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Comment Re:Ha! (Score 1) 57

The SET amp used 845s and the diodes were regular 1N4007s. Ultrafast diodes don't really have much advantage at 60hz. The biggest difference is made by adding snubbers to tame diode switching spikes. See https://www.diyaudio.com/commu... for a good explanation.

Toroidal transformers from Toroidy in Poland used to be cheap (including shipping) if you ordered them from TME electronics. But a certain orange individual ruined that with tariffs and international shipping.

Comment Re:Uber has been pushing Uber Eats at me hard late (Score 1) 34

The worst part isn't even whether or not Eats / Doordash suck (and make no mistake, they do) at their core purpose - It's that virtually every restaurant traditionally known for delivering has realized they can cut that nonsense right out of the budget and just push everyone to use a third-party delivery service at the customer's expense.

I know I'm going to sound like a cranky old man here, but once upon a time, food delivery was a sweet job for a late teen / early 20-something - Drive around town rather than being stuck in a kitchen, busting their butts to get the food to you while it was still warm, and were thrilled to get tipped a five. Now, if you only tip these professional "food ransom services" a twenty, you can expect to scrape your food off the garage roof and be named-and-shamed on IG for being such an insufferable asshole as to not pay more for the delivery than the food. And even if you tip "enough" to avoid the wrath of your driver, it's guaranteed to be late, cold, and in way too many cases to be coincidental, missing a few fries / nuggets / whatever. Go ahead and complain, and they'll just ban both the driver and the customer, and good luck getting a refund.

But hey, I have nothing to complain about since I live more than 10 minutes outside a city core, nobody will accept the delivery anyway.

Comment "Selling" isn't the root problem (Score 4, Informative) 43

Oh, goody, the website selling our licenses is down. Whelp, toothpaste back in the tube, we can all rest easy knowing that the day is saved!

Of course, the next obvious step if they can't sell them is to simply release the entire batch into the wild. And how dare any of you think this might somehow be the fault of sweet innocent idscan.net for inadequately protecting the highly sensitive data they were grudgingly entrusted with in the first place.

We need a hell of a lot more CEOs in prison, and we need any politicians that requires / supports / allows this bullshit to join them. Of course, absolutely none of that is going to happen because Joe Sixpack has zero clue any of this is going on; and even if he somehow catches wind of it from a Facebook meme, oh well, it's just one more breach, who cares, he gets notices of those on a monthly basis and has been intentionally trained to treat them as junk mail.

Comment Re:Ha! (Score 1) 57

I've built a few over the years. First was a large single ended triode running conservatively with only 750 volts on the plate. That used two chassis with one being for power. The power supply is hybrid with the lower voltage driver stages using a 5AR4 rectifier and the high voltage section uses a silicon bridge. All CLC filtered except for the filaments which use AC.

Currently I have a much smaller setup with some small pentodes in push pull. The power transformer is from an old console hifi and I had to drop some voltage so its power supply has a choke input then a CRC filter stage. Decided on a shunt regulated supply for the screen grid voltage.

The next long term project is going to be a higher power amplifier with some tv sweep tubes. The output transformers for that are toroidal.

Comment Re:Yay (Score 1) 107

News flash! You don't need a $500 toothbrush with a camera and AI processing. You only need a 25 cent soft bristle tooth brush and a $4 pack of floss picks.

Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

Wanna spend more for better results? Buy a WaterPik.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

Comment Re:A republic, if you can keep it... (Score 0) 231

What would democracy without capitalism look like?

I imagine that it would look like democracy. Unfettered capitalism and democracy are innately incompatible, since democracy is all about diffusing power among the whole population, and capitalism concentrates power into the hands of a few.

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

As for your assertion that, "Democratic socialism always ends up quickly abandoning either democracy or socialism." I assume that you're talking about revolutionary governments.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

Comment Re:Dual purpose age-bracket signal :o (Score 1) 128

Fine, we'll do this the tedious way, since you Meta/etc shills are happy to prove they're incapable of inductive reasoning.

It's against the law for sites to request the data when not required by law to do age verification.

Foreign scammers do not care about the law. Social media CEOs play fast-and-loose with the law and consider fines just a cost of doing business. Governments consider themselves above the law. The "good guys" didn't need this law in the first place.

If we're talking about social media apps, they get everything by having your device ID and contacts list. They know exactly who you are and what your real age is.

"You may not use this service unless you're 13 or over" - Poof, every 12YO is suddenly 35. See the problem with your hypothesis?

If we're talking about porn sites, the only way they'd ever see a transition of age category is if you're trying to use the site every day before you're allowed and being rejected, then finally on your 18th birthday it lets you.

I know this will come as a shock to many, but porn sites aren't the problem here, merely the lowest hanging "for duh kidz!!1!" excuse available to push these adult-privacy atrocities through - If anything, they tend to be some of the best actors in this situation, if only because they're the most closely watched by puritanical assholes. I trust PornHub far more than I trust Twitter, and I trust Twitter far more than anything ending in .ru, .il, or .in.

It seems more likely that the kid was rejected by the site, asked their friends what to do, and was told the re-install their OS and claim to be old enough.

Sounds an awfully lot like you're agreeing with me here. Are you referring to a specific situation you'd like to cite?

Same for gambling, etc.

To the best of my knowledge, gambling requires having some way to pay. Kids aren't laundering birthday cash from grandma so they can place a trifecta on the ponies, dude. Meanwhile, this will have zero effect on gambler-in-training gatchas that let kids bet on loot boxes via Play / iTunes gift cards.

You're not even a thinking creature. You're just responding by mimicking.

Pbpbpbttttt! I know you are but what am I?
Christ you trolls are tiresome.

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