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Comment Re:Wait, what? CD-ROM is gone? (Score 1) 148

I spent the first big chunk of my professional life doing interactive development beginning with CD-ROMs. I still miss a lot of things about those times & how much innovation was taking place so fast. Ultimately transitioned from Authorware/Director to Flash and then then away from media once Flash matured. I know it's a dirty word with the security issues, closed system & tons of crappy usage in ads, but I loved what Flash was capable of and quite frankly nothing filled the hole it left very well. But I guess, that's a bit of a tangent. Back to CD - one big thing we learned the hard way was that burned CDs were not a good way to archive things. Sure they lasted better with much more expensive media but even those stored well seemed to degrade and if you needed to go back to discs you burned in more than 5 years ago, things got dicey. I remember going on a tour of a replication facility that did our large scale productions. I went into it thinking that it would be just a large version of disc burners and was absolutely amazed to see the process of one step injection-mold and stamping of the image to form replicated CDs.

Comment Re:Conspiracy? (Score 2) 148

My recollection was those were very competitive times & markets. The draw to be first/fastest was the driver & waiting to make a bigger jump up would open the door to someone else beating you. If you could be the first 6X drive today, the risk of waiting a little bit to be the first 8X just to make a bigger leap wasn't worth it.

Comment Re: Yo man, I still got a stack of AOL CD's (Score 1) 100

There is a huge difference between pressed CDs and burned CDs. I used to do a ton of CD/CD-ROM and then DVD work. Even using expensive, high quality media, burnable discs had quite poor reliability over time. 7-10 years out, I'd guess probably at least 1 in 4 CD-R's failed or had errors. For cheaper media it was an absolute crapshoot. Maybe the media/burners improved - I left that field around 2005 or so. But from my time doing that, I never trusted the media for important archiving.

Comment Re:Young people are screwed (Score 1) 223

True. They're about to find out what it means to vote for these things. Raise the minimum wage, tax billionaires out of the country, shut down all the corporations. There's a direct correlation between cause and effect. Those of us who've been here a while see how it works. Spin people up against the rich so they clamor to implement policies that ultimately make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Um...when exactly did that happen? Two of your causes seem completely imagined. Seriously, what billionaire has been taxed out of the country? Give me even a single corporation that has been shut down.

Comment Re:Lying with bad math (Score 1) 229

Nah, it really is that simple. Stimulus checks/increased monetary supply can lead to inflation...or not. Increased prices on everything does lead to inflation since it's literally the very definition of inflation.

It's pretty amazing to me that inflation has been as low as it's been and has risen as slowly as it has considering the supply shortages of goods and services (including/especially labor).

Submission + - Crazy alternatives to batteries for grid energy storage (newyorker.com)

silverjacket writes: A feature in this week's issue of The New Yorker highlights current efforts to use gravity, heat, momentum, air pressure, and other methods to store large amounts of energy for the electricity grid. It's essential for solar and wind power, which are intermittent.

Submission + - Gizmodo publishes massive new leaked trove of internal Facebook papers (gizmodo.com) 1

DevNull127 writes: Big scoop from Gizmodo today: for the first time, "We are publishing the Facebook papers"

As part of an ongoing project to make these once-confidential records accessible to the general public, Gizmodo is today—for the first time—publishing 28 of the documents previously exclusively shared with Congress and the media.

We have undertaken this project to help better inform the public about Facebook’s role in a wide range of controversies, as well as to provide researchers with access to materials that we hope will advance general knowledge of social media’s role in modern history’s most troubling crises...

Today’s release is the first of a series of posts from Gizmodo to be published in tandem with legal and academic partners. Our goal is to minimize any costs to individuals’ privacy and any furtherance of other harms while ensuring the responsible disclosure of the greatest amount of information in the public interest possible...

Future releases will be added to this page, a directory, that will eventually offer our readers links all of the leaked internal documents we have published.... Click here to read all the Facebook papers we've published so far.

Comment Re:What IS sleep hygiene? (Score 1) 27

Agree, it was an absolute life-changer for me. Before, any amount of sleep didn't matter - I was still crazy tired & needed naps. After - I was back to the point where getting 6 or more hours & I never felt tired once awake. I get that it for some people it can be an adjustment or it just doesn't work as well. For me, it just clicked instantly & was very much a case where great results made using it a no-brainer.

Comment Re:Hahah! (Score 1) 88

Not just feasible. As many of his critics (correctly) point out, many of Apple's innovations weren't actually Apple's creations. Many technologies that were already released in production, but Apple's implementation was better/more effective so were actually used more widely.

Comment Re:It would have to be one hell of a story (Score 1) 86

The idea is completely workable and possible, just not yet. Companies like Abbott and Siemens are invested heavily in improving point of care patient testing using rapid testing on miniature devices of small amounts of blood.. A lot of their goals for the future sound like what Theranos was claiming to be able to do today.

Something being possible at some point in the future is doesn't make claiming to be able to do it now any less of a lie. Doing the testing they claimed to be able to do, with the size of device they claimed, in the time they claimed - with the tiny amount of blood was in fact impossible at the time.

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