You need to keep not only Intel's 486 models but 486 work-alikes from AMD and others. If a CPU is actively supported all of the variants need to be supported for the claim to be meaningful. Even if that's four different models that still four machines that are over three decades old.

The biggest issue is LiPoly batteries, at the power density modern phones require, are impractical to get insurance certified for retail sale/storage. Such batteries have only the barest envelope to resist punctures and no real structure to resist deformation.

When they're sold in a phone there's no issue since the body of the phone provides the puncture and deformation resistance. Outside of a phone they can be quite dangerous. Old cell phone batteries were much lower power density and had thick plastic shells and were classed pretty much the same as alkaline batteries. A modern LiPoly battery gets higher density by stuffing lithium foil in the same volume that previous batteries used for their hard impact shell.

As such those batteries are classed differently by things like fire codes and insurance policies. A single improperly handled LiPoly battery is essentially an incendiary device. A box or pallet of them can be incredibly dangerous if mishandled.

Since the typical retail shop isn't going to ever carry them and the expected life of a battery in a phone is often longer than the support lifetime of the phone, manufacturers just use glued LiPoly batteries to prioritize weight and battery life.

The word "worth" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. What is "worth"? Is it the market cap based on some unrelated secondary market (the stock market)? The Wall Street value of outstanding stock is rarely if ever related to any fundamentals of companies. A run on a stock can push its market cap over $100 billion for no reason and then suddenly the company needs to be broken up?

Bandwidth is not oil or fresh water. No one is going to run out of it. It also has zero marginal cost so there's no cost to "produce it".

As long as power is supplied a router will deliver bits. At ISP scales there's very little power difference between full utilization and partial utilization.

I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

Solar is also more easily distributed. While large solar plants definitely benefit from economies of scale, they can be easily augmented with on-site solar installations and storage.

Normally a parking lot is just a giant heat island. However if you put up solar panel shades, not only do you shade everything in the parking lot but actually capture some of that insolation and put it to use. The same goes for pretty much any structure.

The same ends up being true with local battery storage. A battery can capture excess generation and then apply it locally when load increases. This helps the grid (supplied by any type of generation) as increased loads don't necessarily spike demand on the grid and can be more gradual since a local battery is augmenting the grid supply.

It's orders of magnitude easier and cheaper to throw solar panels on my roof and install a whole-house battery versus setting up a nuclear power plant in my garage.

I'm definitely not opposed to nuclear for a base load generation but expanding renewables with storage can have the same base load effects as nuclear with none of the downsides or expense. The Sun provides an absurd amount of "free" energy, it is ludicrous to not capture it for use.

Like an airline, but with orbital rockets.

An airline that can only take off and launch from a tiny number of sites. That number is not only limited by regulations but just basic infrastructure. The Starship can't reach Earth orbit without the first stage booster. There's a very limited number of locations that can possibly launch, recover, and service those boosters. A Starship landing anywhere but a dedicated spaceport would be stranded.

Rolling us back to pre-Facebook era Internet would go a long way to restoring the old magic of the Internet.

The golden age you're pining about before Facebook existed because of Section 230. Before Section 230 online fora and BBSes were really too small to be noticed for the most part but did in fact run afoul of the law as posts made there were treated as being published by the host of the forum.

If those protections are eliminated it will not be financially viable for anyone but gigantic players like Facebook to host any sort of user generated content, including Slashdot comments. It will also affect companies like web hosts since they'll now become liable for all of the content on their customers' sites. Shit even web developers that host a client's website will be run out of business since they'll now become liable for their client's content.

TikTok itself is banned inside China. Many western social media and news organizations are also banned there. The precedence is already there.

The difference between trolls and bot farms and manipulation directly from the social media platform is gas lighting is significantly easier. The platform has all of a user's graph data and can directly measure engagement with manipulative content. If they detect any engagement they can push less subtle manipulative content and accelerate as they measure increased engagement.

Trolls and bot farms don't have the same level of feedback. They're certainly not ineffective but their targeting is not nearly as precise. TikTok in particular is problematic in that Chinese intelligence services have direct access to and influence on the platform.

This is concerning not just with telemetry and graph data but also influence campaigns. Because the weighs in "the algorithm" of any social media feed are completely opaque to the end user there's no way to know the difference between organic content, stuff the user engaged with knowingly, and content inserted to wag the dog. This is used by platforms for advertising but works the exact same way for manipulating for any reason.

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

The problem with that whole talk is it pre-supposed the observed phenomena are in fact objects. If the "Nimitz" UFO was indeed an object it had 5000Gs of acceleration and used a terawatt of power. If you pumped a terawatt of power into an object the size of an F/A-18 it would turn into plasma.

So your hypothetical object has completely unsupported "engineering" requirements to simply exist. You don't need to understand all "physics" to know that your hypothesis that a UFO is an actual object and not a mistaken measurement is unfalsifiable. It's basically saying a UFO is magic. Further such hypothesis is not skeptical. It makes unsupported assumption ls because an observation doesn't match an expectation.

It's far more rational to approach UAP from the position that they're measurement error. Instead of crazy logical leaps assuming these objects run on essentially magic, it only relies on a much more prosaic understanding of the mechanisms of measurement.

A reflection inside a telephoto lens can look like all sorts of things. The depth of field further transforms in-lens illusions. Lenses designed to correct chromatic aberrations can have an effect on the transmitted image. The projection onto the flat plane of a CMOS sensor further amplifies the odds of optical illusions. Also the fact many cameras are monocular again increases the odds an optical illusion being seen in the output.

An out of focus moth close to a camera moving at very boring moth-like speeds can look like a much more distant object moving at ludicrous speeds. Camera movement can make a close stationary/slow object appear to be moving quickly. A distant object moving at boring speeds relative to a moving observer can appear to be making crazy movements.

At the core of these illusions is the fact a monocular lens is projecting rays from any numbers of things at a variety of distances onto a single flat sensor plane. The rays aren't tagged with a distance value. The planar sensor has no idea where a photon originated from. Without good references it's hard to judge the actual size and distance of objects. There's precious few good references in the sky for judging the size of distant objects.

Jumping to conclusions phenomena are in fact objects is not scientifically rigorous and intellectually lazy. Assuming an observation must be some unknown physics is just god of the gaps logical fallacies. A jillion measurements of different phenomena doesn't really help since the same type of sensors (monocular CMOS cameras with refresh rates of tens or dozens of Hz) will just misidentify the same class of phenomena the same way.

The police can't "trace ballistics" of jack shit. That whole concept is a bunch of pseudo-science woo. At best it might be able to correlate a bullet having been fired from a particular model of gun. The idea that a bullet can be reliably traced to a particular gun is fantasy. Even when a particular gun model can be identified with ballistic tests those tests can't reliably differentiate between two individual guns of the same model.

The only way ballistic pattern matching might ever work is if a particular gun had a defect that left a specific telltale on a bullet. Even then you'd need to identify how likely that defect would be in the population of that model gun or manufacturer.

Most police forensics tests are pseudo-science with ballistic analysis being one of the worst and least statistically sound.

The whole concept of "ghost guns" is absolutely filled with cop math. Regular guns with the serial number filed off get lumped into "ghost guns" as do ones with home-milled lowers. The danger of 3D printed guns effectively zero. If this bill was in any way trying to deter the construction of illegal guns it would try controlling mills and drill presses rather than 3D printers.

No, Python is readable.