Luckily in 2024 we found another HUGE supply of Helium in Minnesota.

I was thinking something similar. Having 2048 bad ballots seems more like a encryption key issue than a hardware failure.

Three USB keys with the same key that are unable to decode the ballot makes me think the problem is in the encryption algorithm, perhaps if bit 11 is high, the algorithm encounters a divide by 0 error or similar.

Actually the military CANNOT turn off GPS. GPS is provided worldwide by a constellation of about 30 satellites in precisely calculated orbits. If you turn off the GPS constellation then it is turned off everywhere. Too many users worldwide rely on GPS for it to be turned off for a regional conflict. Every plane over the US, every ship in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, every remote traveler in Alaska, Canada, Australia, South America, Africa, etc. would suddenly have no navigation tool.

Instead, it is much easier to just jam the signal where its loss helps prevent military targeting. The GPS signal at ground level is so weak, -160 dBW (-130 dBm), that it only takes a few milliwatts of radiated power to overwhelm the GPS signal for some distance. The higher power the jammer radiates, the larger the jammed area. During a regional conflict, the adversary might want to jam GPS signals for hundreds of miles.

The problem with jamming is it is obvious. When a GPS receiver says "Loss of signal" the pilot or missile can immediately switch to a backup method. What is worse is "spoofing" the signal to broadcast incorrect GPS signals that trick receivers into calculating an incorrect location or altitude. Many examples recently have been published of planes, drones, and other devices being told they are too high and they descend into the ground thinking they were correcting for altitude errors. Losing GPS is frustrating, not trusting it when it looks normal is worse. Is an unexpected increase it altitude because you entered a thermal zone and were lifted higher or did you just encounter a spoofing signal?

Inertial navigation is a problem if you don't have a way to correct for the drift angle. Imagine a boat on a river heading directly east to reach the dock on the other side. You know if you travel directly east for 10 minutes the map says you should reach the dock, however the river current is pushing you south during those 10 minutes. After 9 minutes you expect you should be almost at the dock when in reality you are miles downstream and your INS system might not know it. Moving in a fluid environment like water or air requires frequent external location verification to compensate for drift. There are ways to do this but most of them require additional signals that are probably also being jammed.

I'm sure other posts will correct some of my oversimplifications, but this is a TL;DR overview of why GPS cannot just be turned off and why INS isn't the quick replacement.

Agreed. I stopped flying American years ago and haven't missed their poor customer service since. The JD Power's 2025 customer satisfaction survey rates American at the bottom of the list.
https://www.jdpower.com/busine...

I wouldn't be opposed to this merger as long as they divested themselves of CBS and CNN before approval. News organizations should not be consolidated to the point that we have no independent news available.

Concentrating all the news organizations under one editorial board presents the opportunity for one person's opinion becoming the only news that is broadcast, either right-leaning or left-leaning. We don't want all news organizations to become either clones of MSNBC or Fox News with nothing in between.

I also took a COBOL class in college and the introduction programing exercise was pretty easy. However, this is like saying HTML is easy so anyone should be able to create a web portal.

As LostMyBeaver explained above, "The problem is that JCL, RPG, CICS, DB2 and all the surrounding infrastructure is very confusing." This would be the CSS, JSON, CGI, PHP, SSI, and other infrastructure that our imaginary web portal interacts with. Creating a static web page is fairly easy. Combining everything into a dynamic infrastructure takes time and multiple iterations.

Same with the COBOL code. The programmers experimented and found solutions to all the edge cases, all the system calls to the OS, all the file locking and transaction logging that is required for audits, all the database calls, etc. that would be difficult to transcode onto a different OS and hardware.

So finding replacement COBOL code might be something that AI can help with, but unless you build a virtual machine to replicate all the old system calls, then test your new code in C, Rust, Python, or the language of the day and then determine what OS and hardware you are targeting, you really don't have a replacement solution.

Transcoding old software is not the same as translating Latin into English.

Luckily scientists have found a medieval antibiotic recipe called Bald's eyesalve and are examining why it works on some superbugs that shrug off some modern antibiotics.

