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Comment Re:MaterialsSci research on Fiber optic elasticity (Score 1) 27

Russia and China thank you for making the cables much easier to snag with anchors.

You're welcome?

Occasionally you get meter-plus slips, even far from the epicenter, and those could strain the cable pretty severely even with a tether to provide slack.

Depends in part on whether the cable is allowed to slide freely in the tether loop. If it is, then any extra length can come from the entire cable, or at least a large enough portion of the cable to prevent it from snapping, I would think.

Comment Re:MaterialsSci research on Fiber optic elasticity (Score 1) 27

Amazing, the sea floor heaving so much that glass fiber optics fracture.

about 50 miles away from 'eruption-center' of the volcano uprising.

All that damage, that far away. I surmise the glass fibers snapped from whip-lash effect?

Seems like with an anchor and a solid styrofoam buoy or similar, they could float the line a few feet above the sea floor on a flexible tether and prevent this problem more permanently.

Comment Re: this is fun, going offtopic (Score 1) 32

Off the shelf set top boxes are much older than Apple TVs.

Apple's were the first ones that anyone took seriously. Before that, you mostly had HTPCs, which were kind of niche.

And the Newton was just Apple's "Me too" device, a copy of many other tablets of that time.

Wow. Today I learned about two devices I had never heard of. But look at the user interface of the Samsung tablet from that era and the GridPad tablet. Compare with the Palm. They're nothing alike.

Now tell me the Newton UI wasn't a major influence on Palm's UI.

Comment Re:Media = PRAVDA - LEFT WING propaganda (Score 1) 157

Is it fair to blame Fox for what was already happening? Or complain that it was intentionally biased in the opposite direction from that which the other outlets were intentionally biased?

The appearance of Fox News was when any appearance of trying to be honest in newmaking went out the window. So yes, it really is. They made the talking head gallery into an art form.

Before that, there was a clear line between news and interviews, and biases were largely subtle, mostly in the form of choosing which stories to cover, rather than in the form of deliberately interposing large amounts of commentary into the coverage itself. This is not to say that there weren't editorials, but they were clearly delineated from the news portion of coverage. After the rise of intentionally biased news sources, that all stopped.

And no, most major news outlets were not intentionally biased before that. They had biases because the individual people reporting had biases, but that's not the same thing as the corporate entity dictating that bias by fiat. Most journalists prior to the Fox News era would have resigned rather than put up with that. It was very much seen as a violation of journalistic ethics back then.

Comment Re:Media = PRAVDA - LEFT WING propaganda (Score 1) 157

What do I blame for this? Two things.

I would pick two different things: 1) The mere existence of 24-hour news-entertainment channels, a-la Fox News, CNBC, etc. 2) The people that consume the product from point #1, and conflate it with "journalism".

Well, one of those is basically the same as one of mine, to be fair. IMO, it's not 24-hour aspect that's the problem. It's the entertainment aspect. CNN was founded in 1980, and Headline News was founded in 1982. The quality of news/journalism didn't really start to decline rapidly until the late 1990s, and it cratered by the mid-2000s.

Before Fox News, CNN was the only 24-hour news source. It had no competition, so it had no incentive to spin the news and sensationalize it to get viewers. If you wanted news some time other than first thing in the morning, noon, or 6-ish in the evening, you went to CNN. When Fox News and MSNBC started competing, they added more entertainment to differentiate themselves, the 24-hour news-entertainment cycle became a thing, and things went horribly wrong.

But I mean if you think news quality started going downhill significantly before the mid-1990s, I'd be curious to know when you perceived the decline.

Comment Re:It's not the media that's the problem (Score 2) 157

My thinking as well. Once monetization of social media was perfected all of the "silent" voices could now be heard. Unfortunately, many of those voices were partisan hacks.

s/many/nearly all/

It turns out that when advertising is free, the worst elements of society that provide the least benefit to society take advantage of it to bad ends.

We may never know for certain if Walter Cronkite was a decent person but he did attempt to be a gatekeeper for news, maybe even things that matter.

Wish I had met him, but sadly, I didn't, so I can't say. I did meet Sam Donaldson (who overlapped with him at a different network) and Katie Couric (who missed overlapping by only a few years at the other major network), and they seemed like decent people. I'd imagine Cronkite was as well. Most of the journos back then were.

Comment Re:Media = PRAVDA - LEFT WING propaganda (Score 4, Insightful) 157

No one trusts the media. They lied about Covid (Chinese bio-weapon), lied about it's threat-level. (It was relatively harmless). Campaigned to lock us down for the harmless virus. Campaigned to keep us locked down. Campaigned to force mRNA experimental Genetically Engeered substances into people's bodies. Note, these are not "vaccines" by the original definition, and they cure NOTHING. The press are just LEFT WING propagandists, aka Liars. They also tried to tell us Biden was doing a great job, and Kamala Harris could run the country. Then you have endless Trump Derangement Syndrome, the same as the Score-5 brainwashed woke indoctrinated groupthink gaylords on Slashdot. The Media also cheers on those who laughted at the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, and tried to blame it on the "Far Right". So, do we trust the Media? Do we heck. The Media are LIARS.

