the event of a collision). Dropping from 30 MPH to 25 MPH is a significant increase in safety for a small sacrifice in practicality in areas where pedestrians are likely to be crossing the road (and in many places in England, houses are built almost to the kurb with only a small footpath, not to mention that pedestrians are often obscured by a line of parked cars (so be doubly grateful you England hasn't fallen victim to the SUV craze).
My point is, you cant sacrifice too much practicality for safety or vice versa, too much safety for practicality. Because of this, you need a more credible excuse.
In the UK the normal speed limit in a residential area is 30mph. 20mph limits in the vicinity of schools are becoming more common. In general UK speed limits are quite relaxed, and especially on non-urban roads policing of moderate speeding is very limited; It is not at all unusual to find traffic averaging 80+mph on UK motorways (interstates) which have a 70mph limit, and you could comfortably do 90mph if traffic is flowing with no real risk of a ticket.
All of this should make the UK a very dangerous place for pedestrians if speed limits alone were a primary driver of road fatalities, but they aren't. The UK averages 3.6 fatalities per billion kilometres driven. The US average (where limits are on average lower) is 7.1, which is effectively double. It seems much more likely that issues like car quality, driver certification, road design, car design etc are far more influential.
The US also has very lax speeding enforcement. I drove from LA to SF and back doing 85 MPH most of the way on the I-1, 101 and 5. I got pulled over just inside Las Vegas doing 88 in a 65 zone, the first thing the officer asked is "you're coming back from the Speedway aren't you" (yes there was a speedway, I was on the way back from it and yes they let you go very fast there). He stared at my license for a bit and told me to watch my speed in the future and drove off.
Of course in the US, law enforcement changes radically depending on what county you're in, but I'm pretty sure most interstates dont even have speed cameras.
However the UK gets it right. Strict enforcement of speed on urban roads and congested motorways, lax enforcement on empty motorways, A and B roads. However the big thing is, they target poor driver behaviour, not just speeding. If you're doing 100 on the motorway in a safe and courteous manner, you're fine. If you drive like a dickhead, then you get picked up. Bad driver behaviour and poor driver training are the biggest influencing factors in increasing motoring fatalities. Whilst training should be improved, law enforcement is the only way to reduce bad behaviour and by bad behaviour I dont just mean speed discipline but everything from lane discipline to indicating to keeping a safe distance to elements of road craft like letting people in. Blocking overtakers is a common thing in the US and Australia, not because it is legal but because the police just wont enforce that law.
Why am I not surprised that he's also a BMW driver/customer? He might as well get "stuck up, rich douchebag" tattooed on his forehead.
Whilst I dont disagree with the tattoo idea, you dont need to be rich or a douchebag to get a BMW these days. You can get a 228i for US$32,000 and a 235i for US$42,000. These aren't even close to being the base model which is the 220i (or 116i in Europe), that being said the 228i would be the cheapest bimmer I'd buy because the x20i's and diesels are crap to drive.
Not really. It looks like a dick move on Elon's part. I like Elon, but it looks like Stewart was in the right here and Elon's looking kind of petty, making an overly harsh personal response instead of addressing the issue with the man like a decent human.
Actually Elon is looking good for doing this. A little bit of schadenfreude. The blogger looks like a complete idiot for:
1. Thinking he's the king because he put down a 100% cancellable deposit.
2. Thinking he's the king and writing to Elon Musk.
3. Thinking anyone agrees with his silly little blog.
Elon Musk (who I'm actually a bit critical of) did the right thing here and it is his prerogative as a business owner. I can sympathise here because when I ran a business, often it was smarter to throw out the whiny, complaining, arrogant customers because they would monopolise my time with their irrational complaints. You think this is no big deal, but in a small store with only one or two staff (including myself, the owner) one person taking up my time for no good reason means that customers, paying customers walk out the door for a very good reason (getting no service). So early on in my business career I learned that is was smarter to cut a toxic customer than to keep them. Sure they'd leave shouting "You've just lost a customer, you'll be out of business in a week" however in reality, I'd be making money by serving other customers and they'll be back in the very next week buying something else. Only 3 people received a permaban from my store, I'm a harsh businessman, but also a fair one.
