Drones are plastics, motors, battery and computer chips.

Most people know the batteries are more expensive. But most do not know that the motors are also surprisingly expensive to make in the US.

China took over that business when they started making toys and appliances. It used to be unimportant and required labor not brains.

The plastic and the computer chips are not cheaper in China.

If only you could get wood by punching trees

I'm on Devuan. Most Debian packages work but not all. When one doesn't I use the appimage or flatpak, preferably the former. It gets me the software and I move on. Right now I am using OrcaSlicer from a flatpak.

When I was growing up, gifts for geeks were cheap junk. That has changed over time, but it isn't mature. Geeks came into their own about ten years ago, but not everyone has caught up.

This is how I know AI are over-educated morons. They know the things they are taught, but can not deal with new issues.

The total inability to do anything they were not expressly trained to do makes them totally unsuited to replace a human - except for Congressmen. :D

We need to organize. All of us who are not billionaires, it's in our best interest to ensure that they don't get that much power; this time there won't be enough marquisates, counties, and baronies to fight over among ourselves for the crumbs they're willing to give us to keep us in line.

This time, socialism won't do; we're not proletarians doing work on a production line. We need to be able to create our work projects without being able to sabotage us or buy from one of these great feudal platforms.

For once we have the necessary tools and knowledge to make it viable. It is true that platforms centralize power, but we have enough free software and open computers to create an alternative that does not depend on that central power. We only lack awareness that it is necessary to achieve it, and the organization to carry it out.

If you don't have a CD drive, then you don't get to rip CDs. You'll have to acquire your files some other way. And/or buy a CD drive.

How can I rip CDs to a phone?

You don't. You rip them to your fileserver at home, and run a subsonic-API server on that. The phone connects to it over a VPN, and a subsonic API player plays it to the car with bluetooth.

seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

I went to a couple movies a few months ago, and I didn't see any of that. My fat American ass had plenty of room in the reclining sear, and the next row of seats was a few feet beneath me and seemingly ten feet away. The theaters have become fucking luxurious.

But it's expensive. And I wonder if that's what's keeping the obnoxious screaming kids away.

And you're totally right about the half hour of ads. That's definitely the worst part, these days.

But the seats and space .. omg those problems are over, at least here in the super-wealthy gigantic metropolis of .. Albuquerque.

Abandon hope, all ye who press enter here.

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.

Now, yes, there are predictions that you could get a supermassive black hole launched into space, especially during a galaxy merger if the velocity of the smaller black hole exceeds the escape velocity of the combined galaxy.

But I'd be wary of assuming that it's a launched black hole, unless we can find the merger it comes from. There may be ways for such a black hole to form that cause the stars to be launched away rather than the black hole being flung, and if a galaxy isn't rotating fast enough to be stable, one could imagine that a sufficiently small galaxy was simply consumed by its central black hole. Both of these would seem to produce exactly the same outcome, if all we have is the black hole itself and a velocity.

I'm not going to say either of these is likely in this case, or that astronomers haven't examine them (they almost certainly have), but rather that we should be cautious until we've a clearer idea of what the astronomers have actually been able to determine or rule out.

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...

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.

So will cameras in your bedroom. (and create a wonderful new side industry for the government selling access).

Also, letting the cops get DNA of everyone in the US will also help you stop crimes. (and cause quite a few divorces).

Furthermore, letting the government read the emails of all businesses will cut down on fraud. (And hurt all those small companies trying to compete with the big ones).

There a ton of ways to reduce crime while doing tremendous damage to innocent people.