Yes, or at least it's starting to. Certainly, why the Haussdorf and Minkowski dimension matters, as it must mean that the needle's movement describes a very smooth shape, and I suppose a very solid one with the set of possible needle orientations completely filling that space, right? There must be a slew of interesting implications I couldn't even guess at, given my relatively paltry mathematical knowledge.

I blame school scheduling for that. From Jr High on through college, all my math classes were first thing in the morning. Since I spent the bulk of those classes face down and drooling on the textbook, I'm amazed I made it through calculus. Had they been held at a decent hour, I probably would have stuck with it longer.

So, in MY perfect world, we'd be going back to cartridges, where the 'cartridge' is basically a 256GB NVMe drive, so the game cartridge could theoretically be patched on-media, load times would be far lower, and there wouldn't be nearly as much dependency on massive storage on the console itself.

The reason why it will never happen this way, is because NVMe drives, even at Sony-levels of purchase, would be a significant portion of the game itself. If Sony got 256GB drives at $30 a pop wholesale (about half of what a quick look showed a drive for at retail), and they simply forwarded the cost onto the consumer, ignoring markup *and* all the retooling required to write games to NVMe media at scale, pretty much every game would be $100 or more, just because of the media...and if Sony can get away with selling games for $100 a pop, then you KNOW that Microsoft is going to trip over themselves to do the same.

Perhaps GameStop could find a new role, in that they could sell blank Sony-blessed cartridges, and then sell a case with a license key, that allows Gamestop to write the game, at its current patch level (it'd take 5-10 minutes to write in-store), to the blank cartridge, maybe include a box with a manual and some cover art if they're feeling fancy, and the cost of the media is externalized onto the customer without the game itself costing more...but it'd have to be a system like that for such media to work.

The reason why optical media is still the one everyone points to is that it's the compromise that works - users have immutable copies of the game, and the discs cost about a dime each - a trivial amount for Sony to absorb. Even if we bring it up to $5 for the case, the amortized cost of the duplication equipment, and the transportation fee...it's still cheaper than Sony will ever get flash media on a per-unit basis.

Ultimately, the reason people want discs is not because people LIKE optical media specifically, but because a whole lot of us have had download-only or stream-only media become unusable due to some licensing drama that our subscription fees were supposed to pay for. Optical media is the compromise, not the technologically elegant solution.

What I don't understand about it is the Minkowski dimension part. Not being a mathematician, seeing "Minkowski dimension 3" makes me think, "well, duh, if you're rotating something in three dimensions, you need three dimensions." If that's obvious to me, an idiot, I must not know what it actually means or it wouldn't be an open problem. Looking up what a Minkowski dimension is, I'm puzzled.

You seem to know what you're talking about, so if you know and it isn't any trouble, can you explain that and how it relates? I can just ask an AI, but maybe I'm not the only one who's curious about it. Plus, you're probably a real person, which is nice.

A Ferengi without profit is no Ferengi at all.

I don't think they did anything, group dynamics just ran its course. All Apple did was add a hint of luxury, users did the rest.

Please no off-topic political spam. I'd agree if you said it anywhere else, but not here.

After re-reading the summary, I may be wrong about that.

Or, buy something you can't afford because of a psychological failure - allowing unchecked desire to make decisions instead of reason. I want an RTX5080, and I could turn a paycheck into one, but what then? I have bills, a mortgage, and three other mouths to feed. I can't afford what I want, so I go without or I go with cheaper. Which, on account of said bills, mouths, and mortgage, means I go without. I could make payments. I could put it on a credit card. Those are expensive, and Lord knows I don't need more expenses.

It's not outsourcing, it's allowing other companies to finance Apple devices. If that was something you could only do through Apple, it wouldn't be long before the EU fined them for it.

It's amazing when you realize just how many problems in society are the result of nothing more than a lack of self-discipline.

I do. I buy the cheapest iPhones and keep them for as long as possible.

It's hard to compete when the other side is cheating. IP theft and subsidies are how they cheat. And don't pretend that there isn't a security threat by having their hardware in our infrastructure. They sold us port cranes and used them to spy on every container that passed through every port in the US except Savannah. If you think they should also be processing our telecoms and data, you're mad.

They're saying that they can't operate without a Chinese knockoff of something invented in the US? I call BS and offer instead to offer to allow them to f-k themselves. China isn't trying to do anyone any favors, they're trying to eliminate the competition. We're the competition.

That's a pretty messed up thing to say.

if the woman studying sea life was named Julie Dagon.