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Comment Re:Extreamists? (Score 1) 52

Of course they're extremists. They don't believe anyone who produces anything should have the right to their own property.

Perhaps they simply don't believe that copyright terms should have been extended, and that culture belongs to The People, as copyright law used to acknowledge with its original period. Maybe the extremists are the ones that think that culture should never belong to The People, like you.

Comment Re:Why they are more expensive (Score 1) 62

Environmental regs in China can be brutal. Factories completely closed because they are too close to a river, industrial processes banned overnight. Then there is external stuff like RoHS.

You can't trust that a Chinese RoHS label is legit, Chinese companies are slapping it on shit like shoelaces. Meanwhile China has an essentially impossible to comply with RoHS standard for goods sold in their country, where you are taking responsibility for the content of your product, and you cannot simply cite your suppliers' specifications.

Comment Re:Why they are more expensive (Score 2) 62

Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight.

Outside of these custom all-in-one ready to fly drones, drone motors are ALREADY like that. They come in well-defined sizes, they are rated by kV (thousands of RPM per volt) and they have standard mounting holes. If you just don't screw with the fully preassembled drones up front you can easily get that kind of parts interchangeability. You can also buy controller/radio combos which provide the same or superior range to what DJI offers, so the only benefit to buying a prebuilt drone is that you don't have to do anything, and it comes with a number of down sides.

I built my first quadcopter for under $200 all in, including a Devo 5 radio which I could load alternate firmware and an additional $10-ish radio transceiver module into so that it supports all of the major protocols. That's a price with regular range and without FPV, but the point remains — you don't need DJI.

Comment Re:Thereâ(TM)s a scam - somebody has to be th (Score 1, Troll) 13

but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account

Nah, that's the reason for the moral. The actual moral is: don't fuck with Apple gift cards — neither a buyer nor a redeemer be. Apple has certainly taught us all a lesson, and that lesson is that their gift card system is insecure and they will punish legitimate customers for their lack of security. Whether it's even possible to make a gift card secure is irrelevant to that lesson.

Comment Re:No thank you. (Score 1) 55

In my mind you'd be buying a car without a battery and simultaneously subscribing to a battery service, but if you ever wanted to own a battery you could buy one. You'd get the battery delivered to the dealer (and/or they would work with one or more services directly and keep some on site) before you picked up the vehicle so it would be all the same to you as if it had come with it, and it would also come charged.

Moving them around without a battery at scrapping time is not a detriment, as vehicles to be scrapped are usually moved around with a fork lift anyway.

Comment Re:No thank you. (Score 1) 55

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

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... though his invention worked superbly -- his theory was a crock of sewage from beginning to end. -- Vernor Vinge, "The Peace War"

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