FWIW, people for the most part evolved without cooking their food. We've been evolving since long before the dinosaurs.

OTOH, they didn't actually decide that "burnt food kills you", they decided that it increased some risks. I've never seen any evidence that this was wrong.

I think it was actually a reference to Revelations, though IIRC, that was supposed to be a mark both on the forehead and on the wrist.

YOU might think of it as a boycott, but I think of it as "self-protection". I avoid Musk's products for self protection...that I also hope it harms him at least a trifle is a minor additional bonus...and it doesn't matter if it doesn't.

This, though for the most part, you don't need the whole rover — only its brain (and perhaps its communications electronics). The situations where you need the whole rover involve figuring out how to get it unstuck. And the more experience they have at running the things around on Mars, the less likely that becomes.

However, Florida is a small enough part of the global problem, that what they do locally will have essentially no effect. They couldn't fix the problem with local actions, and they also probably can't make it measurably worse.

Note that the US is not such a small part. That's a large enough fraction of the problem to make a measurable difference. Scale is significant.

Most of Virginia doesn't get all that cold. 30 kids in a room with limited air circulation should suffice, even without lots of insulation. Air conditioning, however, might well be a different matter.

IIRC, there's a decent link between registered gun ownership and the suicide rate. However, a lot of gun ownership is unregistered, so that's probably not reliable.

I might well agree that the current administration is worse, and scale does, indeed, matter. But judging scale when one side is crippling state governments and the other side is removing individual rights isn't clear. The events are too different.

One can say that "morally the crippling of state governments to enfranchise the disenfranchised" is better, but it's still a centralization of control.

To be fair, both sides have uniformly supported measures to increase the government's control over the citizenry. They tend to support different measures, with different arguments, but both do it. This is basically because people act to make their jobs easier. The differences are because they have (sometimes only slightly) different goals, or "centers of power".

Note that this applies to the Warren Court and the civil rights decisions as well as to the current more blatant authoritarianism.

There are huge differences, but it *is* a reasonable analogy. It's certainly more like that than it is like "copying", even though copying, in the extended sense, is involved. As it is in all learning.

The *average* blackout duration for Madrid (CAIDI) is 1.6 hours. While you wouldn't expect a large percentage of outages to exceed four hours if the average is just under half of that, infrequent isn't zero, and when you're talking about critical emergency infrastructure like telephones, you really should want the outage durations for those services to be zero.

And even if the average really were just 30 minutes, the point remains that this was done in response to an outage that lasted way more than 4 hours, so the proposed fix wouldn't have prevented the events that triggered the legislation.

Definitely. Standards shouldn't specify what kind of backup, just the duration. If they want to use batteries, fine. Generators, fine. Flywheel storage, fine. Compressed air storage, fine. If you can get more than 24 hours of storage, add some solar, and you now have basically an unlimited duration. This is, of course, the ideal answer, where practical.

There are two types of outages. Widespread outages at the transmission level are fairly rare (almost everywhere). Outages at the local level, like substation failures, overhead line damage from car accidents/wind/ice, etc. are not. It doesn't take a massive regional outage to make cell phones unavailable. In urban areas, cell towers cover a radius of only a couple of miles, typically, with lots of dead spots when even a single tower goes down. One bad traffic accident, and thousands of people could lose cell coverage. And those localized localized outages can take way more than four hours to repair.

For cellular phones, you either have the same system or you don't have any way for people to call an ambulance in an emergency. So that argument really doesn't hold water. And for urban towers, it could take you more than four hours to reach the owner of the business whose roof has the tower on it so that you can get access to the premises to connect a generator. So that's also not an entirely safe alternative.

Okay, the news article I read said that it took days to fully restore everything, but that may have been a few fringe places or something.

Either way, mandating 4 hours of backup in response to an event that lasted 15+ hours still seems more than a bit shortsighted.

That may be what sg_oneill meant, but that's not what I meant in the post that sg_oneill was replying to. NotRobot is talking about exactly what I'm talking about — using a tablet for reading sheet music while I sing or play music on an actual physical instrument.

The best part of the Android tablet experience is that MobileSheets lets you have two tablets side-by-side and sync them with Bluetooth so that you can turn two pages at once, so that you get to the spot where the publisher (hopefully) left time to turn before having to deal with it. That costs $320 with basic Android tablets, or $1500 with iPads (or $1660 for iPads with cases to match the Android tablets).

To be fair, I *do* compose music, record music, etc., but I do all of that on my Mac, not on a tablet. Tablets are simply the wrong tool for the job.

For recording, iPads don't have nearly enough storage for recording, and don't provide an easy way to back up locally, which makes giant audio files a no-go.

For composing, I can't imagine doing it without a physical keyboard, because keyboard shortcuts are what make that survivable. And Apple's keyboard for the 13-inch Air is a $280 add-on. Worse, even if you do that, you'll still have a tiny 13-inch screen, which IMO is undesirable. And if you can tolerate a 13-inch screen, a MacBook Neo would still be $400 cheaper than a Wi-Fi Air with keyboard and is vastly more capable.

Also, even though I'm slowly starting to get used to non-discontinued score editing software, 100% of my existing compositions were done in Finale, which has no iPad version at all. So for working with all of that content, an iPad would be basically useless. Given that it was one of the most popular music editing apps for a very long time, I'm not alone in that problem.