"why was it in the kernel to begin with?"

kernel changes should be tightly controlled. Not pushed out anytime a vendor has a (poorly tested) update they want to blast to the masses.

Keep outside party code out of the kernel !

"led to no changes to the law"

I thought the DMCA was the result of that whole debacle.

Not sure how this story cleared that bar. Nothing techie for the nerds, and not a name anyone here recognizes.

TL;DR: Some rich guy you've never heard of died when his superyacht sank.

"TI already produces huge amounts of ICs in Texas"

The QC in Texas must be absolute ass. One customer of mine uses a 10-pin LED driver IC from TI on the BOM. The piece of shit blows itself out fresh off the reel one out of every roughly 20 times. You aren't even pulling a full fucking amp at 48V and this thing rockets off the board, taking traces and pads with it.

No, there isn't a short. On the boards where the pads and traces survive, replacing the IC (usually) fixes the issue.

This whole presidency has just been one big grift. Being a US senator has been widely understood to be a very profitable position, but this is really the first time we've seen the oval office get turned into a money-printing machine for the sitting president.

Other presidents have suspended control of their businesses while in office to eliminate even the appearance of conflict of interest. But this one, every decision he make seems to revolve around figuring out how to funnel more money into his family and businesses.

Unfortunately, it doesn't do any good to try to "expose" him on it, he has NO shame and doesn't care what anyone sees since his appointed buddies aren't going to hinder him. He's just going to keep doing it and throw a tantrum anytime he gets blocked. And that isn't happening nearly as much as it should, since in the past even the congress-critters maintain very relaxed laws to give themselves a wide berth to grab some money. But he's just going all-in on those weak laws (and lack of willingness to enforce them) and is going to wring every penny he can out of the country and its taxpayers.

On the bright side, he's made American History class a lot more interesting. And I'm taking bets that we get a whole rack of new laws on limiting presidential abuse as soon as he gets done robbing the bank.

"Then you do this "battery swap" and get a *used* battery pack that's been god knows where. "

This is what ISO documentation standards are for.

"How many of you made a working drone at 17?"

We were making fly by wire RC planes as pre-teens in the 80s.

If it can do the 4 basic operations of arithmetic without using much of any power, you could have a simple solar calculator that pretty much never ever needs batteries and can run in some of the lowest light conditions possible if you just gave it a few caps to charge.

so now we're going to go through that again? I know, change can be good, but sometimes Apple just seems to want to change things "just because they can".

I just don't think APFS has had enough time to "stew" in the field to get a proper large list of changes and enhancements to make for it yet. They need to sit on this a few more years before making us all reformat our drives again. I want more "bang for the buck" when it comes to inconveniencing me.

Also totally OT, slashdot scrolling my window up and down while I'm typing a reply (because it wants to load a new ad) is SUPER obnoxious behavior. We spend less than 1% of our time on the Reply Composition screen - you don't HAVE to display an ad there, nobody's going to click it.

Perhaps you idiots should make yourselves aware of the dangers of the products which you buy before you whine about them doing things THEY DO BY RAW FUCKING NATURE.

Go back to school and learn about fucking lithium chemistry.

or your bank got made outside the identified batch of serials.

signed, ISO-compliant QA tech

These are past warranty, and in some cases the pack is nearly a decade old.

Zero reason for a recall that I see and I am pretty strict when it comes to lithium batteries.

Existing energy infrastructure already pays for "capacity" thats not being used, to older systems like natural gas and coal. This is necessary because energy production MUST match energy demand or someone's lights are going out. When an energy source (power plant) on a reasonably big grid suddenly goes offline ("trips out"), the grid can tolerate it but drops dangerously low. Other plants that are only putting out say 70% of their capacity quickly spin up to max production to cover this shortfall and bring the grid back up to a safe level. (usually in terms of grid frequency)

These plants don't want to just sit at 70% production most of the time, that costs money to have capacity and not be SELLING it. So the grid pays them a percentage of the going rate for their unused capacity, because the grid MUST have some reserve in case of the previously described situation. They're being paid to have (but not USE) capacity. ie be a "safety net". If we weren't willing to pay them something for this unused reserve, then they'd have no reason to invest in having it in the first place.

Renewable energy sources (like wind and solar) are in similar situations. When its windy and sunny, they produce plentiful, cheap energy. During those times, non-renewable plants can shut down or throttle back, saving consumers a lot of money with their cheap energy. But sometimes production exceeds demand. It depends on the time of day or day of week. (and even time of year) Solar and wind aren't just "on" or "off". Once you get enough of them online, there's going to be periods of time where more energy can be produced than can be used. (and storing energy is hard - we're just getting going with grid batteries) But if you want all that delicious cheap power during the peak use, you've got to give them something for the times they have more power than you need.

So there's nothing new about "paying for capacity", we've been doing that for decades. It IS slightly more annoying though, since this is "leaving money on the table" since that capacity is essentially "free" power not being used. (no coal or natural gas required) That's just the thing with most renewables, they produce power on their own schedule, not when it's convenient for us. We need to improve our energy storage infrastructure. I'm not sure why this is only "becoming obvious" now, it's been a known issue for decades. Maybe it's just been a matter of waiting for better energy storage technology, or maybe it's a "we'll bring up this added expense after we're done paying for the wind and solar plants"?

All this means that just like the hydrocarbon plants, renewable plants need to get paid something for the time they spend not being fully used, because other times we NEED them to run at full capacity.

This isn't a problem that's going to go away on its own. We've got A LOT more ways to make power than to store it. Batteries are probably the best solution in the short term, but they're relatively large for what they store and are expensive. Pumped storage (dams) are the grand-daddies of energy storage, but have very specific geographic requirements. Molten salt is often considered (especially for solar) but has technical challenges and limited capacity. We really haven't found anything so far that works better than batteries, and it's not for lack of trying. So for now you can expect we're just going to have to keep paying energy plants (of all types) for unused capacity.

A limp vine?

We seen to be littering the moon with quite a bit of trash recently. I think we have a better record of landing on Venus than the moon right now, which is saying something!

I suspect it's a matter of cost and convenience. "it's closer and easier" seems to be leading to lower quality landers. No redundancy, simple things breaking, fragile designs, lax testing, no way to fix problems that come up, anything goes wrong and it's a complete mission fail.

We're launching so many landers lately that either totally fail or provide a pittance of science before dying. It's embarrassing. What are these, K-Mart blue light specials?