vimacs2

Sorry but this is absolute nonsense. Having awareness of a problem does not imply necessarily having the best possible solution and neither should pointing out the problem be gatekeeped by this stupid expectation that you suddenly need to do the job of the offending party for them.

You will also end up with solutions that are more reactionary than genuinely innovative in the sense of being designed from the ground up on the basis of first principles.

Your comment is implying that there is a universal recognition of these problems already but that's not true outside of our insular tech bubble. These lists are great for anybody outside of that bubble who want to rapidly get up to speed on all the problematic actions that Apple has taken, and with a lens focused on preserving the freedoms of the user.

It's definitely different in the sense that the required automation, solar panel, and reusable rocket technology for bringing those dreams into reality are no longer science-fiction but a mixture of both current and near term technologies. The vastly expanded knowledge of the solar system since the 70's also means we can actually make informed estimates of economic value of the planets and asteroids out there.

For me it's now a non-brainer that we will be an interplanetary civilisation before the end of this century - even if realistically the overwhelming majority of humanity will still likely live in or around Earth for at least another millennium - barring some major mass extinction level natural or artificial cataclysm (note that even fairly pessimistic projections for climate change do not meet this criteria).

Reading back now, I realize my comment was indeed just dumb and borne from not properly reading the OP's comment and thinking of the anti-vaxxer movement in general, not the actually rational aversion to untested ones during the Covid crisis.

I would have editing a disclaimer on it but it's too late.

I don't disagree there, I'm just pointing out that there is a difference between the two cases.

They can be made as sturdy and secure as your budget and desire extends. These things would be designed from the ground up to have additional atlas piller supports for redundancy in case a ring gets damaged with many different power supplies to guarantee that the active support system continues to operate.

Remember that you do not need to move all of this mass off anywhere once in place so you build it like a building, not a ship that needs to be optimised for low mass and acceleration.

You do not build these flimsy since even the modest ones will have a big upfront cost and the better equipped one is, the bigger the payoff. They are incredibly easy to extend and maintain once the initial ring is set into place though since they are in orbit so as long as you match its own orbital plane, you can operate on it just fine.

You will have a big superstructure magnetically suspended around the moving ring rotating in the opposite direction to the inner ring at the speed of the earth's own rotation so it stays stationary relative to the ground, and which is both half the reason why we build these things but also makes it significantly difficult to penetrate that inner ring.

That superstructure is going to be much heavier than the inner ring by necessity since that inner ring is moving faster than orbital speeds to counteract the momentum generated by the superstructure. So you might as well use that mass for useful things.

We should also not think of active support structures as somehow less sturdy than passive ones. In fact they are far more sturdy since they can be used to create arbitrarily high levels of compressive strength - whatever level of juice you are willing to expend - and this is where those fusion reactors would indeed come in handy. You would also in reality use multiple inner rings instead of just one though one would be fine too for an initial construction.

Keep in mind though that even considering conventional power sources and no superconductors, these things can regenerate a decent fraction of that expended energy back by using the moving ferromagnetic matter inside to generate electricity through the induction generated by either orbiting along the earth or in the case of the atlas piller, falling all the way down from the mesosphere or even further if you decide that it's worth your investment to extend one all the way to geostationary ala the classic space elevator.

Might be a bit overkill though since the orbital ring itself can easily launch you at decent speeds for cislunar and even interplanetary travel.

You also probably have a shit tonne of solar panels on the superstructure itself and would probably want to add a fission or fusion reactor too for added redundancy since you always want multiple power sources for very large structures.

Either that or we continue to rely on rockets which cannot be scaled up to the point where off world travel is as common as air travel without bringing ecological ruin and gargantuan amounts of noise pollution. It's just about the only real curse of being on a planet that has both a thick atmosphere relative to most rocky planets (in our solar system) and also being the massive of the rocky planets.

Except the difference is nudity is natural and sometimes instrumental - for washing, bathroom use, and medical care for example - and denying basic healthcare to your children is not, unless you plan to be instrumental in your child's demise and that comes natural to you.

Yes, the people who are specifically critical of abusive practices of poweful executives are the "control freaks" here. Flawless logic.

