I used this when installing fresh copies of Windows 11 and was very satisfied with it. I never thought about it increasing RAM as the author says, I was just interested in disabling CoPilot, all telemetry options, changing the start menu and task bar to act more like Windows 10 and various other options.
Winutil is definitely a tool I wouldn't recommend for a beginner, as many of the options are things you wouldn't want to mess with, but it will create restore points for you to put things back. You can hold your mouseover the options to see what it's doing and click on the question mark icon to learn exactly what it
s doing. Since it also lets you run O&O Shutup, it's getting rid of a lot of phone home garbage and tracking you want off too.
I use it and the WinAero tweak tool [1] just to keep Windows Update disabled until I can be sure the slop updates Microsoft puts out are actually working or not, since recently half the time they break something serious in the OS.
If society progresses as envisaged, people will always want newer and better technology. Living standards should improve for all, as the older technology is purchased second-hand by those who cannot afford the latest versions, and/or repaired as desired.
When a businesses chooses to drop support for a product entirely (hardware or spares no longer produced, and software no longer updated), they've presumably already made the business decision to drop the product for sale. If the product were still in demand and the existing devices still function, dropping product support could effectively render the devices useless or destined for landfill.
This often happens when: online services are dropped, devices cannot be repaired, or worse, software cannot be simply updated for security and compatibility reasons etc.
If manufacturers want existing users with working technology to upgrade, they should design compelling improved products, not force a load of e-waste and bricked devices. There's little reason for a manufacturer to quickly drop support without following this model of open sourcing, unless they know they are forcing existing customers to an unnecessary upgrade.
Manufacturers should support their products, innovate, or let them go over time. The "market" (consumer choice) should dictate when a product is obsolete. We own our products and should have the rights to maintain them. They should be paying us and taxed for damaging the environment for dropping support early and/or without open-sourcing.
Some tires are going to wear fast no matter what. I had some Pirelli PZero summer tires that I could never get more than 15k out of regardless of how I drove. The tire compound was very soft and sticky.
If you have something like really high performance tires, I recommend just using them. The grip is always there and you are always paying for it. As long as you aren't losing traction constantly, the difference is negligible in my experience.
I agree with your overall point, but I think the person you replied to has a point as well. The cost of developing F9 is ridiculously low (considering the industry), so it should have been possible to do by any country / group of countries if the cost was the only problem...
> "According to NASA's own independently verified numbers, SpaceX's development costs of both the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 rockets were estimated at approximately $390 million in total."
> He would have to convince the courts that I don't like having a trade deficit with anyone somehow means our trading partners are "placing a burden or disadvantage upon the commerce of the United States by any of the unequal impositions or discriminations aforesaid"
Why? If the GP quoted the law correctly and the plain-language reading is also the legal one, it's all about what the president finds as fact. I don't see how that language gives the courts space to second-guess the president's findings.
> What does that part about VAT have to do with this? VAT is essentially a sales tax with a more involved collection process.
To add some further context that helped me understand VAT:
Sales taxes are great, with minimal dead weight loss and distortion, but have the downside of encouraging black markets since it's easy to avoid reporting final sale transactions.
VATs are designed to be mathematically the same as sales taxes, but robust to black markets. The sales tax is captured on the manufacturing end, which is much harder to avoid reporting for a variety of reasons.
> the sub-prime lending crisis had its roots firmly in Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagal
Not really. You'd just have very highly correlated financial entities that would have collapsed the exact same way. AIG received the largest bailout and wasn't even a bank.
> they then patched with the inferior Frank-Dodd.
Dodd Frank is why the finance sector was stable despite all the volatility introduced by the pandemic and inflation. The culture of banking has significantly shifted to being more conservative now, and risk has moved to the buy-side of trading, which is easier to let go of. Trump partially rolled back regulations such that banks under $250 billion no longer had to had to conduct stress tests, and bank collapses occurred all the way up to that threshold.
