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Comment Re: Please, don't tell them ... (Score 1) 421

ERM. As somebody who lives in Africa I should tell you there is NO religion that condones cutting girls clitorisses off. There are several CULTURES that do but they do so despite not because of their religious beliefs and quite a lot of them are Christian.
And as an American a country where male genital mutilation is an extremely common cultural practice despite being discouraged by your major religion this should not be hard for you to comprehend.

Comment Re: Publicly Funded Governments (Score 1) 159

License fees here are evil because you as a taxpayer have to pay them and then to read a document from your government (which in many cases you are legally compelled to do: tax documents for example) you have to pay them again (since you aren't allowed to use the copy you and your fellow citizens collectively bought). At least when my taxes help pay for a road I get to drive on said road.

Comment Re:You *NEED* to do breaks. (Score 0) 190

I did read the entire post.
Experience does not change that YOU are not ABLE to judge whether you're reaction times are affected and to what degree - it's a biological impossibility.
No amount of experience will change that. It may change the degree of impact (an assertion you make while offering absolutely ZERO evidence to support it) but even if it did YOU are not qualified to determine that (about YOURSELF you can NEVER be qualified). Those people who study this sort of thing, you know scientifically, have consistently found that driving tired has the same or even worse impacts than driving drunk - and drunk people ALSO always think their driving ability isn't impaired - while thousands of dead innocent bystanders speak to the contrary.

The reality is that I read your entire post, and dismissed it with the sarcasm all of it deserved. You're a danger on the road, an irresponsible citizen and a future inmate on a charge of reckless endangerment and manslaughter.

Comment Re:You *NEED* to do breaks. (Score 0) 190

Yes, I am absolutely certain that you are an unbiased judge of your own mental performance after 4 hours of driving.
I mean nobody else on earth is and study after study have shown that there is literally NOBODY worse at judging somebody's performance at anything than the person himself but I absolutely certain that you are, indeed, the sole exception that has ever existed.

Now what about all the people who are NOT you ?

Comment Re:And how long does it take... (Score 2) 190

Why would they talk at all ?
According to the register's review the Model-S has just about the most awesome sound system ever built into a car.
I can tell you, if I had one (and man I want one !) and I was in a super-charger station, I wouldn't be talking to anybody - I'd be cranking up some Twisted Sister at max volume and rocking the damn casbah !

Comment Re:I'll believe it.... (Score 1) 143

You do know that the Model S right now, is the cheapest car in it's class right ?
Or do you think "floor price" is the only price that comes into calculating the price of a car. Nearly all cars have higher maintenance costs over their lifetime than the floor-price, the second-hand price is a huge factor (the more value lost, the worst it works out when you want to upgrade) and of course the fuel cost.
Factor all those in and the model S is cheaper than any other car in the luxury sedan class - and offers out-of-the-box far more features than any you can get for the same price.

The best second hand car to buy in my country, South Africa, right now is the BMW 3xx Diesel. This is because
1) Those cars have a very long life
2) Being built locally - they are adjusted to the quality of our roads - excellent cars like Renaults or Chevolet's just don't LAST here.
3) A second-hand BMW 3-series, now about 10 years old, can be resold in 5 years for about 90% of what you pay for it ( which is not much).
4) It has absolutely top of the range luxury and safety features.

In fact, buying that 10 year old BMW works out MUCH cheaper than buying a brand-new car for R10K more, because the car you can GET for R10K more is going to be something like a fiat palio or or other bottom-of-the-range car that will lose far more value as you drive it off the lot, cost you a LOT more in maintenance and uses a much more expensive fuel - and it will be a much less safe car to drive.

My 8 year old Audi A3 is pretty much the second best choice right now after the BMW, but when I upgrade in the near future (now that I have a kid, a four-door becomes valuable) I will probably look at BMW.

There is SO much more to calculating the price of a car than the number written on the windscreen at the dealer - and when you actually DO those sums - there is NO car that's comparable to the model-S in features (or anywhere close) that isn't FAR more expensive a vehicle to own.