Interesting overview of Bald's eyesalve from 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you're going to throw facts around to support your point, at least get them right.

Korean War ~~ June 25, 1950 - July 27, 1953
Vietnam War ~~ November 1, 1955 - April 30, 1975
U.S. military All-Volunteer Force established on July 1, 1973

If James Unick was born in 1961 he would have been 13 when the military eliminated the draft. The murder happened in 1982, which was 7 years after the Vietnam War ended.

You could just as easily attribute his mental state on veganism, homosexuality, the hippy movement, drug usage, or lead in school drinking fountains. There is no evidence of any of those things. Trying to blame his mental state on disapproval of the Vietnam War is just you projecting your opinions.

My boot time is as long as my system needs it to be. I would guess it takes between 15 and 30 seconds, depending on memory retraining, verification, and my attention to it. Honestly I don't even notice as I'm still getting my desk ready, setting my coffee or water on the corner of my desk, and planning my work.

Booting from a USB drive to do offline backups or system maintenance can take longer than booting from an NVME drive, but in that case I'm watching for the "press any key to boot" message displayed by various USB boot systems.

On previous computers that did take longer, I just pressed the power button before I sat down and it was ready when I returned. Boot times were never a metric that I paid attention to.

Not the best quote from an acting associate administrator. To me it sounds like she's saying everything up to now has been just playing around and now it's time to get serious. Not the best image to put into the public's mental vision.

I don't want a "we'll keep trying until we get it right" level of certainty. I don't want a "this rehearsal went smoothly with only a few hiccups" level of certainty. I want a "we've now done this four times successfully and landed" level of certainty before we put astronauts on board.

At least they identified the decision-making problems before another Challenger incident. When the prevailing attitude is "it looks good on paper. What could go wrong?" without real-world testing of the hardware in actual space environments, they are signalling they are willing to accept mistakes and fix them later.

Not the way manned missions should be tested. Accept the cost of many test flights in actual space with proposed modifications before putting astronauts on board.

Don't forget "bubble memory"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Why not? Muscle growth occurs by hypertrophy, which is the increase in volume of muscle tissue through the enlargement of existing muscle cells, primarily achieved by applying stress (resistance training) that creates micro-tears in muscle fibers, followed by repair and growth.

Instead of sending the meat (muscle tissue) to the gym to bulk up, they just create the environment in the vat that stimulates growth. Give it all the nutrients it needs, the proteins and hormones to encourage growth, nice warm growing environment, and let it grow. This isn't taking baby muscles and encouraging them to grow, this is growing adult skeletal muscles right from the start. With the right fat percentage, I don't think you can tell a hamburger made with this form meat from scrub-grass fed cows.

Since the initial batteries can't/shouldn't be charged at temperatures below 41F, my guess is they use a pre-charge warming feature when the batteries are that cold. If the pre-charge cycle doesn't know to turn off at the right time, there is a small chance they might get TOO warm during charging.

The first five busses they received had bad firmware. The later busses with different batteries work fine. Also, the GMT bus garage "does not have suitable fire mitigation equipment to store or charge an electric bus indoors at this time", so part of the problem is GMT's reluctance to charge them indoors due to their own infrastructure limitations.

GMT also stated "Since the barrier to charging under 41 degrees is simply a software update, the manufacturer could find a technical solution that could resolve the problem this week." I think GMT is just trying to light a fire under the manufacturer to update the firmware quickly so they don't have to upgrade their bus garage immediately.

Then you're going to be gobsmacked by how they can reconstruct a person's physical appearance from just their skull bones.

Back to the topic at hand, it's not that difficult to theorize about reproducing the voice's tonal characteristics. A person's voice is influenced by their skull shape, jaw size, sinus cavities, muscle structure, neck length, etc. With millions of examples to match voice intonation to physical appearance, they can make a reasonable approximation of a person's voice tonal sound.

What they would have problems with is regional accents. A person growing up in NYC, Dallas, LA, Atlanta, and Bangor, ME will have different accents that would be harder to replicate.