Generally speaking the current administration is looking to cut some functions and programs from federal agencies and then pay private entities to perform those same functions because they believe that private industry can perform those same functions better more cheaply [1]. There is certainly some merit to that, however I think being dogmatic one way or the other is for simpletons.
Specifically for privatizing space telescopes or privatizing NASA as a whole I don't think that has been on the table, but you can imagine a scenario in which eventually something like 20%, 40%, 90% or some other significant portion of NASA's "funding" is just a pass-through vehicle for private contracts.
Honestly if you want to learn and understand more about some of these activities you can just read the news because a lot of analysis is being done, well-informed opinions are being written, and indisputable factual evidence including quotes, interviews, and detailed data are publicly available. Admittedly some reporting is behind paywalls, but that's easy to get around. I understand it's not very fair to tell someone to "go read the news", but if you can't keep up with current events or you aren't willing to that's kind of just your problem. There are plenty of websites across the political spectrum ranging from the Financial Times to the Economist, to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, international journals, and more including locally focused websites that keep tabs with events going on at the federal, state, and local level. It's certainly a lot but it's your responsibility as a citizen (assuming you are American, apologies if not) to keep yourself informed and well read.
[1] I'm being charitable here because I personally believe that the goal is to just funnel money from government agencies to specific private enterprises that have the favor of the current administration. Crony Capitalism is what that is called. The current administration has not yet earned my trust to believe otherwise.
I wonder how this relates to Hollywood, namely the well-known shift towards men having bodybuilder level physiques, even in roles where it doesn't really fit the character.
If you're in sport, you know that highly performant bodies don't look like that almost ever. They're too specialized to have the physique that prioritizes aesthetics. Road cyclists with their lanky frames, powerlifters have fat over their absurdly strong cores. High level marathoners look like they might blow over in a stiff wind.
The most interesting thing about the article to me was the mention of kinesthetic skill. This is a huge differentiating factor IME in mountain biking. Some people do not have the meta visualization to understand why what they did worked or didn't, why they cleared that rock, why their weight transfer caused the front to wash out. The feedback loop doesn't exist, and they can't progress.
I think "stupid" may be overstating it a bit. I think it's more that people only have a limited mental bandwidth and can only focus on a limited amount of categories of life. Person A may think person B is stupid for not caring about the quality of background music. But person B might think person A is stupid for ordering a $5 glass of the house wine at a restaurant instead of some special French vintage. And person C might be aghast that that both A and B have standard factory tires on their cars instead of high performance low-profile racing tires.
The article is so all over the place, it’s hard to understand the point it’s making.
It mixes together different agencies doing forecasting for different purposes and widely fail to actually go where it should. I’m starting to wonder if it’s not a puff piece from a company with an interest in pretending that the target for emissions should be higher (it probably is actually).
As it doesn’t at all address how the IPCC scenarios which are the main tools for political discussion nowadays use energy consumption forecasting, it’s kind of completely useless.
Spoiler alerts, the IPCC does scenarios based modelling using five broadly different scenarios called SSP which take into account economic development and its impact (with varying levels depending of the SSP). The point is that this covers a broad range of possibilities. Plus, these SSP are reviewed for each reports while trying to take into account what was misestimated (speed of development of renewable was one thing which was underestimated before). The problem pointed in the Vox article basically doesn’t exist.
The instincts you have about privacy today are inappropriate for back then. It's hard to get to your mind around the difference sending an email, or making a phone call, or sending an SMS to anyone in the world being nearly free makes.
Back then in most countries even a local phone call cost a couple of dollars in today's money. Interstate and international phone calls had background 30 second beeps to remind you dollars were being poured down the phone line.
The effect of spam is obvious - there wasn't any. But you probably aren't thinking about the other end of the scale - what was an upcoming phone call worth to you? The answer to that is almost unimaginable in today's world - receiving a random international phone call is almost certainly worth the interruption many times over. That meant having your name, address and phone number published in a directory was definitely worth it. It was worth it to the phone company too, of course, because it increased the usage their network. So they provided the listing for free. It was a win, win for everyone.
