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Comment Re:Scary (Score 4, Insightful) 447

Why not just track us all, because it's not fair to anyone when people commit crimes? Once we lose an underlying presumption of innocence, any invasion of our privacy or erosion of personal liberties seems to make sense.
It's not my job to help the government do theirs. They can catch tax cheats with good, old fashioned detective work. To presume that my heavy use of cash is somehow illegal or fraudulent is ridiculous.

Comment Re:Shareholders want to buy... (Score 1) 408

The point is that the shareholders, to the extent that they have votes, control the company. There's no issue of "being held captive", because it is theirs. If you don't like that, you don't sell shares to the shareholders. Nobody forces that. Heck, you can take a public company private by buying it out if that's what you want.
I don't understand all this angst towards shareholders - it's not like anyone forces a company to issue stock.
That's real-life. Textbook is the fantasy that you take money from someone without them owning you.

Comment Re:killed? (Score 2, Interesting) 408

The difference is that Bell Labs did pure research. While Google may be doing pure research, it isn't evident based upon the projects that are publicly visible. Pure research is what yields the long term society–changing breakthroughs, whereas R&D on fantasy projects often have higher capital expenses with nothing to show for it even if the project succeeds.

Comment Re:Thoughts from someone who lives in China (Score 1) 334

You can skew the number all you want. Facts are facts, and the fact is that the conditions at Foxconn are bad. So bad that this year 150 workers threatened mass suicide in protest. They where all fired and forcibly removed. To me, that does not sound like a content work force.

Nowadays, people don't seem to even understand the definition of a fact...

Comment More feel good legislation. (Score 1) 473

Let's say you save 200w for 6 hours per day by using a more efficient lightbulb. That's 1.2 kw hr per day, or roughly 4mJ.
Given that a gallon of gas weighs about 3 kg and therefore has about 120mJ of heating value, this saves the equivalent of about 4 oz of gasoline per day assuming 50% efficiency. Is legislation for is really warranted?
If they would fix the awful public transit in the SF bay area, we'd be saving something significant instead. Or if we had diesel cars, or stopped drinking bottled tap water.

Comment Re:Ohhhh shit (Score 1) 344

Many of which electric cars fail at too. They are poor at top speed (lower continuous peak power, typically limited by battery discharge rates and thermals) and cornering ability (heavy - look at a Tesla vs. Elise). They're way more costly, because batteries are expensive. And they're not going to get cheap, because lithium ion batteries already have economies of scale. EVs have great off the line acceleration and are quiet, but that's about all that's going for them.

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