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Comment Re:Silly. (Score 2) 75

Even if battery energy density started getting close to that of liquid hydrocarbons, and thats a looong way off still, youd still need more batteries than you would fuel because batteries dont get lighter as they discharge like burned fuel does, rocket equation stuff. A 747 carries ~150k kilograms of fuel, if that didnt burn off thats an extra 37k kg the first quarter of the flight, an extra 75k kg the first half of the flight and so on...

Battery planes may never make widespread sense, if we ever start generating enough carbon free energy cheaply enough and even if all ground transport goes battery electric or whatever, at some point it might still be worth it to just make carbon neutral jet fuel with air fuel synthesis. That seems closer on the horizon than the battery tech needed for large planes to be feasible, hard to beat jet turbines for that application.

Comment Re:Exactly 10x (Score 1) 89

I know everybody turns off any new features immediately upon release, but with the new(ish) agent the way some of the various bits and pieces have come together has been pretty great.

Credits are global now, so youre watching something "why does he look familiar?", you click down to the actor now it shows you their whole filmography, you can watchlist stuff right there, and even a little category 'Youve seen them in' with anything with them in any of your libraries youve watched by recent. Not just other shows if youre watching a show or only other movies if youre watching movies. And since you can just search and browse through anything/anyone now, its actually replaced IMDB for me just because its sooo much cleaner. https://watch.plex.tv/person/n... vs https://www.imdb.com/name/nm00...

And speaking of the watchlist, thats universal now, you can search and add stuff you dont have, from any service, even stuff thats not on any service, and the watchlist can interface directly with the *arrs, so youre looking up that guy from that thing, watchlist another of his movies, radarr goes and does its thing. You can add upcoming stuff too and they even have trailers now, so i dont have to go to Youtube anymore cuz it doesnt make me wade through 20 fake AI trailers before finding the one on the actual studios channel and then it doesnt autoplay some assholes reaction or breakdown of the trailer i just watched right after.

AND if your users have their watchlists public, you can monitor theirs too, so friends and family can just watchlist stuff you dont have without leaving the plex app, so you dont need to try to convince them to use a third party app like Omni to request stuff.

All the other social features still suck tho, their own lack of features makes you abuse the rating system as a filter for other things instead of as a rating system, but replacing IMDB and youtube for at least my purposes has been pretty nice. Some of my users dont have their watchlists public either so i still have a facebook group chat for requests cuz who wants to use some third party app for requests. .

$750 is ridiculous tho, i paid $100 during a 50% off sale a couple of black fridays ago, but with all my collections and playlists and everything and especially all my users switching to Jellyfin wouldnt be as simple as everyone pretends, but if in the future they roll out Plex2 to loophole my lifetime or try to charge my users individually ill figure it out.

Comment A Jewel of an Engineer (Score 4, Insightful) 41

It seems right that since I announced the BBS Documentary production on Slashdot, I should also take the time to give testimony to one of its primary interviewees that took it from side fun project to meaningful historical work.

My goal had been to do a documentary on the BBS Experience, working from interviews with flexible friends and nearby folks, and then work up to the "Big Ones", the names who had been in my teenage mind when I ran a BBS, like Ward Christensen, Chuck Forsberg, Randy Suess, and others. But then I had someone from Chicago checking in to make sure I wasn't going to skip over the important parts the midwest had told in the story. So it was that a month into production, barely nailing down how I would fly post 9/11 with a studio worth of equipment, that I found myself at CACHE (Chicago Area Computer Hobbyist Exchange) and meeting Ward himself.

They say "Never meet your heroes." I think it's more accurate to say "Have the best heroes" or "Be the kind of person a hero would want to meet." Ward was warm, friendly, humble, and very, VERY accomodating to a first-time filmmaker. I appreciated, fundamentally, the boost that he gave me and my work, knowing I was sitting on hours of footage from The Guy.

There were many other The Guy and The Lady and The Groups for BBS: The Documentary, but Ward's humble-ness about his creation and what it did to the world was what made sure I never overhyped or added layers of drama on the work. Ward was amazing and I'll miss him.

Comment Trip chaining? (Score 1) 417

It baffles me how many people make special trips for things, i never go just one place, if i need one thing it can wait until i have more places to go. Go to the grocery store 2-3 times a week, theres 3 on the way home from work. We do big grocery shopping for staples and nonperishables at one further away probably every other weekend, but we also go to target, the hardware store and sams club on those trips.

Businesses

Brown vs. Startup Over a Sandwich 119

An anonymous reader writes "Crunchbutton, founded by Yale grads, is trying to replicate the success of its one-button food delivery service in and around Brown University. The controversy began when the startup delivered a popular Brown sandwich called the 'Spicy With' to students. Brown's lawyers sent Crunchbutton a cease and desist letter, demanding that the company remove any associations with the university or its name. The startup says it has complied with the demands, yet Brown has not backed off, and it expects to be served with a lawsuit. This tale illustrates the perils of encouraging entrepreneurship while protecting the interests of a big educational institution."

Comment Hydrogen is a terrible fuel for a vehicle. (Score 5, Interesting) 580

Thats why we use gasoline. While hydrogen does have a higher specific energy, Octane and other hydrocarbons of similar lengths have some of the highest energy densities of any readily available compounds. Hydrogen has a specific energy of about 142 megajoules per kilogram, while gasoline has about 48mj/kg. BUT, a kilogram of gasoline is about 1.4 liters, and a kilogram of liquid hydrogen is a little over 14 liters. so not only would you need a fuel tank nearly four times the size for a car of similar range (and thats assuming hydrogen would be as efficient as an internal combustion engine), but hydrogen is only liquid at 20 degrees kelvin, or about 250 degrees below zero. Maintaining that low a temperature requires even more energy.

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