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Comment Conflating two issues wrongly (Score 0) 206

People here are conflating Facebook doing the right thing and removing content with censorship. Censorship is when a person is not allowed to say or promote an idea. No one is suggesting that a person is not allowed to say or promote ideas, within certain quite reasonable legal limits like yelling fire in a movie theater.

What we are saying is that Facebook should not be allowed to promote known false, dangerous, malicious, and intentionally inflamatory comments _FOR_PROFIT_. We are not asking to censor Facebook's speech in any way, we are saying they should not be allowed to do such things that they know are wrong or sometimes illegal for money, BIG difference.

Facebook's business model is based on making people angry, afraid, and polarized. They are effectively monetizing the destruction of the social order, and doing it in a knowing way. They should not be allowed to do so, or at least not be allowed to do so with the legal shields they have.

No one is suggesting that we remove their, or their user's right to speech, just that they should not be allowed to magnify it for profit.

Comment Misleading stats from Intel (Score 1) 99

Very few places seem to have the balls, or more to the point lack the tendrils of the advertising sales team infecting the content, to call Intel on their obvious BS.

This 'performance gain' is vs a 3-year old laptop with HALF the cores and a GPU that is 25% slower. Think that matters on games? Oh yeah, the older CPU only boosts to ~4GHz so 25%+ slower. Take out that 25% from the GPU and the new Intel part is 10% faster on average with twice the cores. Does that tell you how long this turbo boost can be sustained for? Does it tell you how often it can hit the max turbo?

If you go to Ark and compare it to the predecessor I9-9980HK, you will notice it is the same die, same GPU, same everything but 100Mhz faster, 300MHz if the OEM bothers to implement all the bells and whistles and puts in a cooler heavy enough to keep the CPU tJunction under 65C. Good luck with that for more than a few miliseconds.

            -Charlie

Comment Re:Got to Love Elon (Score 4, Insightful) 203

We will know if GM built a bettter car battery in 8 years or so. I am sort of dubious, because it's more like your cell phone battery than a lithium car battery. It uses cobalt. GM brags that their EV battery uses less cobalt "than other EV batteries", but Tesla uses none. We know that Tesla batteries last. It will take a while to know that about GM batteries.

Musk is great. He took a lot of things that everyone knew about and nobody would dare to do, and made them work from a business perspective. We need lots more people like that.

Comment Re: Explode? (Score 1) 96

Interesting reference:

Blast wind: At the explosion site, a vacuum is created by the rapid outward movement of the blast. This vacuum will almost immediately refill itself with the surrounding atmosphere. This creates a very strong pull on any nearby person or structural surface after the initial push effect of the blast has been delivered. As this void is refilled, it creates a high-intensity wind that causes fragmented objects, glass and debris to be drawn back in toward the source of the explosion.

Here. I found several on the web with a single search.

Comment Re:Yikes (Score 2) 96

The problem is getting people to build it exactly as the computer models it :-)

I would think that welds are quite chaotic in nature. The heat changes the crystal structure of the steel, the welds are not uniform, etc.

Steel is really complicated stuff. It's a matrix of iron alloy and hard nonmetallic crystals like carbides. The iron alloy can have five different crystal structures, and can transition between them through heating - which welding does. There is also thermal stress from welding, which you can relax by annealing, but annealing the entire vehicle is not practical.

Comment Re:Cryogenic temperatures required!! (Score 2) 96

The cryogenic nitrogen used in the test is very cold, as you can see by the frost on the vehicle. Atmospheric pressure is only 14 pounds, so if you pressurize to 14 pounds greater than you intend in space, you get equivalent stress on the vehicle. The final test is to actually send it to space.

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

Let's not kid ourselves that fossil fuel exploration and production doesn't also have tremendous tax credits and subsidies, and that nuclear did not also have this when the plants were being constructed. If you want to take away one, you have to take away the other too. I'm also not at all clear that California municipalities are forced to contract with a specific indeprndent solar provider like Alta power.

And backups are not an issue for desalinization. You only need to desalinate when there is power

Comment Re: Not everyone (Score 1) 131

We can't really pretend that nuclear plants for economically effective any longer. Pretty much all of the oil-fired plants constructed in the 1950s and 60s in California, and about half of the natural-gas-fired ones are no longer economically feasible for operation, and despite the fact that nuclear plants theoretically should be cheaper to operate than the fossil-fuel ones, they haven't been. Cross your fingers and hope for effective fusion, but we're not seeing that so far either.

So it happens that solar and wind crossed the line of being less expensive to sell to California municipalities than fossil-fuel-based power over the past several years. And the perovskite-based cells are looking very promising, and approaching 30% efficiency for tandem perovskite and silicon cells.

Of course desalinization does not have the storage problem that home power does. If you've got more solar power in the daytime, only desalinate in the daytime. And we have lots of desert in which to make that power.

So yes, there is desalinization in the future. I think the real problem, though, is that California has both more people, and more acres farmed, than it can support.

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