Elon is in the same boat. The number of people who want a Tesla far exceeds the number of people who pay attention to this guys blog. The guy was hoping to take advantage of the Streisand effect, but instead the Streisand effect turned on him and just got more positive press for Musk and Tesla.
I take it you're the kind of person who's never run a business and believes that "the customer is always right". I can tell you've never run a business because you think that most customers are:
a) right.
b) decent human beings
c) rational.
You couldn't be more wrong on all counts. Customers are, by and large, irrational, arrogant, insufferable beings who are almost never right and if you disagree with this statement then chances are that you are one of those customers.
You'll find that twins only do this for really long taxi-ways. The second engine will come on several minutes before the flight regardless to ensure they are warm and ready. Taking a turbine from off to full throttle would result in some very angry reliability engineers throwing stuff at you, likely whatever is left of the turbine.
Sir, I wish I had mod points for this.
If airlines didn't keep them separated, removing an engineers boot from a pilots arse would be a regular medical procedure.
Then again, I've seen this in most industries. Engineers are usually kept separate from operators for good reasons:)
Five comments in, and the signal-to-LUDD ratio from the Luddites has already dragged the conversation so far below the noise floor that it's not even a conversation anymore, just LUDD LUDD LUDD.
Guess what? Internal combustion engines of any kind will, at some point in the future, become non-viable. We'll have to come up with alternatives or lose much of our transporation capabilities. What they're doing here doesn't have anything to do with propulsion during flight, but at least someone is trying to think outside the proverbial box.
Erm, no.
Petroleum based fuels may at some point in the future (a very, very long way away in the future, there is more oil on the planet than people know about) become enviable, but the principle of ICE's will remain viable, they'll just switch to a new fuel source.
I own a Nexus 9 and I think it is a good solid tablet. But mine looks raggedy as hell because the matt finish on the back is only a thin film overlay that has worn off all over the place and in others is lifting like old dead skin. So face up it looks good, face down it looks like a 20 year old tablet that has had a hard life.
It depends on who made it.
After 16 months of daily usage, the case of my Nexus 5 showed little wear. The case on my 2013 Nexus 7 has two chips on the corners due to carelessness (dropping) but apart from that has nothing but a few scuffs. The Nexus 7 was made by Asus and the 5 by LG.
It was the same with my ancient Galaxy Nexus although the front bezel was wearing down to bare plastic after about 4 years, it still looked impressive enough that the car detailer who found it* asked where he could get one. I had to tell him he needed to go back to 2012.
* At that point I was glad to go back to the status of never having lost a phone. Apparently it had fallen out of my pocket and into the Bermuda triangle between the drivers seat and centre console.
I would not buy a phone without a microSD slot, and the Nexus line fails by not including such an essential feature.
But, more important than that: Google definitely should put more pressure on manufacturers and carriers to keep the phones' OS updated for longer.
Sample size of one, registered.
Micro SD has been superflous for some time now with the most basic of phones coming with no less than 4GB of usable storage space. Its more of a pain to deal with as you have to use FAT file systems for it.
My last to Nexus phones (Nexus 5 and Nexus 5x) have supported USB host mode for a while now, so you've got plenty of options for expanded storage.
A pro competitor at Tour de France averages 450 watts. Casual fit rider averages 220. That means having a mere half a horse power would let the casual rider win the Tour de France
For those weak at the unit conversion, there's a nice rhyme for remembering it.
In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
Divide the year of his voyage by two,
And you get the number of Watts in a horsepower.
Your poem fails on the last line. But those of us in Australia have an easier way.
Just times a Watt by 1000, then you have a KiloWatt (also 1 HP is 0.75 KW for those still using archaic measurement systems).
Is it just more publicized than that in other sports? I mean, you don't hear about cheating nearly as much in other "sports" where they depend upon mechanical equipment... Nascar, F1, MotoGP, etc...
You'd think that Bill Belichick were the coach...
Little man syndrome.
