Nothing wrong with a price hike for improvements. The problem is that the MTA had the money before the pandemic, but spent it wastefully.

NYC resident here. I think that the big issue is that the old mechanical signalling system has been an issue for decades, and that the MTA, even when it was flush, didn't prioritize it.

Hurricane Sandy took out several lines, and they claimed that they were going to upgrade to digital signalling as part of the restoration process. They didn't do it then.

The MTA, at one point, had an HR department that made up 25% of it's workforce (!). The history of waste, mismanagement, and misdirected resources is so damning that anything that they do should invite suspicion.

Chrome didn't succeed just on the merits. Google absolutely paid everyone and their brother to make it a monopoly, just like all of their other actions.

I'm sure that there's a better home for it than Google.

The author clearly doesn't remember what life was like before standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML. There was a reason why the Web won over AOL - the open standards.

Author also forgets Microsoft's attempt to create embrace-extend-extinguish supersets of Internet standards (i.e., Project Blackbird, poorly documented here - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F... ), and how they continued that, to a lesser degree, with Internet Explorer.

Chrome's near-total-domination means that Google could start to do really crappy things unless they're stopped. You think that Google wouldn't love to use Chrome for rent-seeking? Dream on.

Rip that browser out of their hands, now.

Forget about spying, security, etc. This is just the final nail in the coffin of America's decline. Social media was a powerful tool to project American culture into the world, and one of the last ones.

Jeans and rock 'n' roll? The Japanese do them better. TV? South Korea and Poland produce better stuff than the USA. Even saw an impressive Romanian show on Netflix. Non-American movies, boy bands, industrial design, cars... you name it, America no longer leads in any way.

Software and pizza were the holdouts, and it looks like pizza will be the sole survivor.

It'll be sold to one of Trump's supporters or new knee-benders - Musk, Bezos, Zuck, etc., at a fire-sale price. Reversing the ban simply keeps the value of the asset high.

This is a new spin on what happened after the Soviets fell - valuable assets sold for a pittance to political chums. This time, instead of the assets being state-owned, they're private, but dependent on the state to be allowed to exist.

Three out of four are not entirely true. I agree that neon pieces can be heavy, especially with larger diameter tubing.

My two neon pieces absolutely do not buzz at all. Properly made and powered neon is silent.

High voltage is only present inside the tubes. The transformers are very power efficient, and draw very little power from USA mains. There is no danger at all.

Flicker should never happen with, again, properly designed and constructed piece. In fact, mine had a bit of flicker initially (as I'm a novice), but eventually it sent away. In my case, it was due to some bends being a bit narrow, causing some issues withe flow of the gas/plasma.

Lastly: neon can literally last indefinitely, assuming no physical trauma. I have replaced LED bulbs that dimmed in a few years. Some of the original neon signs are still in use.

If the crack isn't catastrophic (the entire thing shattered), neon signs can be and are repaired, and then recharged with gas. But yes, it does take a pretty specialized person to do the work - same person that makes the signs.

I hope that there's an old Asteroids stand-up arcade machine in my future :)

Thanks for the compliment. I used screenshots from MAME of the sprites to ensure that my artwork was to proper scale. Sadly ran out of time to make neon "bullets". Was originally going for Space Wars ships, but they would have been pretty complex (at least, for me).

I've made two neon signs. I'm not an expert, but I did learn a lot about the craft, and how that relates to the article.

All neon signs are made by hand. Including those "mass produced" beer signs - they might have made some kind of jig to help, but still all handmade. The process, greatly simplified, typically works like this:

• Design is sketched, by hand, on sheets of butcher's paper,
• Tubes are headed in different types of burners, and bent and joined according to the design and the creator's skill,
• The design is tested in various ways,
• The design is evacuated, with gas(es) and optionally other substances (elemental mercury, sometimes) then added back,
• electrodes installed (involves melting and joining glass),
• The design is then mounted on something, carefully. All that glass gets heavy, and things need to stay rigid,
• Finally, transformers are wired, and the design is lit up.

This is one of my two signs: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fimgur.com%2Fa%2Fya5L7r2. The overall design is 4' x 4', and weights around 30-40lbs, including the plexi backing. I have no idea how I'll ever move it. It took me ~100 hours to do the entire thing (someone good could have done it in less than 20 hours). It uses, I believe, argon plus some mercury to give it a white/blue color.

The diminishing demand for neon signage is shrinking the ecosystem. Less neon craftspeople, less sources of the tubing, vanishing materials distribution. One instructor told me that "LEDs killed my business". All of this means that getting neon made is super expensive. Simply put, there are no unskilled labor stages. There is no technical innovation. I used Inkscape for my design sketch, and all of the old hands thought it was magic.

LEDs have many advantages. They're cheaper, the signs weigh less, they do not need rigidity, and they can be created with a lot of much cheaper labor.

Nonetheless, you'll never get that quality of light from an LED. Neon has a quality that is impossible to duplicate - a warm, liquid quality. Subjectivity aside, neon signage retains a singular practical advantage. If you need to fix or alter a neon sign, it'll always have the same light quality if you use the same gases and other materials. Need to replace a letter from your LED sign years down the line? It isn't going to match. You'll never find the same exact LEDs ever again.

A patent-trolls like to go after the weakest "violator" to force those with deeper pockets to settle.

So, they'll go after the project first, since they can't afford to fight in most cases. Then they'll leverage that "victory" to attack anyone making money with that software.

Hope I'm wrong.

Suing for patent violations requires visibility - in other words, if someone is violating my patent for widget mechanism, tear down the offending example and show the similarities.

Software is a different story, at least for closed-source. You can't (easily) go on a fishing expedition and get access to someone's source code just because you suspect something.

For Open Source Software, different story. The source is available, and it means that there is no expensive discovery process, or motioning back and forth for source code access.

In short, this could kill off OSS pretty easily.

Fuel cells are the ultimate form of EVs. BEVs are going to be a dead evolutionary branch if they ever get the costs down.

Having stuff on another drive is not backup. Remember the 3-2-1 rule:

3 copies of the data,
2 different media,
1 copy offsite.

Didn't do this, they lose.

My last Thinkpad, a T480, was the last of what made them great(ish) - easily serviceable, well built, compatible, comfortable.

Even so, Lenovo had already started with their silly whitelisting of devices in the BIOS, so no WiFi upgrade for you unless officially improved. Lenovo also made batteries difficult to buy, and expensive when you find them.

I side-graded to a Framework 13 - moved my memory and SSD into a bare chassis, which took less than 5 minutes on the Framework side. Got faster WiFi and an NVME interface that actually uses all four lanes.

Framework is also very dedicated to Linux support, another reason why folks (used to) buy Thinkpads.

Very rugged, new batteries cost $50, and I can repair it anywhere I carry my screwdriver if needs be.