I'm a coach and mentor for 599 Robodox and my son is a senior on the team this year, so it's extra tough.

We also qualified for VEX Worlds which has been canceled as well.

It's brutal for coaches, mentors, and students. All the time designing, fabricating, building, programming and we didn't even get to play one comp (we would have been competing next weekend). And all the fundraising and the whole business side of things, too.

I just wonder how this works in practice. I know that if people in lesser jobs than mine started making the same as me, I'd have an issue.

Are the people who were making $15 before this going to demand $20 because people in lesser jobs are making the same as them now?

And then the $20/hr people demand $25...

And the $30/hr people demand $40...

And on and on... ???

Talk to me when they can master pointers.

Change jobs!

Fixed that for you... ;^)

Sure, I understand the supply chain.... but how did it get like this? It's not like China had all these empty factories already built and all these organizations created and staffed hoping for someone to come along and the US had nothing in place. Cheap labor and relaxed environmental rules attracted the entire manufacturing ecosystem there. If we hadn't dismantled our manufacturing ecosystem by essentially transplanting it to China, we'd have all those capabilities, too. I think there is enough people needing work in the US that Apple could have sacrificed a certain amount of profit to be a better US citizen and establish it's own manufacturing ecosystem here. It would help me decide to purchase their products, leading to.....

I also understand the concept of Demand - I don't like the way they're doing business so I don't buy their products. Sure, almost the entire consumer electronics world uses Foxconn and similar companies but when Apple is literally overflowing with money, I think they could have "Thought different" about what to do with it. I'm using this knowledge by affecting the part of this that I can - the Demand part.

And since I have been modded Troll, I'll add that I didn't say that *I* thought they should be treated as an Evil Corporation (regardless of what I think), I'm curious as to the reasons why the public at large (and the media) isn't. Likely, it's Shiny Trinkets Syndrome.

So while Apple holds a meeting to try to decide what to do with too much money, it's clear that they've been overcharging their customers and abusing their vendors who in turn abuse their workers. Why do we like Apple so much and don't put them into the "Big Evil Corporation" bag as is so popular these days? Are they any better than perennial punching-bag Exxon-Mobil?

And if they can get away with charging what they do for their products, couldn't they afford to "onshore" some of the manufacturing to the US? Or are they using China to get away with environmental regulations... oops, another check in the "evil" column, maybe?

I used to work for the support department of the Konica copier/fax/printer division back in the early 90's and used to be able to diagnose fax machines by ear. They had two modems - a 300-baud baseline for the capability negotiation and the "high speed" modem up to 14.4k at the time for the data transfer. You could tell if there were too many "retraining" sequences where it would back down the baud rate until one worked. Too many of those sequences indicated poor line conditions. Or you could hear if one of the modems had failed "deaf" or "mute" by the missing parts of the sequence. Fun times talking on a headset and doing the modem dance while standing over the diagnostic machine.

I made a bunch of money aligning Commodore 1541's with and oscilloscope and the Dysan(?) alignment disk - at least good money for a 16 year-old at the time (1985 - Comsoft Computers in Sun Valley, CA). I also sold periodic preventative alignment checks since you'd find that once your drive started failing on commercial disks and was re-aligned, it didn't match all the out-of-alignment data you'd recorded on your own disks!

So this "act of God" concept actually works to the benefit of the atheists. The religious can have their claim denied because they failed to pray that they would be spared the incident or failed to achieve a sufficient degree of piety to influence their deity. The atheists would have no such control, and thus, liability.

Tricky, those insurance lawyers!

You're here, too, you know.

Equal pressure on the inside and outside is effectively zero pressure. That's why you don't blow up like a balloon and pop when travelling from sea level to high altitude, yet your bag of Doritios might.

You don't need to pressurize the liquid on the inside, let the ambient pressure do the work. Off the top of my head, you'd only need something like a flexible diaphragm let the pressures equalize. Remember that liquids are virtually uncompressable so you you'd have very little displacement. The problem then becomes dealing with the parts that cannot be filled with liquid, such as batteries but now you're talking about much smaller structures and a hardened case may be more practical for them. Most electrical components don't have compressible space inside them that I can think of off the top of my head.

Speaking of pressure equalization and diaphragms, there's no reason you can't do this with air on the inside, you just have to have a large enough compression space for the air to compress into (i.e. an external air tank/bladder). So if the pressure at depth is 100 atmospheres, you'll need a sea-level compression space ~100 times the volume of space that your working equipment requires. Better make sure that air in there is very dry, though as there could be all sorts of effects due to water vapor condensing, etc.

And I didn't disagree with him.

The easy answer is to drown the internals of the devices to be used at depth. Obviously sea-water is salty and that would disrupt and ruin things in short order but any non-conductive and non-corrosive liquid should do the trick. Optics can be designed to account for the difference in refraction ratios, most electric motors can be used "drowned", especially brushless types.

**** fsck**