Of all the early computer start-ups, Apple is the only "started in the garage on a shoestring budget and passion to create something everyone would love" that I can recall hearing about. Were they they only ones to get started like that?

And I see so many people already trash-talking Jobs... business sense without a great product has nothing, but tech genius without business never takes off. Both are necessary! It takes a good product and a good salesman to make a successful brand. Apple was fortunate to have both, it was their recipe for success.

I've started to see warnings in terminal when using keyed SSH, something along the lines of "vulnerable to store-now-decode-later attacks". I assume this is due to not using eliptic-curve codes in my PK generation?

The most recent crashes I've had were all due to external hardware. (usually a dock being unplugged) I haven't seen that recently though so maybe that was addressed.

I've also had issues in the past with not going to sleep / waking back up properly, but again haven't really seen that recently so maybe that too was addressed.

Pretty much 100% of my recent related issues have simply been "system's getting slow, and no my memory hasn't all leaked away, it just wants a restart", and so I DO restart it, and I get all my performance back. It's annoying, but not impactful. Not sure what's getting gummed up under the hood, I don't see anything getting logged or showing up in any monitoring tool.

I tend to push my machine pretty regularly though, and end up being coerced into rebooting about once a month.

I do a lot of photo manipulation, and I HAVE ran into a problem with Finder's QuickLook gradually getting slower after tens of thousands (yes really) of videos and images being quick-looked, but I can just kill the Finder's QuickLook process and it automatically bounces back fresh as a baby. So whatever "general slowness" issue I've been encountering after weeks of uptime could probably be fixed if I knew what needed to be bounced, but nothing is making itself obvious with high cpu time or memory use, so I just have to reboot to get it back.

A bit OT but I do find it a bit sad that windows has decided to do away with the traditional BSoD, not by making the OS more stable, but by hiding it when it happens. "Nothing to see here, everything's fine!" (NakedGun)

maybe not? Look at cache for example, there's L1, L2, and L3, each getting bigger and slower. Just because L2 is slower doesn't mean it doesn't get used.

Or look at some of the older storage techniques like hybrid drives. (such as 1tb of spinning platters, with 32gb of ssd)

Modern SSDs are even doing that. Watch the IO speed when you write a large file, see how it's fast to a point and then gets slow? that's a write buffer getting filled up.

Maybe the same technique could be used with ram, basically on the same lines as the VM files that unix systems (including Mac OS) use?

So there's plenty of precedent for adding higher latency storage, simply because the big increase in capacity is worth a little added latency. Carefully managing what you use it for greatly reduces the impact of the latency.

I suspect Windows supporters will claim Mac users are less intelligent, which would suggest they do MORE stupid things. And if stupid things correlate with crashes, Macs would crash more.

But they don't. So somebody is wrong about something, or there's more missing information.

Legally speaking, threats fall under "assault". If I raise my fist to you and step up and punch you, I'll probably be charged with "assault and battery". Where "assault" is the "imminent, credible threat of physical violence" of raising my fist and approaching you, and "battery" is my actually hitting you, (and if I miss or you dodge, that trades n the Battery for a second Assault charge) It's an important distinction because the laws and consequences differ

A threat of physical violence must be credible to be assault. That usually places the bar at "a reasonable person would genuinely fear for their safety as a result of the words and actions".

"Remote threats" are handled a bit differently. They used to go through the US Mail and so were addressed with "mailing threatening communications" (part of 18 U.S. Code) although that requires a lot more investment and consideration. Get out pen and paper, think about what you're going to write, draft the threat, stuffit in an envelope, add a stamp, take it to a mail box. That involves lots of time to reconsider, plus the investment of time, paper, envelope, stamp, and finally time to go mail it. (all while reconsidering and being able to change your mind) Most threats never made it into the mailbox as tempers cooled and emotion gave way to reason. But if it made it all the way through that process, a reasonable person would more easily be able to conclude the threat was credible

Now, it's fifteen seconds of "furiously type a line or two of rage and click Send." And it's handled by the FCC now since it's using an interstate communications network. There's a separate "legal bar" for it to pass, but it's essentially the same thing. The laws are much more recently authored, and so require a bit more since courts now rely more on letter of the law than interpretation by a judge. They're looking for Intent (specifically, are you venting, intimidating, or announcing your intentions), does the message describe a credible threat to the victim, and is it specific about what's being threatened.

"I'm gonna dance a jig the day someone ends you!" - lacks intent
"if I get my hands on you l'm going to launch you into space and watch you suffocate!" - not credible
"you're going to regret the day you pissed me off!" - not specific

(Law Abiding Citizen demonstrates masterful avoidance of legal classifications by careful choice of words)

Although as mentioned above, power and money can press a thumb down on the scales of justice and get an investigation launched regardless of established legal standards.

