bleepblorp

Probably not possible.

Searchlights work by focusing light from a source to infinity. Physics dictates that small light sources focus better. Getting searchlight-level brightness from an LED source will require an LED array, which will be too big to focus effectively.

LEDs make excellent floodlights, but if you want reach, xenon discharge lamps are still the best option.

I wish the industry would bite the bullet and come up with 'USB-hypothetical' based around a strictly enforced standard which used active optical cables with additional conductors for power.

An awful lot of USB issues would go away by getting rid of the need to push an electrical protocol too close to physical limits, enforcing sane minimum standards so end users have a clear idea of what a given port can provide (none of the current mess where 'USB-C' represents a connector that could support any number of protocols), and making layer 1 a dumb pipe (no special wires needed to support optional feature X) so functionality could be entirely software-defined.

USB is just too complicated for its own good, and has too many optional features, to be friendly to end users.

This is frequently done when parts become too difficult/expensive to maintain, but replacement from scratch still takes many months.

Pretty much every part of the west is having problems with long elevator/escalator outages these days because so many escalators/elevators were installed in the infrastructure boom of the 1960s/1970s. They're now all reaching the end of their useful lives at the same time and they all need major overhaul and/or replacement.

Sorry, I can't help as I haven't read that one yet.

There is no element of truth whatsoever to the Republican view that Democrats engage in voter fraud. This has been a baseless Republican shibboleth for decades and it has been repeatedly investigated. Even those investigations tied closely enough to Republican politics to be vulnerable to motivated reasoning have found no evidence of systematic voter fraud[0].

And yet, the voter fraud narrative continues, in very large part because it justifies very well documented Republican electoral fraud schemes designed to restrict the democratic rights of demographics that do not vote Republican. Indeed, the GOP was under legal supervision for 35 years, until 2018, for systemic, organized, voter suppression strategies intended to tilt elections in its favor.[1] Freed of any supervision by the Supreme Court, the GOP is happily working to manipulate the vote in its favor in 2020[2][3][4][5]. Also: "Russia, if you're listening,"[6][7] is a clear case of violating democratic rules for partisan advantage. There is no equivalent history among modern Democrats after the post-civil rights realignment of the parties.

As far as the legitimacy of the electoral college (and, for that matter, the Senate and the Supreme Court) is concerned, the United States was founded on the principles of no taxation without representation and that all men (in the language of the time) are created equal[8]. While it is within the GOP's constitutional right to fill the supreme court with conservative extremists, the practice disenfranchises the majority and subjects them to the rule (=taxation, among other things) of a minority that is hostile to both their interests, and, indeed, to their way of life. It is naive to expect that the creeping disenfranchisement of the majority of the population--in a country founded by launching a rebellion to end its own disenfranchisement--will pass quietly.

This is not a both-sides bad issue. This is a contest between two mutually incompatible views of the United States: between a broad coalition that wants democratically-representative government and a narrow, but highly motivated, bloc that sees no value in democracy and is actively working to undermine it.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/24/fbi-has-not-seen-evidence-of...

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/the-gop...

[2] https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...

[3] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...

[4] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/columnists/grieder/art...

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/01/politics/jacob-wohl-jack-burk...

[6] https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mueller_report

[8] Is civics education so bad that I really need to cite this?

Very large businesses might not care about spend, but pretty much everyone else does.

Almost everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill for non-converting visits because their site went viral. Everyone will be unhappy if they're stuck with a six figure bill because their site was used in a DDoS reflection attack, or got pwned and used in a DDoS attack directly.

Everything I run on nickle-and-dime-to-death cloud services, such as AWS, won't even respond to unauthenticated requests (Nginx return 444, or reachable only via Wireguard) precisely to mitigate this risk. To do anything else is just financially irresponsible.

I've even considered coding a kill switch that will shut down AWS instances if they exceed billing limits, but the fact that AWS charges a fee to check your spend via an API makes this awkward and speaks volumes about Amazon's motivations.

Amazon's refusal to offer spending caps on AWS benefits Amazon and only Amazon.

This isn't surprising. Reformed conservative thinker David Frum warned about this several years ago, with his most notable quote being:

"If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy."[0]

Conservative opposition to democracy has already has wide, deep, roots and extends from kook candidates in blue states up to the Senate (where McConnell described attempts to increase voter turnout as a Democratic 'power grab'[1]) and the Trump circle, which has identified reducing voter turnout by disrupting absentee voting as a critical electoral strategy[2]. This problem isn't going to get any better.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/56364271-trumpocracy-t...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/politics/election-day-...

[2] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...

Given that you're involved in a discussion regarding Facebook's connections to the Rohingya genocide elsewhere in this thread, it's hard not to conclude that your demand for sources connecting Facebook to politically-motivated violence is disingenuous.

It's a matter of opinion whether Facebook is responsible in any way for that genocide, but it's a matter of record that Facebook did very little to prevent its platform from being used to organize it.

As for 'sources' for the outcome I expect from any anti-trust enforcement, it's really not appropriate to demand an a cited essay/publishable work reviewing the past fifty years of antitrust law and practice combined with a detailed analysis of the GOP platform and the established views of Trump's USSC justices. That kind of analysis takes a lot of time and isn't usually done for free.

Facebook is far more dangerous to society than any patent troll.

Facebook is in the business of selling the ability to coerce people into doing things that are against their best interests. It's very dangerously good at it. Facebook has also turned a blind eye to its platform being used to organize politically-motivated violence.

It needs to be heavily regulated or shut down completely.

