frankus

42 ms·

451.
by frankus 14y ago
A typical new house in the US is wired for a 200A 240V circuit, or about 48kW. By contrast the energy flux of a garden-variety gas pump is in the tens of megawatts.
452.
by frankus 14y ago
There is actually a bit more to this line of argument than the idiotic one the lawmaker takes. The primary thing that makes a bicycle more efficient than a car is that it weighs around an order of magnitude less than the passenger, rather t
453.
by frankus 14y ago
The difference is that table sugar and high fructose corn syrup are about 50% fructose (the rest glucose). While glucose (which is what bread is mostly metabolized into) can be used by every cell in the body, fructose must be broken down by
454.
by frankus 14y ago
Should've been more like "called it". Agreed, it doesn't meet the legal definition of prior art.
455.
by frankus 14y ago
In that case I have prior art: http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Slap_20Bracelet_20Cell_20Phon...
456.
by frankus 14y ago
I'm surprised they don't mention vanadium, with its 5 oxidation states. It's already used in commercially-available flow batteries for grid energy storage ( http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/worlds-largest-vanad... ).
457.
by frankus 14y ago
It's kind of a lot of power (hundreds of kilowatts for a panic stop from 60mph), so a reliable resistor bank would probably add more weight/bulk than it buys in reduced brake wear.
458.
by frankus 14y ago
From an energy policy perspective that sounds about right, but from the standpoint of what's theoretically possible that would seem to be ignoring some really promising areas of research.
459.
by frankus 14y ago
Fuel cells are just "open" batteries, where the reactants are continuously fed into the battery and the products are removed (whereas in a battery the reactants and products occupy the same physical volume).
460.
by frankus 14y ago
I agree with OP if your timeline is the next few years, but there is still a ton of headroom between, say, lithium polymer and the theoretical maximum for specific energy (the speed of light squared). Obviously nuclear batteries are going t
461.
by frankus 14y ago
It strikes me that this would lend itself well to a graphical programming interface (a la Quartz Composer).
462.
by frankus 14y ago
WRT point 3: Xcode will now allow dot-syntax access to non-property getter methods, however its arguably clearer to use dot syntax only for properties since they're declared and documented separately from old-style getter methods. There's a
463.
by frankus 14y ago
A banking service with "micro-accounts". E.g. each month I would put $80 in my "buy a new laptop every couple of years" account, and each day I would put $20 in my "feed and entertain myself" account. Every couple of years I could buy mysel
464.
by frankus 14y ago
(submitting each idea as its own comment) A centralized content-consumption queue with comparison shopping and price alerts. E.g. back in the days when Netflix was DVD-only and had a decent selection of films, you could add practically anyt
465.
by frankus 14y ago
An affordable car stereo with a UX that doesn't feel like it was made in 1987: - A good display. Even a decent display. Something that isn't worse than the mobile phone I bought in 1998. - A big knob or two for navigation (if I wanted to op
466.
by frankus 14y ago
There's already something called time-of-use metering, which is like what you're suggesting but based on long-term trends rather than a spot price. Right now it's only cost-effective with large loads, and only economical if it's largely aut
467.
by frankus 14y ago
That's an interesting and seemingly obvious approach, so I'm curious why it's not really discussed. I'm guessing that at current wind/solar capacity, any fluctuations can be absorbed by just slowing down the flow out of the reservoir, rathe
468.
by frankus 14y ago
The Three20 guys tried something similar a few years back: http://three20.info/extension/extCSSStyle . It's a pretty neat concept, particularly if you have web content that needs to be styled in coordination with your app's chrome.
469.
by frankus 14y ago
I've been thinking a lot lately about what sorts of systems "the rest of us" (where by "us" I mean "them") are able to program effectively. One thing I've noticed is that people that don't really know programming in a hacker sense seem to h
470.
by frankus 14y ago
The biggest issue for me is that I respond very negatively to caffeine withdrawal (I get extremely cranky and it often triggers a migraine). What keeps me from drinking more is that I don't want a missed dose to ruin my whole day. Second bi
471.
by frankus 14y ago
You could do this with multiple devices at known locations. E.g. if you always keep your (latest-generation) Mac mini in the office, and your MacBook Air in the kitchen, and have programmed them as such, they could communicate with the app
472.
by frankus 14y ago
That's one of the coolest "features" of Bluetooth LE: Apple has decided that the risks to battery life and overall system integrity are low enough with BLE that they've left it quite wide open from an app-developer perspective. There's even
473.
by frankus 14y ago
My understanding is that Uber is using only licensed drivers. But they're using drivers who are licensed for limousines rather than taxicabs. There are some pretty antiquated laws surrounding taxicabs in most larger cities, and the degree o
474.
by frankus 14y ago
Reminds me of a great article on taxis in general I read last year: http://daily.sightline.org/2011/08/05/freeing-taxis/ "What if the Northwest’s cities legally capped the number of pizza delivery cars? What if, despite growing urban popu
475.
by frankus 14y ago
I think most of OP's arguments are spot on, but I think it's likely to be an elevated system installed over the center divider of the (mostly very straight and very flat) I-5 corridor. Tunneling that distance just isn't feasible at the stat
476.
by frankus 14y ago
Induction motors used in vehicles are basically always three-phase machines driven by a variable-frequency inverter.
477.
by frankus 14y ago
With a variable-frequency drive (or better yet, flux vector control) you can achieve full torque at zero speed with a squirrel-cage motor.
478.
by frankus 14y ago
Depending on the control system, yes. If you run an induction motor off a fixed-frequency supply, it produces very little torque until it is spinning near it's synchronous speed (typically 3600 RPM, but depends on the supply frequency and p
479.
by frankus 14y ago
As mentioned before, Local Notifications can be equally spammy, are impossible to turn off, and are visually indistinguishable from push notifications. The are also not subject to a strict interpretation of the app review guidelines. The on
480.
by frankus 14y ago
Cargo-Cult types notwithstanding, I think developers were mostly smart enough to interpret "separate the view from the code" to mean "separate the application logic from the presentation logic". The problem that this project is trying to so

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