Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 195

Yeah but I have to drive 1000 miles up hill (both ways) every day for work in temperatures where lithium itself freezes, and I only pee on Sundays.

I don't need 1000 miles. 600 (unencumbered) is definitely sufficient, and 500 might be okay. The thing is that I'll lose half to 2/3 of that range when towing my camp trailer, and that's not even considering that I'm typically towing it up into the mountains, gaining ~5000 vertical feet. I also need minimum 12k pounds of towing capacity and I'd like a little headroom, so call it 16k, and the bed payload has to be able to take at least 2000 pounds, because that's how much the trailer puts on the fifth-wheel hitch.

I'm anxiously awaiting an EV pickup that can do this. I'd love to have essentially unllimited electricity to buffer cloudy days (I have 1 kW of solar panels on the trailer and on sunny days they generate way more than enough, but consecutive cloudy days can leave be difficult).

3/4 ton and 1-ton gas and diesel pickups typically have oversized fuel tanks that provide about 600 miles of range, because that's what you actually need when you start hauling or towing significant loads. I don't think an EV pickup needs to have more range, but it needs to be comparable, and to be able to tow and haul comparable loads.

I'm not anti-EV by any means. I bought my first EV in 2011, and have had electric cars ever since. Trucks are a different sort of problem, though.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 195

Oh, I think the Silverado EV's are adequate. 480+ mile range in best conditions still puts me way over my bladders ability to drive even in the absolute worst conditions of that tow + cold weather. That thing will still be 200'ish miles of towing in cold weather.

That's getting there, though I'd like to see some driving tests with a good-sized fifth wheel at highway speeds. The towing capacity is probably okay, though it provides very little headroom for when I'm towing both my camp trailer (~8k) and my boat (~3.5k), which I actually do several times each summer. But I think the payload capacity is too small to tow the trailer, which puts about 2000 points on the truck.

Comment What a joke... (Score 1) 26

If they weren't ripping people of with every purchase there would no need for a "discount". I was the "guy" who was forced to replace our really nice Commodore Pet computers with that crApple BS in HS. Apple never did anything for the schools that they didn't get paid for. Their software SUCKS, their networking SUCKS. In an effort to be "cool" and trendy apple has made supporting their stuff annoying time consuming.

Comment Re:All according to plan. (Score 1) 195

Agreed. My sedan has been electric for nearly a decade now, but I'm still driving a diesel pickup (1-ton, though a 3/4 ton would be sufficient) because EV pickup range is inadequate -- and I think it may be inadequate for a while. I need 250 miles of range when towing a trailer, which means I need ~500 -- maybe 600 -- miles of range without.

I'm not generally a fan of hybrids, but I think plug-in hybrids with large-ish batteries may be the sweet spot for a while with pickups. The Dodge Ramcharger is looking really good to me, though I'd like to see them make a 2500.

Comment Re:META is doing this to make them quit (Score 1) 91

That's actually a smart strategy.

It is effective at reducing staff cheaply, but it has a huge downside, shared with most attrition-based schemes for reducing payroll: The best employees are also the ones who find it the easiest to leave. The worst employees are also the ones who will grit their teeth and hold on to the bitter end.

It's harder and more costly (in the short term) to do targeted layoffs which allows the company to target low-performers, or those who are low performers relative to their cost. It's the better choice, though.

But I wonder how many employees will quit in today's job market.

Lots of the top performers will.

Comment Ho hum. (Score 1) 72

Most posters seem to be assuming it's a scam. I can't possibly think of a reason why they might think that. (A few million, yes, but getting it down to one is hard.)

However, that's almost by the by. It's rated for 5G. 5G is old. 6G is the new standard and WiFi 6 has been around for a while now. If you're actually serious about designing a new phone from scratch, and have not yet released it, you'd almost certainly want it to be 6G-capable. Nobody in their right minds designs for yesterday's standards, when they're going to be competing with tomorrow's products.

This, to me, is far far more important than whether or not it is real. If you're designing a product for a market that's on its way out, you've got a serious problem. If you're clamouring for a product that's designed for a standard that could be phased out by the time you see it, then you're not thinking straight.

