Thank you so much for that! It's extremely on-topic, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I learned a few things as well.

It will probably never happen, but the sane and simple fix is to make ALL copyright ownership end after, say, 30 years. And that would be applied retroactively. The work was first copyrighted in or before, say, 1995? Public domain - no ifs, ands, or buts, and no legal remedies for the copyright owners.

This would put an end to the Internet Archive's battles, and would be a great boon to YouTubers such as Rick Beato, who - courtesy of Universal - frequently suffers copyright strikes and de-monetization in return for promoting artists' music. By extension, it also obsoletes a lot of the arguments around what constitutes 'fair use', simply because many of those arguments are over material that goes back to the 80's, 70's, 60's, and earlier.

Could you hook the hardware up to a Linux system and then get that data to your applications some other way? Looks like Linux still has firewire support, and you can connect to pipewire with ffado.

That's typically disingenuous. Yawn, yawn, yawn.

There's no sobbing in vibe coding.

Just bullshit on top of more bullshit.

Thanks for the reference. I did some further digging and found this:

One of those features, he said, is the turbine’s two-piece blades that will allow researchers to swap out blade tips—and replace them with tips that can be fabricated in NREL’s own Composites Manufacturing Education and Technology Facility (CoMET), also located at the Flatirons Campus.

“We can take the old tip off and put on something else we'd like to try,” Derby said, adding that researchers could create blade tips with different aerodynamics or acoustics, some kind of structural modification, or new materials. “This gives us an option to replace a piece of the blade—which is much less expensive than trying to replace or fabricate an entire blade—and do some really interesting work.”

It seems that while it's technically a two-piece blade, it's only the tip that's a separate section. So the reduction in shipping length is minimal. Also, I imagine that the stress at that joint is not too high, given the tip's (relatively) low mass and the fact that its contribution is more about reducing turbulence and improving efficiency than it is about providing "lift" that drives the blade.

In short, I believe that my original comment is still valid.

What was functionally worse about the XP fisher-price skin? It didn't change any behavior, only appearance.

Yes, airships make sense here, while airplanes do not.

All it takes is just one soft spot on an improvised runway to demolish a larger-and-therefore-more-expensive-than-ever-before cargo airplane either on takeoff or landing.

You actually believed that the world's largest cargo airplanes are going to land on an improvised runway? SMH.

No, you can't, because they would interfere with one another. Strictly speaking of course you can, but it would be a bad idea. You can put the big-bladed ones closer together than they do, but then they would interfere with one another too.

Not to mention that in that scenario there's effectively no such thing as failure of only one 'copter. If one goes down, the other will soon follow, unless it has a very good release mechanism and someone really fast on the 'let-go' trigger.

With the HUGE stresses on those blades, you do not want any joints in them.

Typically, each blade is round at the hub end, allowing for a shit-tonne of studs to hold it in place. Farther out, the blades are much thinner, so there's not as much volume for hardware. Additionally, the joint represents a region of concentrated stress, and good engineering practice avoids those as much as possible.

Because they are on the ground.

That's outright false.

Can you stack them high enough that they get into where the wind actually is? And if so, why not just put one windmill where the wind is?

So make them use more horizontal space?

Obsolete and dead?

VAWTs make sense only on the tops of lonely hills.

It's funny, I've been doing a lot of thinking about life - not just human life, but all life and its history on planet Earth - over the past few years. So I recognized what you were saying immediately, because of similar thoughts I've had. But when I wrote my comment, I indulged myself in a kind of 'human exceptionalism' without realizing it. So thanks for the reality check.

Too true - and thanks again. And yup, I still get irrationally angry at the dandelions, even as I marvel at their persistence and hardiness.

I hear you, and I too wish the internet was less commercialized. As for store hours, I'd like to go part-way back to the way things were when I was a kid.

I think having longer shopping hours is good, but I think having one day a week where the majority of the population isn't working would be better for society. Sunday seems the natural candidate, given that there are several stat holidays on Mondays, at least in Canada. One day a week where families and friends can count on being able to get together in real life, and have encouragement to do things that don't involve acquiring stuff because most stores are closed.