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Comment Re:Is military right-to-repair unrealistic? How so (Score 2) 37

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

Comment Re:This whole concept has always bothered me. (Score 1) 68

Gravity tends to clump stuff up.

But not the same way luminous matter (the "standard" stuff) clumps up. The mass distribution needed to explain spiral galaxies assumes that this "dark matter" remains at the periphery of the galaxy, keeping the rotational velocities constant as one moves away from the galactic center. So now, dark matter has to be something that doesn't interact with gravity (or curved space-time) the same way normal matter does. It curves space-time like normal matter does. But it isn't pulled into the gravity well (space time curve) toward the center of a galaxy the way other matter is.

Or, our model of gravity/space-time isn't quite right.

Comment Re:This whole concept has always bothered me. (Score 1) 68

It probably is all around us, but does not interact with regular matter a lot.

It appears not to at solar system scales. Because we can plot the trajectory of a satellite to intercept an object beyond the orbit of Pluto without considering its effects. But at galaxy scales, it distorts the effects of gravity and galactic rotation sufficient to be easily observable.

Magic stuff, this dark matter. It knows when to be there and when not to.

Comment Re:And just like that, everyone stopped using Plex (Score 1) 75

That would be awful, your described setup won't be able to handle subtitles and various sound tracks (multilingual support), it wont' remember where you stopped watching and won't be able to resume it later and would make a total pain to search the library.

You do realize that what you're describing is all of about ten lines of Javascript with the right libraries (audioTrackList property, subtitle library, currentTime property), right?

Comment Re:And just like that, everyone stopped using Plex (Score 1) 75

What about tracking what episode you're on? And having profiles so each member of the family can track what episode they're on? I mean, I'll be switching to Jellyfin but that's a good reason to not just do what you say, unless I'm missing something.

Great opportunity for open source web services. :-)

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