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Comment Re:Remind me again (Score 1) 33

Corporate culture x boomer mindset.

Boomers usually buy the cheapest thing if it is generic, but boomers recoil in existential horror from dropping a trusted brand name.

Corporate culture amplifies that risk aversion 100x so that even other gen people fear making a switch like this somewhere.

Try getting a person over 60-65 to change their phone or ISP contract, drop cable or landline, buy a car from a different brand or whatever. They will protest loudly and probably refuse to do that.

And that generation currently owns the most money.

Vendors have recognized that and are now bleeding them dry before they finally leave the corporate offices for their retirement.

Comment Re:The studies take that into account (Score 2) 98

Tire particulate
Microplastics small enough to breathe them (broken and rubbed off from all the plastic products all around us)
Microscopic particles (printer toner, very fine dust)
Inorganic materials with very sharp points (of which asbestos, glass and rock wool are the main sources)
Pet and animal dander
Fine organic particles and soot (of which cigarette smoke is the main source, also coal dust, coal and wood smoke)
Radioactive particles (of which radon gas is the main source outside of catastrophes and war)

Comment Re: because they were wrong in the 1950s? (Score 1) 98

People are hugely, insanely UNDERestimating the effects of radon gas on their lungs. 80% of people you tell this never even heard of radon gas and 15% of them might only know it's a colorless, odorless, radioactive noble gas, but only about 5% know or think about how this gas simply seeps out of the ground, collects in basements and ground floor sleeping areas and is almost as dangerous as smoking for lung cancer.

Because lung cancer awareness campaigns always focused on smoking, people did more or less disregard other highly dangerous lung carcinogens over decades. Radon is the main carcinogen beyond smoking and asbestos - and after that comes the group of all organic dust, soot and very fine particle sources. That is: coal and wood fires, barbecues, coal dust, grain dust, printer toner, plastic particles, particles from normal tire wear on public roads, dander from animals.

Breathing in anything except air is more or less carcinogenic, and normal air can contain radon gas or ozone from natural sources.

Get a radon detector and estimate your exposure to radon gas in your sleeping area over a few months. If the results are low risk for your area, you can sell it second hand. If the results are medium risk or higher, you know that it's necessary to take precautions and renovations for your home to avoid that. Sealing the ground in your home or against radon is possible or at least ventilating the basement and sleeping areas to prevent build-up of radon.

Avoiding tobacco and radon means avoiding two thirds of all lung cancer cases.

Comment Re:Time for laser guns (Score 3, Insightful) 158

Pin-pointing a laser onto a moving target is getting progressively more difficult the faster the target is. Targeting optics need to be progressively faster and more precise to hit the object for the time needed to have the intended effect. And all the effect the laser it has is proportional to the energy it deposits per square centimeter onto the target. With more air passing by the object, even more energy is dissipated and with the faster speed, the total flight time in range of the laser is progressively shorter.

That's what makes hypersonic weapons so dangerous. They're too fast for defensive missiles to counter. There's less time for detection and identification overall, less time for a friend-or-foe decision, less time to align the laser spot on the target, the laser will be less accurate on the target, depositing less energy per square centimeter and second, the while the projectile dissipates more energy per second to the air around it and the laser system will have far less time anyway to destroy the incoming projectile before it impacts the thing it was supposed to defend.

Look at the few leaked videos of hypersonic missile impacts. These missiles are so fast that there's barely a 1 or 2 seconds between the missile appearing and impacting. Current lasers have AT BEST a 10km engagement distance and that doesn't include the plasma shield that air forms around the HGV due to air friction at that speeds. At Mach 12 and ideal conditions, the laser will have less than 2 seconds time to deliver all its energy, through all atmospheric distortions, follow the HGV's potentially unpredicable flight path without instantly and permanently blinding all humans near and around the defended area.

Atmospheric dust and smoke will quickly render that even more impossible than it already is. So even if the first few defense shots MIGHT be effective, every subsequent shot will become harder and harder because there will be more and more dust and smoke in the air around the laser. If lasers become too effective in the future, then you will see the attackers firing whatever they can find to increase smoke and dust in the atmosphere around the laser or reengineer their HGVs to release insane amounts of smoke when targeted or destroyed so you can at best destroy the first few of them until there's far too much smoke around to do anything with lasers against the next wave. Or they wait with their attack until there's fog or dense clouds over the target, forcing the defense to use MASER or similar things that could penetrate clouds more easily, but who knows what disadvantages that brings. And the Chinese leveraging their most prominent strengths, you can be absolutely sure their HGVs will be mass-produced in ridiculous numbers and through economies of scale become ridiculously cheap as well. They will then simply spam them over the target so that no amount of laser technology will be able to counter them, because you can't reasonably concentrate the amount of energy needed to defend against all of them. Even if you had 100 or 10000 lasers of the required intensity (1MW or more), there simply won't be enough Watts / Joules around to feed them all.

