Recent Comments

If I travel to China, I'd like to maintain email contact with co-workers, friends and family. It's beginning to sound like the only easy way to do this is through a throwaway email account created for this one purpose. While in China this account should be accessed with a "throwaway" device -- one that doesn't have business/personal data.

Which providers can be reliably accessed in China? For example, it seems like Gmail is not a good choice... How about Hotmail or Yahoo email?

This is an interesting idea and I had a good laugh at the inpired name.

It's not mentioned whether this is catering to people who are in an area without an available bathroom... or who refuse to go to public bathrooms. Probably both.

If the former, this serves as a commentary on our weird capitalistic society that any business has the audacity to refuse bathroom use to non-patrons. To me, that's a business offering to play chicken with any person who is crazy enough to play a game of mutually assured destruction. If someone comes into your restaurant clutching themselves and tells you they really need to go to the bathroom and they're about 5 seconds from exploding chunks of diarrhea out of their asshole onto the floor, is it time for you to haggle with them over buying the cheapest fucking thing you offer? That $1.79 of soda? Is that the wager you put on the table? Because any person can counter wager with having you clean up shit off the floor.. of your eating establishment.

If the latter, this is sadly another commentary on our current hand sanitizing generation of germaphobes who are only doing themselves (and more importantly, their kids) a disservice. Public bathrooms are indeed disgusting. But they're disgusting for a reason. It's a perfect example of tragedy of the commons where cleaniness of a free publically available toilet is used up and not replaced by certain people. Instead of learning the lesson, we are instead giving in to our germaphobia and jacking up our high horse a bit higher. I won't abide pnp-ing into a public bathroom. My shit is too good for that shithole. I need to find a place worthy of my shitting standards. And I can do that because there are people offering their private homes as a valuable commodity, cleaniness. For others to shit on.

It's just a transaction. But what does that make the user? A snob who needs to use a fucking app to find a place good enough for them to leave their shit in. What do you say when your friend looks up from their phone and asks you to get off the main road and drive 3-4 turns into a residential neighborhood so they can go inside a random house to use their bathroom? Do you ask them, did you just use your phone to order yourself an one-time bathroom use at a stranger's house?

What does this make the renter? A fucking bathroom janitor. That's what. You didn't strike on some golden principal that people will treat a pristine golden bathroom with respect. If they're renting your bathroom, your house is a public bathroom and people will tread shit all over it and leave piss on the floor just the same. And you're the one wiping up that stranger's piss. Because you're a rent-seeker.

What does this make the business who initially turns away non-patrons who need to use a bathroom really desperately? A terrible business run by a terrible businessperson. Because I've always seen people follow the general social custom that you should patron the place you just shat in. But the small subset of bathroom needers who might get away with not giving you business afterwards ruins it for everyone else, right? How dare they? Using your bathroom FOR FREE. You pay workers a minimum wage PER HOUR to clean that fucking place. And you provide that water to flush their shit out of your toilet. That costs all of $0.005 per flush or so. After a hundred people took a shit or a piss, you would have lost two quarters. And at the rate we're destroying the planet and water is becoming scarce, holy fuck, you'll soon be losing a whole dollar per 100! How can you even afford to run your business like this?

Transactions in a capitalist market are supposed to facilitate a winning trasaction for both sides. There are no winners here. Just assholes.

This is what I call real innovation! I am almost tempted to build one myself. It is very easy to attach some plastics to each by ironing them together.

First link busted - missing the : in http://

Fear not! Charlie Hebdo will stand up for our Freedom

That's actually a good point... It's entirely possible the energy cost of washing a cloth bag is more than producing and disposing of several one-time-use plastic bag. Now somebody just needs to actually prove it...

Its only Tonga. I'm, sure they have a wonderful army/navy/marines/airforce. But Billshooter Nation has a fiercely loyal subject with no combat experience since kindergarten, no training, no weapons, the strength of 1/10 th of a normal man, and a budget of $10. So I think we're good.

Asians and Indians. One squatting on top of the loo the other exploding all over. Yuck.

Ever been stuck somewhere and needed a loo badly? We have maps of public toilets now. This service will help.

Be prepared to fight for it. This has been tried before.

In case of total society breakdown diabetics can makeshift their meds

An island created by a volcano located in the ring of fire can be found in the ring of fire?

Thanks for telling me, I wouldn't have worked that out!

This is an interesting idea and I had a good laugh at the inpired name.

Seems like the Airbnb logo would be a pretty good fit too; more-so than lodging, anyway.

One of my first jobs was as a janitor at a local university. I can indeed confirm that the women's stalls were worse than men's on average. I blame it on the hover (ew, that toilet looks gross, I'm not gonna sit my ass on that, I'll squat above the toilet and let fly...oops, now it's even more gross).

Good point, I guess I know which government's officials I need to bribe "lobby".