To be fair, you don't have to DO anything criminal, you just have to be a suspect, or piss off someone with power and money. (like Patel) Then they get a court order, and then information is legally required to be handed over for investigation.

And so as long as you didn't actually do anything criminal, your identity should stay private and only visible to the investigators, and get swallowed by the system as the investigation gets closed. (unless above power/money pushes for a public arrest/hearing, regardless of merit)

Thunderbolt (4 etc) has been leading to things like external graphics cards and external PCI slot boxes hitting the market. This may end up taking a significant share of the "expandability" crowd away from the "internal upgrades" market.

I see this as especially significant with laptops. For years I've been using a large thunderbolt dock with my laptop at home, making it a pretty good desktop machine when I'm at home. It adds a 24" display, big external speakers and bass, camera, conference mic, external storage, gig ethernet, etc. And yet I can pull a single plug, stuff it in the bag, and hit the road with it, something not easy to do with a desktop computer. (not that it stopped us from hauling towers, monitors, keyboards, etc to LAN games in the 90s!)

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen performance CPUs or additional ram available via thunderbolt 4 yet. (or does it exist and I've just missed it?)

Maybe the next "mac pro" won't be a stand-alone computer, but instead it'll be a plug-in accessory that turns ANY mac into a mac pro?

It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

this looks like the EVs are going to be forced to decide in advance on the trolly car problem. "Do I save my passenger by injuring pedestrians, or almost certainly get my passenger killed?"

This is going to have to be coded in software. And if you think you can just avoid coding it, the choice will be made for you, BY THE CODE. It's a binary decision, you can't opt out of making the decision because INACTION is one of your options.

So eventually legislation is going to have to get on the books to answer it. From what I can tell, right now it's not codified in law for people, and they're letting prosecutors, judges, and occasionally juries decide whether the "correct" decision was made by a human in such cases. You can't take a car to court, so for liability reasons it's going to have to have a definitive answer in code, because coders, development teams, and entire corporations are going to get dragged up on the stand to answer to charges based on the decisions that were (or were NOT) hard-coded. All sides are going to force it - injured passengers, injured pedestrians, and survivors of fatalities.

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.

1. Fertilizer is made from methane, so that's also stuck there. This is a HUGE problem for countries like India.
2. Poor countries are already switching to 4 day work weeks to save fuel.
3. Iran is letting ships whose balances are settled in Yuan leave. That means the power of the petro-dollar is under serious threat.
4. Countries that can no longer get Iranian oil are now buying non-Iranian oil, which drives the price of ALL oil up. There's speculation that it will hit $200/barrel. That's more than 3x what it was over the last few years. That will affect the price of literally everything. All transportation costs go up, so costs for all goods go up.

At some point, the price will get high enough that some countries won't be able to buy it at all, they'll give up. At that point, some interesting things might happen, since the demand drop-off vs. the price drop off will cause a wobble in the price. People will start looking elsewhere for energy.

Solar and small-battery vehicles (e-bikes, e-scooters) might start taking off even more. You might not be able to buy petrol for your car, but your e-bike charges quickly and can still tow a few hundred pounds worth of stuff. Maybe BEVs adoption will become even MORE popular, since it's one less way you have to directly pay for petrol.

But this war is all con. 100%. Like, Trump didn't even fill up the oil reserves before going to war. China's been buying oil for MONTHS at low rates now, so they're actually the least impacted here, despite the fact that they get a lot of oil from Iran. That means they have zero impetus (not that they had much previously) to do anything about this. This is purely punishment for the USA. Those are expensive weapons being wasted on Iranian targets (in some cases, planes that are actually just paint on the ground). It might be possible for the USA to open up the strait again, but the second they leave, Iran can just close it off again. This might be the most forever of the forever wars, or it might just be an outright defeat for the USA.

This whole thing is such a mess on so many different axes. I didn't even get into how Israel is driving a lot of this, and it's all because Netanyahu is a corrupt warmonger. He's firing in all directions, and he's relying on the USA to protect him.

It wasn't just to maintain value for their corporate properties, it's because they love seeing people in the office, doing their bidding. They'd be able to save so much on capital expenditure if everyone worked from home, but they keep people in the office because they looooooove to see who they're oppressing.

Yeah, there was just fuel rationing and it FUNDAMENTALLY changed the car industry for decades? Big cars went out of style and Japanese econoboxes became a thing because people wanted to spend less on gas?

I get it, you were a KID in the 70s, so you didn't really understand what was going on and what the challenges were. But you could go and read about them now if you want--you're probably north of 50, I think you're ready to learn the truth.