Yeah, I get how that’s their intended use, I’m just saying I have my doubts about that business model. If this is their pitch, I don’t think they’re gonna sell many.

The thing is, they will be expensive. And it’s not an expensive service, it’s an expensive product. A state or a nation will have to buy a bunch of these, likely for hundreds of thousands each. And then just sit on them millions of dollars worth of energy infrastructure just sitting around not generating energy… Then when it’s time for them to be deployed you have a whole bunch of government workers saying “uh, I’ve never set one of these up, where’s the user manual?”

If instead you had them in regular use, when it comes time to deploy them in an emergency, you’d have people who actually know how to use them. Plus you could be generating power with them wherever extra power might be needed.

I did catch that, I was just pointing out there are additional problems with the statement as well. But I’ve edited my statement to make that more clear.

Hmm interesting. I don’t see how it could be economical as an emergency-only power source. To build them and store them for occasional use seems pretty unappealing. Surely if you had them, you’d use them to generate electricity/passive income.

You could think of them as easily mobile power systems, available to respond to emergencies, but used wherever is convenient the rest of the time.

So yeah, they’ll still be a hazard for air traffic, but luckily we do have an established solution for that, the blinking red light. Also, controlled airspace around airfields.

Would it be possible to use heat to get it to float, instead of helium? Heat it up with electricity.

Sure, that would be possible. The generators themselves will produce some amount of heat. It’s also going to have a fair amount of passive lift, as it’s essentially a kite. So simply being able to maintain a rigid shape and effective airfoil could do a lot to produce the desired lift. If it were redesigned with that in mind, shaped more like a glider/kite/parasail, something to maximize lift, it’s possible that it could be done without a light gas, though it would also be more reliant on favorable winds.

I have to wonder though, how much the power transmission lines weigh, that seems like a serious limiting factor on maximum attainable altitude.

The transmission line question is interesting though, there’s a complex optimization problem there. Traditionally with wind, larger turbines are more efficient. As you increase the turbine blade size, the area that the blades cover (and thus power generation potential) increases more than the mass of the blades do. So the result is (generally speaking) a larger wind turbine is more efficient than a smaller one. But now factor in the transmission line… The larger the turbine the more power it generates AND the thicker (and heavier) the transmission line has to be for its entire length. To complicate things more, higher altitudes mean stronger and more reliable wind. So now how do you optimize for turbine size/cable gauge, and cable length/altitude?

It seems tricky, but like perhaps there’s just a right answer, an optimal size.

So that “10,000 meters” didn’t scale right, clearly. But you also can’t possibly call those “high altitudes”. Small planes like cessnas fly at low altitudes, like 2,000 - 5000 ft, a 747 flys at a high altitude, 40,000 ft; 1600 ft is nothing, that’s lower than some buildings.

I think I agree with Cory Doctorow’s opinion

I’d say that’s always a good position. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him come out on the wrong side of a topic.

Have they? Is Roku dominant in this market?

Space exploration. It feels like the one awesome thing humanity is doing right now. Also maybe the most important thing humans are doing right now.

I might switch to a flip phone if it had gps and maps.

That’s simply the killer app for smart phones, at this point it’s a necessary part of my life. Without it I need a separate device just for that, and that device is actually less useful.

Edit: now that I’m reading other responses I have to agree, secure messaging and 2fa are really important too.

I could live without everything else, but to be honest, I don’t use much else. A few games, Lemmy, music apps, audiobook apps. Of those, Lemmy is the app most likely to leave me feeling upset, or like I want to doomscroll.

I think limiting the apps I use is the biggest thing I can do to not make the phone a negative influence for me. But to be clear, if that starts happening, Lemmy is the first to go, I already don’t use any other social media.

Unrelated wasps seem to prefer prosciutto over any other item on a spread filled with meats and cheeses.

But so do I, this is terrible news! The prosciutto is the only part I don’t want to throw out!

I’m about to be seeing a lot less Roku…

They know they’re entirely replaceable right? Like the Amazon fire tv, apple tv, Chromecast… Making their platform shittier really shouldn’t be their top priority if they want to stay in business.

In all fairness, that is one of the strong use cases for computers in general. Doing simple yet tedious tasks accurately. When looking over 50 names checking for a particular letter, humans get bored and make mistakes. We actually aren’t great at that sort of task. I think simply calling this ineptitude both misses the point and under appreciates the reality of being human.

Alas, it is easier to call someone dumb than to try to understand them.

Yeah, I have to agree. When a breach occurs (and it happens to just about every organization at some point or another) a press release this honest, responsible and immediate is not really the norm. I see this as a show of competence on the security front and integrity for the company as a whole.

I do wish Plex wasn’t further enshitifying their product more with every release, but that’s a different issue.

Metallurgy isn’t my field, but here’s an educated guess…

There are different kinds of contaminants. In raw ore you largely have silicate rock and metals. In recycled material you have relatively pure metal (alloys), and a large variety of volatiles.

Now with ore you can grind it all into sand, sift it, and smelt all the heavy grains. The rock should mostly just separate from the metal, these are just phase changes. But with recycling, those volatiles are going to burn and some are going to react with the metals, changing the chemical makeup. And with ore, you basically know what minerals you’re working with. With recycled materials, it’s anyone’s guess. Does this can contain some food residue? Or an oil? Perhaps chemical cleaning agents? Is another plastic container stuffed inside?

There’s a lot of variables with recycled materials, I imagine it’s hard to predict how some of those variables react.

their business model was unsustainable,

So stop development, problem solved. Seriously, that’s all anyone wanted. Just keep selling the mobile app, people will keep buying it. Update it once a year and don’t change anything else. They probably could have continued to run everything with one or two developers.

It kills me that they took something good and turned it to shit rather than letting it be.

Whatever, just keep it down, ok?

Play with my kid. I’ll be in bed.

I think I’m going to have a harder time fitting a threadripper in my 10 inch rack than I am getting any GPU in there.

Well, you could always use a closed loop CPU cooler. (Not necessarily that one)

With the radiator hanging out in back, this shouldn’t need much height.

Fake news! That user “CatDogL0ver” is just is a dog and a cat using a keyboard. They’re just trying to discredit squirrels.

M-83

They’re even French