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Comment Re:A plant that burns nonexistent hydrogen. (Score 1) 75

By grossly inefficient you mean twice as efficient as one of the most common ways we convert stored energy: burning gasoline in an otto cycle?

Irrelevant to the discussion at hand, where no otto cycle engines are involved.

Yes it is inefficient, around 40-50%. But it does have some benefits in that it actually scales quite well compared to say batteries.

It doesn't. That's why TCO on a HFCEV is far higher than a BEV.

Comment Re:EV sales in *USA* plummet (Score 1) 215

Jimny engines would have to pass emissions acceptance and then the vehicle would have to pass crash testing. It's difficult for a small vehicle to survive the partial offset crash test and we actually make light trucks do that here. Finally, as a light truck it would be subject to the chicken tax. It's three major hurdles to cross and then no, I don't think they would sell "like crazy" here, though they certainly would sell. But Suzuki left the US market already so they would also have to implement a dealer and spares network again, so that's a fourth impediment.

So no, it's not as simple as "regulations bad". Suzuki was already making the post-Samurai Jimny for other countries when they left the US auto market in 2012, and if they thought it would have been a contender, they no doubt would have stuck around.

Comment Re:What's happening to the US? (Score 0) 215

Having lived the last 50+ years knowing the US as the leading country in innovation and technological advancement, it truly astounds me how the situation seems to have completely reversed now.

What's happening is that the Republican plan for decades is being fulfilled. During the Reagan administration they began compromising education in order to produce low-information voters, the actual phrase was they were trying to eliminate the "educated proletariat" and they succeeded. Now enough Americans are dumber than dogshit for them to sell fascism as freedom. We've maintained our technological advantage until now by importing educated people from other countries, but now that we're abusing anyone who's not whiter than white, they don't want to come here as much and they're looking for other homes. Also, whether they want to come here or not, the goal is to get rid of the brown people.

And, paradoxically, this only worsens the US position in relation to China, the very scenario that the same people who reject clean energy fear so much.

Yes, but the people making the decisions are in their sunset years and can also afford to leave the country.

Comment Re:Summon MacMann (Score 1) 178

Grid scale batteries with nuclear would be ideal - the battery can absorb excess electricity allowing the reactor to run closer to the demand.

They'd be ideal for nuclear, sure. But if you're going to have the grid scale batteries, why use nuclear? Right now the reason is obvious, we don't have those batteries, so we can't just shut off plants. But the goal isn't to shut the plants down early, but rather to avoid building more of them.

Comment Re: Who'd have thunk? (Score 1) 201

And that exception for involuntary servitude has been abused to arrest people with the motive of having the use of their prison labor. Which is not the purpose for which it is allowed by the constitution.

The constitution says it's for the purpose of punishment, but it doesn't say no one is allowed to profit from it. The government really shouldn't be allowed to contract out any of its core functions, that would help a bit here.

Comment And it's temporary (Score 3, Informative) 25

AMD will just do the same shit later, it's not like they won't still want to do it.

I will be the first to admit that Nvidia drivers are problematic on Linux. There are still problems with sleep, for example, and even the installer sucks rocks. (Having to set TMPDIR and specify --tmpdir is a bad sign, right?) But Nvidia has got something right — they give full support for very old hardware. This is something that ATI never had right, and neither does AMD. If you want customers to trust you enough to give you their money, you have to demonstrate a willingness to support what you sell. AMD has just fundamentally not done this. The only reason ATI graphics work well on Linux is that AMD didn't write the driver!

So OK, since I'm on Linux I mostly don't care, but since only 3% of Steam users are, maybe AMD still needs to get their shit together a little better. They've been half-assing drivers for as long as I can remember, and again, ATI was half-assing drivers before AMD bought 'em, and their drivers sucked before the cards even did 3D! Frankly, so did the hardware back then, but now the hardware seems quite good actually. Why are they still letting their silicon down with their software?

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