Checking out in a power failure has only gotten harder over time. Now it's well beyond just having someone who can do arithmetic. None of the prices are actually on the items so without the scanner and the POS looking it up in a database the cashier has no way to know the price other than have someone go look at the shelf (assuming they can FIND the correct price there). Once it's all totaled up (perhaps an hour or 2 later), there's no way to accept a card payment. If the power outage is generalized, the customer can't get the cash either even if they have plenty in the bank. In some areas, even knowing the different tax rates on different classes of items would be an issue (school supplies vs. staple goods vs. 'luxury' goods).

At least the equipment that would be fried on the local distribution side is easy to come by. The transformers that would need a rebuild on the distribution side would have to be rebuilt since there are no spares. There's also nobody prepared to do such a rebuild in the U.S. currently.

If Congress is REALLY worried about any sort of strategic resiliency, that needs to be addressed. There should be spares and on-shore capability to manufacture and re-manufacture that equipment.

So what makes you sure there is nothing reacted against in a different propellantless drive? Even if you don't know what it is.

Again, not that I think the drive in TFA is going to actually produce thrust.

Now run the numbers for an electric motor where the rotor is a satellite with an electromagnet and the stator is the Earth.

Note carefully that I am not claiming the propellantless drive in TFA actually does anything but get warm (if that), just that a theoretical propellantless drive need not intrinsically violate thermodynamics.

The next issue is on the American corporate side. More and more people are noticing the ludicrously low prices of things if they buy direct from china and wondering why the same thing made in the same place by the same people costs so much more when bought from a U.S. company.

Not barge in, tell the company to fix it or they put out a press release denouncing the company and it's executives by name as a threat to national security.

Alas, no. Apple's users in China are getting the ones having to taste the medicine.

Credentialism doesn't help. At one time, those with the right kind of mind tended to learn on a C64, Atari, or perhaps an Apple][ and then got a job. Before that, interested people took an aptitude test and got on the job training.

Now HR is all about the degree and some keywords.

Good additional info, thank you.

It died when Broadcom pulled it's stunt. It's still in use, so zombie. Only, instead of "brains!", it's moaning "money!".

What makes you sure it's Inconel? It wasn't a high stress or high temperature part.

At the least "buying" the software meant you can use it for as long as you could find a machine to run it on.

The big push of corporate america these days is to deepen the poverty cycle by turning everything into a rental.

Silly me, I thought "nobody owns anything" was part of the Communist plot.

Don't mistake a statistical trend for a universal truth. There were simple songs earlier on as well, but there were also more meaningful and complex songs. Think of the early Beatles as paying their dues to the record company suits.

IIRC, it's been more of a think for NiCd than LiIon.

In LiIon batteries, IIRC, the dendrites only form to a significant degree when the battery is abused. That's why most LiIon batteries simply fade away to uselessness rather than the considerably more violent end that happens when the separator is punctured.