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Comment Re:A limit is a limit (Score 1) 475

A former coworker of mine hit the retread off of a semi once, it flipped up around his front wheel and got caught in the front fender. He was thrown from the bike and skidded quite a ways. Luckily for him he was wearing a full kevlar suit but it still split and left him with some road rash. Ultimately he was ok and is back out riding as far as I know.

Do watch out for that stuff and always choose to avoid if possible. I am glad for what I was taught about riding over obstacles as it has come up, but avoidance is always the best bet if you can manage it.

Comment Re:This helmet scares me. (Score 1) 126

What the fuck is a quick release strap? As far as I know double D rings are required for any helmet in the US, maybe other place are using different connectors?

You are so right about the cost. If I am going to shell out that much at least make it fiberglass. install that crap into the best helmet you can build.

That said I agree with the grandparent. I think this is not a terrible idea in principle but the UI has to be perfect or it can kill you. This is not a case where good enough (or worse yet, we threw this shit together) will cut it.

Comment Re:This helmet scares me. (Score 4, Insightful) 126

One of the issues with age and helmets is that the core materials can degrade with time. People like to say that helmet tech gets better and safer and it does, but an old style helmet is still a lot better than nothing.

The best reason to replace your helmet every 5 or so years is that they styrofoam can break down and that can significantly reduce the usefulness of the helmet.

Also, every time you fill up that bike the styrofoam inside is exposed to a solvent. Gasoline vapor. Sure, its not going to dissolve it over night but 18 years? you might be pushing your luck. Still it is pretty much impossible to quantify the condition of the inside of a helmet. Some companies will test them to see if they are still usable after a minor accident but that process is not worth the cost unless the helmet is very expensive. All things considered it is best to replace them if you have had an accident. I'm not even sure if that testing would show solvent damage or if it just shows where the styrofoam has been deformed by impact.

That said, if you are going to ride with that or nothing.... go with your old Arai.

Comment Re:Maybe it's just me ... (Score 2) 131

Once you have set a chrome cast playing some media it is doing it all on its own and it requires commands from another device to get it to stop... or it comes to the end of the media but it could be set up to repeat over and over. If you can't control the chromecast anymore its pretty useless.... I'm guessing there is a way to factory reset the device and start over.

Comment Re:Cry Me A River (Score 1) 608

Barely, it ignores the actual bulk of developers back then. Few people did real work in HyperCard. Sure, some larger apps were build in COBOL and VB but the reality is that the more advanced work, the apps that were actually worth their salt were mostly written in C and then C++. These apps required serious serious skill to develop.

That said, the web is a mess, web development is a mess and that is a problem. It would be great if we could tear it down and start over, but the reality is that anything you build always compiles down to the basic languages that all browsers understand and until you can change that I think it will be very difficult to empower regular people to make complex, useful web apps. The foundations were never built to support what we have now.

Comment Re:Now I'm confused ... (Score 1) 380

natural gas is a serious greenhouse gas, if we start shipping it around and pumping it even more chances are more will leak into the atmosphere.

Also, it is explosive so that is a downside too. Of course we do actually use compressed natural gas for some vehicles (municipal busses for instance) so its not totally crazy, but maybe not the best thing to scale to everyone using it.

Comment Re:waste of time (Score 3, Insightful) 380

4. Find out "fresh" battery has gone through so many cycles it only has half its capacity left and find yourself stranded just short of the next "filling" station.

Look, all of these technologies have issues... maybe those batteries made from carbon that supposedly don't loose their capacity will end up being practical in a large scale, that would be great, but also, maybe this design will turn out to be a huge boon for the hydrogen car industry, basically solving one of the biggest problem in hydrogen fuel cells.... how to store enough hydrogen safely to have a reasonable rage.

Now I would be curious how the energy density of Ammonia, converted using this process, compares to that of gasoline which is currently pretty much top of the heap for portable energy density. It would also be nice to know how it compares to the current generation of batteries.

Everyone has their own particular chosen winner/looser but that is stupid. Innovation could come from anywhere and right now we need all the irons in the fire that we can get. We can't afford to put all of our sustainability money behind one thing that may or may not turn out to be the best choice in the long run.

Comment Re:Doesn't give warm fuzzies (Score 2) 162

The HIPPA rules are quite importnat, they do a lot to protect privacy in that data is not simply allowed to be shared without consent (unless you are incapacitated in which case a doctor in an emergency can get just about anything he wants. There are rules for tracking access to sensitive information along with auditing of the stated reason. Its pretty good stuff.

That said, it only requires people to provide a certain level of data security.... since, say OpenSSH is an industry standard used for protecting information, it is sufficient for HIPPA requirements. Obviously a company would need to upgrade their systems in the face of a heartbleed style attack but would only be liable if they dragged their feet on it and not liable for the data lost before the bug was public. Its maybe not as secure as people would like it to be in that respect. Still, better than what we had before.

Comment Re:Families come first (Score 2) 370

Maybe its money that motivates him or maybe he is sick of having less purchasing power than he did 5 years ago as everything has gotten more expensive and wages have remained flat. I have had that experience here, I will likely need to move on in order to get back onto the earning curve I was on before so that maybe, one day, I can retire.

That said, if my company did other things better I would be less likely to be looking for a job over money... so it really isn't just about the cash usually.

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