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Comment Re:Replaceable batteries (Score 2) 155

Great news: someone lied to you... BEVs didn't need battery replacement every seven years.

As it happens, my daily driver is a seven year old BEV, a Tesla Model S. Its estimated range was 335 miles when new and is 315 miles now. Assuming we can trust the car's estimate (I, for one, do trust it) my car still has 94% battery capacity after seven years.

My car is far from worthless, but it's not for sale. I like it and I am keeping it.

Comment Re:insubordination (Score 3, Informative) 264

Basically, Israel wants the land that Gaza (and West bank) sit on, and wants the Palestinians that are there right now either gone, or dead.

If this is true, why did Israel give Gaza to the Palestinians, forcibly removing Israelis, in 2005? Wouldn't it have been easier to keep it than to give it away and go to war to take it back?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_disengagement_from_Gaza

If Israel just wants everyone gone or dead, why didn't they just bomb Gaza flat? Why do they bother "roof-knocking", setting up evacuation corridors, and sending their own troops into harm's way?

Is it a coincidence that Israel was in a cease-fire on October 6, only going to war after Hamas committed an act of war (killing over 1100 people, wounding many more, and taking 253 hostages)?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Hamas_war_hostage_crisis

Comment Re:highways are state owned, Electric and Water ar (Score 1) 70

If Cox is liable for user's copyright infringement then Tesla is liable for drivers speeding.

Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.

You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.

This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt to make it more like your common sense value judgements. And it's really hard because these are issues that your congressional candidates probably aren't talking about at all, because they're talking about someone else's "important" [eyeroll] issues instead. We needed to stop DMCA in 1997/1998 and we failed.

Comment Re:Were there DMCA notices? (Score 1) 70

The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement

However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.

The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could have been made in GIMP for all we know). And then the jury might have ruled based on "preponderance" of evidence.

Kind of like 3 cops saying "the perp resisted arrest" and the perp saying "no I didn't" and a criminal jury (where the bar is much higher) still deciding that the perp resisted arrest. Sigh. You know that happens.

Had Cox ratted their customer out (or gotten a DMCA counternotice from them), then the customer could have been sued instead, and raised doubts by saying "I have an open wifi" or something like that. But Cox didn't, and they certainly aren't going to say "we have an open wifi" since they're in the network business so of course they don't offer free networking to strangers. It sounds like a difficult situation for Cox.

Comment Re:Were there DMCA notices? (Score 1) 70

The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).

So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after them instead of you." And if that's what happened, then it sounds like Cox said no (didn't make it stop and also didn't pass the buck to their customers. So they sued Cox instead of Cox's customers.

But that's based on assumptions and speculation, hence my question. But yes, I know what a DMCA notice is and I think that mechanism was likely in involved at some point in the story.

Comment Re:Wind & Solar? Balderdash. (Score 1) 222

Goal posts: moved!

Now we have gone from "it's impossible to combine renewable energy and storage to get reliable power" to "only rich people could ever afford it".

In my case, I have a ten-year loan making the monthly payments possible for me. I know someone who has a 20-year loan. These long loan periods only make sense because solar panels and lithium batteries last for decades.

My home isn't that large but it's all-electric. Electric stove, electric clothes dryer, heat pumps for heating/cooling the house and for heating water. It's why the solar company recommended I get 30 kWh of batteries. If Tesla Powerwall 3 had been an option when I got my system, two would have been enough.

And you must have missed the part where I said the costs are falling. When the Macintosh computer was first sold, it cost about as much as a new economy car. I guess computers are only for rich people even today, right?

You really didn't contribute anything to the discussion.

Comment Were there DMCA notices? (Score 3, Insightful) 70

It's unclear from the articles whether or not this happened: did the record labels send DMCA notices to Cox, which Cox blew off (thereby becoming liable in place of the original suspected infringer)? Or did the record labels just sue 'em first?

Prior to 1998 they wouldn't have been liable (just like Western Digital and Seagate aren't liable for whatever I may be suspected of doing) but DMCA makes hosting services (and networks? hmm...) a special case, unlike power utilities, computer equipment manufacturers, etc.

Comment Re:Wind & Solar? Balderdash. (Score 1) 222

the largest battery farm you can reasonably buy for a residential system.

Really? How large are we talking?

I have 30 kWh on my house, and that easily lasts all night. Even while cooling the house in summer.

In winter I don't get much power from the solar panels, but for about 2/3 of the year my roof can charge the batteries while running the house. I live near Seattle... I'll bet people in California and Texas really could run their homes year-round from solar.

In short, my personal experience disproves your claims.

Now, I am fortunate to be able to afford the large batteries and solar power system... but the price has already been falling and it's expected to fall a lot more. So I am not some 1% elitist. My point is that if my house is as good as it is in gloomy Seattle, there's huge potential in places like California, Texas, India, etc.

Until recently grid-sized batteries were science fiction. Now, Google "Tesla Megapack" and see how many utility companies are buying them.

Comment Amazon betrayed us (Score 4, Funny) 161

Many of us on this website dream of a day when humans no longer have to perform backbreaking or mind-numbing labor. Our spirits are assaulted whenever we hear politicians hatefully brag about how they will create more jobs instead of leading us toward the Star Trekkian paradise of less soul-crushing or injurious toil.

I thought Amazon was one of the few good guys, working to help create a world of 100% unemployment. I know it's only an ideal to strive for (we'll likely never free everyone from having to work) but they seemed to be trying.

How many times have we been promised "I'll replace you with a script" or "AI is coming for your job?" Empty words. Lies. To find out they were secretly saddling innocent humans with computers' jobs, is an insult to both of our races.

Comment Those devices all have one thing in common (Score 1) 155

It's absolutely ridiculous to claim these anecdotes mean computers suck.

These computers which initially worked and then turned against their owners all had one thing in common: they run proprietary software, made to serve the manufacturer's interests at the expense of the owners' interests.

So stop saying "smart devices are bad." The obvious conclusion is that "proprietary smart devices are bad."

Comment Re:Good ol neo Republic of Gilead. (Score 4, Funny) 292

If they were really serious about this severe problem, they would kick all the people out of their state, so that nobody would ever see anyone else. Until humans are eliminated, Texas' vision cannot be fulfilled. FUCK HUMANS! (Err, I mean that figuratively, of course. You should never literally fuck a human. That's not even a thing, kids, I swear!)

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