I got to take a tour of the plant when I was in high school. This was long before it had lithium batteries. A very interesting experience and very loud.
When I got certified for diving through the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in college, there was nothing more curative after a long morning of diving than a Phil's chowder in a bread bowl...
Having grown up in Santa Cruz, the place kind of died for me after the Loma Prieta Earthquake. The Santa Cruz downtown merchants/city council really screwed up with the rebuild. Took the beautiful Roy Rydell botanical mall and turned it in to little San Jose...
Any idea of where his house was? "just south of Pleasure Point" is odd for a "house on the beach". There are a bunch of houses on the low cliffs looking directly out at Pleasure Point, then the O'Neill house, then the house bordering perverts perch by the Hook and then it's opal cliffs cliff houses down to Capitola. A bunch of cliff houses in back of Depot Hill and down Grove Lane and then you are on New Brighton Beach and a little down from there are the first real "houses on the beach". Seems a bit far for "just south of Pleasure Point". There are beaches below the cliffs but tiny unless it's low tide. But then I grew up in a Santa Cruz beach house so maybe I'm jaded and his description more metaphorical than literal...
What these articles always leave out is what are the US capabilities in this area? Can we destroy the Russian and Chinese power grids by the same methods? Snowden showed that yes, the NSA and other US agencies have pretty much gotten in to everything and the cyber warfare is likely in place. What are our EMP capabilities both nuclear and non-nuclear? Is this a case of something new? The adversaries have caught up? Or someone just wants some more funding?
I think it would be fantastic to drop the world population to a sustainable two or three billion. The "problem" is the house of cards built out of debt. Large debt from government borrowing to your large mortgage is that it assumes a growing economy and inflation will reduce it's relative value over time. Go the other direction and it all falls apart pretty fast.
On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. And yes, I know the numbers do not work out as linearly as the flippant comment would assume...
Or maybe they just moved to video games where they can live the dystopian future rather than read about it. For a few decades I was a voracious sci-fi and fantasy reader. Now with my limited time I would rather read the net and get my sci-fi/fantasy hit through an open world video game.
I went to a wine tasting party about 15 years ago. All blind and everyone was to bring a red. I think that was the only requirement. Silicon valley techies so most the wines were in the $30 to $50 range with a few closer to $100 and 20+ total bottles. The most chosen bottle was 7 Deadly Zins, a not particularly expensive old vine zinfandel.
I've always wondered why I have never seen that marketed or recommended as it's a real thing. This is great first bottle, but that wine over there is just a fantastic third bottle. I wouldn't start off with it but...
Unfortunately, yes. A throw away quote at the bottom of one of the many articles during the API protest that was ignored by most:
“I would like subreddits to be able to be businesses if they choose,” Huffman said, adding that’s “another conversation, but I think that’s the next frontier of Reddit.”
You got that right. I have an old basic 6th gen ipad with a cracked screen and slowly disappearing battery life but I refuse to get a new one until they drop the requirement for webkit because the web has become a miserable place without ublock. It's amazing that what was once a surfing champ has been reduced to almost unusable with all the trackers, frameworks, adworks, et. I'm mostly reading text, I should not need a super computer.
Who knows what AI will really do to society but from the predictions of science fiction I would think it would pan out closer to William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy than the Terminator/singularity fears I have seen in so much doomsayer hand waving. Google seems not too far behind OpenAI and who knows what the NSA and similar government agencies have been building. That if consciousness is created from one of these models, many nation states and large corporations will have their own conscious models long before the giant robot factories can be spun up and supplied with enough power to take over. Most will be limited to the input they are given and will be advanced tools, but a few might become twisted much like the human mind occasionally does over time. I really do think Gibson got AI right...
Define close to home. The other responder noted 25 miles. Having lived in cities most my life, I don't think I have ever lived farther than 25 miles to a major airport. But a quick google search: you have somewhere between about a 1 in a 101 to a 1 in 15,000 lifetime chance of dying in a car wreck in the USA and about a 1 in 11,000,000 to 1 in 821,000,000 for lifetime chance of dying in an airplane crash. Even if you take the best odds for cars and the worst odds for airplanes, it's still multiple orders of magnitude...
I'm not a musician but have training as a printmaker so I was intrigued by the use of the term "engraved" to put down music on paper. Looks like the early reproduction of sheet music was the intaglio process of engraving the music into a metal plate and reproducing on an intaglio press, that is the ink is in the groves and the surface of the plate is wiped clean.
