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Comment Re: The Mac Pro died in 2019 (Score 2) 84

And of course that Mac Pro idea was killed by the cosmic trashcan thing. In a sense what one wants is a kind of 'docking tower' into which a Mac Studio fits, giving a lot of expansion. If you want a machine with 3 SSDs and 4 HDDs, you have to put up with crazy sprawl with modern macs. With an old school tower with it all contained inside, you had a single box you could pick up, carry around, and just plug in.

Comment Re:too bad (Score 1) 312

The Second Amendment was intended to be a check on federal power. None of the amendments were incorporated into jurisprudence about what individual states could do until arguably 1890 and not certainly until the early 1920s. Many states had laws around firearm storage for decades. In the 1830s, Massachusetts was the first among several states to generally bar carriage of firearms in public. Texas would follow suit in 1871.

The Heller decision written by Scalia was a sea change in constitutional law, but it laid down important limits that were respected in the MacDonald decision that followed soon after and which incorporated the Second Amendment as applying to states as well as the federal government. Scalia wrote that firearm law limitations were presumptively lawful, and essentially laid down an opportunity for the federal government to prohibit future types of weapons sales by preventing them from becoming publicly available. Here's what he wrote (citations removed).

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those "in common use at the time." We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of "dangerous and unusual weapons."

It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service—M-16 rifles and the like—may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause. But as we have said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty. It may well be true today that a militia, to be as effective as militias in the 18th century, would require sophisticated arms that are highly unusual in society at large. Indeed, it may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks. But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.

Scalia had no problem with regulating or even banning public availability of broad classes of weapons as long as those available to the public continued to be available to the public. In his view, existing weapons like missiles and new weapons like portable lasers could be banned because they were not "in common use." However, Scalia died in 2016, and the Court has moved to a substantially broader view than he had.

What are you going to do when Nazi Trump really ramps up the persecution? Oh right, sit back and protest and hope the government doesn't murder you all, ie just like Iran did to it's protesters two months ago.

The people who have clamored most over the last 40 years about government overreach are largely those most supportive of Trump's tyrannical behavior. However, the fastest growing segment of gun owners in the last couple of years are those on the left, with even more disproportionate growth among minorities. There are a lot of former military who are very unhappy with the direction that he's taken, too. There are a lot of guns on both sides and not nearly enough police or military to handle them all.

So far, the Trump administration's own overreach has been embarrassing enough to force them to back off. The videos of the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti were bad enough, but the responses by almost everyone up to and including Trump in labeling them terrorists and declaring that the ICE and CBP agents did no wrong before we even had multiple views of what happened caused them to backpedal (even the NRA chimed in against the administration). Bovino was removed from Minnesota and demoted, resulting in him either deciding or being forced to retire. They sent Tom Homan in, and the first thing he did was withdraw half of the agents assigned there, and most of the rest have returned to their assigned jurisdictions. Noem's constant bluster and media presence have sidelined her in the administration, destroyed almost any chance of a political future and cast a permanent pall over the brutal enforcement actions under her watch. Her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, isn't much better in terms of policy goals, but he has said that he doesn't like and doesn't want the constant press from extreme actions. The GOP, including Trump, is being forced to negotiate on things in the DHS budget bill that Trump declared just a couple of weeks ago were nonnegotiable. Trump's actions in Iran have backfired, and so far, the only negotiations happening seem to be in his own imagination, leaving him looking even worse, even among his own supporters.

They're weak and they know it, and their support isn't as solid as it was a year ago. Whether this means they continue to back down or they suddenly lash out, I don't know. But if they do move to mass violence, it isn't going to be against a group of unarmed pansies entirely incapable of shooting back. I hope it doesn't come to that, because it will become impossible to predict the outcome.

Comment Re:All it takes in our economy (Score 3, Informative) 57

Trump has issued 101 pardons in his first 13 months of office, many of whom were very obviously guilty of serious crimes and for which Trump was expecting a quid pro quo. The Cuellars are a prime example. The evidence against them was overwhelming, yet Trump pardoned them and then got angry that he registered to run as a Democrat for office in his district. And there's Changpeng Zhao, whom Trump didn't know anything about but pardoned on the idea that his prosecution was a "Biden witch hunt." We're supposed to ignore that Peng's company made the Trump family $2 billion richer a few months before.

Comment Re:His rockets are barely reusable (Score 2) 126

I'm not fond of Musk, but this part about SpaceX is just blatantly untrue. Falcon 9 has an enviable record, with only two full failures and one partial failure out of 619 launches. Of the 602 attempted recoveries, they've made 589 of them using 53 boosters for an average of 11 launches per booster, with at least one (B1067) completing 33 landings.

NASA has most certainly not given up on reusable rockets. They continue to plan for the Falcon line to be used, and New Glenn has some contracts with more likely coming as it demonstrates reliability. Vulcan is supposed to eventually get reuse capability (we'll see), and NASA uses that, too. Even most of the smaller rockets have or are developing reuse capability.

Tesla is a mess, Musk had to get SpaceX to buy Twitter and Grok, and Starship is clearly having more problems than expected, but SpaceX's core Falcon operations are working just fine.

Comment Re:What's the backlog at ASML? (Score 2) 126

For power, he will likely divert a bunch of solar panels and grid-scale batteries from Tesla.

The bigger issue is that he wants to put this close to sources of vibration, like the Tesla gigafactory that uses high impact tools to shape metal. Apparently reputable commenters elsewhere have said that these impacts, while invisible to human sensations, are likely enough to affect high-sensitivity chip manufacturing operations. Existing fabs all over the world have to take into account traffic from nearby highways, and the gigafactory will be even closer and involve sharper impacts.

He has also dismissed concerns about clean rooms in the past, saying that they're overblown, and that he'll be able to eat a cheeseburger and smoke a cigar in the same rooms that are running manufacturing operations.

He was good as an idea man for a while, but his ideas have lost contact with reality.

Comment Re:Contributed to Moral Decay (Score 1) 92

The ruthless selfishness of many billionaires and a certain POTUS are far more deserving of the term 'moral decay' than what goes on on OF. But when it comes to denouncing 'moral decay', people tend to look the other way unless and until something naughty comes along, then out come the condemnation and the pitchforks.

Comment Re:Excellent news, I guess (Score 1) 114

The enemy are companies making money of your data; business models championed by the likes of Google and Facebook. You could argue that they're just exploiting weak privacy laws and enforcement. The FBI aren't at fault for accessing publicly/commercially available data, unless there's some American law that forbids even this. Stop giving your data to companies. Stop supporting these businesses that don't respect you, your data or your privacy.

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