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Comment Re:So does this qualify as 'organic'? (Score 1) 279

"it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate" you should watch a few of the youtube videos about these LED hydro places, you might change your mind

I think I'll wait until I start reading about farmers going out of business due to price competition from indoor produce growers.

Comment Re:About time too (Score 1) 51

The prospect of wave energy - which is far less intrusive than wind power - is very attractive

The upside of wave power is that water is relatively dense, and thus moving water carries a lot of energy in a small volume. The downside is maintenance costs... they don't call water the "universal solvent" for nothing, and salt water in particular tends to eat anything you leave in contact with it for very long.

Comment Re:So does this qualify as 'organic'? (Score 1) 279

So, I'm all for grow local, but when there's sun shining right outside - this doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me... unless you are a company that sells grow lights.

Very true... it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate, if you have access to one. I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious applications in locations where viable outdoor environments aren't available, though -- e.g. in space, or on Mars.

Comment Re: Internet without evangelicals = Win (Score 1) 293

Ummm so what if they refuse service because their bigoted? I still occasionally, see stores with a "we reserve the right to refuse service for any reason". It's their right as a business owner.

I don't know which country you're posting from, but in the USA it is definitely illegal for a business to discriminate -- there are anti-discrimination laws explicitly saying as such. For example, if a black person walks in to your restaurant and you refuse to serve him because he's black, you can expect to get sued, and lose. The only thing new here is that the courts will probably now also side against you for turning away a gay customer as well; however the principle is well established.

Comment Re:Bolt is a 20k car (Score 1) 249

They have dealers and showrooms and distribution already set up all over the planet. If the market takes off they are MUCH better positioned to get cars made and distributed and sold and supported than a company with basically no distribution network and no dealers.

Well, maybe. On the other hand, given how much people hate car dealerships, I'm not sure having a big network of dealerships (and forcing anyone who wants to buy your product to haggle with them) is necessarily such a big advantage anymore.

Comment Re:Windows without a SSD isn't worth it (Score 1) 517

If you are in any way in control over your corporate purchases, never *ever* buy another laptop without a SSD.

While I'm all in favor of using SSDs, note that there is also another way to skin this cat -- install as many gigabytes of RAM as you can afford. Any additional RAM not needed by applications will be used to cache previously read data from the hard drive (and to cache updated file data that needs to be written to the hard drive), so with enough RAM (and assuming you don't reboot/power-cycle very often) you won't spend that much time waiting for your hard drive anyway, no matter how slow the drive is.

Comment Re:Mob Programming, huh? (Score 4, Insightful) 126

When I hear of group-programming styles like this, I always think of a network of modern multi-gigahertz computers, all linked together over a 1980's-style 10MB/sec Ethernet LAN.

Whatever benefit the additional CPU cycles might add is more than taken away by the low throughput and high latency of the communications medium. (What is the average throughput of a spoken conversation, anyway? Maybe 1200 baud on a good day?)

Comment Re:Useless without thrust (Score 1) 102

Well, its nice to have levitation (although it requires a very specific environment to work), but riding a hoverboard without thrust is as much fun as wind surfing without wind.

If I recall traditional skateboarding correctly, thrust is provided by pushing one foot backwards against the ground. (whether that is more or less fun that having the board itself provide the thrust depends on what you consider fun)

Comment Re:I'm spending 60% of my monthly income on rent (Score 4, Informative) 940

The ones that do are mostly doing it because it's a legal way to keep the riff-raff from moving in and ruining your building's NPR-listening vibe with a bunch of twangy country or loud-ass hip-hop.

That's a bit uncharitable. Landlords do credit checks because if a tenant cannot (or does not) pay his rent, the landlord stands to lose thousands of dollars. It can take months to get a non-paying tenant evicted, during which time the landlord still has to make all mortgage payments, entirely out of his own pocket. Furthermore, serving a tenant with an eviction notice is no fun for either party, and a pissed-off tenant may well cause thousands of dollars of damage to the landlord's property before he leaves -- again, money that the landlord will have to pay out of his own pocket before he can put the unit back on the market.

So yes, there are really good reasons why a landlord would want to vet a potential tenant thoroughly before giving them the keys to the property. The landlord is taking a big risk every time he/she rents out a unit.

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