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Comment Stop streaming! (Score 1, Troll) 42

Streaming is a form of DRM and tracking, which unnecessarily consumes extra resources. You should do it as little as possible.

You can download all the public domain movies on archive.org, you can easily download any youtube videos there's any chance you'd like to watch more than once. You can easily record TV shows broadcast over the air. You can quickly copy to disk any movies you've purchased on physical media, for convenient viewing. etc.

Streaming is a ball and chain, restricting your selection, limiting your options, etc. Never once has a single video, TV show or movie in my collection been taken away from me when the copyright owner decided they could make larger profits by doing so.

And why not? $50 for an iView CyberBox (Android) that includes an ATSC tuner and USB port, and another $60 for a 2TB USB hard drive.

You can quickly and easily build a huge collection of media that actually BELONGS to you, and is at the mercy of nothing but a good electrical supply. In any other kind of major natural (or man-made) disaster, would you really assume you will have uninterrupted internet access? Radio is a nice change, for a little while... but when things are falling apart around you, having your familiar entertainment choices at hand can be a great comfort in unplesant and uncertain times.

Comment Re:Got to Love Elon (Score 4, Insightful) 203

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.

Comment Re: Explode? (Score 1) 96

Interesting reference:

Blast wind: At the explosion site, a vacuum is created by the rapid outward movement of the blast. This vacuum will almost immediately refill itself with the surrounding atmosphere. This creates a very strong pull on any nearby person or structural surface after the initial push effect of the blast has been delivered. As this void is refilled, it creates a high-intensity wind that causes fragmented objects, glass and debris to be drawn back in toward the source of the explosion.

Here. I found several on the web with a single search.

Comment Re:Yikes (Score 2) 96

The problem is getting people to build it exactly as the computer models it :-)

I would think that welds are quite chaotic in nature. The heat changes the crystal structure of the steel, the welds are not uniform, etc.

Steel is really complicated stuff. It's a matrix of iron alloy and hard nonmetallic crystals like carbides. The iron alloy can have five different crystal structures, and can transition between them through heating - which welding does. There is also thermal stress from welding, which you can relax by annealing, but annealing the entire vehicle is not practical.

Comment Re:Cryogenic temperatures required!! (Score 2) 96

The cryogenic nitrogen used in the test is very cold, as you can see by the frost on the vehicle. Atmospheric pressure is only 14 pounds, so if you pressurize to 14 pounds greater than you intend in space, you get equivalent stress on the vehicle. The final test is to actually send it to space.

Comment Re:Did they finally hire a proper EE with experien (Score 2) 97

I still can't believe they don't have a real competitor.

They do, Intel. You can get REAL, fan-less quad-core Atom mini-PCs that run on 5W of power for under $100, including the case, power supply, eMMC storage, hdmi cables, dual video outputs, 3 real USB ports, everything (those are all extra cost with a Pi).

You can get this box for $110 on Amazon (non-affiliate link) with 4GB RAM, 64GB 100MB/s eMMC, dual output (vga & hdmi) 4K graphics. That'll do almost everything people want a Pi for, and more. Lacking in GPIO pins admittedly, but $2 for a USB gpio dongle on eBay will solve that one, too, or spend a bit more and get even more GPIO than the Pis have.

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

Let's not kid ourselves that fossil fuel exploration and production doesn't also have tremendous tax credits and subsidies, and that nuclear did not also have this when the plants were being constructed. If you want to take away one, you have to take away the other too. I'm also not at all clear that California municipalities are forced to contract with a specific indeprndent solar provider like Alta power.

And backups are not an issue for desalinization. You only need to desalinate when there is power

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

We can't really pretend that nuclear plants for economically effective any longer. Pretty much all of the oil-fired plants constructed in the 1950s and 60s in California, and about half of the natural-gas-fired ones are no longer economically feasible for operation, and despite the fact that nuclear plants theoretically should be cheaper to operate than the fossil-fuel ones, they haven't been. Cross your fingers and hope for effective fusion, but we're not seeing that so far either.

So it happens that solar and wind crossed the line of being less expensive to sell to California municipalities than fossil-fuel-based power over the past several years. And the perovskite-based cells are looking very promising, and approaching 30% efficiency for tandem perovskite and silicon cells.

Of course desalinization does not have the storage problem that home power does. If you've got more solar power in the daytime, only desalinate in the daytime. And we have lots of desert in which to make that power.

So yes, there is desalinization in the future. I think the real problem, though, is that California has both more people, and more acres farmed, than it can support.

Comment Student work, not an effective strategy (Score 1) 129

This assumes that the device with the microphone is sensitive to frequencies above the hearing range. Most devices have a low-pass filter for the purpose of avoiding any input above 1/2 the sample rate of the DAC, since these will create artifacts, aliasing, and distortion. Even in the case that current devices have left out the low-pass filter, it costs pennies to add.

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