You see people who go into cycling races do so because they aren't good or rich enough to go into motorsports. Much the same as the MAMIL (Middle Aged Man In Lycra) who cycles is bitter because he doesn't earn enough money and has too many kids to buy an MX-5. So he rides and pretends that he's superior to the guy who does have enough money to afford a separate Mazda roadster for his commute to work whilst swerving all over the road in an attempt to hold up any of his peers in sporty autos. This kind of inadequacy is even worse in the world of professional cycling where not winning means literally having to admit you're a loser.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm on the mobile site, as I usually am, reading /. on my phone while having a cig (no judgments please).
Look, what you choose to do with a welder is your business, but for the love of god get off Slashdot whilst you're doing it. Cig welders can cause some serious injuries if you're not careful.
Since when are "guns" a "next technology" when they've been around for hundreds of years.
Besides, the great Satan these days is social media.
If they actually targeted guns as a problem with the same vitriol, they might do some good for once.
You must also realize...they don't care. You are an infidel to them. Christian, agnostics, atheist, secular humanist...it does not matter. You are not a true adherent to their particular strain of Islam so you must be killed or subjugated.
You must also realise, that most people do not believe in their religion to that degree, in fact that is a big part of why people are fleeing into Europe, because they're sick of dealing with extremists and simply want a normal life, with a normal job so they can have normal kids in a normal house.
It also does not help that Europe and America are bombing their homes.
Rather than carry why not buy on the spot in the country you're travelling to? Every airport should have a duty-free shop of some sort. What you'll probably find are power strips with surge protection rather than something specifically marketed as a surge protector. Look for one with a fuse or a mini circuit breaker. If you're worried about the quality, then you can try daisy-chaining two of them.
Personally I carry one socket adapter and a powerboard.
That way, I can charge all of my devices from one power point. I've also got a powerboard with universal outlets so that I can plug in Australian and local electronics. Useful if the only useful power point is being used by the TV or what not.
However I dont bother with surge protection. I've never had any of my electronics fail on holiday and if the power is regularly that dirty, the hotel will have surge protection installed at the mains as they dont want to replace all their TV's, computers, set top boxes and alarm clocks every time the power surges, let alone get complaints from their guests about dead laptops.
If you are somewhere third world, and the nominal 220V line goes to 260V and stays there for a while (fractions of a second to many seconds) the kind of surge suppressor found in power strips is useless. Your adapter will probably fry - and with luck fail in a way that blows a fuse inside without sending any damaging over voltage to the device it is powering. Better quality power adapters have added parts on the output that clamp the DC to safe limits even if the upstream parts in the adapter are being overvoltaged to failure.
That being said, I've travelled all over the third world from Colombia to Thailand and I've never had to use a surge protector. Most devices are solid enough to handle dirty power and most hotels, coffee shops and what not will have surge protection installed at the mains if power is that dirty (They dont like replacing all their electronics when the power company screws up).
Surge protectors are just another thing taking up space in my bag... so I dont bother carrying them.
A surge protector for 230-240 volts is what's needed.
Actually what is needed is a voltage converter/step down transformer, surge protectors don't downvolt 220-240v to 110v.
Or the US could just admit that 110v is a bad idea and follow the world onto 220-240v.
However for laptops, it usually doesn't matter as most manufacturers make one auto-switching power supply for the entire world. Check your power brick to see if it supports up to 240v, it should say something like "AC 100-240v". As for the rest of your stuff, just make sure whatever you get a step down converter/transformer, then just bring a powerboard/powerstrip from home.
As an Australian (240v), I only have to worry about getting a plug adapter. Most Europeans are in the same boat.
Libertarians will never come to agreement as to whether not there is a duty to ensure that ALL people are equally free. This of course allows for Authoritarians to gain and keep power simply by promising to enforce a Conservative Libertarian agenda on Social Libertarians or a Social Libertarian agenda on Conservative Libertarians. Perhaps someday we will all agree to live and let live, but I fear that day is a long, long way off.
Libertarians are naive in the extreme (like the bunch that invested in the "Galts Gulch" in Argentina a few years back). On the up side, there's a business opportunity in New Hampshire with the best kind of clients happening pretty soon. Anyone with a silver tongue and no qualms about ripping people off should be rubbing their hands with glee at the moment.
Why do those drivers continue to drive for Uber? Do they all want to drive for other people as a hobby?