The fact that part of what is ostensibly mainstream media spews stuff that would lead to a post like this is exactly why trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Back in the 80s and before, journalists actually had to take the time to learn enough about their stories to sound intelligent. And that meant that when they interviewed a talking head in politics, if the politician lied, the journalist would often correct them.

In the post-news era, we started seeing more and more talking head "news", where news channels spent more and more of their time having guests on the show who spew whatever bulls**t they want and nobody calls them on it.

And in the post-truth era, that level of idiocy began bleeding into the news, with "journalists" putting spin on the news, with the destruction of fact checking, and with the quality of the reporting spiraling.

What do I blame for this? Two things. First, the rise of Fox News, created by Rupert Murdoch to be an intentionally conservatively biased news source. Second, decades of media consolidation producing steady declines in pay and in job availability for people who work in journalism, leading it to become a less and less desirable field, resulting in most of the best and the brightest choosing other fields. This is not to say that there aren't intelligent journalists, just not nearly as many as a percentage of the total. Also, media consolidation has resulted in fewer voices in general, which further erodes trust.

Comment Re: We *might* get to Mars (Score 1) 47

The specific impulse of a fusion drive is expected to be several hundred times that of a chemical rocket, and "maximum speed" for a rocket is proportional to the specific impulse.

Nearer term advanced engines, i.e. ones that have working prototypes or even production examples, are in the 10-100x range. That takes a trip to Saturn from 12 years to between a month and a year. Or a few days for a hypothetical fusion drive.

Comment Re:this is fun, going offtopic (Score 3, Insightful) 32

Apple had the trifecta of three visionary types. Steve Wozniac (pretty much single handedly invented the 80s portable TV computer), Steve Jobs (Didnt invent shit, but had a god-like sense of predicting what consumers would want.) and Jonny Ives (Masterful industrial designer. Love or hate Apples, but the devices that came out under his watch where beautiful).

Jobs should have left the company to Ives.

Please, no. The Mac under Ive was a train wreck of missing functionality. From the lack of floppy drives in the iMac (which was a nightmare in the education market, to the point where ~100% of them ended up with some kind of floppy drive or Zip drive or similar attached externally), to the premature dropping of FireWire (which Apple literally just dropped support for a few weeks ago, but which was phased out on the hardware side from 2008 through 2012), to the premature removal of USB-A ports (which a lot of Mac laptop users still curse to this day), to the premature removal of HDMI ports, SD card slots, and MagSafe (all of which Mac users complained about so much that they actually put them all back).

That's before we even get into human interface issues like the butterfly keyboards, the touch bar, the removal of Touch ID and the home button on the iPhone, etc.

The post-Ive MacBook Pro models are IMO a breath of fresh air pretty much across the board. I'm hoping the iPhone gets there eventually.

Tim Cook is a fine enough businessman, and he seems a decent person (I've yet to hear of him throwing tables at staff members like Jobs did) but the only real innovations to come out under him where watches (which where kind of predicted by everyone, so more just getting in early) and the ARM thing, again less innovation more just smart use of resources.

To be fair, that ARM thing resulted in Macs that run all day without a charge, which is literally the thing more Mac users have asked for than probably any other feature, and have literally been begging for since the PowerBook G4 took away the dual battery bays in 2001.

And remember that the iPhone team wasn't led by Ive. It was led by Forstall, and the hardware team was led by Tony Fadell. That's where bulk of the innovation that made the iPhone a success came from, IMO. This is not to say that Apple should have held on to Forstall, given reports of his personality conflicts with other execs, but I think he should get credit for a lot of the fundamentals of what made the iPhone a success, along with Tony Fadell, who also gets credit for the iPod.

Ive... made a case. It was a beautiful case, where they talked about how they carefully matched each front and back in various ways to ensure that the alignment was perfect, yada, yada, yada, but it was still a case with a glass screen and a port and a headphone jack (that was recessed so badly that no headphones anyone owned could even plug in).

Has Apple lost its innovators? Maybe. Will Apple find new innovators? Probably. Is Apple doing good engineering in the meantime? Definitely.

But nothing that completely blows the market apart. macs look more or less the same as they did a decade ago. IPhones have stagnated because the updates are so incremental. IPads are still IPads. Wheres the new product lines?

They tried to do a self-driving car, but I guess they couldn't pull off the AI. I know they've been doing stuff with drones for Maps imaging purposes since at least 2016, and I'd imagine that tech could eventually turn into a real-world product if they ever decide to productize it. I'm sure there are other skunkworks projects at Apple that could eventually turn into something cool, or at least I hope so, because that's how innovation usually happened at Apple, and presumably still does.

