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Comment Re:Would a Spar be Repairable? (Score 3, Interesting) 14

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

Comment Meshcore (Score 1) 63

I'm familiar with the backup power design of some of the cell towers where I live.

Let's just say I'm also learning how to build solar Meshcore repeaters and placing them on appropriate hilltops where I can.

You can Royal Decree anything but don't bet your life on it.

Also nobody likes to mention that the big Spanish overvolt grid crash coincided with the arrival of a very large CME. We mustn't rile the natives.

Comment Re: Bygone days. (Score 1) 49

Republicans lost two presidential elections, 2008 & 2012, due to running conservative candidates. So they gave up and became a further-left party. Now Obama looks like a relative conservative .. but Clinton & Harris look conservative _too_.

Voters are insisting on left-wing presidents, with the exception of Biden because the initial leftist shock of Trump pt1 was too much to absorb.

Comment Re:Backfire (Score 1) 103

Give the man his funny, but the real question is how much "exercise" the immune system needs to receive and even the best AIs still have no real idea on that one. Ditto diet and physical exercise about about 20 different things.

My joke? It don't matter much. Still gonna die. And I bet you wanna complain about that, too.

Comment You're so cute when you think voting matters (Score 1) 65

I have a really funny idea for how to use computers to make voting better rather than ever more meaningless. Just as a tangential-topic typing exercise, I'll share it:

Still needs a good label, but the key ideas are ranked guest voting and equalized representation. Guest voting would allow you to pick from a neighboring district, which would be even more effective when your district has been aggressively gerrymandered. The electronic ballot would start with your own district, but you could click to get all the neighboring district candidates. Then you would rank the candidates. Most people would probably stop after a few, perhaps even after one, but why not allow as many as you like.

The next trick is in the counting. Still thinking about this one, but I like the idea of starting with top votes only. It’s simple if the candidate who gets the most #1 votes wins that district. But we aren't done yet. What about the voters who didn't pick a district winner? We'd look at their #2 choice. The voter might have been willing to accept another candidate from their own district, and that might be the winner, or perhaps the voter prefers a candidate from a neighboring district who won that district. On down the list of choices until the voter picks a winner, with the goal of each voter getting to pick a representative that voter actually wants.

Now for the twisty bit: The winning representatives are NOT equal, but rather have voting weight in accord with how many voters they actually represent. The result would be that each voter would have exactly equal representation in the legislature and each representative should care exactly equally about each voter represented.

Oh, yeah. One more wrinkle. What about voters who didn't pick any winner? How about a tertiary election while primaries are eliminated? Those voters would be contacted and get a chance to pick from the winners of their own and the neighboring districts.

I have a much simpler but even sillier idea of how to fix the Supreme Court. But since when has Slashdot been about solutions, even fantasy solutions?

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