I guess it depends on whether Tonga can claim it, since it's in their territorial waters..

Can I just plant a lava proof flag and claim the island as my own? The nation of BIllshooter can finally arise!

Just *slowly* bond it to some oxygen. That works pretty well, in my experience.

Yes, but more problematic, it's such a small molecule that it's really, really hard to keep contained.

I wonder if it will let toilet owners rate the visitors, because some people have no respect for other people's things (especially women in public toilets, if my SO is to be believed)

I think it's a more viable option than the solar-powered drones or balloons that Google and Facebook are toying with, but they'll need the cash reserves of those two huge companies to make it workable.

Sounds like Elon Musk is following my advice:

Google Inc (GOOGL) Investing $1 Billion in SpaceX for Satellite Internet

http://www.stockwisedaily.com/google-inc-googl-investing-1-billion-in-spacex-for-satellite-internet/239068/

Google can certainly afford to throw away $1 billion, particularly if their announcement encourages several times as much private investment, getting the project off the ground and of course the company's inevitable bankruptcy won't bring the satellites back down, leaving a resource Google will continue to benefit from, indefinitely.

*clap* Good show!

n/t

Doesn't storing hydrogen inside a metal container embrittle the container?

No, but that means the bag has to be washed before it can be reused. Or thrown away.

But, It will be 20 x funnier if you fill the tubes with helium.

Edit: and maybe 20 x less explosive-ier.

64k should be enough for anyone..

That's $95,000,000 for the lawyers and $500 each for the class members, yay the US legal system!

Not to nit pick, but as we're talking programmers and engineers, shouldn't that be 65,535, not 64,000?

Here's hoping they don't settle.

Far better to see these companies dragged through the mud and made to pay a whole bunch more.

You might want to reread the small print before you sign...

With that much hydrogen we may as well convert cars to use H

You can go 4x faster if you fill the tunnel with hydrogen.

I also got a 4k monitor over the holidays. Try setting the system zoom setting to 200%. Some apps and webpages may not have full "retina" or "2x" support, but this site does at least. :)

Well, considering that peregrine falcons can reach 300 Kph+ it looks like they'd be easy prey.

In my defense, I had a horrible night of sleep wednesday night. Also, the font on this site is awfully small on my 4K monitor, and...

30 meters, 30 feet, it's all the same. This isn't rocket science, after all.

But in the end, this whole study seems like somebody trying to win an Ig Nobel prize. Birds crash into planes because the planes are moving too fast for them to get out of the way? Whodathunkit?

Well, the summary says 30 meters, so I'm guessing our wonderful education system here in the states taught him that a meter was a French word for foot. The 98 ft that immediately precedes it was obviously a french trick to take away our freedoms.

Walmart (which probably has a larger sample than anyone else) studied what happened when disposable plastic bags were banned in some locale (I forget where this was, but some city in California). They found that sales of packaged disposable plastic bags went up significantly -- apparently replacing all the Walmart plastic bags that had formerly been repurposed.

Point is, people still wind up using and disposing of the same quantity of plastic bags, whether they use the 'free' bags their groceries went into, or buy brand new plastic bags by the box. And the purchased bags are heavier plastic, rather less degradable than the store-type bags.

So banning plastic grocery bags produces no net gain to the environment, and likely produces a net loss (more nondegradeable material, more petroleum used).

Also, I've started to wonder if the store-type bags are now a cellulose-type plastic, since they fall apart at the slightest exposure to the elements.

Where do you see 30 ft?

30 ft must make them pretty vulnerable to things like peregrine falcons..

I could be mistaken, but I believe that a large part of the reason plastic bags aren't often recycled is because the volume of plastic is so low that there's very little point even trying, compared to recycling other plastics.

For some reason though, politicians seem to have latched on to plastic carrier bags as an environmental issue.

StoreDot-an Israeli technology company

There goes the Pipedot store name ;)

Flimsy single-use plastic bags are to be avoided. They contribute to litter and pollution -- a lot.
Re-use folding plastic crates. We've been using those for over a decade. Get a few sturdy ones .. never look back.

If they could implement this for a car, that would be quite impressive. I wonder how they deteriorate over charge cycles.

They didn't do a very good job then.

It is very hard, if not impossible to do a good job if all efforts are undermined by employees. And sure, you can padlock a computer, but there are limits, what a normal private company can do.

If it only last 5 hours won't that lead to a massive waste of energy?

I guess that's why the current use is to charge an underlying lithium battery.

Rockets are fine for landing in Mars gravity.

The rocket scientist being interviewed, strongly disagrees with your assessment...

e.g. "would likely destroy the vehicle."

Rockets are fine for landing in Mars gravity. They work for landing in Earth gravity too. The problem is that it's really expensive to send enough rocket fuel to Mars to land with rockets.