At least the equipment that would be fried on the local distribution side is easy to come by. The transformers that would need a rebuild on the distribution side would have to be rebuilt since there are no spares. There's also nobody prepared to do such a rebuild in the U.S. currently.

If Congress is REALLY worried about any sort of strategic resiliency, that needs to be addressed. There should be spares and on-shore capability to manufacture and re-manufacture that equipment.

So what makes you sure there is nothing reacted against in a different propellantless drive? Even if you don't know what it is.

Again, not that I think the drive in TFA is going to actually produce thrust.

Now run the numbers for an electric motor where the rotor is a satellite with an electromagnet and the stator is the Earth.

Note carefully that I am not claiming the propellantless drive in TFA actually does anything but get warm (if that), just that a theoretical propellantless drive need not intrinsically violate thermodynamics.

The next issue is on the American corporate side. More and more people are noticing the ludicrously low prices of things if they buy direct from china and wondering why the same thing made in the same place by the same people costs so much more when bought from a U.S. company.

Not barge in, tell the company to fix it or they put out a press release denouncing the company and it's executives by name as a threat to national security.

Alas, no. Apple's users in China are getting the ones having to taste the medicine.

Credentialism doesn't help. At one time, those with the right kind of mind tended to learn on a C64, Atari, or perhaps an Apple][ and then got a job. Before that, interested people took an aptitude test and got on the job training.

Now HR is all about the degree and some keywords.

Good additional info, thank you.

It died when Broadcom pulled it's stunt. It's still in use, so zombie. Only, instead of "brains!", it's moaning "money!".

What makes you sure it's Inconel? It wasn't a high stress or high temperature part.

At the least "buying" the software meant you can use it for as long as you could find a machine to run it on.

The big push of corporate america these days is to deepen the poverty cycle by turning everything into a rental.

Silly me, I thought "nobody owns anything" was part of the Communist plot.

Don't mistake a statistical trend for a universal truth. There were simple songs earlier on as well, but there were also more meaningful and complex songs. Think of the early Beatles as paying their dues to the record company suits.

IIRC, it's been more of a think for NiCd than LiIon.

In LiIon batteries, IIRC, the dendrites only form to a significant degree when the battery is abused. That's why most LiIon batteries simply fade away to uselessness rather than the considerably more violent end that happens when the separator is punctured.

Agreed. I tend to keep a cellphone until it's dead. The last one I had went through a couple screen protectors and a new battery until one day it simply wouldn't connect to the cellular network anymore. I would certainly like an extended battery life, especially since the trend is towards harder to replace batteries now.

Since a phone can run from the charger when it's plugged in, a pulsed charging circuit wouldn't be all that complicated and shouldn't add much cost, even given the silly markups in play these days.