I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

#SaveWaterWithGoatse

Little paperclip is going to need about maybe, i dunno, 10cm of erodable shielding up front to absorb the dust debris in its flight path. These kind of stories always get excited and forget the shielding. Space isn't empty.

"squeezing it with the same pressure the outside of a submarine would feel 500 feet below the waves"

- The same pressure anything would be experience at the same depth. Oh but it's a submarine, so much more intuitive.
- 500 ft is about 150m
- rho.h.g can be approximated as 1 bar per 10m

"pressurizing the gas to approximately 15 bar". Thank you.

I've played this dance in other industries.

They will buy just enough from Arizona to keep it viable and show diversification, while buying most of it from Taiwan.

Arizona will probably be running a few batches a week, which keeps the processes in place and ensures that the knowledge is maintained and it is a viable source.

This might be 5% (made up number), 95% remains with Taiwan. The higher price impact is minimised, impacts on market etc. They might even be able to sell most of them as premium US products for defence and friends, or into the general US market to avoid tariffs.

It provides the safety net. If something happens they can relatively easily turn to knob and rapidly shift more production to Arizona because the initial set up work has all been done. But until then they will be minimizing quantity and maximising headlines.

I'm doing SwiftUI app development and upgraded one of my test devices to iOS 26 beta 4 this morning.

I don't see anything different, but I assume something different is happening under the hood.

...laura

Despite very credible allegations, Biden was never convicted of raping raping Tara Reade. And his daughter's recollections of him inappropriately showering with her outlasted any statute of limitations. But I see where you're going, there. The rest is a good fit, right down to the weaponized government, for sure. The plot twist is that the real kingpins are behind the scenes, using him as a puppet. It's good villain story line material fresh from real life.

Where I live (Kamloops, BC, Canada) the all-time high temperature record for a long time was 42C, set in July 1941. Most of southern B.C. set records that month. No air conditioning. Ugh! We demolished that record when it hit 47C in June 2021. I've never been so hot in my life...

The hottest we've been so far this summer was 36C. I expect to hit the Big Four Oh at least once, but the long-term forecast isn't promising.

...laura

"I used to be a bartender. Now I own a boat!"

I've always loathed the term "Nintendo Tax" because it implies some kind of penalty, like a wealth tax or a vice tax. Though I can't argue that it's not a real thing - Nintendo's best games hold their market value far better than rival games, even from other top-tier Japanese developers.

Still, I would approach this phenomena from the other direction. Nintendo is not able to maintain high prices because they're somehow fleecing people (as a tax would imply), but because they work to make games that stand the test of time. And then back it up with a sales strategy to match.

So much of the industry treats video games as ephemeral entertainment - something to consume, and then throw away as you move on to the next game. It's the traditional media model for TV and movies extended to interactive media. And for most of the industry it's an accurate observation: game sales are ridiculously front-loaded, and few games (especially single-player games) have a long tail. After the initial hype subsides, you need to lower your price quickly in order to keep unit sales (and thus revenue) from cratering. All the while you're already hard at work on next year's game.

But Nintendo has been able to channel the lifecycle of board games and card games. In their eyes they aren't creating media, they're creating a digital plaything. They're creating something that you'll play now, but you'll also want to play next month, next year, next decade. Case in point: Mario Kart 8 is 11 years old and the only thing that has really diminished its value (and sales) after all of this time is that it finally has a successor in Mario Kart World.

When is the last time you saw a permanent price cut on Monopoly? Uno? Settlers of Catan. The occasional sale, sure. But a copy of Catan is still going to sell for $40+, even today. That's the business strategy Nintendo is tapping into. If a game is good - like really, really good - and it's repeatedly replayable, then why does the price need to be cut soon after launch? Why can't people come along and discover it years later? Why does it need to be priced like it's a quickly depreciating asset - like a movie instead of a board game?

And that is the ultimately where the Nintendo Tax as we know it comes from. Make a game good enough, make a game gamey-enough, and don't devalue it by replacing it 3 years down the line - and it's something people will want to buy even years later.

Though this is a relatively recent phenomena. It's only after we hit the PS360U generation of hardware that systems had enough processing power and memory for games to not be constrained and do whatever they want. And that games stopped being obviously dated in terms of visual when compared to the previous generation. It's no coincidence that this was the last generation where Nintendo offered their Nintendo Selects line of discounted games.

I think you are confused. Allow me. The US gets to keep the dollar, no change there. The issue is the federal debt which is now heading up bigly, thanks to blagger boy's bill. It may head into very problematic territory if the promised GDP growth does not materialise alongside. Debt service will become too great. Printing money will follow and then it's inflation and you're heading to Zimbabwe. Meanwhile the greenback gets ditched; bad timing because we are just about at the point where China is starting to look like a reasonable alternative partner in comparison.

Still wondering about those upload speeds, though.

It's kind of a complex question. It depends on where you are and what plan you currently have.

If you're in a mid-split area (where Comcast is using a larger range of frequencies for upload traffic) and had a plan to take advantage of it - which it sounds like you are - then the new plans actually regress on upload speeds. The old ~1Gbps and ~2Gbps plans had 300Mbps nominal uploads (closer to 360Mbps due to overprovisioning), while all other plans were 150Mbps nominal. The new plans drop this down to 100Mbps nominal for everything except the new ~2Gbps plan, which gets 250Mbps nominal.

Unfortunately, you're facing an either/or proposition. Comcast won't remove the data cap for existing plans, you have to transition to a new plan. But if you do that, then you'll get the new, lower upload speeds. With that said, Comcast isn't forcing anyone to upgrade, so current customers can stay on their legacy plans indefinitely.

A hybrid is the answer for many people. They work well. Electric continues to improve but is still too much of a niche product.

I recently bought a new car. If I could lay my hands on something like a RAV4 Hybrid I'd be all over it. Good luck. I bought a VW Taos instead.

...laura

Apple typically provides mainstream support for a macOS release for a year, and then security patches for the two years following.

For example, macOS 13 (Ventura) was launched in the fall of 2022. It is receiving security patches until (at least) the fall of 2025.

quietly request the READ_GSERVICES permission. This lets them grab your Google Services Framework ID, a persistent device ID that survives app reinstalls and SIM swaps. Translation: perfect for long-term tracking.

Given how critical that permission is, how are they even able to request it quietly? I would think Android would be screaming at the top of its lungs if that permission were requested.

OpenSSH is the best known OpenBSD project, but they also makes pf (used in pfSense, OPNSense, etc.), OpenBGP, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, LibreSSL, etc.