In the meantime battery costs will keep plummeting - just the scale-up in production alone will ensure that, throw in improved engineering in the batteries themselves and you're set for a few years of huge drops. Since the battery right now is the most expensive part of the Model-S - don't be surprized if even the sticker price drops dramatically over the next few years.

Frankly if I am ever stupid enough to buy a NEW car in my life, I won't consider doing that with anything EXCEPT a Tesla, it's literally the ONLY car that offers anything that even VAGUELY resembles value for money if you buy it new.

Comment Re: Fusion Confusion (Score 1) 305

>. I've never understood how you could possibly get more energy out than you put in as has been the mantra for any current earth based fusion test. Wouldn't that nullify some fundamental principles?

No, because that sum doesn't count the energy in the fuel as "energy you put in".
The problem right now is that the energy required to CONTAIN the reaction is HIGHER than the energy you can get out of the fuel.
As we make the containment systems more efficient, they use less energy - eventually they will use little enough that the reactor can power the containment field and have energy left over for other uses.

That is what is meant by "more out than in". No energy CREATION or violation of any laws happening - just you misunderstanding what the sum being done actually REFERS to.

Comment Re:Patent Trolls arent just little companies (Score 1) 97

Well you know all that "repackaging bad loans as if they are tripple-A rated investments instead of high-risk" that the banks did. There's nothing WRONG with high risk investments, many investors seek those out actively, but generally these are not big governments.
The repackaging meant that these investments were sold, under false pretences, to organisations (including governments like Iceland) as highly secure investments to store and grow their money.

How the hell that is not outright fraud and how EVERY bank CEO is NOT in jail is the question of the century. Sorry but when you LIE to people about what your product IS - that's the very DEFINITION of fraud ! Don't tell me "but the government forced them to make those loans" - firstly that's really not as true as you think but more critically NOBODY forced them to then use FRAUD to offset the risk - there are perfectly valid and legal ways they could have done instead.

Now let's imagine for a second that this part never happened. The bubble eventually burst, lots of loans defaulted. The banks end up with a bunch of houses (the security on any mortgage) which they sell and recover a large chunk of their losses - a lot of people who were formerly unable to buy a house gets one on the cheap, the banks perhaps sue the government for making them give loans to easy and maybe win a few bucks back.
What does NOT happen now is that suddenly half of Europe's welfare states who had all be highly profitable welfare states for DECADES are broke because the accounts where they stored all their surplus and emergency funds just fucking disappeared overnight ! They don't suddenly sit with pensions and unemployment and other benefits that their society has PAID for with taxes which they are UNABLE to pay out to the people who have the right to them under their laws.
They don't suddenly find themselves having to make cost-cutting laws that lead to protests in the streets and the rightwing idiots don't get to point to that as proof that "socialist countries always end up broke" - while conveniently forgetting that these countries were, ALL of them, so far in the green on their social spending that they could have covered their benefits for several decades even if they got no tax money in at all - and only had this problem because the place they put all that surplus money turned out to be a fraud committed by American banks.

You don't end up with a Eurozone crisis. You don't have China turning into a mennace 50 times bigger than they were ten years ago.

You probably have a recession but it's a fairly mild one, some job losses followed by rather MORE jobs being regained.
The teabaggers never becomes a significant political force. Michelle Bachman's is allowed to remain an OBSCURE moron. No government shutdown in 2013. No Ted Cruz in Washington. Rick Perry finally manages to get the job he was ACTUALLY destined to do but had twice failed to get due to being overqualified as the village idiot of some small town in South-east Texas. And Obamacare may just have been the single-payer system it SHOULD have been all along.

So why is it, that the thing which made your average run of the mill EVERY congress has one silly economic policy turn into a global motherfucking disaster and which is a very obvious crime under even the bloody mosaic code ... has seen not a single jail sentence, in fact the sole fall-out anybody got was JP Morgan's fine - which we know for a fact was less than HALF what they BUDGETED for fines when they bought Bear Sterns.

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