It's legal armageddon as NBC, CBS and Fox sue Dish Network over its new DVR feature allowing users to automatically skip ads, and in response, Dish sues them right back - and adds in ABC for good measure.

DrJulianBashir · 2012-05-25T17:43:13.007560+00:00

Maybe not, but I've had a MythTV DVR for a couple years that had commercial autoskip. It was a beautiful thing.

razekai · 2012-05-25T17:36:41.812061+00:00

Um, no. Tastes super yummy. Have you never had congealed salad or jello salad?

reposed · 3 days

Typical Thespian 'tude.

castastrophe · 3 days

It is creepy in the same way many children's fairy tales from the 1800's and before are creepy. But that makes it all the cooler.

nullnullnull · 9 days

I just finished a kitchen remodel on a 98 year old house that included replumbing the kitchen and tired bathroom plumbing, a mix of clay and cast iron pipe. It wasn't rocket science. Just dirty, long and tedious work in confined crawl space.

It could have been done faster if I hired it done, but I would have had to work 3 times as long to pay it off, and wouldn't have had the satisfaction and feeling of self-reliance of a hard job done well.

Just needed to read up on plumbing code and normal practices. Though I can imagine some houses would be a lot harder to replumb than others, especially if it was on a slab foundation.

yunododat · 1 month

I'm glad we agree on exactly what I said in my parent post.

yunododat · 1 month

you can't claim SS is in any better shape than the "entire rest of the US government."

Its mandate comes from the government. Expectation of benefits go to voters and citizens of the government. Its reserves are invested in government securities. It is inseperable and equally solvent, or lack thereof.

yunododat · 1 month

I mean protected instrument not in how "safe" it is calculated to be (we all know how good rating companies and economists were in predicting our current situation). I meant protected in that those capital reserves couldn't be expropriated to other uses. This is what the federal government in essence did when they invested the SS reserves in T-Bonds, and at the same time wildly overspent revenues outside of SS. And this is decidely not bullshit. That money to cover future benefits will have to be created from somewhere.

yunododat · 1 month

You forget that the number of workers to cover that 25% shortfall (to pay taxes to cover benefits) per retiree is also set to fall by 33% over the same period.

yunododat · 1 month

Then you've got a whole other issue of how a company, like GM, like AA, manages the decline in their business. It would make pensions almost worthless unless they are fully insured, which is just passing the problem on to another organization. Personally as a worker, I put zero value on any offered pension, though the PGBC should prevent it from going all the way there. I only accept 401k as reliable income towards retirement.

yunododat · 1 month

Social Security is not a defined benefit plan in the same way a pension plan is, where the predicted necessary reserves are theroetically invested in safe instruments that will pay for future benefits starting at a required age.

I know the theory doesn't work that well, hence the need for the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp. Heck, we've already reduced the "defined benefit" of Social Security by increasing the age for full benefits from 65 to 67.5.

In Social Security as you pointed out, current workers pay for retirees, and the surplus was invested in government bonds. But there is no real surplus anymore. When those bonds come due to pay future retirees, since our government has been running a deficit and wracking up debt, it will have to increase the income tax rate (on workers) to get the funds to cover those redeemed bonds and pay retirees. Or it could print the money to cover those bonds, which would cause inflation, and reduce the value of everyone's income and assets.

Because the surplus wasn't invested in protected instruments, future workers will be saddled with the full burden of all current retirees at that time, or the current retirees will face massive cuts in their "defined benefit." And the future for Social Security is ugly.

In 1945, 5 years after benefits started, there were 41 workers paying to cover each retiree, today there are 2.9 workers per retiree, in 2040 there is predicted to be 1.8 workers per retiree. How are less than 2 people making 50k a year and being taxed at a combined rate of 12.4% going to cover one retiree getting ~28k in benefits?

TheAubz · 2 months

No scuba. Water was about 3-4 feet deep, washing over hood, a couple inches over bottom of windows. I drove laterally that way about 40 feet. Sorry if gave wrong impression.

Yes you probably couldn't start it unless all of the air passages and electronics were 100% waterproofed, which would be a very expensive and time consuming operation. That's cool driving a truck under water w/scuba gear.

ttruth1 · 2 months

In this case conservation of energy doesn't apply to the transaction because you aren't creating hydrogen, you are splitting hydrogen that already exists out of water. Though it does currently take more energy to split the water than the chemical potential of the separate hydrogen and oxygen created. But scientists are working on catalysts to improve this.

Gasoline is also explosive and rapidly turns gaseous when vented and slightly warmed. The dangerous thing about gas fumes is they sink. Hydrogen will float away when it is released as long as it isn't ignited first. Hydrogen is a potentially reasonable transportation fuel. The biggest problem (aside from production) is the heavy metal cylinders needed to contain a reasonable amount of it. But there are also scientists working on nano-molecular metal sponges that may be able to hold lots of it under much less pressure.

