There is no universal solution. That's fundamentally the problem, people are looking for a panacea that covers all of the use-cases for flying and is low cost, and none exists nor do any appear visible on the horizon.

The solution is to whittle-away at the use of air travel where it's practical to do so, using technologies that can be powered through means that don't directly consume fossil fuels and may be powered indirectly through any number of means. For some places this means electrified railroads, even high-speed railroads if the nature of the corridors can justify them. For other places this means working to make electric automotive journeys more practical. But this requires a lot of work and cost.

For high-speed rail we've already seen studies that have identified the Boston/DC corridor and the Pacific corridor as potentially viable, and there have been mumblings about a Texas corridor. If the time required isn't massively different than flying due to the headaches of airports and if the passengers have more comfort and the ability to bring more luggage than they can when flying, then suddenly it can become attractive if the costs remain competitive. Which of course will mean understanding that it won't be a profit-maker at first, and possibly not ever. But if that subsidy is the price to pay to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels then so be it.

It'll never happen, because the counter-argument is that the new buyer of that IP might turn around and leverage it.

Correct. The AZ vaccine still protected people from COVID-19, but carried more risk than other vaccines for COVID-19. Getting vaccinated is the right move for anyone that had no specific medical condition that made the vaccine more harmful than beneficial, but there's comparative risk, and serious side effects like blood clots are worth weighing if one has a choice of which vaccine to take.

It's not really all that different a concept than the situation with the Polio vaccines. Salk's killed, injected vaccine had the risk of secondary infection from the injection site and a few documented cases where the virus wasn't properly neutralized so it caused direct infection. Sabin's live, oral vaccine did on occasion lead to clusters of Polio outbreaks along with mutation of the Polio virus. Even as someone that hates needles with unbridled passion I'm more favorable to Salk's vaccine. The failure to prepare it properly leading to a few cases of Polio given to patients were very rare occurrences, while Sabin's vaccine lead to far greater numbers of clusters of Polio. But if I had been alive during the Polio epidemic and only Sabin's vaccine was available in my area I wouldn't have refused it.

Frankly with the serious side effects I'm surprised that it wasn't withdrawn from the market sooner, or its sales relegated to places that simply couldn't get vaccines with fewer side effects.

A cult called McDonnell-Douglas management.

I don't know what allowed them to be the ones to essentially take over Boeing, but after the farkup that was the DC-10 it doesn't even make sense.

Since Star Wars is also basically just a revisiting of all of the tropes from the silver-screen-age serials that predated the features, it's not really surprising that it doesn't have many women in it either. The crapsack universe is pretty violent, and paternalistic attitudes have meant trying to shield women from the less savory parts, plus military attitudes have also typically not included women in the ranks too much either, something that's changing but even the better part of five decades later only slowly.

So an analog computer?

"He sees cities as the givers and takers of things. He's fascinated by cities. He doesn't actually want to live in one. He now lives in a ranch near one. He wants to orbit them. He's a paradox."

This is not a special position in any way, shape, or form.

There's an entire industry built around people that want as much of a sleepy small-town life as they can get while still having access to all of the amenities that urban living offers, it's called suburbia. Everyone with their individual detached homes so they're not having to listen to their neighbors constantly, in their relatively quiet neighborhoods that see almost no outside foot-traffic from those who don't live there, because there's literally no reason to go into these neighborhood if you don't live there and aren't visiting those that do.

Yet a half-mile away there's a major intersection with one to four shopping centers on its corners, with a supermarket, a gas station, a department store, a home improvement store, a barber, a daycare, a dance studio, a fitness center, and perhaps a dozen restaurants varying from takeaway counters to sit-down full service places with linen tablecloths. And within five miles there's a hospital that can handle nearly every condition and ailment that comes in through its doors. Within ten miles there are civics centers with performing arts programs and other venues. And within 20 miles there's high-paying work available to those with skills.

Suburbs are nice because you have the choice of interacting with the local community or not at your leisure.

What you're talking about is YOST.

https://yost.com/computers/RJ4...

The problem with it isn't the signaling at the port, it's getting the serial part to work on the host PC or other device being used. Almost nothing has RS-232 DE-9 port anymore, and even USB-A is becoming less common. Plus the FTDI scandal with cloned chips and nonfunctional drivers is another major problem.

I've had MRSA in my forties. I was lucky, my primary care provider caught it before it had gotten bad enough to require hospitalization, strong, STRONG antibiotics took care of it. When I had it, it manifested in a fashion that I thought was allergies, mostly localized swelling. I ended up trying to treat with antihistamines but that didn't accomplish anything. As it got worse I went in and was immediately sampled for testing and started on both oral and topical antibiotics.

So yeah, it can happen naturally to someone that's otherwise healthy and doesn't have a history of this sort of infection. The trouble is, it's not especially common either, so when the second whistleblower dies during a short span of months once investigators are actually paying attention, it's not something that should be ignored. Unfortunately given the budget that Boeing and its rich execs and board members have, it would probably be trivial to find a way to pay an assailant to do something to whistleblowers that doesn't easily tie back to them so long as they're not stupid about how they transfer funds.

I might buy that when SoC is required due to how goddamn small the device is for things like phones, but laptops are orders of magnitude bigger than phones.

It's a little wrong to comment that XPS were upgradable, my XPS-13 is not upgradable. So I bought the max RAM when I purchased it so that I wouldn't have as much of a problem with inadequate memory later. I wish it was upgradable but it was my experience shopping for small computers that vendors simply weren't doing that unfortunately.

And why again are we unable as a species to organize to put solar on our rooftops in a way that is beneficial to the property owners rather than breaking new ground?

Hell, even farmers are experimenting with solar panels as fencing, and they're finding that east-west orientation for panels that can generate electricity from either side are working out well. Seems like there's a whole lot of infill possibilities available to us without tearing up a bunch of pristine (as in untouched) land in the process.

Wind, yeah, that's going to likely require breaking ground, since most people don't want the risk of living near a wind turbine given the occasional RUD.

At least on laptops I've bought since 2016, there's been a metal flap on the underside that the sticker is behind. The flap could theoretically be torn off I suppose, but it's held with a magnet and is recessed enough to make that reasonably unlikely.

My guess is that manufacturers will just add an initial-setup subroutine that won't allow setup to proceed until the default password is changed by the person doing the work.

One issue with requiring each and every bit of hardware to have a unique password will be more e-waste if these devices are less useful on the secondary market. A common technique to work with old hardware is to perform a factory reset on the bench before reconfiguring it for one's own purposes.

Then again, since most devices, even cheap devices, have their MAC addresses printed on them, it wouldn't be all that difficult to populate the same table used for that with the factory unique password in the printing system, and to then include that unique password on the label. It would still be a good idea to force the user to change the password, but if they don't then it would at least require someone to have gained physical access to the device in order to get that password. I suppose a dictionary attack could be used if the vendor password list leaked to the Internet as well, but that's a whole new level of failure.

Heh. I was in the cablemodem pilot neighborhood in the mid-nineties, and somehow managed to convince Dad to sign up for it. A few months later COX called trying to upsell, they got down as low as something like $1.50 more per month for cable TV on top of our Internet service and he still said no.

It was probably a good thing really, we already watched too much TV and that would have only compounded the problem, but I couldn't help but be amazed at how cheap he was being at that particular moment.