shiroiuma

>But it's hard to go back to just a few colors, low-res graphics, often no way to save, etc... for me at least, the modern affordances mean something.

All those old games have a way to save now, if you run them in an emulator as is commonly done these days. That's how I played through Metroid and finally beat the mother brain in just a day or two during the pandemic.

>Sure, if you don’t count safety features like memory management, crash handling, automatic bounds checks and encryption cyphers; as anything useful.

>Networking stacks, safety checks, encryption stacks, etc all contribute massively to software “bloat”.

They had most of this stuff in the 1980s, and even earlier really. Not on your little 8-bit microcomputer that cost $299 that might have had as a kid, but they certainly did exist on large time-sharing systems used in universities and industry and government. And those systems had only a tiny fraction of the memory that a typical x86-64 laptop has now.

In the US today, they try to entice people to those places by forgiving their student loans if they work there long enough.

I think in reality, it shouldn't be hard to find people willing to take out garbage by simply paying a little better than other manual-labor jobs. There's always going to be people who can't work other jobs for some reason, so if they're choosing between manual labor jobs, the one that pays more is going to be more attractive. They don't need to pay enough to hire a doctor, because not that many people can do high-value work like that competently.

Not for that task, you don't. Just get a washer/dryer. They're very common where I live: the machine both washes and dries your clothes, and uses a heat pump system on the dryer side for high efficiency.

What's missing is a robot that will take the clothes out of your washer/dryer, fold them up, and put them away for you.

The problem is that if you make the place feel very unwelcoming to newcomers because you don't want the people who bring problems, the people who bring value don't come either unless you're offering extremely high pay, which Japan does not.

Yep, this is the same almost everywhere. You're not going to find many young people who will go to a university to get the qualifications to be a medical professional, and then willingly move back to their middle-of-nowhere small town to do that job, even if it pays more.

Society cannot function without garbage people. It must be done or society will collapse quickly, so society better find a pay rate that gets the job done.

Another magazine I think they should have mentioned: "Radio-Electronics".

From what I've read, the crew capsule really is all-new and very different from previous NASA capsules. However the engines and other launch stuff is just reused old stuff or a little modernized (SRS main engines + SRBs).

We didn't have robots in 1969, and the Apollo missions resulted in many of the technologies that make modern robotics (and robotic space missions) possible.

It's probably unaffordable for anyone to buy things from the US due to shipping costs, because the Trump administration has completely screwed up everything there with tariffs and mismanagement of the USPS and more. But the US is not the world. A better comparison is how much it cost to ship things from China a year ago compared to today.

That's all nice and well, but what exactly is the point if it's not going to be enforced *at all*? So we can feel smug and superior?

The Shahed drones have more than enough range for this, easily. Whether they're "cheap" I guess depends on your perspective; they're certainly not as cheap as some handheld drone, but they're still pretty cheap compared to all the stuff the US is using now.

What's the problem. The Russians do stuff that you say are "war crimes", and what happens to them? Nothing. So why should anyone care if some person on the internet says these are war crimes? There's obviously no penalty against doing them, so they're not really war crimes.

There's no good excuse for countless bad and stupid things Trump has done, but he did them anyway and no one has bothered to stop him.

I disagree: lots of cheap drones would be extremely effective against an aircraft carrier. They don't need to sink the ship; they just need to damage the jets or disrupt operations on the flight deck. Even a small drone is a serious threat to a jet. How can a carrier defend against a drone swarm? They only have so much ammunition for those CWIS guns, and defending against the swarm will probably cost a lot more than the swarm itself does.

Of course, this assumes the carrier is within range of the drone swarm, but that seems to be the assumption in this line of argument.

Eventually, I think they'll have more cost-effective defenses against small, cheap drones, but they don't have them yet.

Drones have limited range. Perhaps a submarine would be better: sneak close to your target, raise a pipe from the sub to the surface, then launch a bunch of drones from it.