All we've gotten is the bloody VR headset thats too expensive and nobody wants since VR is an intractably flawed technology that causes eye strain and headaches in *most* people. Good fun to toy with occasionally, but not at $3K+

No disagreement. But it's awfully easy to say, "Why haven't you come up with anything new" without actually suggesting something that they should have invented. There's really not a lot new in the consumer electronics space. It's not like somebody else beat them to the punch on much of anything other than AR glasses (and, arguably, EVs, if you consider those to be consumer electronics).

Comment Re:this is fun, going offtopic (Score 1) 32

Apple.. hmm.. yeah, I guess they've done pretty well... Mac.. iphone... that's 2 good ideas.

You forgot Apple TV. The concept was brilliant, and it was arguably the first viable off-the-shelf set-top box, beating Roku by a few months.

The problem was that Apple A. did not license their tech, and B. insisted on being treated as a luxury brand in a field where being a luxury brand is a significant competitive disadvantage. A better UI isn't good enough if you can outfit every TV in your house from Roku ($29.99) for less than you pay for one set-top box from Apple ($130). And it is doubly hopeless if someone is buying a $120 TV with Roku software built in.

Predictably, despite having what is IMO a better product, Apple got their a** handed to them in the market.

I'd also give them credit for Newton, which led to Palm, which led to smartphones. I mean, they really were at least a decade ahead of their time back then. And that story went an awful lot like Apple TV, except for the part where it got Steved. :-)

Comment Re:Crap product for a crap idea (Score 1) 77

No reason not to connect the two pods - minimal weight increase, reduces chance of losing them, makes it easier to charge a battery.

One more thing to get snagged, increases the odds of the wire breaking and making the hardware an expensive, irreparable brick... no, thanks.

Oh, and their small size means bad sound quality.

That's not inherently true. From a physics perspective, because earbuds are sealed against your ear canal, you can reproduce bass response with a much smaller motion of the driver, because you aren't having to compress so much air. And because the driver is small, you can still move it fast enough to get good treble response. So in theory, earbuds should be able to produce a flat response curve a lot more easily than over-the-ear headphones.

If you look at the AirPod Pro response curve, it's somewhat colored (AirPod Pro 3 especially so, with IMO way too much bass boost), but +/- 6 dB or so from below 20 Hz up to the anti-aliasing filter limit for the codec. Contrast this with over-the-ear headphones, where they usually put a bass boost centered around 120 Hz to make up for the response falling off at lower frequencies.

So if you're thinking that your over-the-ear headphones sound better because of the driver size, you have it backwards. They sound better to you because they're massively colored, but you happen to like that sound.

Comment Re:Say no to cloud (Score 1) 67

Well, this is a bit old, and may not apply anymore, but you used to be able to backup entire disk partitions from Linux on the Apple. (But that might have been from a live CD, I don't remember.)

Ah. I understand the confusion. You're talking about a Mac. The Mac platform isn't truly locked down; you can give any app full disk access trivially in System Settings, etc. This is mainly for historical reasons, because taking away privileges is a lot harder than never having them in the first place, and a lot of apps wouldn't work at all if you couldn't.

When talking about Apple's locked-down platform, I was referring to iOS (iPhone, iPad) and, by extension, iOS derivatives like VisionOS and WatchOS.

Comment Re:Say no to cloud (Score 1) 67

The problem is that the iOS sandbox makes a full backup via rsync impossible, because except as permitted by specific entitlements, apps don't have access to other apps' private sandboxed data (as opposed to data that the app intentionally stores in a shared location), and unless something has changed very recently, there is no "full disk access" sandbox entitlement or equivalent on iOS(*).

* There are at least ostensibly ways to create magic sandbox escapes that would give an app that ability, but I'm 99.99999% certain that Apple would never permit an app with that sort of entitlement in their iOS App Store.

While this doesn't make the technology entirely useless, it does mean that no one other than Apple can truly perform a full device backup comparable to an iCloud device backup.

Comment Re:Say no to cloud (Score 1) 67

This is why you NEVER use cloud storage. If you have no choice but to use cloud storage you should be encrypting the data outside of the cloud or any "backup / syncing" software required for the cloud. If it's encrypted in the cloud the cloud provider 100% has the private key to decrypt, If it's encrypted in their backup / syncing software they most likely can also have a copy of the private key or have a backdoor to decrypt. If you encrypt it separately then only you have the private key and the only way anyone is decrypting it is to brute force it or use a vulnerability to break it.

More to the point, this is why governments — the United States government in particular — need to demand that Apple open up their platform to allow third-party backup tools so that users can choose whether to use iCloud backups, Google Drive backups, Dropbox backups, CrashPlan backups, a not-yet-existing tool that backs up to a NAS on your home network whenever you're at home and to an encrypted disk image on iCloud when you aren't, etc. That puts the backup companies in competition with one another to deliver the most secure backup scheme, and ensures that any company that bows to that sort of pressure from a foreign government will quickly find themselves customerless, replaced by a company that didn't do so, or even replaced by open source software that is auditable.

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