The complaints are twofold. They moved their manufacturing overseas but didn't cut their prices to reflect the savings. So Americans are getting squeezed from both sides. Consumers can't force them to pull production back to the U.S. but they can (in effect) offshore the top heavy expensive management and Wall Street by buying Chinese. The difference is apparently around $40K on a car.

Different industry, but I have a Chinese 3D printer. It's not perfect, but it cost 20% of what a 3D printer from an American company would cost (which also wouldn't be perfect). All it's missing is a bunch of ugly beige plastic, vendor lock-in on the supplies, and replacement parts made of pure unobtainium. Believe me, I don't miss those "features" at all. It did come with full respect for my right to repair and a wide variety of 3rd party parts readily available.

On a side note, I did consider building a 3D printer from parts, but when I looked in to it, sourcing the parts in the U.S. would have cost me more than buying the ready made (some assembly required) printer from China.

Good flick if you want to get a feel for how Pharma sales work.

I'm surprised it hasn't be Pfbanned yet based on who it highlights.

"the data will be kept" isn't an explanation of WHY. Why will it be kept? Was it capable of sending it but did they do this on purpose to create a treasure trove for later?

Upon sentencing, Lachwani turned his head all the way around and told the judge "Your mother sews socks that smell!"

Have you ever signed up for cable or even some streaming? They quote one price and tell you all the amazing things it includes. But the bill is higher and includes special fees for some of the things that were touted to be included in the advertised price.

Why can't it just send it back to the base station there and have it forwarded back to earth? Isn't that how it's been working all along? (or is it too far away from the base station?)

They always rant about Wayland, systemd, Pulse/Pipewire, devops, dkms, quic, zfs, etc.

I used to wonder why they don't just not upgrade their os, but then I realized they are lazy and want somebody else to maintain their old system for them.

I mean, even compiling gentoo with the right use set is too hard for these bellyachers.

Yet the humility never occurs to them that the non-lazy people who actually build distros are embracing the newer technology.

Instead the Old Farts case aspersions and ad-hominems at these hard workers. It's pathetic.

I'm done with their BS and won't help them understand anymore - the arguments are almost universally in bad faith.

Because otherwise they would just not upgrade. I have some Infomagic Slackware CD's from 1993 they might be interested in. Yeah, my first Linux box was over 30 years ago and I competently run all those technologies now. I don't fear change even though understanding new tech takes work and I can't just rest on my laurels.

I see no requirement for a GLOBAL rest frame. Ships push against the water all the time, but ocean water is not a global rest frame.

Wild imagination alert here. Imagine a "dark magnet" that could push against dark matter permeating space. Now the whole thing reduces to either a propeller in the water or an electrodynamic tether. Of course, it's not going to be producing one newton per watt.

You're missing the point. Any decent engineer KNOWS that fiber cuts happen. Whether they should or should not is irrelevant, they happen all the time. Having a state's 911 service depending on a single cable not being damaged is piss poor engineering at best.

Side note, always keep a short length of fiber with you. If you get lost or stranded, bury the length of fiber in the ground. When the backhoe shows up to break it, ask the operator for a lift into town.

We really need the cloud to butt extension more than ever.

Look up Starfish Prime. A nuclear test at an altitude of 250 miles. It caused some unexpected EMP damage in Hawaii, 900 miles away.

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.

I'd venture a guess that it started out with someone offering the service of providing 911 access, and it worked fine at small scale. Then they found more customers to connect, because traffic was very low for the infrastructure they already had. Then more and more jumped on the bandwagon, to offload their "911 responsibility" to this one popular provider. Adding more users was practically "plug-and-play", they just had to adjust some routing tables and bam, their 911 responsibility had been outsourced and now they can forget about that annoying and expensive thing the government mandates them to do "because we have this other outfit taking care of all that for us".

Then over time this one scrappy little outfit found itself the sole 911 service provider in three states. But instead of using all that new capital from all their new customers to upgrade their now over-extended systems and add redundancy, they just pocketed most of it. Their customers were happy, their shareholders were happy, life was good. Nobody thought there was anything wrong because there hadn't been any problems, and the 911 calls were getting through. There were no reliability or single-point-of-failure audits because there had never been any problems with it in the past.

Then a wild posthole digger appears, and suddenly everyone is vividly aware of just how fragile of a system everyone in the area is relying on. And the finger-pointing begins. "We never could have imagined something like this could possibly happen!" Oh yeah, ignorance is bliss.

I wonder if circuits like this are being overused due to low prices? Like if you have a "weak link" circuit that is one of the few that connects popular points X and Y together, and "in theory" there's a lot of users for that circuit, but the smart ones realize they can't put all their eggs in one basket through there (like their primary AND their backup system, you can't run BOTH through the same node, for fault-tolerance reasons) and so the owners of that circuit find they're having trouble selling capacity through it, so they lower prices. This attracts outsourcers and resellers to reroute through there for the low prices. Then some groups, looking to cut costs, find this new outfit offering bandwidth from X to Y and switch to it, without realizing that now their backup service is running through a node that their primary service does. I'm sure there's processes in place to catch when this might happen, but I wonder if the lower prices (due to those 'aware of the danger' avoiding the node) is what's leading to unexpected loss of redundancy for the less diligent groups?

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.