Because it's still new enough that there are plenty of starry-eyed suckers who are ignorant of the fact they wont make money.
Plus a lot of costs are obfuscated. An Uber driver who isn't very good with numbers (because the app does everything for them) goes home and see he's earned $X, the ones with two brain cells will figure out that fuel costs $Y but still think the rest is profit... However they fail to take into account the costs of maintenance, insurance, repairs, so on and so forth.
Eventually the shine will wear off and Uber will end up with the worst of the worst. Drivers who literally cant get a job doing anything else.
Complain to your municipal government. Taxis here are clean, the drivers have to conform to a dress code and a service code, and there are dedicated inspectors to make sure that standards have to be maintained. When a taxi enters service, it cannot be more than 5 years old, and has to be retired when it it 10 years old, no matter if it's still in great condition. Rusty cars aren't allowed. Heck, there's even one cab driver driving a tesla because the extra initial cost is offset by the lower running costs.
This. Its the same in my city (Perth, Western Australia), the government does a fairly good job of vetting taxi drivers and taxi companies. Taxis are clean, drivers are presentable and all of them speak at least passable English (most drivers are Australian, but that reflects the demographics of Perth).
I've lived in places with unregulated taxi services, the end result is that they operated like criminal gangs. Turf was carved up, enforced and fought over. Every tuk tuk driver carried a gun. When governments tried to set up municipal transport, the drivers were dragged out of their buses (which were retrofitted Isuzu D-Maxes) and beaten. The west went though this generations ago, that's why we ended up with taxi regulations. Whilst Perth is expensive, our wages compensate. In Phuket, a taxi wont even switch on it's engine for less than 200 baht (US$6) and that 2/3 of the daily minimum wage there.
Having seen what happens when taxi services regulate themselves, I'd take the "terrible" regulations any day of the week.
A 25 mph speed limit is unrealistic on any public road I've ever seen, with the exception of roads made of cobblestone. It's difficult to drive a modern vehicle that slowly--it takes concentration on your speed that frankly makes you have much less attention to pay to obstacles and hazards... like children.
Odd. My car drives at about that speed idling in third gear. It takes no effort at all. If I want a slower speed I pick a lower gear. It is a high volume production car with no mods.
Gears? most steering wheel attendants will have no idea what these "gears" you speak of are.
Most of them have trouble moving their slovenly fingers to flick on the indicator (turn signals).
That does not mean anything if we do not know what happened or the layout of the street. Perhaps that car was speeding, but by how much? Perhaps the kid was jumping in front of the car and would have been injured anyway.
Right, it was the kids fault. Great logic there.
In Europe, they do this think called "enforcing the law" which is why you get people in civilised nations driving at sensible speeds in town centres.
So set speed limits at 10mph, or 5mph, or ban cars entirely if decreasing fatalities is always a justification for decreasing a speed limit, because if it isn't then you need a more credible case.
Sigh, not this red herring again. Speed limits, especially speed limits in built up areas are a balance between practicality (getting somewhere) and safety (reducing the chances of a fatality in the event of a collision). Dropping from 30 MPH to 25 MPH is a significant increase in safety for a small sacrifice in practicality in areas where pedestrians are likely to be crossing the road (and in many places in England, houses are built almost to the kurb with only a small footpath, not to mention that pedestrians are often obscured by a line of parked cars (so be doubly grateful you England hasn't fallen victim to the SUV craze).
My point is, you cant sacrifice too much practicality for safety or vice versa, too much safety for practicality. Because of this, you need a more credible excuse.
In the UK the normal speed limit in a residential area is 30mph. 20mph limits in the vicinity of schools are becoming more common. In general UK speed limits are quite relaxed, and especially on non-urban roads policing of moderate speeding is very limited; It is not at all unusual to find traffic averaging 80+mph on UK motorways (interstates) which have a 70mph limit, and you could comfortably do 90mph if traffic is flowing with no real risk of a ticket.
All of this should make the UK a very dangerous place for pedestrians if speed limits alone were a primary driver of road fatalities, but they aren't. The UK averages 3.6 fatalities per billion kilometres driven. The US average (where limits are on average lower) is 7.1, which is effectively double. It seems much more likely that issues like car quality, driver certification, road design, car design etc are far more influential.
