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disposeofnick9

Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:50PM (#11858220)
Bathrooms in corporate-owned establishments because there's no sense imposing unnecessary costs on independent shops whom cannot best afford it. Plan your day, schedule your meals and surprises are reduced. And for emergency or actual camping use only, I also have a compact, compostable toilet with the disposable bags (it's just a frame and disposable bags).

On a slightly different subject, I suggest anyone considering living a habitable vehicle not use on-board plumbing or sewage systems because they're messy, time-consuming and expensive to maintain. The vehicle I use only has a water tank but I still use water-store RO water in a washable refrigerator bottle. Using a tank and sink system requires flushing and sterilization periodically, and is often awkward to fill sanitarily.

Chinese cells are like illicit drugs: quality varies widely and it's hard to know what someone is getting. I bought 4 laptop batteries from Amazon and all had overstated capacities of the 18650 chemistries... some had 2000 mAh (10% overstated), others 1800 (22% overstated) , when the 4s3p packs were marked "8800 mAh." I tested the cells individually, and they came out to about 85-99% of spec. The problem is also in the manufacturing because I have zero confidence in these cells not development crystals under anything more than 0.2C dis/charge and lower temperatures.

I think we need an independent UL/CE for evaluating and lifecycle testing and certifying cells are less likely to short out or die prematurely by digging deep into how a battery is made against its specifications, conducting MTTF tests and many other tests and approaches for holistic grading and improvements. Otherwise, fake and shoddy cells will continue to flood the market with phony and dangerous goods. It can't be leveraged as a bureaucratic industry or incumbent protectionism, but to keep standards high as are for all other wall-powered devices. This will knock players whom can't or won't make good products out of the supply-chain, but they deserve it.

Can't wait to buy the plastic battery holder grids for Tesla-sized cells. My first 18650 pack is made from 4 laptop batteries and is capable of about 63 A at 0.2C.
Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:15PM (#11857925)
Not quite as old and cool as an aircooled 22 window DIY EV like the electric samba, just a digijet Vanagon Westy water-boxer plankton-burner. If/when I had 12 grand, I'm ripping the gas motor out and going EV because there's so many free/cheap charging places available now. Plus, climate change and jihaadis.

PS: CA, NJ and others plz vote today. I did yesterday. If you want change, you gotta be counted.

Re:Planned GPS outages in southern California on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:10PM (#11857885)
because it's pointless and since areas can be and have been turned off for non-military receivers.
Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:09PM (#11857876)
Airbnb, uber or is that an offer to cofound an app to pay to live with startup people?

Personally, I'd never let someone rent it without a massive security deposit and a very profitable rate because parts are rare, fragile and expensive.

Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:07PM (#11857859)
Thanks bro, I got this. :)

Although I do have an LED spinning light ball, an old tape-player radio and the world's smallest dance floor.

Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @05:05PM (#11857830)
VW doesn't make a big RV. :)

The same as anyone else. It sounds like you're trying to imply something like stereotypes or biogtry. What are you really asking?

Travel patterns mapped before, during and after events helps predict future spread patterns.

Search-engine queries and pharmacy sale histograms by SKUs, especially with geolocation metadata, are vital for pandemic and bioterror surveillance.

Re:Silicon Valley's housing crisis, in one sentence on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:56PM (#11857744)
I live in a VW somewhere in Silicon Valley.

Ask me anything (respectful, non-troll)

EDIT: I don't usually bite, but when I do, I won't eat much.

Re:Planned GPS outages in southern California on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @04:52PM (#11857708)
Why on earth does the military-industrial complex need to spend money on a duplicate, irrelevant technology? I worked at Trimble Nav in the radio group, and the POTUS has the ability to increase selective available (SA) to an enormous number (which can be defeated by differential/kinematic corrections, but was set to 0 by executive order under Clinton) or disable the unencrypted channel entirely for a particular region or the entire planet (which includes space). WTF!
Re:President Y combinator at the Bilderberg meeting on Tuesday June 07, 2016 @02:10PM (#11856392)
Sam will give us the straight dope on all of InfoWars (lol) favorite conspiracy theories. ;)
Re:Save iTunes on Tuesday May 10, 2016 @08:32PM (#11671812)
DRM, bleh.

It's sad that open source browsers and open web standards folks are doing the bidding of corporate interests. At this rate, we won't be able to own a permanent, portable "license" to a work, only rent a license locked to a particular device on a certain platform.

Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:56AM (#11627457)
Actually, there already is, it's called OpenADR.

http://products.openadr.org/?posts_per_page=-1

See also Ecobee vs. Nest: http://controltrends.org/controltrends-news/news-and-informa...

Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:51AM (#11627439)
"Have you seen the swimming pool on the roof?"