My idea is more fun though :(

On a serious note, I unfortunately don't think that would make companies behave because the problem with corporations is not specifically bad leadership but a more systematic one.

Hierarchies just naturally cause communications to breakdown between different levels of an organisation with sufficient scaling and this will lead to inevitable conflict between workers and management which will further expand to conflicts between the company and their own userbase.

Sorry for not being civil. I was feeling irate at the time and took things way overboard when a lot of your comment was probably intended to help.

Having high exhaust velocities does not mean you will have the high thrusts required to get yourself out of the earth's atmosphere. Most current proposals for Nuclear Fusion powered ships involve an exhaust that is orders of magnitude more diffuse than that of chemical rockets.

They only come into their own once they are already in space or in orbit which returns us to the problem that we need to have launch assist infrastructure that can deal with that first step without resorting to those "flamethrowers" as you call them.

It's also not true at all that fusion is necessary to allow for clean energy (even ignoring that many of the near term fusion reactor designs still need to have radiation shielding to deal with dangerous neutron emissions). We could use a combination of renewable sources and nuclear fission to deal with the energy crisis now and then utilise fusion once it's finally matured to the point of usefulness. Indeed, we could use that orbital infrastructure to help construct a planetary cloud of solar collectors that can operate 24/7 and beam that energy down via microwave rectiner technology that is already capable of achieving greater than 85% energy conversion (keep in mind that we lose far more energy simply from the diffusion of sunlight through the atmosphere). This approach not only can power the earth but any off earth colonisation prospects with line of sight with our planetary cloud - without needing to haul the likely massive early generation fusion reactors.

Neither is fusion necessary for advanced space travel. It would be very useful but chiefly for travel to under-developed sectors of the solar system. solar reflectors scaled up enough can be used to speed up and slow down entire fleets of ships with far higher potential top speeds than even antimatter drives permit (since there is no requirement to have onboard propellant). They also double as handy point defense systems for dealing with both debris and ships that are attempting to turn themselves into relativistic kill missiles - remember that there is no such thing as an unarmed space ship, they are all potential weapons of mass destruction, especially once we reach the state where we have fusion drive powered ones.

Instead of pulling "obvious" reasons out of your ass, how about listening to the guy's explicitly given reason instead - specifically that he wanted a gaming rig and didn't want to pay the "Apple tax".

There is also PCI-Passthrough so you can in fact use a VM for gaming but it's rather cute that you're attempting to paint me as the one who is somehow failing to understand why a particular system might not fulfills their needs.

Also, which "other guy?" Handerous himself? I don't recall him ever expressing being "pissed off and sour" so either you just assumed guilt by association or your reading comprehension is way off.

Also, you literally painted a crash a year as if that's a real problem with MacOS or really any desktop OS. Don't pretend like you're being objective when you are clearly not.

It's great that purchasing multiple devices for each OS suits you. Not everyone is you or agree on what a "simple" scheme is.

I flirted with the idea of using supersized nuclear powered aircraft as the terrestrial version of the Aldrin cycler[1] concept. Basically, these things would be designed to never land but instead run in circular paths between continents with a fleet of onboard craft and hangers that will exchange cargo and passengers instead. They will be designed from the ground up to be maintanable and refuelable under constant operation (not a particularly difficult goal for a nuclear powered craft).

Safety is a very valid concern for any supersized airborne vehicle but especially a nuclear powered one! However, this is one department where scale in itself brings it's own benefits. The volume increases faster than the surface area so you could have a hull far thicker than that of many naval ships while still having a truly vast interior volume. Not needing to ever land also reduces avenues for sabatoge and presumably the craft's interior itself would be heavily compartmentalized. You can also optimise your hull to deal with a narrow air pressure range which you cannot do with normal craft which need to be able to handle a wide range from ground level to the stratospheric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_cycler

Even if we pretended that it's rational to hedge all your bets on not only having a working fusion reacter in the near term future but having the capability to miniturise it to a degree where it could be used as an engine for a launch vehicle, you would still be dead wrong.

Fusion still shares the same fundumental problem that chemical rockets or even more advanced options like blackhole or antimatter drives face - the rocket equation. We need to use near term reusable launch vehicles like the Starship to help set up the required launch assist structures that would make genuine mass transit of people and cargo into orbit possible.