The US also has very lax speeding enforcement. I drove from LA to SF and back doing 85 MPH most of the way on the I-1, 101 and 5. I got pulled over just inside Las Vegas doing 88 in a 65 zone, the first thing the officer asked is "you're coming back from the Speedway aren't you" (yes there was a speedway, I was on the way back from it and yes they let you go very fast there). He stared at my license for a bit and told me to watch my speed in the future and drove off.
Of course in the US, law enforcement changes radically depending on what county you're in, but I'm pretty sure most interstates dont even have speed cameras.
However the UK gets it right. Strict enforcement of speed on urban roads and congested motorways, lax enforcement on empty motorways, A and B roads. However the big thing is, they target poor driver behaviour, not just speeding. If you're doing 100 on the motorway in a safe and courteous manner, you're fine. If you drive like a dickhead, then you get picked up. Bad driver behaviour and poor driver training are the biggest influencing factors in increasing motoring fatalities. Whilst training should be improved, law enforcement is the only way to reduce bad behaviour and by bad behaviour I dont just mean speed discipline but everything from lane discipline to indicating to keeping a safe distance to elements of road craft like letting people in. Blocking overtakers is a common thing in the US and Australia, not because it is legal but because the police just wont enforce that law.
Why am I not surprised that he's also a BMW driver/customer? He might as well get "stuck up, rich douchebag" tattooed on his forehead.
Whilst I dont disagree with the tattoo idea, you dont need to be rich or a douchebag to get a BMW these days. You can get a 228i for US$32,000 and a 235i for US$42,000. These aren't even close to being the base model which is the 220i (or 116i in Europe), that being said the 228i would be the cheapest bimmer I'd buy because the x20i's and diesels are crap to drive.
"No coupe for you."
FTFY.
The Model X is an SUV.
This is more evidence in Musk's favour as all SUV drivers are complete douchebags.
Not really. It looks like a dick move on Elon's part. I like Elon, but it looks like Stewart was in the right here and Elon's looking kind of petty, making an overly harsh personal response instead of addressing the issue with the man like a decent human.
Actually Elon is looking good for doing this. A little bit of schadenfreude. The blogger looks like a complete idiot for:
1. Thinking he's the king because he put down a 100% cancellable deposit.
2. Thinking he's the king and writing to Elon Musk.
3. Thinking anyone agrees with his silly little blog.
Elon Musk (who I'm actually a bit critical of) did the right thing here and it is his prerogative as a business owner. I can sympathise here because when I ran a business, often it was smarter to throw out the whiny, complaining, arrogant customers because they would monopolise my time with their irrational complaints. You think this is no big deal, but in a small store with only one or two staff (including myself, the owner) one person taking up my time for no good reason means that customers, paying customers walk out the door for a very good reason (getting no service). So early on in my business career I learned that is was smarter to cut a toxic customer than to keep them. Sure they'd leave shouting "You've just lost a customer, you'll be out of business in a week" however in reality, I'd be making money by serving other customers and they'll be back in the very next week buying something else. Only 3 people received a permaban from my store, I'm a harsh businessman, but also a fair one.
Elon is in the same boat. The number of people who want a Tesla far exceeds the number of people who pay attention to this guys blog. The guy was hoping to take advantage of the Streisand effect, but instead the Streisand effect turned on him and just got more positive press for Musk and Tesla. I take it you're the kind of person who's never run a business and believes that "the customer is always right". I can tell you've never run a business because you think that most customers are:
a) right.
b) decent human beings
c) rational.
You couldn't be more wrong on all counts. Customers are, by and large, irrational, arrogant, insufferable beings who are almost never right and if you disagree with this statement then chances are that you are one of those customers.
Twins routinely do single-engine taxi.
You'll find that twins only do this for really long taxi-ways. The second engine will come on several minutes before the flight regardless to ensure they are warm and ready. Taking a turbine from off to full throttle would result in some very angry reliability engineers throwing stuff at you, likely whatever is left of the turbine.
Sir, I wish I had mod points for this.
