[–] 8 points 3 months ago

You might be able to make it less uneconomical, but air resistance is a bitch. You wanna go twice as fast, you need four times as much power, and now you need a heavier plane to carry all that fuel. Which uses more fuel because of how heavy it is. Diminishing returns kicked in before you even got airborne, and now you're just throwing thrust at the problem and you're throwing fuel at the thrust.

Sure, there are some people who don't give a fuck, and would be willing to expend whatever in fuel and emissions to build a plane that will use as much fuel as a commercial liner that carries hundreds to get six people to Dubai a couple hours faster, but no sane government would allow that kind of plane to be built or even land on their territory because of how plainly awful that math is for everybody not richer than god.

Right?

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 27 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    That one big hurdle is "What's the fucking point"? The number of people who need to get halfway around the world six hours faster and who are willing to pay ten times as much for the privilege is vanishingly small, and frankly, that's not a problem that needs solving.

    I mean Boeing can't even build subsonic airplanes any more and Airbus. . .well, they have "Bus" in their name. Who needs a supersonic bus?

  • source
  • [–] 24 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

    Pros of MoCA:

    -Easy to implement

    -Don't have to run new lines

    -Reliable

    -Up to 2.5gbps

    Cons:

    -Each run needs an moderately expensive adapter on either side, which also needs power

    -Cable management at the endpoints can get messy

    If you have one or two endpoints where you can tuck away some boxes, MoCA's probably fine. If you want to wire up every room in your house, buy a roll of cat-6 and bite the bullet

  • source
  • [–] 60 points 5 months ago (5 children)

    There's no legitimate reason for ICE to withhold information from the public. There's no legitimate reason for any government agency to withhold information from the public. You can't have a legitimate government if the government is allowed to keep secrets from the populace. This is like baseline shit. We can't even start arguing about left and right until we agree that the people in power can't keep secrets from the people who put them in power.

  • source
  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    Only it's not free. If you run it in the cloud, it's heavily subsidized and proactively destroying the planet, and if you run it at home, you're still using a lot of increasingly unaffordable power, and if you want something smarter than the average American politician, the upfront investment is still very significant.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 34 points 1 year ago

    Because in the USA, private individuals don't have meaningful access to the legal system. Realistically, the best you could possibly hope for in a case like this would be a settlement in a class action where every Windows 10 user who's willing to jump through a bunch of hoops ends up with a seven dollar check in half a decade.

  • source
  • parent
  • context
  • [–] 239 points 1 year ago (35 children)

    They've really painted themselves into a corner with their AI investments. It's starting to look like the total addressable market is a small fraction of what they'd need to break even on their atrociously ill-advised investments into the sector, and now they're becoming increasingly desperate to shoehorn a technology that nobody wants into everything they can.

    Literally everybody who has an inkling of an idea of what's going on in the AI space knows how this ends, but somehow the board and c-staff at MSFT are not counted amongst the inkling havers. In a few years they're going to have to write off countless billions that they've wasted on this idiocy and nobody will be surprised but them.

  • source
  • view more: next ›