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Comment Re:Will it make ICEs irrelevant (Score 2) 180

I don't drive 600 miles without stopping. I could, however, completely understand not refueling in that time.

I expect to stop after about an hour or two on the road to use the toilet. After that, about every 4 hours until I'm there. I don't know if you've done much driving in the US, but the vast majority of our highways don't have service plazas such as are common in most of Europe. You actually have to exit the highway and find a gas station (or, if EV, charger). The only Tesla Supercharger in my area is in a place that makes sense from the company's perspective (fringes of an outlet mall parking lot, ready access to high-power lines), and yes, we all have GPS now, but it's decidedly not a minor detour to get to. From getting into the exit lane from the highway to being at the charger is a solid five minutes' drive each way, during which time you will pass two large truck stops that have all the amenities that long-haul truckers need (showers, e.g.) as well as a large selection of snacks and drinks, which the Supercharger doesn't - you'll have to walk to the outlet mall's food court. And once you're at the charger, it's outside and uncovered. Enjoy baking your car in the sun or soaking yourself if it's raining.

Anyway, the whole point from my perspective about insane range isn't how often I use it fully. I don't use up the 600-mile range of my wife's car (what we use for trips) fully, but 600 miles at ~80 mph with air conditioning or heating on probably corresponds to an 800-mile theoretical max range (at most-efficient speed, no climate control used). It's that I can count on 3/4 of that without worrying about it. And since you're going to protect your battery by keeping it between 10-80% most of the time, you're already limiting yourself to 70% of total capacity for typical driving.

I agree that charging that was as fast as fueling an ICE car would go a long way to mitigating that issue, but I still don't want every single bathroom stop to be 15-20 minutes (exit highway, drive to station, fuel/charge, drive to highway, get back on) when they could be ~5 minutes at a rest stop that just has bathrooms, not gasoline. Nor, once I've settled in for some serious miles, do I want to be forced to stop every 2.5-3 hours.

Comment Re:AI? Really? (Score 1) 53

Why have automated calls at all? Sports are social events where people got to see other people who have trained to peak human performance compete against each other at popular games.

I don't want to see perfect play by optimized automatons, I want to see the earnest best effort on the part of the participants and argue about different plays with my friends later. The players will make mistakes, and so will the officials. That should just be part of the game.

Comment Re:If you want to print photos (Score 4, Interesting) 92

[If you want to print photos] Aren't you still stuck with inkjet?

Only if you don't live near a Staples, CVS, Walgreens, etc. You'll get even better results because (at least CVS but probably everyone) has dye sublimation printers, which are vastly better for photographs than color printers.

For other color prints, Color laser printers are not that expensive, but I haven't had much success. I'd recommend stick with B&W, and outsource color stuff to office supply / pharmacy type stores.

B&W laser is so vastly cheaper and lower maintenance, particularly in a sporadic use case, that it's not even a competition - Last time I bought a laser printer, the starter toner was good for 1500 pages at 5% coverage, and it worked fine even if I last printed something 8 months ago. Compare to a typical inkjet in which a full toner pack is good for 200 pages at 5% coverage, has to run ink through every so often to keep the tubes clear, and (for the last HP inkjet I owned) prints black text using all colors despite having a full black cartridge.

Caveat: if you are planning on printing addresses on envelopes to be mailed as a substantial use case, go with the inkjet. Toner fuses to the outside of the paper, so it can get stripped away by the sorting machines.

Comment Re:TCL who? (Score 1) 48

Buy now, before they can afford to throw a cellular connection in there. I have a TCL TV. It’s technically smart, but it has no network connection (my guest WLAN is password-protected), so it’s just a display for my TiVO and my AppleTV. Picture is good. Sound has a strange bug that causes it to go quiet or even silent every once in a while, but a reboot fixes that. I could get a dumb commercial display for 4-5x the cost, but I don’t need commercial durability, just the dumb part.

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