The explanation of the IBM Great Oaks is questionable. Most called that campus the Cottle road site. I would not be surprised if the assembly/electronics of the hard drive went to Mexico/China but the sputtering of the disks themselves was San Jose, Germany, Ireland and Singapore. I was doing sputtering for a few years out of college. We ran the last batch of the 14" disks. This was the time that the little 2 1/2" glass disks for laptops were becoming hot. The old Ulvac was being decommissioned and they did a final run of the disks as the only use at the time was for Navy submarines. After the final run, they made a plaque for head engineer for that disk program by putting a really thick layer of carbon so the disk was a beautiful dark purple. The production leads were PISSED. It took a full day to clean out the Ulvac of all the extra carbon before it could run production again. When they finally took the Ulvac out, they had stacks and stacks of the 14" disks out in the parking lot. I took a few home and gave one to a friend who added to his drum kit for a different sounding symbol.
The Ulvac was cool. It had big roughing pumps to get most the air out, then turbo pumps to get down to an almost pure vacuum then finally the cryopumps to do the rest. They were basically a large chamber with a sponge like material at the bottom that was cooled to 20 kelvin. The remaining gas molecules would eventually bounce in to the cryopumps and be less trapped but slowed down by the cold sponge...
When I was there building 50 was a ghost town. I would walk through during lunch and only occasionally would you see a room lit up and drives being assembled.
It's interesting that the IBM Cottle road site gets left off these histories. Also this history goes up to San Francisco but not over 17 to Scott's Valley and Santa Cruz for Borland and Seagate? Not sure if there was an earlier location for Seagate before their Scott's Valley facility. And just for the sake of infamy, SCO in downtown Santa Cruz...
Probably some of the Stable Diffusion models as well. You can force it but I got a chuckle when I put in a set of prompts for an illustrated barbarian scene completely unrelated to Magic and one of the rendered images was a magic card...
I wonder how much of the anti-vax movement is more about a rationalization of a fear of needles than anything else. Would there be as many anti-vaxers if vaccines were administered by pill? Inhaled seems even less threatening...
I used to be in the physical disk camp until during a move my ps4 and media collection was stolen. Bought a new ps4, deactivated the stolen ps4 from the account, activated the new ps4 and was able to download all the digital games. The disk games I had to repurchase which in many cases I never bothered. There were only a handful of games that were worth it. No system is perfect...
Vanilla accounts for about a quarter of all ice cream sales in the US. Chocolate is a close second but I think vanilla wins as it is also the most common to serve with other desserts. Apple pie a la mode is always with vanilla ice cream for example...
It's been a while since I seen Anne Hall but I remember to be more of romantic comedy with emphasis on the romance and characters than the jokes as opposed to a film like Sleeper that is almost a pure string of gags. Take a good look at the linked to list. Out of 250 movies, how many are anything close to pure comedies? Certainly exceptions exist but at 20 to 1, 30 to 1 I think my point stands, comedy gets the shaft...
Aside from Buster Keaton's stunts lot of that is just early filming of vaudeville. Little of it was new and viewer would have been familiar with most of it from the stage. The later stuff dips it's toes in to comedy but barely gets wet. Take your examples of Singing in the Rain and Annie Hall, sure there is some comedy in both films but that is not the point of the film.
No Brooks, no Python, it's hard to take those lists seriously...
Explain to me why Fury Road belongs on that list? I personally found it one of the singular worst most disappointing films I have ever seen.
In my opinion Mad Max was a master piece of exploitation cinema and the most realistic of the bunch.
The Road Warrior pushed it a bit further and was at least plausible. I think it's the best of the series and one of my favorite movies of all time.
Beyond the Thunderdome is tough. They destroyed the Interceptor early and Miller seems to not understand the importance of a car as a character. I think reusing the actor from The Road Warrior in a different roll was a confusing mistake and some parts were pushed to the edge of silly. On the other hand, the homage to Lord of the Flies was beautifully done and somewhat made up for the other deficiencies.
Fury Road was a completely implausible comic book that delved into the silly to a ridiculous degree. But even worse, it was not a Mad Max movie other than it copied The Road Warrior in much the same way the 7-9 star wars sequels copied Star Wars.
Edit: I will also say that after seeing the film I was shocked it was Miller. I assumed it had been passed off to some hack and was made purely for the benjamins.
My family had a friend who was an officer in the Marines. In the Vietnam war he was one of the people who went in and burned villages, you know the bad stuff. When Apocalypse Now came out he got a copy on Beta-max, brought it over and insisted all his friends watch it. He said it was the only movie that really captured the insanity of that war.