The first season of the BSG reboot was tedious, and reached the point of me saying that I don't care about these people, because the utter stupidity and short-sightedness of some major characters was just too much to handle. It got better after that. *And* it felt like it was just a long string of figuring out ways to survive the situation.

SG-1 and Atlantis did not fall into either trap. Almost without exception, the characters were smart, and the ones who behaved in stupid and/or power-hungry ways were inevitably shamed, and eventually learned from it or (in the case of enemies) died.

SG-1 had the most diverse pile of unrelated episodes in Season 1, and after their introduction in the first three episodes, they barely even touched the Goa'uld again for most of that season (key part of episode 14, plus minor bit parts in episodes 8, 16, 20, and finally becoming front and center again in 22). There was not really even an arc in that season.

Atlantis was similar. Most of the season was exploring their new part of the universe.

The out-of-control bit in Universe just turned every episode into a repeat of the same one: Go to a planet, something goes wrong, "Oh, no, they're not going to get back," somehow they figure out a way to get back. They didn't get control until somewhere around episode 30 (halfway through season 2), which was when the show started to not suck, but by that point, they had lost more than 53% of their initial audience.

I'm not generalizing at all. There are real grid stability reasons why you don't want someone drawing that much power to charge their car fully in four hours. If your use case requires fast charging, you need to have grid batteries to spread your impact out over time, or else you are causing significant problems. A few people doing that isn't a big deal, but if everybody did it, it would be apocalyptic. That's why the target for automakers should be fully charging the car overnight, or 10+ hours.

Additionally:

• You're dragging around the extra weight of additional/larger charger hardware, which wastes energy.
• Everyone who doesn't have the three-phase connection and high-amperage breaker setup will be using the charging hardware at a fraction of its rated capacity, which is likely to be less efficient.
• Compared with a dedicated HVDC charger, you're drawing power at a higher amperage and lower voltage for a longer distance, which wastes even more energy.
• It probably involves an entire additional charging board, which means one more set of components that can fail and require service.
• Most of the the locations where you would charge likely do not support such fast AC charging speeds, so chances are you'll mostly benefit from it at home anyway.

And while the folks who take advantage of that extra charging speed might save a little money in the manufacturing cost compared with installing an external HVDC charger, it still adds up to far less than the amount of money wasted on bigger hardware by everyone who got that hardware but doesn't need it.

It's not even close to being a reasonable engineering tradeoff, IMO. You're far better off focusing on making HVDC chargers cheap. And for the amount of effort required to keep the unnecessarily complex hardware going long-term (manufacturing replacement parts, stocking them, etc.), the manufacturer would probably be better off just buying HVDC chargers wholesale and giving them to customers who complain. A HVDC charger with 22kW output costs only about $3k.

Trump is the one who tore up the deal that put inspectors into Iran to ensure that they didn't get nukes. If Iran gets nukes, it is because Trump gave them nukes on a silver platter in a misguided effort to "own the libs" who put that agreement in place.

And the things he has done regarding oil — disrupting Venezuela, creating a situation where Iran can mine the Strait of Hormuz, massively inflating the cost of oil, eliminating world sanctions on buying oil from Iran, etc. — are also effectively giving massive aid to a state sponsor of terrorism.

It's hard not to see the direct consequences of many of his actions as commander in chief as anything less than supporting terrorism. The only question is whether it was done intentionally or merely because of utter incompetence.

What I don't understand is this: Did Congress authorize this spending? No? Where's the budget for this coming from, and why has no one already filed a permanent restraining order to prevent the illegal misappropriation of federal funds?

I ask because to do this, they have to steal — yes, steal — money away from something Congress DID authorize. And this isn't a tiny amount of money we're talking about here. There are probably some other major efforts that Congress authorized that won't happen because our idiot-in-chief is stealing the funds to do something else.

Customers who care should just sue. This is pretty strictly a civil issue, and the government isn't going to bother to intervene. It's up to the customers to force them to reverse that.

That said, 22 kW AC charging is absurd. It requires 32A of three-phase power or 90A of a single phase 240V, which means a three-phase 40A circuit or a single-phase 120A circuit. That's larger than the total capacity of my entire breaker box at my house. In a sane universe, the demand charges alone would be enough to discourage anyone from charging at more than about a third of that rate, because unless you just happen to be producing solar power locally at the time, it's horrible on the electric grid.

Even Tesla never went much above about 17 kW for home charging, and they stopped doing that years ago because there was approximately zero demand or real-world use of higher charge rates.

So while technically speaking, they are absolutely doing something wrong, they're still right that the number of people who legitimately care is likely to be within the margin of error of being zero.

They deliberately but in a system for verifying that the software is allowed to run, and deliberately used a certificate that has a fixed expiration date. Whether through incompetence or malice, Microsoft deliberately bricked the software. Technically, they did it a decade ago, and it is only just now being revealed that their time bomb is about to go off, but the effect is the same.