:)
If airlines didn't keep them separated, removing an engineers boot from a pilots arse would be a regular medical procedure.
Then again, I've seen this in most industries. Engineers are usually kept separate from operators for good reasons
Five comments in, and the signal-to-LUDD ratio from the Luddites has already dragged the conversation so far below the noise floor that it's not even a conversation anymore, just LUDD LUDD LUDD.
Guess what? Internal combustion engines of any kind will, at some point in the future, become non-viable. We'll have to come up with alternatives or lose much of our transporation capabilities. What they're doing here doesn't have anything to do with propulsion during flight, but at least someone is trying to think outside the proverbial box.
Erm, no.
Petroleum based fuels may at some point in the future (a very, very long way away in the future, there is more oil on the planet than people know about) become enviable, but the principle of ICE's will remain viable, they'll just switch to a new fuel source.
Gotta wonder who provided the coins?
What difference [pounds desk] at this point, does it make?
Because the coin has not provided the long form of it's birth certificate.
Require all Euro-bank involved expenditures above 100 EUR by members of the Saudi royal family to require tracking and approval.
Oh, shit, did I say that out loud?
Not like there are large banks in the Middle East or anything they could use to bypass European banks.
I own a Nexus 9 and I think it is a good solid tablet. But mine looks raggedy as hell because the matt finish on the back is only a thin film overlay that has worn off all over the place and in others is lifting like old dead skin. So face up it looks good, face down it looks like a 20 year old tablet that has had a hard life.
It depends on who made it.
After 16 months of daily usage, the case of my Nexus 5 showed little wear. The case on my 2013 Nexus 7 has two chips on the corners due to carelessness (dropping) but apart from that has nothing but a few scuffs. The Nexus 7 was made by Asus and the 5 by LG.
It was the same with my ancient Galaxy Nexus although the front bezel was wearing down to bare plastic after about 4 years, it still looked impressive enough that the car detailer who found it* asked where he could get one. I had to tell him he needed to go back to 2012.
* At that point I was glad to go back to the status of never having lost a phone. Apparently it had fallen out of my pocket and into the Bermuda triangle between the drivers seat and centre console.
I would not buy a phone without a microSD slot, and the Nexus line fails by not including such an essential feature.
But, more important than that: Google definitely should put more pressure on manufacturers and carriers to keep the phones' OS updated for longer.
Sample size of one, registered. Micro SD has been superflous for some time now with the most basic of phones coming with no less than 4GB of usable storage space. Its more of a pain to deal with as you have to use FAT file systems for it. My last to Nexus phones (Nexus 5 and Nexus 5x) have supported USB host mode for a while now, so you've got plenty of options for expanded storage.
To stop leakage, buy an Ipad with wings.
For those weak at the unit conversion, there's a nice rhyme for remembering it.
In fourteen-hundred and ninety-two,
Columbus sailed the ocean blue,
Divide the year of his voyage by two,
And you get the number of Watts in a horsepower.
Your poem fails on the last line. But those of us in Australia have an easier way.
Just times a Watt by 1000, then you have a KiloWatt (also 1 HP is 0.75 KW for those still using archaic measurement systems).
Motorized curling, perhaps.
I'd actually get up at 3am to watch curling with jet fuel powered stones.
How do you propose to accelerate the sweepers ahead of the curling stone?
Seriously inquiring minds would like to know (and possibly subscribe to any publication you may produce).
Why does cycling attract so much cheating?
Is it just more publicized than that in other sports? I mean, you don't hear about cheating nearly as much in other "sports" where they depend upon mechanical equipment... Nascar, F1, MotoGP, etc...
You'd think that Bill Belichick were the coach...
Little man syndrome.
You see people who go into cycling races do so because they aren't good or rich enough to go into motorsports. Much the same as the MAMIL (Middle Aged Man In Lycra) who cycles is bitter because he doesn't earn enough money and has too many kids to buy an MX-5. So he rides and pretends that he's superior to the guy who does have enough money to afford a separate Mazda roadster for his commute to work whilst swerving all over the road in an attempt to hold up any of his peers in sporty autos. This kind of inadequacy is even worse in the world of professional cycling where not winning means literally having to admit you're a loser.