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Comment Re:It raises interesting questions (Score 1) 98

Well considering on weekdays if I go to bed after I get home from work at a reasonable hour I have 2 hours of time at home per workday to handle anything that needs to be done and then whatever time is left over for entertainment an additional 6 hours would be the the ability to have a life outside of work.

Of course this is assuming that if this was all of a sudden a standard thing that employers wouldn't suddenly expect an extra 6 hours of work out of people and people wouldn't suddenly be ok with working an extra 6 hours a day.

Comment Fukushima (Score 3, Interesting) 74

Back with the fukushima disaster in japan they were raiding the batteries from the cars in the company parking lot to keep the controls and monitor equipment running.

Also 4 days?! I know a EV holds a lot of juice but if it can really run a home with lights and HVAC for days it should already be being sold as a home backup option.

Comment Re:Totally false, here's the real deal (Score 1) 130

Instead of being lauded for helping phone users get the thing they treasure most above all else - battery life - Apple was pummeled for helping out users, and even though this criticism was utterly unfair, Apple took the high road and said "well how about cheap replacement batteries all around that restore full performance!".

They would have been lauded if they had only did one very important thing; Told their customers they were doing it and maybe also given the option to opt out.

The omission is what got them in hot water because it made phones slower with age (battery degradation) without any indication to their users what the cause was.

Which would push people to get a new phone rather than replace the battery because why would a new battery improve performance?

So yes the criticism of their handling of that was entirely fair.

Comment Re:This has already been tried decades ago (Score 1) 99

If you give the account info to a bunch of unknown individuals one of them is going to change the password and lock everyone else out.
Then you lose all your viewing history and favorite lists and they jack your plan up to the ultra premium 50 user 8K video plan until you can get the card canceled or regain access to the account.

So really you don't want to share your account with individuals you don't trust.

Pretty much best case scenario for sharing with a large number of people is they all turn out to be trustworthy and then you never get the chance to use your own account because the max concurrent number of streams are always in use.

Comment Re:I suspect it'll be gamers who push us to IPv6 (Score 2) 163

I kind of doubt it as the majority of games seem to be using servers now that can act as a go between to establish NAT to NAT connections.

The cell carriers have short changed their customers with IPv6.

With IPv4 on cellular you got a public IPv4 address that you could host a webcam or whatever you wanted and access it remotely with just the IP and port number.

With IPv6 on cellular they give you a IPv6 address that blocks all incoming connections so even if you know the IP address and port you still can't make the connection.

You still have to have a go between server to start the connection, just like you would if you were still using NAT'd IPv4.

I wonder how many of the wireline ISPs have done the same to their customers?

Comment Re: addressing costs (Score 1) 317

The gov't never mandated the use of CFLs, they made the manufacture and sale of lower efficiency bulbs illegal and left it up to the market to fill in the gaps, even halogen bulbs are still allowed but they are expensive, and don't last as well as the incandecents did while only having a little better effeciency. 60w incandecent = 43w halogen = 13w CFL = 8.5W LED

Would we be using primarily LEDs today if the govt had not mandated they stop the sale and manufacture of low efficiency bulbs?

There is a big difference in usability between the CFLs and LEDs, CFLs are dim at startup and then warm up and aside from CCFLs (not a typo) can't stand rapidly switched installs like signs and motion switches and afaik they still don't handle dimming well.

LEDs suffer from none of those issues, neither did incandecents, LED bulbs are a very visible upgrade from CFLs.

Put a modern led and an incandecent side by side and most people can't tell the difference by the light output, with some of the newer ones you can hardly tell even by looking directly at them.

IMHO we only ended up going with CFL because LED wasn't ready at the time, in some cases CFL is still not ready as you can't readily buy higher wattage (like 300w equivilent) LEDs while you can CFLs.

Still I think we would have ended up here eventually on a cost basis but without the low efficiency bulbs ban I think it would have taken much longer.

Same sort of issue with my home heating here,
~2005ish heat pump with LP aux heat, heat pump doesn't work below about 30F which ends up being most of the winter nights here.
Just the hardware costs to replace both units would be something like $24K.
Luckily LP is about as cheap to run as a decent heat pump when bought in bulk or at least it is right now.

At work we have a unit on NG and a unit on resistive electric, the resistive electric costs about 4x more to run than the NG but again many thousands to replace.

My rough estimate was that switching both units over to a modern heat pump that works in below freezing temps would save a bit over $1K/yr so looking like a minimum of 24 years for break even assuming the install was free, switching the electric unit over to NG would save about $650/yr so like 7 year break even.

NG is cheap per therm but has year round charges that make it total out at 3/4 the cost of electric;
1 year of electric heat costs $850
1 year of NG heat and service charges costs $610
but the cost for the NG alone is just $202

Yeah i'm sure the prices will come down eventually but right now the tech is often cost prohibitive even though it's cost effective long term.
It's something you would consider for a new install or a replacement for a failed unit but isn't usually considered worth replacing a working existing unit that's already paid for.

Solar's in much the same spot but IIUC solar has gotten so cheap that the installation makes up the majority of the cost now.

Comment Re: political issue (Score 1) 317

People will always go with the options that cost them the least money, and give them the most benefit. Improve cleaner energy alternatives so they're cheaper and better, and people will gladly stop burning oil, natural gas and coal!

It's not always obvious and many if not most people will go with what is cheapest now rather than what's cheapest in the long term.

My lights are out, I can (or could before gov't intervention) get a whole box of incandescent bulbs that use 4-8x more electricity than modern options and only last about a year for like $8.
Or I could buy a single LED bulb for $10 that uses 1/8th the electric and will last 5+ years.

My house is cold, electric resistive heating equipment is cheap to buy.
Costs roughly 4x more to run than NG or heat pump but it's cheaper to get and doesn't have any additional monthly fees.

How can that be addressed?

Comment Sort of like ModMyLife? (Score 1) 59

Seems to be pretty much entirely lost to time now but back around 2007 there was a site that would let you watch and control people by voting on actions.
Of course this was 2007 and LTE didn't exist yet but it was live streamed over the existing 3G at the time, it worked remarkably well.

Somehow there doesn't appear to be any videos of the site in operation but it was pretty fun.

It didn't have any goals or anything tho they just wandered around messing with people.

BeeMe appears like it will be a story driven based game.

I'll be sure and check it out it looks like it could be fun.

Comment Re:Practical question (Score 2) 97

They don't.
Everything sits as it was shipped and the reduced costs make up the difference.

It's even filled with nitrogen to eliminate the possibility of fires.

I'm interested to know what they are running on it. Like are they using it for commercial services? Or are they really just running through endless test cycles on 27PB of storage?

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