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Comment Re:Blessing in disguise? (Score 1) 63

I got one around 2008. They were the best of the non-premium 1080p HDMI screens at the time.

The one I got had slightly better test review scores on display quality than the LG that year. The Sony was 20% better for 3x the price.

It lasted about twelve years and by then a bigger 4K with much brighter colors was half the cost in nominal dollars, so probably 1/4 the cost in real terms.

And by then cheap flashable streaming sticks were available as was pihole and fairly easy outbound NAT rewriting rules to keep the beasts contained.

Comment "Critical Infrastructure" (Score 1) 175

Well nothing we think of as "critical infrastructure" is using consumer routers - and if it were that could and should be remedied quickly without a ban on consumer routers.

So ... this leaves us with an open question for this to make legal sense.

The best fit is probably an Internet Drivers License and mandatory packet signing for a surveillance control grid and CBDC coming down the pike rapidly.

When in the course of Human Events....

Comment Re:Rust could be awesome. (Score 2) 31

Yeah, not sure if you remember the Vegan Crossfit Pythonistas.

Instead of saying, "we could write a program to..." they would dogmatically intone, "we could write a Python script to..." in almost every situation.

Not sure who taught them the NLP but their dedication was a fervor.

A whole lot of rewriting of fast, debugged, working code got rewritten by them just because Perl, Ruby, and Bash felt like heresy.. For a while python stacktraces were the error message of common use on Fedora.

Comment "Stop making people hate you." (Score 1) 48

Now that we know that Meta lobbied for all of these simultaneous "age verification" laws he's losing what little support he still had.

Have you seen that interview where he just has a bottle of barbecue sauce on his bookshelf?

To make him "relatable" they say?

There's a decades old cartoon that asks, "how would you like your tyranny wrapped, in 'stopping terrorism' or 'protecting the children'?

2025 edit: 'stopping antisemitism' as that's all DoJCRD seems to know about.

Comment Re: Potential dangers (Score 1) 92

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

Comment Re:So much for state's rights. (Score 1) 75

States have no rights in the American system. They have powers, insofar as they exercise them.

Humans have rights, granted by God, as the default religious basis for the Natural Rights Republic.

You'll notice that Regulating AI appears nowhere in Article I , and Federalist 10 explains why these powers were strictly limited.

Yet the Political/Parasite class is happy to abrogate their power for power and money and ensure a government school child never hears about The Federalist Papers in thirteen years of compulsory schooling.

So we're left with too few Americans who even know they should be livid.

Perhaps letting Robert Maxwell and Howard Zinn be in charge of the textbooks was a massive and fatal mistake.

Comment Re:WTF is wrong with this guy's brain? (Score 5, Informative) 114

He's also a sleasebag who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by three women (and in general being a sex pest to many more). When a former friend (Jonny Robb) threatened to out him over it (it had been gnawing at him for a long time, and he was friends with some of the girls), Milton entrapped him (deliberately switching the topic to money, baiting him into asking for money to stay quiet, knowing that he was poor), then when he got Robb to ask for money, reported him into the police for extortion. Robb - his old friend - committed suicide after being released on bail. Milton rained largesse on local politicians, including the Attorney General's campaign. Milton was never investigated by the AG's office for sexual assault, while they arrested Robb immediately just on Milton's word.

I've talked with people online who knew Jonny Robb, and the universal answer was that he was the kindest person you'd ever meet. He had a hard life, struggled through overcoming depression and addiction, and had a lot of sympathy for others who were struggling as a result. I saw a podcast once where he was a guest, and I remember one of the topics was about a recent event where he was at a fast food restaurant, and there was a homeless lady, clearly mentally ill / schizophrenic, who was in general freaking out the guests and the staff, who didn't know what to do with her, and were probably minutes from calling the police. Robb orders for both himself and for her and sits down and eats with her, chats with her. She's having a great time, having not gotten attention like this in ages, starts joking that he's her boyfriend, etc. After they eat, he walks her out, much to the relief of the guests and staff, heads to a store and buys her a new sleeping bag and stuff. And she looks both simultaneously happy with her nice new stuff, but also terrified, and he suddenly realizes, oh shit, other homeless people are just going to steal this off her. And during the interview, he looked almost like he was going to cry when he said that.

Anyway, he's dead now.

Comment Re: Potential dangers (Score 1) 92

I literally have a BA in horticulture. Regolith is NOT a good choice for hydroponics. Period. Stop trying to pretend it is one. Also, regolith has nothing to do with "shales", and it's not clay minerals either.

The closest thing to industrial hydroponics with it is using it to make rock wool (if the elemental composition is correct) - but you can also use, you know, rocks for that. Rock wool (basalt fibre) is basically air blown / centrifugally-flung lava (artificial Pele's hair) that has been spun. Rock wool actually *is* a common and effective cultivation medium for hydroponic (with the caveat that its reusability is limited, and on Earth we usually don't bother). The problem is that rock wool isn't just basalt. It's basalt + limestone/slag + binders (sprayed into the air to collect and bind the fibres) + other chemical treatments. You may be able to substitute anorthosite or similar for the limestone, but the binders aren't available, so you'd have to come up with new techniques to collect the fibres and make a "knitted" or "sintered" rock wool. As for other chemicals, the full composition of horticultural rock wool usually isn't disclosed (each manufacturer has their own optimal formula to be an ideal substrate), but you generally have to treat the fibres in various ways (as an example, for insulation, which has very different demands, they treat the rock wool with mineral oil)

The statement about bassalt fiber is not meant to be taken in a horticultural context.

"Tell me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse without telling me you've never been in a commercial-scale greenhouse"

Those greenhouse tomatoes that you buy at a store out of season? They're probably grown like this. A TL/DR for you: you start out with rock wool (basalt fibre) plug trays to start your seedlings. You then put one seedling plug each into larger rectangular blocks of rock wool that have holes in the centre for them. When they're ready, you put them into a bagged slab of rock wool (usually a couple per bag), and that's what you produce from. You only maintain a small number of vines from each, regularly pruning off all internode suckers, as you have a fixed space between plants and a fixed amount of root volume so can't have them be expanding outwards (the fixed amount of root volume also means that you have to prune lower leaves to maintain balance). Your vines keep getting longer (and need to to produce more flower/fruit clusters), so when they get to the top of your wire, you incrementally slide them over until they're growing more and more horizontally. When you can no longer slide them over any more or they simply get too long, you remove the plants, toss the rock wool slabs, and start over.

And lastly, if your plan to deal with perchlorates from water is *literally splitting the water with electrolysis*, then you better stop celebrating the existence of this poison on Mars (one poison among many, it should be added - arsenic is higher than on Earth, chromium is commonly hexavalent, etc).

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"Truth never comes into the world but like a bastard, to the ignominy of him that brought her birth." -- Milton

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