To get a feel for how much it's changed consider the yellow pages. Businesses paid huge sums to the phone companies to get their phone numbers listed in other places in addition to the free one. The value of every phone call they got made it worth the money. Now I struggle to get to find the the phone numbers of many companies. It seems they go out of their way to hide it. That's the difference the price of a phone call feeling to zero makes.
This is a lot more akin to finding a piece of a cherry/olive pit in a jar of pitted fruit. A reasonable attempt was made with natural products in play.
No, it’s just that amateur cyclists swear by bananas. Starch, potassium, biodegradable wrapper. Jerseys have handy pockets that can carry several. Walkers and runners often don’t.
"In a million-to-one chance the brake failed to hold and although pilot Thrower grabbed a wing strut to check the plane he was quickly forced to jump clear, just avoiding the tail"
Parking brakes in light training aircraft of that vintage, if they were even equipped with one, were typically a hole drilled through a metal plate, that was placed on the actuator rod for the brake master cylinder, so that the metal plate would jam on the actuator rod and hold the brakes down when you pulled on a piece of string that was tied to the metal plate. They worked similar to the tab of metal to hold open the damper of a crappy old aluminum-framed screen door.
Parking brake failure in aircraft of that era is not a million-to-one scenario, it is the default operating condition. Go down to your local general aviation airfield and peek in the window at the parking brake knob on every Cessna 150 you see, I guarantee that many of them will be placarded INOP, and many of the un-placarded ones are also actually be INOP if you tried to use them.
Here's one for sale on eBay. $300 for that bit of junk! No wonder people leave them INOP.
Powerlifters who train for strength generally train low-rep, high-weight progressive overload programs and often end up with very dense musculature, while bodybuilders prioritize high-rep sets for large amounts of total volume, which produces relatively more muscle size but not necessarily superior muscle density. The two modes of training produce different hypertrophic effects.
> It appears, though, that bodybuilders, relying on a high repetition training system, in contrast to Olympic weight- and power lifters, display a small increase in number of capillaries per fiber.
> Bodybuilders, as opposed to Olympic weight lifters, power lifters, or other power athletes, tend to display a relatively high percentage of slow switch fibers.
This separation of the size of a muscle, specifically, the cross-section of an individual muscle's fibers, on a single individual from those same fibers' strength is new information to the world, if true.
On a single individual, a muscle's size varies in direct, though not linear, proportion to its strength and visa-versa.
Between individuals of course a smaller muscle may be stronger than the same muscle on another individual.
Previous understanding was hypertrophy happened and as a consequence the muscle was stronger and, visa-versa, a muscle was stronger when hypertrophy happened and the two were consistently and directly related.
But what this research is saying is that, for a given unit of hypertrophy, there can be varying amounts of strength increase, depending on what type of training effected that hypertrophy.
It really depends. Suggesting that topics like accounting and finance can be picked "up in a night course" is a bit like saying programming... I know that involves some Javascript and CSS, and couldn't you just pick that up?
I have no formal programming education but started coding 35 years ago. I also have an MBA in finance. For my brain, learning something like functional monadic composition is something I was able to do on my own, but there is no way I'd ever have learned finance at that same level on my own.
It is worth noting that there is a pretty big difference between an MBA in finance, marketing, or operations/supply-chain. As different as developer, tester, and devops at least.
> If the hardware feature was openly documented it'd have been found much, much sooner.
Well, the point of kerckhoff's principle is that it should have been openly documented and then anyone lookindg at the docs even pre-publication would have said "we can't ship it like that, that feature needs to go."
This could be good, but as always the second-order ramifications could be troublesome (only big agricultural business would be able to afford to have crops, etc, etc).
"Cadillac Desert" is a good read to see how bonkers the water system can be (and was devised to be) in the US West, because it basically tries to turn the desert into a garden. The only problem is that there's just not enough water to do that.
