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Comment Re:Just shoot them down (Score 4, Insightful) 133

A large unidentified drone, and especially more than one, flying repeatedly over a military base seems like a pretty clear threat.

If you're operating a 20ft-long UAV, you should know how to do it safely+legally, it's hardly comparable to a random hobbyist with a small quadcopter.

Comment Re:You could just have two UIs (Score 1) 121

And I'm sure a thousand Apple engineers have suggested this. And even now it's techically quite possible and would likely perform great on the latest devices, they won't do it because it means relinquishing control over the device, and letting them run software outside of their control. (Any MacOS chained to the App Store and incapable of running unsigned code wouldn't really be MacOS)

Comment Re:the app store rules and 30% cut is why mac os i (Score 1) 121

The App Store is exactly why they won't allow MacOS on iPad. They've already got iOS compatibility in MacOS for the M-series CPUs. Hardware is now very similar between Mac/iPad. For the top-end iPads, they could relatively easily create a MacOS-for-iPad with an instantly-toggleable 'iOS Mode'. But they want to keep the iPad locked down and shackled to the App Store, even though the App Store has mostly failed at creating quality software for the device, while encouraging incredibly customer-hostile monetization and advertising.

Comment Re:capitalism (Score 1) 300

If you take everything from all the billionaires and divide if up equally between the world's population, what's everyone going to gain? A few hundred to a few thousand dollars? (Probably at the lower end, as it wouldn't be possible to liquidate all those assets all at once)

Then what happens if you give everybody in an impoverished African villiage $1000, $10,000, or even $100,000 in cash, when there's little available to buy? It'll probably mostly disappear to inflation.

And then you have to add up the cost of what was destroyed in the 'great redistribution'. You might as well drop nukes on the 'first world' countries, as without their economies and technology and energy, most people are going to die.

Comment Re:Checked the paper: mechanical computing (Score 1) 65

Might make more sense for the semiconductors or complete circuit boards to be mass produced on Earth and sent up there.

But even then, there's incredible challenges to making the rest of the parts for anything we'd consider to be a useful robot from raw materials found on an asteroid or another planet.

Even manufacturing something 'simple' such as a small modern electric motor is a huge task when you start to break it down. You probably need rare-earth magnets, you may need adhesives to hold the magnets, you need insulated wire, you may need bearings, and so on.

Comment Re:Well-intentioned but idiotic and unworkable (Score 2) 151

A less powerful machine may also take more time to get the same job done. A machine that takes twice as long to, say, encode a video is likely to use more power than a fast machine would for the same job (especially if the monitor and hard drive are powered up for the duration) Same may go for for limits on vacuum cleaner wattage in the EU.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 151

It's easier to create fun if you have a lot of brute-force power to make use of, and aren't spending all your time on optimisation as the game developers of the past had to.

The real waste is ever-increasing screen resolutions (while sub-par framerates are still common...). High-DPI is nice for text, but there was just no need for the rush to 4K gaming (8 million pixels vs the 2 million pixels of 1080p!)

Comment Exclusivity was the appeal. (Score 3, Interesting) 24

For a while, it was an exclusive invite-only club that looked appealing from the outside - it seemed that interesting people were having interesting conversations on there.

Now it's just a free-for-all for everyone, the appeal has mostly vanished. Especially when the reality of it is a barely readable mess of emojis and some questionable UI design.

Comment Re:VR is still a thing? (Score 4, Interesting) 101

VR was almost becoming a thing until Facebook pretty much killed it. PC VR was a very cool experience (for those who could handle the 'VR sickness'). But then Facebook discontinued the Rift, tied things to FB accounts, and focused on mobile VR.

The Quest 2 is a pretty impressive device, and mobile may have been the future of VR, but mobile GPUs really aren't up it yet. You need a beast of a GPU to render a high-end game scene at a high resolution and FOV twice per frame (stereoscopic) at 90fps.

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