Things like skyhooks, lofstroom loops, and eventually orbital rings that would allow people to ride trains or cable cars from an earth city straight into orbit for the same price range as intercity travel today. Needless to say, that is not going to happen until there is enough of an industry up there to justify the large upfront costs of such megaprojects (especially the orbital ring) so the Starship is our best near term hope of getting us up to that point.

Note that none of these projects require advanced materials or new technologies (as opposed to the space elevator that is likely to remain science fiction when it comes to dealing with a body with the gravity well of earth anyway), they're just massive engineering projects.

I'm an exclusive arch user and very happy with my time but your comment pisses me off. You had a poor experience with MacOS and a great experience with Linux so naturally the OP must either be misrepresenting their experience or "doing something wrong"?

Why on earth would anyone want to purchase another computer for the sake of using an OS that they already have been soured on, especially when they could just spin up a VM? That's just being wasteful regardless of how expensive it is (computers also occupy space, energy, and time).

I kind of love how this article neither glorifies nor bemoans how things used to be but instead just gives a detailed and artful description.

No because if this was true, then we would see carbon based life do the exact same process in reverse. However, there is a limit to adaptability, particularly through the dumb and highly stochastic process of natural selection.

We have no evidence of a void ecology in near earth orbit or of life persisting close to the Moho barrier - where the crust meets the mantle. There are hard limitations to the encroachment of life that only technology or radically different chemistry can circumvent.

The same hard barriers might also mean that life on Mars is largely constrained to those few underground liquid water lakes that we have recently found evidence for. Keep in mind that even the most barren deserts on Earth have several orders of magnitude more water present in the air than on Mars.

I disagree with this assessment of silicon based life. While it is true that Earth's crust is mostly silicon, it's also at a temperature that would make metabolic processes using silicon very difficult until you get down to the mantle.

It could be that silicon based life is in fact constrained by temperature and can only arise in planets where the mean temperature is in the thousands. This could in fact mean that we do have a parallel silicon based biosphere underneath our feet. There is obviously no evidence for this whatsoever but then again, there is no reason to assume that the occasional leakage in the form of volcanic eruptions would leave any trace that we could use to deduce that these samples were once living entities.

Sorry but I'm not American so this whole whataboutism game doesn't really work on me. I actually think America are in fact the worse of the two when it comes to international activities and by a wide margin. I also do in fact boycott American companies based on their profiteering and support for both the Iraq War and the illegal Israeli settlements. I pretty much avoid all products from the UAE and Saudi Arabia as well for similar reasons. This is a fake dichotomy. I can condemn both China and America because I don't see them as that fundamentally different.

Both are capitalistic societies - one with neoliberal leanings and the other with a totalitarian state controlled capitalism. Both are intensely hierarchical and class based societies and neither are democratic to a meaningful capacity.

Organisations that derive their stability from a base of exploitation do not deserve to exist and I frankly care more about the plight of the workers in the global south than people being laid off in America or China (which is already beginning to outsource work to African states the same way the US had started to outsource work to China). That's not to say that their plight does not matter but keep in mind that much of the material wealth and stability that the US (and to a lesser extent, China) and even it's working class citizens enjoy was built off the back of the South.

I am in agreement that boycotts on their own are largely symbolic gestures but broader economic sanctions do have a history of working, South Africa being the most recent example.

It's sad that people would lose their jobs but I wouldn't lose any sleep over it. This whole argument is toxic - we can't punish a company for doing unethical things because of all the people who rely on them? I reject this argument because providing jobs is not a real defense of anything and it also implies that the corporation's security means job security when many companies will do mass layoffs irrespective of how well they do (Activision being a rather infamous example) to help make revenue figures look better leading up to a review. Kodak are also most likely going to go under regardless unless if they make a real innovative change - and sucking up the CCP is not going to be it considering that market is saturated at this point.

The fact that evil empire number 2's actions could arguably less terrible than evil empire number 1 is not a defense. How about both the US and China are responsible for reprehensible things which deserve condemnation? It's gross enough to see US companies bootlicking their own government but it's even more nuasuating seeing them do so to another. It's also objectively even more reprehensible because it is not something that is even necessary for survival compared to not antagonising your own home state.

