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Comment Re:Why they are more expensive (Score 2) 58

Imagine manufacturers getting together to standardise some of these things. Maybe they create a new standard every 5 years. If you want a drone motor you'll know what sort of power supply so what voltage it should take, whether it's a high RPM or lower RPM use case, what power and what weight.

Outside of these custom all-in-one ready to fly drones, drone motors are ALREADY like that. They come in well-defined sizes, they are rated by kV (thousands of RPM per volt) and they have standard mounting holes. If you just don't screw with the fully preassembled drones up front you can easily get that kind of parts interchangeability. You can also buy controller/radio combos which provide the same or superior range to what DJI offers, so the only benefit to buying a prebuilt drone is that you don't have to do anything, and it comes with a number of down sides.

I built my first quadcopter for under $200 all in, including a Devo 5 radio which I could load alternate firmware and an additional $10-ish radio transceiver module into so that it supports all of the major protocols. That's a price with regular range and without FPV, but the point remains — you don't need DJI.

Comment Re:Thereâ(TM)s a scam - somebody has to be th (Score 0) 11

but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account

Nah, that's the reason for the moral. The actual moral is: don't fuck with Apple gift cards — neither a buyer nor a redeemer be. Apple has certainly taught us all a lesson, and that lesson is that their gift card system is insecure and they will punish legitimate customers for their lack of security. Whether it's even possible to make a gift card secure is irrelevant to that lesson.

Comment Re:No thank you. (Score 1) 55

In my mind you'd be buying a car without a battery and simultaneously subscribing to a battery service, but if you ever wanted to own a battery you could buy one. You'd get the battery delivered to the dealer (and/or they would work with one or more services directly and keep some on site) before you picked up the vehicle so it would be all the same to you as if it had come with it, and it would also come charged.

Moving them around without a battery at scrapping time is not a detriment, as vehicles to be scrapped are usually moved around with a fork lift anyway.

Comment Re:No thank you. (Score 1) 55

You could do battery swaps for NEVs in a scheme where you didn't own a battery at all, and instead just subscribed to one. You could also do it for heavy diesel truck equivalents, as big diesels typically have the fuel tanks hanging on the outside of the frame where they're nice and accessible anyway. But it doesn't make any sense for the vehicles in between that, i.e. the bulk of them...

Comment Re:I've been using KDE for two months (Score 3, Interesting) 37

MATE is outdated (but good for resource constrained systems) and GNOME is dumbed down and hard to get good results from, you need a whole bunch of add-ins just to get where KDE is. KDE was very bad in the past, but it's really come quite a long way. GNOME was really quite good in the past, but it's really gone the wrong way. I'm not against having a simple mode but I don't want oversimplification to infest everything.

Comment Re:god damn it (Score 1) 279

For example, all of this Epstein nonsense, why the fuck wasn't this released when the Democrats were in power?

Because the USA doesn't have the concept of absolute power, Donnie Dipshit's pet Catholic Court notwithstanding, and those files were sealed by a judge at the time. There are a lot of fundamental ways in which the two parties are up to the same bullshit, but Democrats tend to obey court orders.

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 279

A military with an obtuse and opaque budget is one thing

Corrupt, yes.

and in all reality, the military has a lot more reporting requirements than the NCAR.

Requirements, maybe. Meeting them, absolutely not. They aren't just reporting an amount spent on classified projects and therefore we can't have a breakdown, they're saying they can't figure out where an awful lot of money went at all.

Comment Re:"Look out, incoming pendulum!" (Score 1) 279

I think that this (electing a Trump) is what happens when the pendulum gets pushed too far

Obama was more like the Republicans than they think. For example, he was fully behind the MIC, blowing people up without due process and so on. Obviously there is a big contrast, for example we know he did a lot of drone strikes because of his EO which gave us information on how many strikes were used and where, and Trump was doing about four times as many strikes per month when he rescinded that order so that we wouldn't know how many he's done since.

Even the ACA was a Republican health care plan, spruced up a little bit but still writing profit for insurance companies into the law. So no, the pendulum just wasn't pushed that far at all.

How can we get to a ranked-choice system at a national level?

Revolution. The chances of us rewriting the constitution for that (which is what it would take) are roughly nil otherwise.

Comment Re:Vought's in the cabinet for one reason (Score 4, Informative) 279

Project 2025 is the result of a moral and ethical pendulum being brazenly shoved way the too far to the left

To you, the centrist (pro-corporation, pro-authoritarianism, pro-incarceration, pro-MIC — based on voting records) policies of the Democrats are "too far to the left" when actual leftism includes far more liberal ideas. This is because you are too far to the right to even see the left from where you're standing.

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