That's because the power supply was dipped in epoxy resin - which is actually the major cause of C=64 power supply failures. The power supplies were very prone to overheating due to the epoxy encasement and were pretty much unserviceable due to the difficulty of getting to the components.
Yours didn't fail due to spillage of sprite because the power supply was in effect waterproof.
Next week, when this story appears on Slashdice, let's all just link to this post.
> Then again, it's rather challenging to discern an ACTUAL "point of no return" from "nothing promulgated vociferously", particularly when the people INSISTING that THIS TIME the sky REALLY IS FALLING are basically the same crew that has told us the same thing about running out of water,
Which has happened on the West Coast, so that they are now buying water rights from other states and built immensely expensive aquaducts to make up for the shortage... and now moving on to what they should have done decades ago, which is construct desalinization plants
> running out of food
It isn't that we're running out of food - it is that we mis-manage it, use food for the wrong purposes (ethanol), and actually pay farmers to destroy crops rather than can or freeze it and donate it to food banks.
> running out of oil,
We were; but then the government enacted fuel economy and emissions laws, both of which forced manufacturers to find ways to make engines more efficient than they used to be, and to not dump raw fuel out the exhaust. That's why we can now buy 600+hp supercars which achieve >30mpg when driven conservatively. This is one case where government regulations did spur some major innovations. You don't have to put up with a 25hp VW beetle with no heat to get 30mpg any more - you can get turbocharged sports sedans which can achieve > 40mpg cruise on the highway, and now full-size trucks which get better than 20mpg... and it's only going to get better.
We aren't running out because we're tapping new reserves, and are now turning to shale and fracking, and are using it more efficiently, even though we now have more cars, trucks, etc. than ever before.
> running out of land
In cities and surrounding communities we are.. but the world is nowhere near overpopulated. Certain regions are overpopulated.
> , etc, etc, ad infinitum,
I'd say that the West Coast which is suffering an unprecedented drought and massive flooding in Texas, and the incredible amount of precipitation the northeast has been getting is valid proof that climate change is accelerating beyond what can be expected; certainly faster than the "geological timescale."
We don't need to stop driving cars, or enjoying heat or air conditioning. What we DO need to do is invest heavily in green power, and consider retooling refineries to make diesel and synthetic gasoline from plant matter - making it 100% carbon-neutral. Legalize industrial hemp as well as other strains of cannabis - it's a better food source than soy anyhow, considering cannabis is hypoallergenic, whereas soy is a major allergen that is getting harder and harder to avoid.
Stop protesting wind farms - where there is high sustained winds, encourage wind power.
Give tax incentives for retrofitting homes and commercial buildings with photovoltaic panels, and do the same for geothermal heat pumps - or hell, even give tax credits for the installation of swimming pools providing the pool is being used as a heat sink (when I build my forever home I actually plan to use the pool as a heat sink, integrating it into a geothermal system).
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing; we can have our toys and our freedom, we just need to be willing to embrace change, and we need to be willing to tell lobbyists (paper mills, soy industry, oil industry, corn/ethanol industry, etc.) to SHUT THE FUCK UP and deal with going the way of the buggy whip, and instead consider changing their business models to engage in production of green forms of petrol, or geothermal HVAC systems, or better solar panels and battery banks.
but.... how does that help Haliburton, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing get rich?
Wars need to be invented so that they can buy more yachts.
... Sort of. I have a giant ad-blocking
> I think I just hate the phone in general. I would much rather type everything.
Oh hell that is SO EFFING SLOW. If I text someone more than 3 or 4 times in a row it's because one of us is unable to speak. I watch people have 10- to 15-minute-long texting sessions with one person that could be settled with 2 or 3 minutes of actually talking. It's painful to watch.
In the 90s, there was a joke: "If you want to know if you're talking to a decision maker in a company or not, ask them how much RAM is in their computer. Anyone who knows, isn't a decision maker."
But now, we're riding on the cusp of almost a decade of "It just doesn't matter." Most computers are good enough for most tasks for most folks. And by "most" I mean 98% in every case. My work computer has 8 GB of RAM but I only know that because I remember it being upgraded so I could run VMs. My main computer at home has 4 GB and I know that because every once in a while I think about upgrading and I check prices and then I decide not to bother. But I couldn't tell you the exact CPU in either (one might be a Core i5 and the other an i7), nor do I know the speed on either to within 200 MHz. (I think one is 2.3 and the other is 2.7 but I couldn't say for sure which is which, nor am I certain about either of those numbers. Maybe one is a 2.5 or 2.2?)
