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Comment Re:Flywheels (Score 1) 299

Of course, if your house gets SWATted and the cops shoot your dog and a round happens to hit your battery pack, there is likely to be a sub-optimal discharge from them as well. I imagine pretty much any energy storage mechanism will have a similar problem. If you're storing enough energy to power a house, you're storing enough energy to be dangerously inconvenient if it's all released at once.

Comment Re:Here's to hoping they don't find oil (Score 1) 152

Think of the energy and building material that would give. All we'd need is for the molten magma stream to boil some water on the way out, and while still molten, be transported to the site of whatever massive construction project we choose. Maybe tie the two together, using some fancy Leidenfrost effect to keep the hot lava flowing on a cushion of steam. Once the lava gets to its destination, huge bots with chilled trowels would form it into walls or sculptures. With enough magma to fill the grand canyon, we could build an urban area big enough to cover most of Wyoming. Make the buildings free to homesteaders who agree to bring the buildings up to code. Name it 'Magma, Wyoming' or something. Also do a monument like Rushmore, but featuring all the presidents. Make each head the size of a mountain and call the new range The Presidentials. See? Lemons into lemonade.

Comment Re: Too expensive. (Score 1) 112

Curiously, I use MetroPCS, another MVNO that uses T-Mobile towers. MetroPCS only charges $5 for the first 2.5GB and $5/GB after that for tethered data. Since they're using the same towers as Google, you'd think the big G could at least be competitive with existing MVNOs using the same equipment. Also, it is interesting to note that at the 35 mbps LTE speed I get, I can suck down 1 GB in under 4 minutes. At $10 per four minutes of data, Google is asking more than some phone sex operators.

Comment Re:Not fully junk (Score 1) 313

Cryonics Institute charges $28K for whole-body suspension. A fancy casket, funeral, flowers, burial plot, etc. can easily cost more than that. By spending that cash on cryonic suspension, there's a long shot of coming back in some form or other. Being turned into air pollution or worm poison is pretty much guaranteed to leave your body unrecoverable. Not much of a wager.

Comment AI isn't taking over (Score 5, Insightful) 294

All the doom-n-gloomers miss what's really going on. AI isn't taking over - we're redesigning ourselves. Once viable non-biological emulation of our existing mind becomes possible, people will choose to migrate themselves onto that. Humans will upgrade. The end of biology will be a matter of consumer preference.

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