Remember decades ago we had a hurricane and power was out for about 5 days. The streets were a mess.. trees and power lines down everywhere. Yet when you picked up the phone there was still tone and the green backlight still lit up.

Certainly NOT for Katrina.

Hell for at least a MONTH after Katrina, no matter where you were in the US you could not receive a phone call if you had a NOLA 504 phone number.

But for some reason texts would work.....so, I learned how to text then.

Phones were dead in the city for awhile for the one that came through LA 1-2 years ago....phones were out at east a few days if I recall..?

They won't be OceanGate-grade. They used PRCF that had already been rejected by quality control. That's a non-starter in aircraft.

As production has ended, if the A380 is genuinely necessary, then the economics shift somewhat. That doesn't mean they CAN be replaced, from the sounds of it they can't* (at least in many cases), but the inability to replace the aircraft would mean that options that aren't rational become necessary.

*I have to be careful here. If the wing is designed to be the absolute minimum weight possible, then I don't see how they could be without fully disassembling the entire wing and then reconstructing it from the ground up. And adhesives/welding might mean that just can't be done. At all. On the other hand, there's no obvious reason why you couldn't design a wing to have far more structural support than actually needed AND make spars deliberately maintainable and replaceable. I don't have an A380 handbook in front of me, so can't say how Airbus approached this. But it seems improbable that they're built to be swapped.

exactly. so why is it a problem if people choose to pay through their nose for techno-fetish or status symbols?

Using Apple products ceased to be any sort of "status symbol"....LONG ago....no one generally gives it a 2nd glance if someone is using something apple branded....

Just curious....does Anthropic and other AI companies as a matter of policy prohibit connections from China or any of their co-horts?

Do they block all IP addresses from china?

And there we have ity. this is allso a self reinforcing system, due it it being dangerous to walk no one walks so waking walkable neighborhoods will never be a priority because everyone drives eventyrere anyway so..

Unless you are in one of the view ultra-urban cities....no we just aren't built to be "walkable"....hasn't been a need or impediment so far to be honest....it's just our way of life here.

And we're not going to be spending exhorbant amounts of money to rip and and redo our cities.

Personally I dont wanna live somewhere where I'm required to live in dense housing and share walls with neighbors. I prefer to have a front and especially a back yard where I can fence it in or my dogs, so I can set up my large log burning offsent smoker, sent up for parties with friends and neighbors for crawfish boils, etc....

I'm VERY happy being "non-walkable"....my cars and motorcycle suit me just fine for shopping, travel and just having fun out on the road....

I don't have trucks or SUVs myself....but to each their own.

Do look for that Jay Leno video...they discuss this and apparently this does not increase the weight....they apparently have plenty of strength through other means....

In saner regions of the world pedestrian safety is a requirement in vehicles

No body fucking walks in the US man....hence it doens't occur to us to be any sort of "priority".

Go stand in front of a truck and ask yourself are you going under, or over when it hits you

See?

Now this is where I assume that most people are like myself and try NOT to stand in front of a truck....

Self preservation and all that...common sense some folks call it.

Cars don't have tall hoods, trucks and SUVs do to ridiculous proportions now. Your average truck sitting at a red light can't see pedestrians at a crosswalk, especially children

Not generally a problem, as that NOone walks in the US.

These are not actually going to be much more customizable than other vehicles. The sole exception is in the infotainment department, where virtually all modern vehicles have some big overwrought thing that you probably don't want because it sucks, or it will in the future â" which will affect you if you're the kind of person who keeps a vehicle. But if you are, the auto industry hates you.

Actually I think there is more user customization available than you think.

I saw a Jay Leno YouTube video on Slate with the owner and lead engineer..was interesting.

It appears pretty much ALL the side panels on this thing are plastic....and screwed on with visible access from the outside of the vehicle.

I can foresee lots of custom shops coming up with new body pieces that can be easily swapped out at any time....

I also saw a hint on that show that in the future potential for 4-wheel drive could be an option....I hope it gets there...talk about massive custom options appearing out there for that...???

But anyway they said they were trying to basically "open source" everything they could able the Slate and give it fully to the user to do...they said they even were allowing user to do their own warranty work, etc....so, don't have to take it to the shop if you know what you're doing and it won't void the warranty.,

but have they managed to stop any pollution coming out of the tailpipe?

/me looks over his list of priorities...NOPE emissions not on my list.

It really isn't for most people you know....

You can get a cheap car that ALSO has basic modern features like power windows, as long as you buy from a capable, modern car company i.e. a Chinese company.

Fuck China.

We need to untangle ourselves from them as much as we can as quickly as we can. They are nothing but trouble for the US.

This is the same dynamic that happened in the 1980s with Japanese cars and the 90s'/00s with Korean cars.

Not even close.

Unlike China...Japan and S. Korea are NOT stated enemies of the USA....china is.

The Trash 80s? Had a Commodore PET 3032. A whole 1 megahertz. On the other hand, the IEEE 488 meant that I could send a command to one disk drive to transfer to a second disk drive, whilst printing, with the computer then totally free to actually do other stuff. SCSI it wasn't, but for the time, it was an ingenious solution to a lot of problems.

Sheer luxury, lad! Sheer luxury!

We had to make our own bits and push them uphill! Both ways! In the snow!