I also completely reject the stance that piracy is theft. Nobody is losing out on anything unless if you believe in the modern delusion that is IP. The fact that occasionally I'm pirating from US and CCP shills is a bonus, not the justification for it. I do not need any justification to pirate. I'm fine with paying for things as well but I'm not under some delusion that the money I'm sending is going to somehow be distributed fairly among the people who actually were responsible for making the production possible. I will and have spent hundreds or thousands when I have the option to send directly to creators, I couldn't give two shits if some parasitic executive would have been able to afford an extra diamond encrusted bidet if only for that last couple of dollars I could have provided him for the privilege of watching a show he didn't make. I only make exceptions for shows that are known to be struggling financially. That's the one case where individual purchases actually have a real impact on the survival of a show or the jobs of the people who do the real work.

I'm fairly critical of the efficacy of boycotts but your anger at your friend seems motivated by a desire to rationalize your own complacency.

We live in a society that is built on a fundamentally unjust framework. It's practically impossible to avoid being tied to exploitative supply chains short of living off the grid and hand making all your own clothes and farming your own produce - and even then you will need to effectively pay tribute to your local municipality or risk falling victim to state violence.

However, incomplete abstinence is better than no abstinence. Every product you refuse to buy is another dollar that these greedy amoral profiteers are deprived from. I think that counts for something, even if it is not a complete solution.

As for media specifically, piracy is still a thing. Just saying ;)

I never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives.

However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand.

It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.

Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.

Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.

Which doesn't really disprove anything. Nobody is arguing that there are armed gunman that target any company that dares deviate from the chosen path of planned obsalescence. The argument though is that the market is overwhelmingly controlled by those that do practice it and furthermore, this practice has nothing to do with serving the interests of the consumer but that of the shareholder.

The fact that there are some that have been persuaded through years of concentrated marketing that bad engineering decisions are desirable is more of an example of manufacturing consent than the "free market of ideas".

It makes you wonder what kind of clarity the images of the James Web telescope will provide when it eventually gets launched - presumably by the time we will have starships that can just go there in person.

All kidding aside though, it does seem like it actually will get launched soon for real. We definitely live in exciting times for astronomy as well as potential space colonisation.

Now that's what I call a courteous roundhouse kick to the social nads courtesy of the great Chuck Norris.

Ah yes, the "free market" argument. Remind me of how that one went with the headphone jack. Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier - despite it objectively being a worse device for it with almost no positives except saving a little bit of cost for the manufacturer. I do not accept the arguments on it being necessary for water resistance or providing much saving of internal storage either - since we have devices that demonstrate how these claims are bunk.

My point is that maybe there needs to be an organised pushback against this instead of pretending like customers have perfect knowledge of the drawbacks and benefits associated with a particular design decision and are not at all affected by marketing.

Which you could also do by simply making the device a little thicker and have a battery run the entire width of the device. Point is past a certain point, thinness becomes more of a drawback than a benefit, especially given the trade-offs involved.

Seems like a deliberate design choice, not some inevitable consequence of modernity. Why exactly does the board need to be cell phone sized when the actual form factor of even a netbook is substantially larger?

I would point out though that while he might have been wrong on the X1 Carbon, you still have not really dismantled the key argument - that you don't need to embrace soldered RAM to get laptops that are thin enough. At a certain point, you're just going to end up with an experience that is objectively worse since keyboards start having more and more give the thinner you make them (not to mention far worse feel).

I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.

Way overstating your case. PC's might be on the decline but they are still far far from being a "rounding error for the semiconductor industry".

Laptops also make up a major component of that still very alive market so no, I disagree that there is not enough market demand for having laptops that can be repaired or upgraded. It's the industry themselves that have worked to hamper the right of repair while giving nebulous pseudo-technical rationalizations for it.

Except then you would also have to explain exactly what those billions of minds are running on and have the ability to predict with 100% accuracy their future state at any point - something which is impossible under our current mathematics and physics.

This is why it's pseudoscientific though - you could still argue that it's a hack or whatever since the ultimate universe might have different laws of physics and computation. At that point, what makes this theory particularly more empirically appealing than a supernatural deity though? An unfalsifiable theory is an unfalsifiable theory.