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Comment Re:Extreamists? (Score 1) 54

Of course they're extremists. They don't believe anyone who produces anything should have the right to their own property.

Perhaps they simply don't believe that copyright terms should have been extended, and that culture belongs to The People, as copyright law used to acknowledge with its original period. Maybe the extremists are the ones that think that culture should never belong to The People, like you.

Comment Re:Why they are more expensive (Score 1) 62

Environmental regs in China can be brutal. Factories completely closed because they are too close to a river, industrial processes banned overnight. Then there is external stuff like RoHS.

You can't trust that a Chinese RoHS label is legit, Chinese companies are slapping it on shit like shoelaces. Meanwhile China has an essentially impossible to comply with RoHS standard for goods sold in their country, where you are taking responsibility for the content of your product, and you cannot simply cite your suppliers' specifications.

Comment Re:tl;dr (Score 4, Insightful) 48

The regulators weren't going to block the deal because they wanted iRobot to die, nor because they wanted it to remain in Collin Angle's hands. They were going to block the deal because they didn't want Amazon to have it. The concern was that Amazon's position of being both a producer AND owner of a global marketplace would put them in a position of too much economic power.

Further, the FTC did not eliminate a choice for consumers. iRobot was already losing to the competition. This bid to be bought was a last-chance effort at putting the product in the hands of a better owner who might be able to make it competitive again.

The FTC didn't drive the business to bankruptcy. Collin Angle did.

So the only consumer benefit here is that Amazon is still just a marketplace administrator, and not also a producer, of at least one consumer product.

Comment Re:Why they are more expensive (Score 2) 62

Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight.

Outside of these custom all-in-one ready to fly drones, drone motors are ALREADY like that. They come in well-defined sizes, they are rated by kV (thousands of RPM per volt) and they have standard mounting holes. If you just don't screw with the fully preassembled drones up front you can easily get that kind of parts interchangeability. You can also buy controller/radio combos which provide the same or superior range to what DJI offers, so the only benefit to buying a prebuilt drone is that you don't have to do anything, and it comes with a number of down sides.

I built my first quadcopter for under $200 all in, including a Devo 5 radio which I could load alternate firmware and an additional $10-ish radio transceiver module into so that it supports all of the major protocols. That's a price with regular range and without FPV, but the point remains — you don't need DJI.

Comment Re:Thereâ(TM)s a scam - somebody has to be th (Score 1, Troll) 13

but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account

Nah, that's the reason for the moral. The actual moral is: don't fuck with Apple gift cards — neither a buyer nor a redeemer be. Apple has certainly taught us all a lesson, and that lesson is that their gift card system is insecure and they will punish legitimate customers for their lack of security. Whether it's even possible to make a gift card secure is irrelevant to that lesson.

Comment Would probably be fine... (Score 1) 69

The CO2 should have to escape through whatever opening is created, and ripstop is pretty standard for this sort of thing, keeping openings small. A venting liquid CO2 tank would be limited by evaporation.
The danger zone would depend on the size of the hole, but like old CO2 fire extinguishers, CO2 tends to disburse fast, and the lethal range for it is drastically higher than things like carbon monoxide, ammonia, and such.
Plus, think of the future! An EV would operate just fine, and a couple minutes would get you out of danger.

Comment Re:battery? (Score 1) 69

It is a closed loop system. Smallish tanks for the liquid co2, great big football field or larger dome for gaseous CO2. Website does not have dimensions, I'd guess the dome varies in size based on total energy desired.
As such, it is like worrying about the inner loop water in a nuclear reactor. Since you theoretically only need that initial charge, it rounds to zero per unit of energy over time.

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