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Comment Re:Robot vacuum cleaners - meh (Score 1) 92

A real vacuum cleaner just about maxes out a standard residential 120v 15a circuit, as anyone who remembers the incandescent bulb era can attest to. A circuit with a few lamps shared with a vacuum cleaner could easily end with you flipping a breaker or replacing a blown fuse.

When you look at the absolutely tiny lithium ion pack these robo-vacs come with, ...

Sitting on my kitchen table right now is a drone pack. It's 57,5Wh, smaller the batteries of most modern Roombas. It's 50C - thus it can output up to 2,9kW. And there's even higher packs available than that. Lithium ion cells can handle some truly high power outputs. It's *energy*, not *power*, that is their limitation. Run a pack at 50C and it'll be empty in a bit over a minute. That said, on hard floor surfaces there is absolutely no reason why you should be drawing more than 300-400W or so, and you can get by with well less than that. High powers are for like shag carpeting and the like. Also, the head matters more than the power (though of course contribute) - for a hard floor, for example, a fluffy roller head is ideal.

Comment Re:Rejected the AMZN Aquisition? (Score 3, Insightful) 92

Facts. I used to have a Roomba for years, but as I live in Europe, it was getting increasingly hard to deal with modern features (like the self-emptying base which needs 120V power). I reluctantly switched to a Roborock when my power converter died, and just, wow, they're light years ahead of iRobot. I think iRobot has been coasting on its name for a while now.

Comment This is good. And not about teenagers. (Score 4, Insightful) 88

Commercial "social media" shouldn't exist in the first place. This will force teenagers to learn about computers, networks, pseudonyms, IRC and self-hosted forums. That can't be a bad thing.

These laws aren't about teenagers anyway. Like a 15 year old me would care if commercial social media is off limits to me. I'd have a spoof account up and running in 5 minutes of the law taking effect. This is about the authorities being able to fine social media giants for bazillions if they chose to target teens. Good stuff. The sooner these corps vanish again and get replaced by citizen run networks, the better.

Comment Yet another Fluxbox / Windowmaker? (Score 1) 21

We certainly do _not_ have a lack of Windowmanagers in the open source world. And the presentation looks suspiciously like yet another WM. Does it have decent defaults and clipboard management that isn't a complete mess and/or broken? Does it have a proper feature complete file and font manager? What about icon management? Those would be my number one distinctions between a simple WM and a DE. And I seriously doubt that this is one delivers on those accounts.

Notch up half-assed FOSS WM #531 I guess. Yes?

Comment Re:Ihre Papiere (Score 2) 269

USAID was horrifically corrupt

The cuts to USAID are projected to cause 14 million extra deaths - a large minority of those children - by 2030. And USAID engendered massive goodwill among its recipients

But no, by all means kill a couple million people per year and worsen living conditions (creating more migration) in order to save $23 per person, that's clearly Very Smart(TM).

And I don't know how to inform you of this, but the year is now 2025 and the Cold War and the politics therein ended nearly four decades ago. And USAID was not created "to smuggle CIA officers" (though CIA offers used every means available to them to do their work, certainly), it was created as a counterbalance to the USSR's use of similar soft power to turn the Third World to *its* side.

Comment Re:Ihre Papiere (Score 1) 269

They can go back at any point if they don't think the conditions and salaries offered are worth the job. What matters is that they remain free to leave, with no "catches" keeping them there (inability to get return transport, inability to communicate with the outside world, misinformation, etc etc). Again, there's a debate to have over what conditions should be mandated by regulation, but the key point is that the salary offered - like happens illegally today en masse - is lower than US standards but higher than what they can get at home.

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