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Comment Re: It's going to cause inflation (Score 1) 131

The problem is that 13%. Their apathy is causing all the fucking problems we have today.

You seem to be assuming that all those registered voters who didn't vote abstained out of apathy, which fails to account for those who looked at the choice and said, "Fuck this; neither of them is fit for the office they'e running for," because they believe that voting for the lesser off two evils is still voting for evil. I personally know quite a few people who voted on statewide and local issues but left the Presidential boxes unchecked. That isn't apathy; that's an angry protest against the 2-party system. Of course, I live in California, where 4 million Harris voters could have stayed home and she still would have carried the state. "But she would have been better than Trump," right? Sure - in the same way a magnitude 7 earthquake is better than a magnitude 9 one - that's better by a factor of 100! I'll happily concede that she would have been much less awful, but that's an extremely low bar, and a far cry from "good for the nation".

If you really want to point your finger at apathy, try the 72 million Americans who are eligible to vote but aren't even registered.

Comment Lots of Tribal Crap (Score 1) 107

I'm seeing more and more "my tribe is red hot; you're tribe is doodly squat" posts. Like, "You can't be a Christian if you're [some group that fundamentalists can't tolerate]" or Trump fans vs Trump haters or flerfers vs globers. Lately I've been seeing posts consisting of memes depicting burly blue-collar laborers extolling the virtues of capitalism or father figures sitting at the dinner table slicing a steak with a cigarette hanging from his lip, while adoring family members gaze at him as he talks about how much better things were in "the good old days". It takes a lot of "hide posts from [whoever]" and "see fewer posts like this" to keep the flood of this drek down to ankle depth.

Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 50

iPhone 17 is rated ip68, so.it should survive immersion in 6 meters of water for 30 minutes; however, the warranty specifically excludes damage from liquid exposure. Also, they caution that the "watertight seal" may be broken if the phone is dropped. So if you're going to drop your phone into a toilet, be careful it doesn't strike the bowl on the way down.

Comment Re:drone battery size (Score 1) 50

Aren't drone ranges largely limited by weight instead of battery storage space?

Generally, yes. It may make some sense for aerodynamic winged drones, but those generally just use some type of gasoline / jet fuel. It could make sense for race or other high speed drones like interceptors, where aerodynamic drag is a big factor.

There are many "aerodynamic winged drones" that are battery-powered - Raven, Puma, and the various flavors of Switchblades are a few examples - not to mention unmanned ground and underwater ones. And notably, the Ingenuity helicopter that performed so well on Mars.

Weight and drag are key factors in endurance for air vehicles, which is why long-endurance quadcopters are rare. Even the fuel-carrying drones are weight sensitive. Designers take great pains to make the airframes as light as possible to increase endurance and payload/fuel capacity. For example, the MQ9 Reaper carries up to 7,850 lbs of payload and fuel, but its unladen weight is only 4,900 lbs, including the engine.

Comment Re:This is stupid (Score 1) 50

But you don't understand, it saves 5% of the weight!

And physics (or Apple marketing) has proven that no consumer openable container can be water tight. it's IMPOSSIBLE!

Water tight? I'm struggling to think of a single Apple computing product that even approaches being water tight. Go ahead - pour a few ounces of water on your MacBook's keyboard or drop your iPhone in the toilet and let us know what happens.

Comment Re:Brain architecture (Score 1) 193

That really is an interesting paper you cited. As a counter argument, I give you Flat Earthers, Moon Landing Deniers, and Anti-Vaxers. There are others, but those are shining examples of groups of incompetent people secure in their belief that they are correct. And now I suppose I will get a flood of replies from members of those groups telling me what a sheep I am.

Comment Re:No, It Won't. (Score 1) 64

No company is ever going to release a commercial quantum computer of any kind.

Anyone who wants to disagree with me can do so by betting against me in Kalshi.

Take out "ever", change "release" to "market", and append a specific date more than five years away but within a decade or so and you might get a few takers. But you might also want to qualify what you mean by "commercial", because it is certainly possible to market a product with a price so high that the only organizations able to afford it are governments. Or Elon Musk.

Comment Re:What the.... ?? (Score 1) 43

Every exam I took in university was supervised. And while I did graduate quite a while ago, it wasn't 133 years ago.

Same here, though I strongly suspect it was before you graduated - the first HP scientific calculator came out in my senior year, and nearly caused a riot in one of my classes because one of the students bought one and it was a LOT faster than the slide rules everyone else was using.

Anyway, I recall a few open-book exams, but mostly you were on your own. My physics 101 prof was pissed off at the class because hardly anyone was doing the homework, so he announced that everyone's final grade would be based entirely on their final exam results. I stayed up all night, doing all the odd-numbered problems at the end of every chapter in the textbook while I was waiting in vain for the Apollo 12 video camera to start working again (Astronaut Alan Bean accidentally pointed it directly at the sun while mounting it on a tripod and burned out the vidicon pickup tube sensor). It paid off - that was the one and only quarter I scored a 4.0.

Comment Re: Cue up (Score 1) 348

Basically, you point the finger at somebody or something else. Whether they have anything to do with it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is diverting attention away from yourself while giving yourself more popularity. This is why the French Revolution was called the reign of terror. This is why Hitler targeted the Jews. This is why Mao tried to kill off all of China's sparrows.

Why does that have such a familiar, current event-ish ring to it? Oh, yeah....

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