Why does this matter, if the product isn't real anyway? First, we don't know it's not real, we shouldn't assume that. But, second, it means that nobody thought it was worth bothering with taking the potential customers seriously. The customers are merely meat with cash. That's not an attitude I can respect. Whichever vendor is making these phones is worthy only of my utmost contempt.

Comment Re:A city at 7000 ft elevation but sinking (Score 1) 28

The problem isn't the population. Bedrock can handle more than that. London isn't sinking because of all the people (and London is huge!), it's sinking because the ice sheet that pressed the Highlands deep into the crust has been gone for the last 10,000 years, resulting in the entire island tilting back to where it naturally should be. You could move London's population into the Great Glen and it would not make the slightest difference - London would still be sinking. The ice sheets were a whole lot heavier than a few tens of millions of people.

(Ok, it would make a difference. If the rich people actually lived in Scotland, the transit system and public services would see a thousand percent improvement inside a week. If they were also forced to speak Gaelic, English would vanish in a month.)

Comment Re: Incredible Foolishness (Score 1) 28

Every place? Fascinating.

There are towns in England and Wales that have been occupied for the past 10,000 years. Manchester isn't the greatest place on Earth, but I'm really not convinced it's going to start sinking into the ground any time in the next thousand years. If "short term" is longer than the remaining lifespan of the human race, I am not convinced "short" is really the right word.

"Short term" is only meaningful if it's shorter than the time needed to take meaningful remedial action, and the time it would take to remediate the problem in Mexico City vastly exceeds the time it will take for the city to crumble into oblivion.

The sun will not explode in 4 billion years. It's far too small. It might well run out of hydrogen by then, but that will simply cause it to swell. If, in four billion years, we can't find a way to drift the Earth outwards to remain within the goldilocks zone, then we're a failure as a species. Of course, we might well have built a Dyson Ring by then. Although, to be honest, if we were going to do that, we'd want to find a gas cloud that was about to form a stellar nursary and head there. If we arrive as the proto star fires up, we've maximum resources in the easiest possible form (a dust cloud, so no mining needed and minimal processing required), can build the Dyson Ring or Dyson Sphere by the time the star really gets going, and have another ten to fifteen billion years.

Comment Re: What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 1) 386

If we are held in low esteem because we can spot a tautological non-sequitur from a mile away, then so be it. That doesn't mean we are wrong.

I strongly encourage you to engage with the literature on the topic. You dont even have to read philosphers, there are plenty of cognitive scientists and neurologists who have excellent treatments of the topic.

Comment Re:let me get this straight (Score 1) 57

Yeah. China *does* have a shit load of coal , but considering their population and the relative underdevelopment of the "backwater" areas , I've been impressed by Chinas attempts at turning the ship around.

I guess shitty dictatororships at least seem good at making the trains run on time

Comment Re:Environmental impact probably overstated (Score 2) 149

I'm assuming (the article really isnt clear on this) that its refering to the energy of a bunch of billion computers actually running the AI model, as GPUs running AI chews a tonne of energy. At those scales it does add up.

I've gone and deleted chrome. I'm using Brave, but its crypto-bros in charge of that so I dont exactly trust them either. They just have a really effective adblocker that doesnt seem to trigger youtube into issueing shrill threats about breaking TOSs with adblockers

Comment Re: What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 2) 386

If it can, then it breaks the deterministic behavior of the known and understood physical components.

Ok. Maybe its the philiosophy graduate in me but....... lets hit the breaks on this non sequitur. Determinism has absolutely no bearing on the question of what is consciousness. Practically no philosopher, cognitive psychologist or neurologist thinks indeterminism is a necessary condition for consciousness.

This seems to be your tautological invention, and your attempting to argue it as a fait acompli. Well no, that isn't sufficient. For the most part, consciousness is , to badly summarise Heidegger, the state of paying attention to things (ie your never just conscious, your conscious OF things), Viewed this way, and pretty much any other definition of consciousness we've come up with (and there are many), not only is indeterminism NOT a requirement, in fact on the contrary determinism is required for consiousness, because when you are consious OF something there is by necessity a transference of state. The outside world CAUSES an impression in the mind.

You *really* are going to need to expand on why you seem to think what you do.

Slashdot Top Deals

The last thing one knows in constructing a work is what to put first. -- Blaise Pascal

Working...