There aren't many cultural guardrails on consumption. We're not supposed to practice gluttony, but what does that mean in the modern world?
We can all agree that we shouldn't buy a private jet to fly between our yachts.
But what about that flight from NYC to vacation in Brazil? Is having lots of children gluttony? What about buying stuff online? Living in the suburbs? Driving kids to a better school for a better education? Driving kids to a special music school to develop their talents? Driving to save time vs public transit? Eating meat? That cross-country RV trip? Air conditioning in your house? What about an international flight to a climate conference? Building a big factory to restart American industry? A giant hospital for treating people who made poor health choices? Helicopters to rescue people from accidents during outdoor adventures? Is racking up billions of dollars in assets gluttony by itself, or only when you spend it in a gluttonous way?
I can believe Sony did it. The PlayStation hit a lot of the right buttons at the right time.
Sega was dead by the time the Saturn landed. Sega burnt too many fans when they launched the Sega CD and 32X just to abandon them nearly immediately. Parents didn't want to hear that Sega was launching yet another system. Sega launched 3 consoles in 2.5 years in North America. Sega burnt all their goodwill.
Video games can be an industry of momentum and trust. If you keep launching and abandoning products, you lost the trust and momentum. Developers don't want to commit to a system you'll abandon. Gamers don't want to buy a system you're going to abandon. Sega had shown that it would abandon systems at the first hiccup - and try to get you to buy junk.
Sega's Saturn was also a weird system. It decided to use quadrilaterals instead of triangles and was complex which makes it harder to use effectively.
Nintendo's N64 would be launching a year after the PlayStation. While the N64 might have had more 3D capabilities, many of the games on the system didn't look as good and the 3D gameplay wasn't as compelling as the PlayStation's.
Not only that, PlayStation games were so much cheaper! At $50/game, it was just a ton more affordable than the $70 that N64 games were going for. By the time that the N64 came out, the PlayStation had a huge library of excellent games that were cheap. You even started to see older games for $25.
Sony's brand at the time was like gold. Everyone wanted anything with the Sony label on it. It can be hard to remember what a dominant force Sony was in consumer electronics. They were like Apple back then. When people heard that Sony was coming out with a video game system, everyone would think that it would be the best just based on the brand. Parents would hear the Sony name and think quality and reliability. Especially if they had been burned by Sega, the PlayStation from Sony seemed like buying the best product that would last.
Nintendo still did well. They have their niche. Sega had destroyed their reputation while Sony was the most admired electronics company out there. The PlayStation offered people a non-Nintendo system that they didn't feel would be abandoned and by the time the N64 came out it was established with an amazing game library that the N64 couldn't match.
Not to mention a massive consumer hostile price hike for no good reason.
Ironically the 4090 might be the only one approaching appropriately priced for its performance, it is a monster after all. The rest of the 4000 series are units traditionally a grade or two lower on the scale but masquerading as higher tier parts, for whatever reason.
This is an example of why you want interoperable diversity in complex distributed systems.
By having everything so standardized and consistent, they had the exact same failure mode everywhere and lost redundant fault tolerance. If they had different interoperable switches, running different software, the outage wouldn't have been absolute.
When large complex distributed systems grow organically over time, they tend to wind up with diversity. It usually takes a big centralized project focused on efficiency to destroy that property.
Winutil is definitely a tool I wouldn't recommend for a beginner, as many of the options are things you wouldn't want to mess with, but it will create restore points for you to put things back. You can hold your mouseover the options to see what it's doing and click on the question mark icon to learn exactly what it s doing. Since it also lets you run O&O Shutup, it's getting rid of a lot of phone home garbage and tracking you want off too.
I use it and the WinAero tweak tool [1] just to keep Windows Update disabled until I can be sure the slop updates Microsoft puts out are actually working or not, since recently half the time they break something serious in the OS.
[1] https://winaerotweaker.com/