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Comment Re:I like the idea (Score 1) 152

Yeah, but oh man you have to be pretty daft to not have seen this coming. No serious group of people thought there was a reasonable chance that hydrogen was the immediate future. They were gambling and they lost. If they didn't understand they were gambling? Just absolutely daft. A fool and their money. And yeah, I'd apply this to the first BEV users too. It wasn't certain they would be successful, and would have a lot of pain points.

Comment Re:Lead By Example (Score 1) 146

We allow law enforcement access to all other forms of communication with a lawful warrant. So should this particular technology be exempt from that?

Let's say I write you a letter (on paper) and I encrypt this letter using a cypher that only you and I know. The government intercepts this letter and asserts it contains evidence of a crime. Are you or I compelled to assist in the decryption of that letter? No? Then why should electronic communications be any different?

Beyond that, how does preemptive invasion of the privacy of all persons (which is exactly what backdoors in encryption amount to) so that, at some future time, the government can sift the communications of those who may have broken the law not equate to a general warrant?

Comment Don't Upgrade, Old Farts (Score 2) 63

They always rant about Wayland, systemd, Pulse/Pipewire, devops, dkms, quic, zfs, etc.

I used to wonder why they don't just not upgrade their os, but then I realized they are lazy and want somebody else to maintain their old system for them.

I mean, even compiling gentoo with the right use set is too hard for these bellyachers.

Yet the humility never occurs to them that the non-lazy people who actually build distros are embracing the newer technology.

Instead the Old Farts case aspersions and ad-hominems at these hard workers. It's pathetic.

I'm done with their BS and won't help them understand anymore - the arguments are almost universally in bad faith.

Because otherwise they would just not upgrade. I have some Infomagic Slackware CD's from 1993 they might be interested in. Yeah, my first Linux box was over 30 years ago and I competently run all those technologies now. I don't fear change even though understanding new tech takes work and I can't just rest on my laurels.

Comment Re:Screw the American auto industry (Score 1) 303

Exactly. I drive a 1996 Honda Civic. If I were to buy a new car, that is the sort of car that I would be interested in. The sort of car that is inexpensive and capable of driving at freeway speeds. If the government would let me buy a Toyota Hilux for $12K I would do that tomorrow. Instead I get enormous pickups and SUVs that get through the loopholes in our current EPA standards and that cost more than my first house.

I just spent a week in Peru where Chinese cars are quite popular, and the taxi drivers that I talked to were pretty happy with theirs. The mentioned, time and again, that, for the price they were great cars. They were definitely popular. I would buy one of those. They tend to have manual transmissions, which I know how to drive, and which I trust not to leave me stranded.

If I could buy an electric vehicle for $10K I would do that. It wouldn't be my only vehicle, but it probably would be my primary vehicle. I love the idea of electric vehicles, but it doesn't make sense to replace my ridiculously inexpensive (paid for and hyper reliable) Civic with an expensive electric vehicle, or my far more useful Honda Odyssey mini-van. It sort of makes sense to replace the Civic with an electric vehicle, however, if the price is right.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 1) 116

Hypersonic missiles that we have no effective counter for.

[citation needed]

Aegis equipped ships have successfully hit ballistic missiles and satellites in testing (and probably under operational conditions as of last weekend), and both of those are, by definition, hypersonic targets. While the US Navy doesn't comment on what weapons a ship might be carrying, it's almost a certainty that all of them have some SM-3s in the magazines at this point.

Our ability to project power is minimal now and it shows in our unwillingness to risk those gold plated targets against any kind of hostile actor that would have a chance of taking them out.

The biggest current problem with the carrier groups projecting power is that their air wings have less combat power than they have had in the past due to both being smaller and composed entirely of strike fighters with relatively short ranges. Using half the Hornets as tankers solves the range problem but makes the availability problem worse in both the short and long terms. The F-35 appears to improve the range situation, shockingly (thought not by enough) and I would expect that, in war time, the Navy would probably augment the air wings significantly (there is definitely room on the decks).

Why do you think those carriers are nowhere near Iran, Taiwan or Kola?

As far as not getting close to anything that can harm them, any nation would be stupid to put its carriers any closer to anything that can shoot at them then it needs to. With that said, Ike is currently operating in the Red Sea where Iran's proxies can shoot at her and TR is currently in the East China Sea where China can shoot at her directly.

Comment Re:Duh (Score 2) 116

Well, it is pretty clear that China would also massively lose in any such scenario.

Is it?

I mean, I have no doubt that (barring something like Pearl Harbor) the US military would take the opening rounds of any US-China conventional war, but the but the supply of equipment possessed by the US Navy and US Air Force is relatively small, will attrit fairly quickly, and the relative industrial capacity and resource availability of the US and China today is very much in China's favor. It's doubtful that the US could execute a building program like it did from 1940-1945 (and especially 1942-1944) because it would take years to build the tools just to build the tools.

Comment Re:Makes sense (Score 1) 85

Why can't you append "-quora" to your query?

Because modern search engines (not just google) have decided that they know better than you and will often ignore your specific search terms to return the shit that they think you should know instead. Quoted search terms, exclusions, etc, are all cheerfully ignored to return a result set that is utterly useless for your purposes and somewhere there is a design team patting itself on the back for what a great job they've done.

Comment Re:50% (Score 1) 37

Yeah, agreed, with one exception. EA. The EA guys are not all there, IMHO. They abandon all short term goals in pursuit of longer term goals that may not happen. You have to plan for short, medium, and long term outcomes that all align with your ethics. Bad things happen when you only focus on the long term regardless of how good your intentions.

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