It is per se fraudulent dealing/false advertising to sell a perpetual license to software with full knowledge that it will stop working on a specific date.

This is, IMO, an open-and-shut Lanham Act/false advertising case. And any even remotely competent judge should absolutely throw the book at them.

If the class action lawyers are at all competent and the primary plaintiffs are not horrible people (bought off), the class action should demand that Microsoft release a hot fix that turns off the relevant validation. It's an hour of coding effort for Microsoft, though it would probably take half a dozen engineers a week or two to spin up a build environment capable of building it. The hassle of being forced to unlock the software would do far more to make them and other companies wary of such shenanigans in the future than any mere financial penalty ever could.

What we need is a clear duck typing law for digital purchases. If a purchase of a digital product looks like a sale, it is a sale, and there must be no known technological provision that is even capable of preventing its indefinite use. It must be possible to freely transfer it to new machines, to new users, etc. without limitation. Period. It must not be possible for the company to prevent this, either through action (deliberately disabling it) or inaction (failing to renew a certificate, failing to keep activation servers online, etc.).

If you can't do that, you should not be allowed to sell digital products. No grey area.

This means that your licensing servers must be available forever, or else you must not require their use. This means that when you buy a movie, it doesn't matter if the distributor's license for that movie is no longer valid, because you, the customer, bought a license that is perpetual, and it must be honored. And so on.

On the flip side, we really ought to get rid of the entire culex genus because of West Nile and various forms of encephalitis, and we also really ought to get rid of other Aedes albopictus as a secondary vector for several other diseases. There are few species of mosquitoes that aren't problematic to humans. This one is just slightly safer to get rid of because it is a recent invader, rather than something that has been part of the ecosystem longer.

Except when they swell up and become dangerous.

True. Most people don't keep them long enough to require a second swap.

I'm not convinced there's any reason you can't have both. As far as I can tell, the main thing preventing easy battery swaps on smartphones is the label on the back case with the IMEI and stuff.

As long as there isn't any legal compliance reason why that has to be on the back of the phone after the repair, you could make battery change-out as simple as "Remove some number of screws on the side, lift the sealed back off like a giant wristwatch, thus disconnecting the battery that's glued to the back, attach a new back with a new battery and new rubber seals, and put the screws back in."

The only challenging parts are designing a self-aligning connector between the battery and the motherboard (if you make the distance between contacts big enough, this is just trivial spring contacts, so when I call it "challenging", I'm being generous) and convincing the companies to stop making the back case and the sides as a single piece and spend an extra half cent per unit on a silicone seal strip between the two. Oh, and convincing the companies that user-visible screws is a good thing instead of a design horror, because form-over-function has been the biggest plague on the tech industry since the 1990s. The point is that it's more a "We don't want to" problem than a "This is genuinely hard" problem.

And even if there's a compliance reason why the numbers have to be on the back case, you could make part of the back case permanent, or make it possible for people to mail order the part customized for their device, or order iron-on decals, or... there are various ways to solve that problem.

That would be a disaster. There are real power and performance wins from having RAM on-die. And by the time you need more RAM, you'll probably want a newer CPU. Now if you mean flash *storage*, then... maybe.

There's probably too much metal between the cargo hold and the passenger compartment for Bluetooth to work anyway. I think all actual bombs on aircraft (other than the failed shoe bomber) have been triggered by pressure switches at altitude or timers.

So it's not just that they wouldn't be stupid enough, but also that it probably wouldn't be successful even if they were.

My house is a relatively normal size (1800 square feet), and it still takes more than three full minutes for water in my shower to reach full temperature when I run it straight hot. If I also turn on both faucets in my bathroom, I can get that down to about twenty or thirty seconds, which is barely tolerable.

At my mom's house in Tennessee, the distance the water has to travel is comparable, but it takes only ten seconds or so.

It's a huge downside to all the water-saving showerheads and faucets that were forced upon us here in California decades ago. We waste a lot of time and energy to make up for a water shortage that exists only because of decades of politicians being short-sighted and kicking the desalination can down the road over and over so that the money doesn't get spent on their watch.

Translation: A company that has the potential to benefit from regulation by squeezing out competitors wants more regulation.

I'm not saying they're not right, just that it seems awfully convenient for a company specializing in pumps that recirculate data center water to want efficiency regulations that would push customers towards their most efficient (and thus presumably most high-margin) pumps.

Instead of having your hot water fan out in a tree, you wire it like a token ring with a return pipe, where each faucet only has a short bit of pipe between it and the ring. Then, you have a pump to circulate hot water through the ring-shaped pipe network. That way, it takes half a second to get hot water instead of half a minute or more.

Sure. I'd imagine most hardware vendors will want it. I'm just saying that the wording, at least as described in the summary, is... problematic at best.