No big loss here: Sony memory cards have always been massively overpriced.

>They don’t joke around with lives on the line.

They don't? They sure seemed to back when they ignored the engineers and launched Challenger, and again with Columbia. And those were times when the country had competent political leadership instead of a complete clown-show.

I have very, very little faith in NASA at this point after seeing how much the administration has wrecked other federal agencies like the CDC and NHS. There's no way I'd fly on that thing.

>But most importantly, airbags explode with serious force that can break bones in a kids face.

They've been known to knock children's head off even. Because of that, they started putting switches in trucks to disable the passenger airbag, and also working to reduce deployment force, esp. if the weight in the passenger seat was low.

Not a terrible idea really: Victorian times were also when the industrial revolution was happening, and unregulated coal plants and factories were belching out unimaginable amounts of pollution into city air. Getting away from that mess and breathing clean air probably was good for you if you had health problems.

There's different kinds of costs: cost to the government, and cost to actually build the thing.

The contractor has no trouble inflating the first one whenever they can, but they want to strip the second one to the bone to maximize profits.

>I've often thought world leaders, upon election/selection, should get a free few orbits of the earth, to give them some perspective on the job they're about to undertake.

Perhaps, but they should also get a few free orbits of the Earth *after* their term ends, on a launch system built by whichever contractor has given the most "campaign donations" to politicians. Surely they'll trust it to be safe, right?

The thing that killed the Concorde was a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.

The thing was already losing money because it guzzled fuel and was horribly loud and uncomfortable inside, while still costing a fortune for tickets. Not many people really wanted to pay 1st-class fares for worse-than-economy comfort just to shave a couple hours off the flight. Also, the plane could only operate at supersonic speeds over the ocean, so when it flew to/from Texas, it had to operate at subsonic speeds (and guzzle even more fuel because it was inefficient at those speeds), and the average trip time wasn't that much faster than a regular jumbo jet. It had been going downhill for a while, but that fatal crash was the end; they stopped all operations after that.

Sure, better communications might have contributed to its downfall, but that would have affected all air travel; just comparing like-for-like, the Concorde really wasn't a great alternative to the subsonic jumbo jets which became more and more prevalent for transcontinental routes.

>but now a lot of job applications require that you give them a LinkedIn URL.

I haven't seen this at all, but I normally do provide my LinkedIn URL to companies that I apply to through that platform. I don't really see the problem, though: I don't post anything (I'm not a LinkedIn Lunatic, though I've seen this with some coworkers), so what's the problem? To me, LinkedIn is mostly just a way to find jobs, and also maintain an online resume of sorts, and also to stay in some sort of contact with previous coworkers. I've had a bunch of recruiters try to recruit me for jobs through it. So it is helpful IMO, but only for career purposes. But I sure as hell don't post opinion crap on there, esp. political drivel. I don't mind the posts from people pointing out, for instance, interesting stuff about Python, so sometimes I read those. I also find entertainment in reading the posts about how companies with ridiculous recruiting practices fail to find decent candidates.

>On LinkedIn this is mandatory, your "avatar" must mirror your physical self.

Huh? On LinkedIn, the only thing that's mandatory is to have a profile that maybe looks like your resume, and that's about it. A photo helps too. Lots of people do nothing more with it than that, and use it to find jobs.

Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.

But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.

So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.

I have dual 27" monitors, both at work and at home. At work, they're 4K monitors, because that's all they have in this size for some reason (LG if it makes a difference). At home, my own monitors are ASUS ProArt 1440p monitors. I run Linux in both places.

I really like my 1440p monitors at home more than the 4K monitors at work. At work, I'm always dealing with scaling and font size issues, but at home everything looks perfect. So I think you're onto something here: 1440p just seems to be a better resolution on a 27" panel.

>Remember that the goal here is to end rent seeking, not allow it but only for the wealthy for as long as it's profitable for them.

Society would work a LOT better if there were a lot more rent-seeking against extremely wealthy people and companies.