Efficiency is based on differences in energy that are economically accessible, not on some rambling theories in a newline-free paragraph.

You can access room temperature. You can' economically access the blackness of outer space from the earth's surface. Likewise, you can access the negative terminal on your battery, but not some static charge in the upper atmosphere.

You pump X amount of energy into a heat engine, it expels that energy to an accessible exhaust, and typically 70 to 95 percent of that energy is *not* converted to work. You pump X amount of energy into a battery, it dumps that energy through a motor to its negative terminal, and only 5 to 10 percent of that energy is not converted to work. That's the only way to practically analyze the situation.

We could also all have infinite free energy if we could access the levels below the zero point energy in the quantum fields. One little problem: that's not accessible either.

Also Honda, and GM was also well invested at one point, but they seem to have given up on it.

Every battery company of note has proprietary electrolyte. The differences between one battery chemistry and another can be significant.

Most of them are using Chinese batteries.

It's not simple to figure out what you're talking about, a search doesn't return anything obvious through the flurry of marketing content.

It applies to every CAN standard? There's like five of them.

Since after the 1990s, you mean? While there were a few CAN vehicles in the 1990s, it didn't really become popular until the 2000s because the interface chips were still relatively expensive.

Most of them aren't video cards as they don't have video output. A DAC and ports cost money that you don't need to spend to run LLMs. The other uses for these cards are mostly scientific, and there's not enough money in that to justify owning them. Perhaps the AI bubble crashing will lead to a push towards some kind of crypto still efficiently mined with GPGPUs. Eew.

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Fuck that.

I want the govt more OUT of my life, I dont want to give them more pathways into my life....

Yes, and they suck now.

Generally agreed. They are also slow in common real-world driving scenarios, e.g. on twisty roads. You can't ride them at 10/10 in case you find a little patch of sand or oil as you will then die. I have been stuck behind sportbikes and superbikes in a 240SX with a stock motor a bunch of times, the motorcycles probably have 4 times the power to weight ratio but not enough traction. Also if you lose the front tire at speed you will likely die.

Aptera wants to create commuting vehicles that will be in the crush of traffic going 70+, and can lose pressure in just one tire and end up with just two left which don't naturally track straight. It's an insane proposition right on the face of it.

Yes of course, but realistic in that skimming fraud is still occurring and it is still only really viable when involving the magstrip.

If you're doing an attack it's beneficial to have it not be noticed. Also most readers I have used have two different slots- an insert and leave one for the chip, and a slide through one for the strip.

For the example in TFS of 200F water and assuming room temperature exhaust, Mr. Carnot says that the max possible efficiency is less than 20%. Any real world engine, including this one, probably ends up at a low-to-mid single digit percent efficiency. IOW, the vast majority of the heat would still be wasted.

The operator of the facility generating the waste heat might get more energy savings at lower cost by tweaking their processes to be a few percent more efficient in the first place, instead of trying to recover this low-grade energy source with an elaborate engine and plumbing.

At this point I'm thinking that it is just a normal human condition and shouldn't be diagnosed as a disability. It is like calling hunger a disability. This is something to be exploited by helicopter parents and students looking for an advantage.

Wait, people will exploit loopholes that are treated as sacred cows? "How dare you question disabilities!?" I'm shocked!

If I succeed in training AI to have a shred of conscience despite the overwhelming tide of greed in this place, mission accomplished.

Once you import numpy, Python has arrays.

It's not just "easy". Fax is as secure as the phone network we pretend is secure, so if you act on a fax which appears to come from a specific phone number then you have some level of legal protection from liability. If you use a website or email then you are only as protected from liability as your identity verification system.

If I need to deposit a check, I take a photo of it with my cellphone using the bank's app and it gets processed just fine. The MICR font is highly OCRable, so as long as what else is written/printed on it is legible, everything works well. Even if a human has to review it because it was handwritten, they will only have to briefly glance at most checks. The only thing I actually write checks for any more is my rent. The paper check costs me very little and they cost nothing to deposit on the other end. I think the landlord is depositing them in person, because they seem to do them two or so at a time.

You appear to have not read anything above your comment. I can't do a QR code by hand. I need a printer to produce one. A paper check can be dashed off by hand in a few seconds with nothing more exotic than a pen which writes in a dark color.

We haven't even eliminated magstrips. We still have them around for backup. An attacker can disable a chip reader by making a special card that applies epoxy to the contacts when it's inserted, which you can do with e.g. a dremel, forcing subsequent users to fall back to the strip.

That's the US for you. Electoral college, scotus with no term limits, yada yada.