TheAubz · 2 months

I've driven a Scout through 40 feet of water this deep successfully. Later my brother dropped the front of the truck into a 3ft deep hole and left it there for a day. When we pulled it out and started it, we had about 10 gallons of water come blasting out of the exhaust. Fortunately for us it didn't back up into the cylinders.

I know covering the exhaust won't do anything however -

The transmission won't lock up as long as you don't turn the engine off and let it sit for several weeks and rust. Just flush when you get out.

Starter and battery likely not affected unless it sits there for days and water has a high salinity.

The ECUs will probably prevent the car from running. They might be salvageable if before you try to start it you pull all of them, wash in distilled water, alcohol, and dry completely. No easy task I admit. But I've done it with simpler electronic boards.

Evap intake is generally at the top of the engine connected to the air intake. If you have water there, your whole engine is probaby hydrolocked.

Coolant is 50% water anyway, and water is a better coolant than coolant, it is there to provide freeze/boil protection. So as long as you flush the system pretty quickly after you get the car out and running, you'll be fine.

TheAubz · 2 months

Either a gas or diesel engine can work under water as long as the air intake and exhaust tracts and crankcases are sealed well, the intake is above water, electronics are waterproofed, and you keep the RPMs up so water doesn't back up the exhaust.

I've driven a Scout (like a Surburban) through water almost that deep (washing over the hood) for 40 feet. Everything turned out fine, but I was close to getting the carb air intake into water.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

Researchers are doing this now, and production plants already make oil from CO (not CO2) for lubrication.

But if your implication is that this will be done at a rate in the next ~30 years to significantly displace fossil or nuclear fuels, I highly doubt it.

PV require rare earths that will experience their own peak production in a similar number of years. Electrolysis is extremely energy intensive due to the laws of physics, and without some massive improvements in catalysts, actually produce less energy in H2 and O2 than they absorb dissociating those molecules from water.

CO2 must be extracted from processes that create it at a high enough concentration, and at a place that is large enough to house the equipment, to feed it back into a gas>liquid process. Researchers are having a hard time making this economically reasonable and scalable. I believe it will be like fusion, always about ~30 years from commerical viability. By the time it is, something else will probably work out better in the end.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

The number you should be looking at is EROEI.

It makes sense from an energy production perspective in Appalachia right now. I disagree with the un-costed externalities they are facing. But if we wanted to destroy and pollute our landscape, I've never seen any analysis that suggested we couldn't recover all that ~200 years of coal at a net increase in energy. Though I do see that the number has been revised to possibly as low as ~118 years (http://www.worldcoal.org/resources/frequently-asked-questions/)

This indicates that even if we did have enough coal -- which we don't -- that it would not be possible to ramp up production of CTL plants sufficiently quickly to fill the demand gap created by peak oil.

So, no, it's not possible.

As I said it isn't economically realistic. And I never said it would be reasonable to replace oil for coal oil gallon for gallon at our current usage. The point of this whole thread was that if you don't have access to oil and you need it, you can make it from coal, it is 100% substitutable and completely possible to do, just not at the scale or economic cost we need.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

You are right, I was typing fast and confused peak production with the number of years of likely production based on proven economically feasible reserves.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

Coal isn't peaking in a generation, more like 6 generations, unless we possibly ban mountain top removal, which we should.

I also don't recall the exact peak for natural gas, but I was thinking it is around a century or 3 generations unless we ban fracking, which it increasingly looks like we should as well, or at least have much stricter regulation of it.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

There is hundreds of years of coal left if we are ok with mountaintop removal coal mining (which I'm not), and since Germany built enough plants to run their air force 60 years ago, I'd say it is definitely possible. It just isn't realistically scalable and economically reasonable to do for everyone's personal transport.

slaterhearst · 2 months

Not sure why you were downvoted, but I wasn't talking about leading the life of a criminal. If you are in a situation like some of these people in the article (apparently honest but stuck in a situation with barely enough income to cover housing and food), there are ways you can utilize the internet for free to find cheaper housing, or get ideas on how to stretch your food budget.

nsfwdreamer · 2 months

Oh you can, the question is at what economic and efficiency cost. Coal can be converted into liquid fuel. The Germans did it for fuel during WW2. There are test plants doing it today, but it hasn't been economically worth doing yet.

slaterhearst · 2 months

They could for free if they went to the library. I know not all projects have easily accessable libraries open at acceptable times. But there are other ways to figure out how to live frugally than just /r/Frugal. You have to make a commitment to do it.

katana0182 · 2 months

The lower cylinder count at the same displacement generally means the engine will be more efficient and have higher torque at the expense of horsepower. That is because torque is influenced by the length of the cylinder stroke, and the lower cylinder count means there is less frictional losses.

When you get down to 1 and 2 cylinder engines that convert their energy to rotational energy, the engine becomes hard to balance and get smooth power output, along with requiring big strong components as the poster below implies. There is a chance hybrid cars will switch to linear combustion engines, which are 2 cylinder engines without requiring a crankshaft.

katana0182 · 2 months

rotary baby!

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