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.

They're calling it Focused Ultra Sound which means using an MRI to guide stimulation of millimeter-scale areas of the brain to disrupt electrical activity there.

So many ads and press releases on a web search but I did find this bibliography:

https://www.zotero.org/groups/...

It's weird how these hospitals don't link papers in the news releases as is common in the West.

Curiously there was an article yesterday about Ultrasound brain imaging so it might be possible to combine the two modalities. This seems like an "obvious to a practitioner" approach though noise cancelation will be needed.

https://alephneuro.com/blog/ul...

We might actually be capable of realizing that headband where you walk into Sick Bay and tell Dr. Crusher you have Holodeck addiction and she slaps it on your forehead for twenty minutes and tells you to lay down and then come back if it recurs.

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.

If you hear "if you can't afford a Macbook Neo you're too poor to be an Apple customer," don't be surprised.

I definitely heard that related to iMessage a decade ago. The 666 304's had some thing about bubble colors.

I'm not going to run it but people have said the kernel handles realtime needs much better than 10.

I do wonder how much of the bloatware needs to be disabled to actually realize that, though.

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.

> Emirates operates these with over 500 passengers

Well they did until the value proposition of Dubai and Abu Dhabi suddenly came into question with three days' food and no way to restock and no sewer system, relying on petroleum-powered sewage trucks to keep people alive.

It sure seems 'convenient' that they suddenly have an insurable loss on very expensive and unprofitable airframes at just the right time.

Let's see what kind of cars the regulators purchase in a few months, or maybe it's just a coincidence.

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.

On a stone or anything else non-flat, sure, though that's just shy of 50% of the outer surface area of an iPad, and you're keeping it on a music stand with feet that stick out, so I don't exactly like those odds. You might get some protection from the case, but did I mention that the $160 tablet comes with a magnetic folio case, whereas Apple's folio case for the iPad is an $80 add-on? If you add the cost of the case to the cost of AppleCare+, the things you would typically do to make a bad accidental drop not be horribly expensive for the iPad add up to more than the total cost of a basic Android tablet. Ponder that for a moment.

No big deal. Most of the sheet music reader apps offer cloud syncing, etc. And even if I had to redownload them from IMSLP or some publisher/distributor website, re-downloading the dozen or so pieces of music that I'm actively rehearsing at any given moment isn't exactly a huge burden. Or I could buy two, sync them every few weeks when I add new music, and keep them both in my car except when I'm charging one of them. With that approach, I'd be all but guaranteed to have a working one with me at all times even if I drop one and break it, and I'd still pay just a third the cost of the cheapest equivalent 13-inch iPad.

Lutnik is an Epstein Associate.

AI Surveillance Police State is his ultimate goal.

Americans are getting 'too uppity' (sovereign).

I'm familiar with the backup power design of some of the cell towers where I live.

Let's just say I'm also learning how to build solar Meshcore repeaters and placing them on appropriate hilltops where I can.

You can Royal Decree anything but don't bet your life on it.

Also nobody likes to mention that the big Spanish overvolt grid crash coincided with the arrival of a very large CME. We mustn't rile the natives.

Even if they provide security patches for only three years, you'd still get 18 years out of it and its successors for the price of one iPad. Having to throw it away to install a new major version of Android really isn't a big deal when you're talking about hardware at disposable prices. Also, the likelihood of it actually mattering when I'm using it exclusively as a sheet music reader is basically zero. :-)

And four hours is nowhere near enough. That's less than the average power outage duration in California, for example (4 hours, 16 minutes). And the fact that this was in response to a blackout that lasted days makes me really wonder what they are thinking, unless the assumption is that they will then scramble to bring generators online to provide continuous service. Four hours might work for landline service, where you have one central office per city, but with cell towers spread out everywhere, that doesn't seem nearly as practical.

In an actual emergency, having only four hours of backup could be grim. Mind you, other countries generally aren't any better, but four hours is still woefully inadequate, IMO.

Sheet music != audio. Sheet music readers are PDF readers plus support for Bluetooth foot pedals to turn pages. The most popular app by far is MobileSheets, and it is available on iOS, Android, and Windows.

Yeah, there are subscription services for iPad that have some additional features that could be useful in some environments (e.g. slightly easier distribution of marked-up copies or using your camera to turn pages with facial gestures), but IMO not useful enough to be worth paying a subscription for it, even with my conductor hat on, much less with my individual musician hat on.

The apps on Android are more than good enough, and the literally dozens of people I know who use them are ample proof of that. Meanwhile, the only people I know who use iPads as sheet music readers own them primarily for other reasons, like drawing.

Apple just has zero "basic tablet"-class devices. The Air is pretty and all, but when you're carrying one of these things around every day in high-risk environments, the last thing you want to do is drop an $800 tablet. And that's for the Wi-Fi-only version.

Meanwhile, you can buy a basic 13-inch Android tablet complete with cellular for $160. And if you drop it, you can replace it with another one. And another one. And another one. And then a fifth one. And at that point, you've reached the cost of one iPad Air 13".

And if you leave it somewhere, you can easily locate it, because it has a cellular connection, unlike the $800 iPad Air. You need the $950 version for that. And now you can buy six for the same price instead of five.

It's not just that Apple tablets are a bit too expensive. It's that they're so extraordinarily overpriced that I can't see why anyone in their right minds would buy one unless they have some very specialized use case that can't be done on Android.

Don't get me wrong, the M4 is an amazing chip. Its performance cores' per-core speed is about 4x as fast as the cheap Unisoc chip in that Android tablet, and it has three of them instead of two. So from a pure spec perspective, the iPad wins hands down. But the problem is, most of what people do with these devices is play movies (with hardware codecs, not software). And even for the niche use cases, very few of them require much CPU. The performance per dollar is about equal, but convincing people that a slightly snappier UI is worth spending 6x the price is really, really hard, because for most people, it really isn't.

If I were buying a laptop, I'd buy Apple hands down. I do real workloads on that. It needs to be fast. But for tablets? The speed was basically good enough on my first-generation iPad Mini fourteen years ago. Everything since then has just been performance for the sake of performance, and almost nobody cares. Being faster only matters if you're one of the 3% of users who actually need a faster tablet (and there's an iPad Pro for that anyway).

And thin doesn't matter, either; exactly zero people have a single f**k to give about that outside of Infinite Loop and the donut building. (I am, of course, referring to the one two blocks from Infinite Loop that Apple engineers eat at during late-night hacking sessions because they're open 24 hours, not Apple's new campus; I doubt those folks care about thin, either.)

And all discussions about build quality, reliability, etc. go out the window when price differences approach an entire order of magnitude.

So Apple badly needs a genuine low-end tablet. In my opinion as a stockholder, they've needed one for a really long time. Great phones, great laptops, heinously overpriced tablets. Just my $0.10 (two cents adjusted for the price of Apple's RAM).