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Comment Re:Will Tesla buy them? (Score 1) 193

Humans are very good at quickly getting objects in and out of awkward spaces but only if those objects are fairly light. Your AA batteries are no problem for even a small child to handle. The starter batteries for petrol powered cars are getting towards the limit of what one person can easily and safely handle.

Afaict an electric car battery is of the order of half a ton. Getting something that weight in and out quickly while also keeping it in a place that is sheilded from crashes and doesn't mess with the praciticality or aerodynamics of the car is a much trickier proposition than dealing with a few AAs.

Comment Re:No (Score 1) 443

They're not the victims. We are.

The point is that they're saying they're the ones who have been victimized by the evil "thieves" of their property. And it's an important point... while it's clearly a bad idea to allow one person/organization to act as judge, jury and executioner -- those roles are separated for very good reasons -- it's utterly ludicrous to allow the victim (or supposed victim), the entity with a personal interest and even a revenge motive, to play any of those roles.

Comment I paid thousands of GBPs... (Score 5, Insightful) 775

And underwent surgery in order to get rid of glasses as they were the worst annoyance in my life - so there's no chance of me using this product.

People don't realise just how much these things are going to negatively affect you - you are going to be cleaning them all the time, they are going to cause irritation and issue with our hair and the side of your head, they are going to range from being unnoticeable to unignorable literally in minutes all throuout the day.

That's my take on it all. The wearable aspect is just a poor substitute for what we have been "promised" in fiction, so until it brings the positives without the negatives that I already went to great lengths to avoid, I'm not buying into it.

Comment Re:Uber is not going to destroy NYC taxi (Score 1) 278

In Oz, the number plate is the "medallion", they are limited but privately traded and currently worth around $500k per cab, people who have them will never want to change the limit. Dispatch was a quasi-authority, the board was composed of govt reps and private operators, they basically set prices, etc, they don't specify the make of car but here in Melbourne it must be yellow. The flagfall fee was supposedly to pay for bookings via the dispatch center. Limo's work the same here, they must be pre-booked. All this was 25yrs ago, dispatch technology has changed a lot since then, good drivers (cab or limo) seem to rely more on their mobile phone than their radio these days.

Comment YEC indicates the absence of self-skepticism. (Score 1) 335

"If he/she keeps that private and nobody ever figures it out, and his math and physics is solid, no problem with it."

In all honesty, though, I rather doubt you will find many Young Earthers who otherwise demonstrate solid grasps of math and physics... since math and physics pretty much rule out the Young Earth hypothesis. In fairness I suppose that in large part it's more just a failure or refusal to examine the actual evidence. But in some ways that's just as bad.

I'm curious Jane, what's your job? - I only ask because on the subject of AGW your "grasp of math and physics" is just as far away from well established science as those of a YEC. I'm not trying to pick a fight here, I firmly believe nobody is immune to self delusion, 35yrs ago I was totally convinced Uri Geller was genuine, after all he "fixed my watch" by staring into the TV for 30 seconds. In 1980 I was interested enough in climate change to pick up a book (about tress) and start following the subject, due to a mixture of ignorance and deliberate misinformation campaigns I remained unconvinced CO2 was a serious problem for almost a decade after Hansen's now famous Senate testimony and the establishment of the IPCC.

Having been a victim of at least one case of severe self delusion, I can attest to the fact it is really easy to spot in others and really hard to see in yourself, this is especially true if you are a "smart person", most (honest) magicians will tell you "smart people" are counter-intuitively the easiest to fool, reason being they carry more prior assumptions than others as to how the universe ticks, it means the focus of their attention is more predictable and therefore more easily redirected.

As an independent observer who also feels obliged to pontificate on the social utility of the scientific method and the role of skepticism in it, I think that both yourself and the YEC cling to your contrarian views because you have neglected the most essential part of the art of skepticism, namely self-skepticism. The only scientific difference I see between a YEC's ideas on evolution and your ideas on AGW is the subject matter, but even that is similar since they are both heavily tilted towards geology and related Earth sciences.

Disclaimer: I offer this post as unwanted advice rather than an unwanted flame.

Comment Principles are expensive. (Score 1) 335

One post on a random website -no matter the content- is woefully inadequate information by which to judge someone.

Exactly, and if a prospective employer decides it's appropriate to judge you on a soundbite you should make certain that the prying bastard is the one who ends up feeling embarrassed and awkward. Don't even bother trying to defend whatever past behavior they are accusing you of, turn it around and make them defend their current behavior. You probably won't get the job, but nobody ever said principles are cheap.

Having said that I can also see that if someone self-identifies as a YEC, it disqualifies them from certain tasks. If someone has preyed on children in the past, it disqualifies them from working with children. For many jobs background checks are in fact proper due diligence, unfortunately there are a lot of self-important people who turn that genuine need into a disingenuous and hypocritical witch hunt.

Comment Re:I want (Score 1) 238

Some quick estimation (read: looking at online vendors but not shopping arround carefully for best prices nor carefullly checking compatibility) puts the cost of a basic system built round that board and with all slots filled with 16 core processors at the order of $5K.

I guess that may be cheap to you, it certainly isn't to me.

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