;)

Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:44AM (#11627413)
Yup. Having many distributed li-ion battery walls charging at night for peak assist during the day is one way to level out demand and make the energy infrastructure more resilient in a Google-servers-like way.
Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:42AM (#11627401)
FES is used in non-kill-zone habitable solutions like datacenters, bottoms of passenger trams/hybrid buses and electromagnetic aircraft catapults. The historical issue with FES is unscheduled, rapid disassembly, but carbon/kevlar composites have been shown to have greater integrity with least unsprung structural mass (because you want the most mass as close to the rim as possible to ensure highest moment of inertia.)

FES has 10x specific energy than supercapacitors or batteries with no memory and precise state of charge. Magnetic bearings and hard vacuums make them quite efficient.

Re:The price of solar power just fell 50% in 16 months on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:31AM (#11627366)
The price of raw cells are super cheap now and if you're willing to reearch, engineering and DIY, you can build great panels for even cheaper. As many large projects come online, both li-ion and solar are going to fall through the floor faster than Moore's Law for some time, and the slow down.

I suspect solar deployment will take the US by surprise, because of the compelling economics.

Hint: go long on SCTY

Re:Ruby Bug: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:22AM (#11627346)
The probability distribution function of average coder understandable-documentation decays exponentially with subject matter expertise, in most cases. Furthermore, it is often semi-rational, usually unconscious non-/for-profit "job-securitization" to lay landmines and obscure functionality to reinforce in-group, elite, "arcane knowledge" hoarding and seem "expert."

A startup founder often wants to work themselves out of a job to do more useful things, most will do all they can to insulate themselves into indispensability (a lot of technical people are super insecure, I'm proly one of them, and a lot of corporate gigs are cut-throat fiefdoms).

Re:Ruby Bug: SecureRandom should try /dev/urandom first on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @06:07AM (#11627310)
Code is useless if no one knows how to use it properly and it's not communicated clearly. Users certainly can't be expected to read every line of code. That's like shipping a car with no user manuals and saying "take the engine apart and see how it works." Arrogance.

Clearly document system behavior or code is essentially useless.

Re:I wrote a small piece on planned death on Wednesday May 04, 2016 @05:55AM (#11627272)
I've seen too many people get unnecessary, life-quality-killing butcherous surgeries and read the evidence confirming most end-of-life surgeries rarely have useful benefit. If you're going to check out, go with dignity and don't put your family / self through extended suffering. If you have to go in an unprogressive country, nitrogen itself leaves no evidence and paraphernalia is minimal and can be removed.

Also, please do a will, pick an executor, prepaid funeral and make a Quick Reference guide to finances, assets, bills, keys and passwords... both my mother and I are getting this done ahead of time.

It's not as depressing as leaving family to stumble through things while grieving.

Re:Craig Wright Is Not Satoshi Nakamoto on Monday May 02, 2016 @07:21PM (#11616591)
Regardless of is/not, Wright says he did it to never do it again.
Re:Craig Steven Wright claims to be Satoshi Nakamoto on Monday May 02, 2016 @03:28AM (#11609716)
Perhaps folks more knowledgable could weigh in if a large liquidation event could happen by darkpools or some other means that wouldn't cause an oversupply "market run."
Re:Introducing the Infinit file system on Sunday May 01, 2016 @10:42PM (#11608932)
How would this be better/different than https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs ?
Re:Berlin Is Banning Most Vacation Apartment Rentals on Sunday May 01, 2016 @10:36PM (#11608910)
It doesn't, actually. In the US, there are just a few apartment consortiums which own the lion's share of the fleet of newer construction units. Anarchist capitalism encourage supply-side monopolist hegemony, not competition. Competition is undesirable for capitalists when supplying goods and services and optimally minimized, it is desirable by buyers but this is mostly irrelevant in an artificially-controlled supply market where demand is inelastic. If Hyperloop were rolled out across most continents, empty land could be "closer" to economic centers and housing supply would be effectively increased by widening the commute radius, making it more affordable.
Re:Berlin Is Banning Most Vacation Apartment Rentals on Sunday May 01, 2016 @10:31PM (#11608897)
American, libertarian, anarchistic capitalism has proved too extreme an overreaction to it's nemesis doppelgänger, communism. Democratic capitalism with sensible safety nets and evironmental regulations isn't as suicidal for us and the planet as what the Koch bros want. Furthermore, with deep learning and automation of most jobs (human-piloted transport, white-collar analyst jobs) will create millions upon millions of people without jobs or retrainable prospects while remaining, ultraefficient and uberprofitable businesses hoard cash while bleeding out the middle class, the engine of the economy. Lots of idle, unemployed, broke people is a recipe for unrest and civil strife.
It should come as no shock that, right now, the elderly in South Korea lack social security in absolute squalor and dignity. Most are abandoned by their families and left alone to kill themselves, usually by jumping off a bridge. There is some occassional food assistance, but there is rarely enough to go around.

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