God only knows what graphics cards they have or who makes them or how much VRAM they have and I don't even know if my machine at home has integrated graphics or discreet. (Work laptop is a MacBook Pro with both; required to drive my 30" display.) This isn't like the old days where it was easy to remember that 1 MB gave you 640x480x24bpp and 2 MB gave you 800x600x24bpp and I was happy to find the *one* 4 MB card that gave me 1024x768x24bpp because I had just found a SWEET 17" CRT for only $400, used, and I didn't want to buy an expensive card with 8 MB to drive it. My 4-year-old computer at work drives my 30" display at 2560x1600 and my equally old computer at home drives a 24" at 1920x1200, so who gives a shit if they're doing that with 1 GB or 2 GB or 512 MB VRAM? Yeah, I'll have to upgrade someday if I want to spend hundreds on a 4K display, but I have no plans to do that. (Dreams, yes; plans, no.) And when the time DOES come, my "upgrade" will be "buy a new machine, transfer my files, and sell the old one."
So anyway, long story short: no fucking clue. But I can bore you with the specs of every computer I owned before around 2008 if you want, including which parts I bought where and what I paid for them.
Seeing the same video bytes -- which I am not going to watch anyway -- EVERY TIME I scroll down the page.
So anyway, why is it that when I click the Xs on the boxes in the right column, they're back next time I come to the homepage? Since the polls aren't there anymore, there's really nothing I need to have in that column at all.
Yeah, I know, off topic, but where else can I ask?
> Ask the Russians and Chinese how well their 5th gen fighters are coming.
Russia's aircraft are actually quite good. For example, he F-15 was developed in response to rumors of the MiG-25... but performance was inferior. The design of the MiG-25 is so good it is the basis for the MiG-31, and is also rumored to be the basis for a MACH 4-capable interceptor... same basic design but with modern materials and construction techniques. Also other Russian (Soviet?) military aircraft were historically superior to ours in other respects; because they had little access to ICs, many of their bombers used vacuum tubes which are far more resistant to EMP than solid state electronics. Don't underestimate Russia's capabilities. It is such a shame that after the cold war we never became better than frenemies with them; if we could get alone and put our heads together we would very likely be moving much faster in developing truly practical space travel.
The Chinese stealth fighter's advanced capabilities exist largely in the form of CGI propaganda videos. Besides, even if it were real, it would likely break the day after the warranty is out, and there will be no phone number for customer support the manufacturer should it fail within the 30-day warranty.
> Animals do it because, as long as they can digest it, it's a significant source of nutrition right after massive energy and biomass expenditure.
Even many animals which cannot digest it (herbivores) consume it. It's not to get nutrition but to reduce odors which attract predators. It's their way of picking it up so they can carry and defaecate it away from where their offspring are.
It's not really "cat shit." They're "cat like" but are not in the felidae order but are in the feliformia which includes felidae (cats) and hyena and mongoose. Wikipedia states that they are in the order viverridae (a suborder of felifornia, cousins of felidae but are not felidae, which are all obligate carnivores).
> So they bolt on a pair of wings, add some propellers that have to be deployed from a casing that protects them during launch, oh and another stage separation event, a mechanism for separating the fuel tank from the engine.
I do not think you know what a turbofan is based on what you stated.
> And that's supposed to be simpler than some hydraulic landing legs and grid fins?
Not simpler to build and package, but certainly far easier to land given that we have 70 years of experience building jet engines
> And carrying all those additions to space doesn't cost them any extra fuel?
It does - but turbofans and horizontal flight with lifting surfaces is far more efficient than attempting to land vertically using a rocket engine, and we have 110 years of experience landing aircraft horizontally, or if you want to combine total experience, probably approaching on a million combined "man years" of experience landing aircraft (and spacecraft if you include the X15, space shuttle, scaled/virgin's spaceship, Buran, and the space plane) horizontally.
"Experience has proved that some people indeed know everything." -- Russell Baker
