Of course, the most sensible way would be to say "hey, you keep dithering on this setting, it's clearly not something you confidently want, so we're going to go ahead and shut it off and if you really want it back, you're going to have to grow a year older and wiser first."

Absolutely. What I'm taking home from all of this is:

Don't buy anything within a month before Prime Day because the price may be artificially inflated.
Don't buy anything on Prime Day because it rewards their price-manipulation.

But seriously, these articles keep coming up - and I supposed that's good - but everyone should always be price-conscious at all times. Buyer beware.

Thanks for replying, but in two words, "don't care". Not about your comment, but about the direction it goes. I object to misleading verbiage. What the official said was demonstrably, provably, clearly false. That is bad and a problem and that shouldn't be allowed to go unchallenged.

The why of there not being a backup is beside the point. The speed at which government moves is beside the point. That you got crap Internet is beside the point. They may all be interesting points, but they are not relevant to the point I was making.

I agree the official didn't say it couldn't have a backup due to cost. And I demonstrated that size is not a prohibitive factor. That quantity of data can be backed up, and can be backed up easily. Could have had a backup. Not could not have had a backup.

For the official to claim could not have when it could have is misleading. The why of it not having a backup doesn't get asked when the baseline is "couldn't have".

Once we arrive back at could have had a backup system it's just about the reasons/excuses. I object primarily to falsely cutting off that discussion.

My favorite is the snowjob. "The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity."

Couldn't. A quick Amazon lookup shows me a 20T Ironwolf Pro is $455 CDN. 50 of those gets you 1P, at under $25k CDN.

Now, sure, you need a some of infrastructure to connect 50 drives. And you need some infrastructure and bandwidth to handle syncing between the two sites. But... that's a cloud provider's task. Bottom line is that for the price of less than a single Hyundai EV, you could own the hardware which would last for about 5 years. Divide that down to monthly payments and that's the ballpark of what you'd be paying a cloud provider.

Couldn't. Come on.

I think you're close to an insight here.

These Sharpies have six components. A plastic cap, a plastic barrel, a plastic plug at the bottom, ink, the metal tip-holder, and the functional part that actually does something - and is imported from Japan.

It's not a stretch of the imagination to envision a factory that makes three plastic chunks, some ink, and one metal part. Your supply-chain is basically: injection plastic, dyes, and some tin. For Sharpie, it's trivial.

Now imagine making a cell phone. Screen comes from one supplier. Glass from another. PCB comes from another. Battery from another. Chipset from another. Camera from another. Sensors from another. Plastic/metal case from another. And each of those inputs is complex enough that wherever they come from, two or more layers of other suppliers are involved. It's a whole ecosystem of manufacture. Well... China et al managed to turn themselves into a supermarket grocery store. Doesn't matter if you need eggs, flour, diapers, or get-well-soon cards, you can get it all in one place. That is why it becomes worth shipping. Enough individual specialties moved, making it synergistic for more to move.

My personal theory is that politicians cannot create jobs.

At best they can not hinder jobs and at worst they destroy them. This of course disregarding ignoring government work like road construction and bureaucracy. But straightforward jobs? No. Normal jobs happen naturally as a result of demand and the prosperity to spend on that demand. Every politician claims they will create jobs. And lower crime. And cure cancer. And make your dick harder. None of them actually know how to.

My voting therefore mostly comes down to "who is going to be less of an asshole" while not creating jobs.

I know, right?

I'd expect scientists with limited time and budget to do ever experiment simultaneously regardless of space constraints, equipment requirements, complexity of detection, and the scope of their mandate.

It's truly ghastly how experts don't rely on Internet laypeople who know it all already.

Please. People pay good money to watch a dude throw a ball. We've always been doomed.

Why - in 2025 and in an industry where precision matters - are doctors hand-writing anything?

Ambiguity isn't okay. Doctors should be entering their notes and prescriptions digitally. I know typos still happen, but it's got to be (way) better than anything by-hand.

Yes, Microsoft meant and said it, when they announced WMIC's deprecation nine years ago, in 2016.

https://techcommunity.microsof...
"Removing a deprecated component helps reduce complexity while keeping you secure and productive."

Less legacy code to maintain means fewer opportunities to get it wrong.

As much as I'm used to doing "wmic bios get serialnumber" as a quick & dirty way to get a machine's details, I guess I'll learn to fire up PowerShell and do "Get-WmiObject -Class Win32_Bios | Select-Object SerialNumber".

Exactly. Up-thread I dug up that there are about 1.3 million EVs in California. And the article says 800,000 home chargers. That means at 1:1 nozzle-to-charger, the demand for public charging is 61% lower. A single charger is already equivalent to almost three nozzles in terms of supply/demand. Even if you assume a 5-minute pump versus a 60-minute charge, after that 3x multiplier you're already at 1/4 the equivalent throughput.

Well, I mean... I'm not gay, communist, or transexual, but otherwise you're not far off.

As for ICE and deportation... they don't have any jurisdiction where I live. And at this point I'm kind of on board with ICE deporting all the non-natives in America back where they came from. Crewmembers under Captain Kirk will have a hard time in Spain, Portugal, Poland, Italy, England, France etc, and the massive pile of African countries where all the slaves came from, but left-leaning folk will be just fine.

You're admitting you're in love with a dead guy? You know that Jesus didn't have Internet access, right? If you really want to live as Jesus did, it's time to log of and go build a chair or something. Also, you may want to see a therapist about the delusion that your Dad is God.


Be a better troll next time. This just entertained me.

It's pretty obvious you're one person. So let's treat you that way.

EVs have batteries on average between 50KWh and 100KWh. A quick search indicates there are about 1.3 million EVs in California. So... approximately 97,500,000KWh or 97,500MWh of total EV capacity. Charging literally every Californian EV from 0% to 100% consumes approximately that.

Another quick search tells us that California has a generation capacity of around 87,000MW. The fine summary above tells us that two years ago California was 66% clean energy. Meaning about 57,420MW of clean generation. Meaning... less than two hours of clean power generation charges literally every EV in California.

Average EV range today is about 250 miles. Let's drop that to say... 200 due to older cars. At 1.3 million cars, that's 260 million miles of range we've charged. Yet another quick search tells us average ICE MPG is about 27. We're talking about in the ballpark of 10 million gallons of gasoline not being burned.

So what the hell are you going on about? Zero litres of contaminated water. 260 millions miles driven. 10 million gallons of gasoline not burned. That is what happens if you charge every Californian EV.

Sure, sure, you can play lunatic games going "charging all at once", inventing a fake scenario where we have to come up with some ludicrous extra generation capacity, as if it would be sustained, but it isn't. You supercharge an EV for roughly an hour, or you home-charge (the majority) overnight away from peak demand (and maybe dip into the generous storage capacity they've been building up). Then you drive for a week. Your scenario is not representative of reality.

Causes might be the wrong word for what I'm trying to express. Enables might be the right one.

What I mean is... if there are only two human beings left on the planet and robots and AI produce anything they ask for, which one is wealthier? You can't measure that because production is on-demand and effectively limitless. But when you introduce a third person who is demanding to consume something... for instance the time or attention of one of the two originals, that makes them more wealthy, relative to the other one.

Wealth isn't entirely about stuff. It's about ego.