There is very little defense against mass-produced, reasonably cheap gliders at speeds above Mach 4. The attackers can distribute production and stockpiles of gliders over their entire country and produce and stockpile for years, and mass them on any single target. The Joules needed to produce them can easily be transported to the factories, because there's enough time to do so. The defenders would have to place enough lasers near all potential targets to counter a massed attack on any of them. The Joules needed to fire the defense lasers would need to be transported immediately from everywhere to any one target area or stored everywhere in a way that's currently totally unfathomable to us. And even if we managed to do that, HGV production would profit from these advancements as well, bringing more and cheaper HGVs down on the target, immediately nullifying that advance right away.

In short: defending against cheap(er) mass-produced HGV gliders is literally, physically, theoretically and even ontologically impossible.

If you want to read further, look up "Hobbesian trap", "Fermi paradoxon" and "Dark forest hypothesis".

Comment Re:Seems pointless (Score 1) 52

The first thing that ages in all laptops is the thermal interface material between heatsink(s) and processor(s). Once the TIM begins to dry / age / pump out / degrade, it sets off a positive feedback loop where the chip gets hotter with TIM aging, which in turn gets the chip hotter still and aging the TIM even faster and so on. A little lint and dust in the heatsink will kickstart this even higher.

LCDs didn't have a CCFL backlight prone to aging in a while, and they also mostly avoided OLED so far, so they don't have the other age-prone display technology.

If the laptop is of any value whatsoever, it is built in a way that allows the heatsink / fan to be replaced by a service tech in one hour or less. Most gaming laptops are built that way and many business line models, too. Business laptops have enough spare parts available for cheap, so they win in that regard.

The published MTBF for a part are rarely relevant for laptops and you shouldn't rely on that. Since laptops are carried and used in the full variety of human behavior through the full variety of human environments, their wear levels are varying wildly. For a server HDD, you can assume server room environments with controlled temperature and vibration. For laptops? No way. Some were used stationary in air-conditioned offices, never moved and not even typed directly on them and some were trotted around every day on construction sites in the desert.

Comment Re:Seems pointless (Score 1) 52

Temperature matters a lot for components and laptops usually max out their component temperature limits quite a bit.

If I had two identical laptops with a similar age and wear, I would immediately choose the one that has seen more hours at higher temperatures, although it would be difficult to formulate this in such a way that it can be used mathematically or algorithmically. Laptop A has operated 1 hour at or above the allowable CPU temp of 100 degrees Celsius and 9799 hours at idle with barely higher CPU temps than ambient - vs. laptop B that has never been above allowable CPU temp, but logged 9800 hours above 70 degrees Celsius. Who knows which one is the better deal?

But on a qualitative level, "operating hours x temperature ~ wear" and thus the usage history of the device is relevant for its used value.

Comment Re:Sorry I just woke up⦠(Score 3, Interesting) 10

Doesn't ANYBODY but me remember that "Napster" was actually RealNetworks? You know, the old Real.com that was the Internet's first scale, commercial streamer? Real became Rhapsody for several years. Rhapsody had no name recognition, so they bought the Napster name from it's owners... BEST BUY.

It gets weirder. Rhapsody had been Sonos' partner streaming service - and Rhapsody is also... I HEART RADIO. Now the whole Napster lot got dumped in the lap of venture capital vultures.

Comment Re:How does a company even function (Score 1) 82

That person is asking people to hide any hint of sexual emotion for 8 hours a day every day forever. And then judge them for not having sex.

Only a feminist woman could argue like that: sex is their unit of value and only they would be so moronic to ask someone to not be sexual and then insult them for not having sex.

Comment Re:How does a company even function (Score 1) 82

"Do your job" means: no TikToks on the job. No forced DEILGBTQIAAAP+ seminars and no person hired or kept for anything but their performance and importance for the work focus.

"Don't make comments to people about anything that makes them human. Do not act like a human to other humans in the workplace": not going to happen. F you and your bullshit forever. We are all humans. We are not machines and we will never be turned into cogs in the machine. We are demanding everyone to act professionally and FOCUS on work issues, but demanding humans to shed ALL their human-related substance for 8 hours every workday is insane. We are not robots. We will never be robots. And you demand us to be. You want us to be faceless, emotionless, inhumane zombies, robots, golems. When everything human is "sexual harassment", you need to work with machines. There are plenty of jobs available with machines and robots. Go there. If you work with healthy young men and women, you will encounter emotions and sexuality. Deal with it. It's what we are. We can never not be humans and we will never be free of reproductive and tribal aspects. It is baked in our DNA and the only reason we have new humans. Birth rates are collapsing everywhere because of demands like yours. Either this idea ends or the civilization that tries to uphold it. Your choice. I say we end the idea first so we can continue being a civilization.

"Incel" means your only unit of value is intercourse. That shows you are a feminist woman arguing against your strawman caricature of men. Also, used in this context, immediately before asking people to NOT do, think, talk, act in any hint of a sexual manner is idiotic. You are judging people for having sex or not and THEN demand they don't have any sexual emotion - how utterly moronic.

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