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Comment Re:833 of These... (Score 1) 175

2000 mile range of a diesel. Probably only 200 to 300 for this POS (I doubt even that but trying to be nice). Electric motors drain batteries super fast under heavy load conditions, and long and even short haul cargo trucks are expected to carry up to 40,000 pounds of cargo. The whole truck including tractor, trailer, and cargo can weigh up to 80,000 pounds. This electric tractor might make it 500 miles on its own. Add the trailer and cargo and likely not even 200 miles. A half hour wasted every 200 miles will bankrupt the trucker. No one will want to hire his/her truck if it wastes that much time.

Comment FFS Tell Us Drain Time With Full Cargo Weight (Score 3, Interesting) 175

It doesn't matter how fast it charges if it can't drive as far as a diesel with 40,000 pounds of cargo. The heavier the weight, the more toque required, which is the Achilles Heel of electric motors and batteries. They aren't telling us anything if they don't show how far it drive pulling a 40,000 pound cargo on a long trailer. 80,000 pounds altogether. Diesel tractor trailers can drive up to 2000 miles on a full fuel load, depending on tank size. I seriously doubt a Tesla semi can drive even 200 to 300 miles with a full cargo load of 40,000 pounds.

Comment NYT had a nice analysis in 2023 (Score 4, Informative) 42

They even have the structure diagramed nicely, based on an analysis of several years of Hallmark and Lifetime holiday movies (400+ movies) .

https://www.nytimes.com/intera...

1. At Christmas time
2. a female { lawyer , CEO, real estate developer , reporter }
3. travels to a small town
4. and meets { high school sweetheart, local handyman, single dad, army vet }.
5. Meanwhile, a
    a. { family cafe , Alaskan inn, dairy farm } needs saving OR
    b. { toy drive , ball, fundraiser } needs to be organized OR
    c. mystery { who owned the bracelet , who is secrete santa } needs saving
6. In the end, { she decides to move to the town, he decides to join her in the city }
7. and they kiss.

The end. It's a fun read.

Comment Re:Heat (Score 3, Informative) 53

Infrared are longer wavelengths. Probably too long to be trapped the way they describe. I immediately wondered about microwaves, i.e. radar. But those are way longer waves, so no as well. The reason they can put a mesh screen you can see through in the door of a microwave oven, is because the wavelength of those radio waves (that is really what they are) are so long they can't get through. Finally, black items can radiate heat, you just can't see it. So sure, if it trapped enough visible light, it could be 'converted' to a longer wavelength (infrared) as the fabric tries to shed the extra energy.

Comment Venus (Score 1) 51

Given their size, we should send half a dozen (or whatever the right amount is) SpaceX Starships to Venus with a payload of reflective dust. Dust that can be released around the planet to see the effect it has with respect to cooling the planet.

Comment Re:Surprising! (Score 1) 59

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

Comment Re: Make them occasionally? (Score 1) 186

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Comment Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score 1) 48

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Comment Just no. Not Power or Heat; Kessler Effect (Score 2) 64

Imagine, a small hits a satellite and the satellite sends out a shitload of shards moving at extremely high speed. And then some of those hit a sky data centre and cause a cascading (Kessler) effect. Of it the meteor hits the much larger data centre directly. We already know we are walking a fine line of losing a significant proportion of satellites if there are collisions.

Or worse, what if some bad player shoots a missile into one of those centres? This would cause orders of magnitude worse results than a simple collision. If a cloud of debris started orbiting, it could knock out a large portion of the world's computing power (assuming most adopted this silly idea). If most of the data centres were put in space and that worst case scenario happened, the whole world would shut down. And if you moved the centres far enough apart in space, they would be so high up the communications lag would have just as bad a consequence.

For shit like this, you have to plan for worst case. It's why they put berms around terrestrial data centres and have enough security to protect a gold repository, just about. Right now, there is no way to protect against a Kessler Syndrome/Effect/Event if it happens.

Comment Subtext: "We don't want you learning how to learn" (Score 1) 43

"You don't need to know how to learn; In fact don't need to know anything. Just ask 'Brother AI', he will tell you everything." [In a soothing big brother voice.]
Keep the masses ignorant and only tell them stuff you want them to hear. It's the next step in making the rich richer, and the poor poorer.
.

Comment Re:Looking put the windows may do the same (Score 1) 14

Way to look like a full on completely ignorant asshole. I bet you think you sounded smart there. Here is an article that gives people some useful information on an important topic, that was not known before. There's nothing stopping you (or anyone else) from taking this thing, which you had no clue about before so couldn't, and digging deeper. In essence fuck off you useless troll. Cancer sucks. Information on fighting it is always welcome.

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