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Comment Lots of Tribal Crap (Score 1) 97

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....

Comment Re:Cue up (Score 3, Informative) 348

I'm all for taxing an individual's earnings in proportion to how well the whole capitalism thing is working out for them

That would be fine if ALL the gains from "how well the whole capitalism thing is working out for them" were taxed as ordinary income. "How well the whole capitalism thing is working out for them" frequently goes like this: instead of selling a bunch of the stock you own to raise money, use it as collateral to get a low-interest loan. Congratulations - you've avoided capital gains tax on selling the stock, the loan proceeds are non-taxable, and your stock stays in the market where it can appreciate in value. Bonus: if you use the loan proceeds to buy more stock (there are restrictions on this), interest payments on the loan may be tax-deductible.

ideally you address that by updating the tax code

I guess it's time to brush up on the golden rule: he with the gold, makes the rules.

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