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That said, I don't expect Washington to break up the tech giants. Meaningful anti-trust enforcement has not happened in decades and would go against very long standing, but unspoken, precedents against Washington harming large piles of money. Any action taken by the government would likely be for show (in no small part to pander to conservative fears over platform bias, and possibly to extract superficial concessions from the tech sector on this front), and would be very unlikely to survive the post-Trump Supreme Court intact.

To an extent. Ultimately, the US problem is insecure employment, bullshit jobs, income inequality, and multiple generations of compounding wealth inequality. People without opportunity turn to destructive behaviors, including glorifying gangsters because they are the only people they see in their neighborhoods who have any kind of wealth or self-determination.

Poor communities didn't turn into the kind of places you describe until after the jobs went away. I do not see this as a racial issue, however.

Poor communities in the US have broadly similar attitudes, and social problems, regardless of their ethnic identity. That problem hit urban African American communities many decades ago and is hitting rural white communities now.

People need money and personally meaningful work. Unless they have it, things go wrong. When people don't have it for generations, ghettos and violence are what you get.

Better managing fire trap towns would reduce the risks to human life but doesn't do anything about CA fires burning down natural landmarks or blanketing the entire west coast, from Alaska to Mexico, in toxic smoke every summer.

Keeping people out of harm's way is a necessary, but not sufficient, step to manage California's fire problem.

Fires have health and economic impacts on people who aren't in immediate danger of being burned to death and the only way to minimize these impacts to reduce the number of fires.

This isn't a new problem. There's a very good example of intellectual property retarding socioeconomic development in the industrial history of the steam engine.

Early steam engine development was a collaborative endeavor, with various engineers building on the ideas of others to make incremental improvements in steam technology. Then came Bolton and Watt, who used patents to stop the development of steam engines superior to their own products.

The Bolton and Watt patents prevented the development of steam railway engines, and in so doing delayed the beginning of the railway era--and all the societal development it created--by twenty years or more.

Intellectual property law is a gift to monopolists. It is not a social good.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_steam_engine

LibreOffice Base is something of an attempt at a newer Access, but unfortunately it's far from ready for production use.

Base has very solid data storage foundations (including the ability to connect to real database servers) but the UI is very buggy and is painful to fight with. Note I said 'fight with' rather than 'use.'

Base seems to have a fair bit of potential, however, if someone where to pour some money and/or time into developing it further.

Unless these devices have enough performance to do on-device speech recognition, they could have to stream audio on an ongoing basis.

I think the data stream from uploading compressed audio for an extended period would be difficult to hide.

By all means take protective measures when interacting with American police, but by no means should this expectation of submission be considered normal in a developed country. Not should it be assumed to offer much protection; US police are sufficiently trigger-happy that they'll kill people even for following their commands.

American police kill 35 people per ten million population; in Canada that figure is 9.7. In Europe, the UK, Australia, NZ, and Japan, that figure is under 4.[0] The problem with American policing is the police, not the fact that too many Americans 'lunge' for cell phones during police stops.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Point of order: grocery price rises are due to the pandemic, in part due to the cost of protecting agricultural temporary workers from COVID-19. World harvests of many crops have also not been good this year[0], which has also increased prices.

[0] http://www.fao.org/3/ca9803en/ca9803en.pdf

HN's issue with broad topic knowledge is considerably worse than just the difficulty of curation.

For example, I emailed the staff with regard to the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on HN and the response was that it is policy not to remove COVID-19 misinformation (including raving conspiracy theories) but also to allow flagging by the 'community' to remove posts pointing out that something is misinformation.

Tacitly allowing the platform to be used to give a mouthpiece to spread misinformation and allowing users to bully people for injecting some degree of factual reality does not encourage good discussion.

Facilitating knowledgeable discussion across a broad range of topics starts with attracting people who are knowledgeable in many areas, and that cannot happen in an environment where the administration allows mob bullying--through the very thin veneer of the downvote/flag system--of people who actually know things.

Escalator and elevator refurbishment projects are extremely lengthy because most of the replacement parts needed to overhaul old escalators/elevators are no longer stock items and need to be custom made. In the worst case, parts may need to be reverse-engineered, re-designed to be compatible with current materials and manufacturing processes, prototyped, tested, and made through limited-run production.

If an escalator/elevator is shut down for a few months (or years) due to refurbishment, it's because worn, but vital, parts of it have been removed for use as reference materials so replacements can be made. It is also possible that vital parts could be too worn for the escalator/elevator to operate safely until new parts have been made and installed.

I'll also point out that published information on the Runnymede project indicates that the current round of construction started at the end of 2018, involved the addition of three underground elevator shafts, and is expected to be completed at the end of 2020[0]. Unless you are referring to earlier work, your '5-7 year' timeline to 'clean an escalator' is a vast exaggeration.

[0] http://ttc.ca/Service_Advisories/Construction/Runnymede_EA.j...

A society the size of the US has a huge amount of inertia and fears over imminent US loss of global status are overblown. However, the US does have several serious structural problems that will eventually threaten its global position if they are not addressed.

You note in your post that has very strong academic institutions. This is certainly true at the postsecondary and advanced degree level. However, the backbone of American innovation through academia is foreign students who come to study, then develop businesses and stay. This pipeline is under increasing pressure due to anti-immigrant reactionary politics and it is unclear if the foreign student to entrepreneur pipeline will survive both tightening official obstacles (e.g. restrictions on visas) and increasingly mainstreamed public hostility to immigration. It is unclear whether domestic students will be able to take up the slack in the event foreign students are excluded.

Tied into this is increasingly steep American descent into dysfunctional politics, where the dominant political culture is now driven by hatred for the people and regions that actually make the US economy work. It is unclear if economically productive areas of the US will remain economically productive now it has become a stated objective of the dominant political culture to persecute productive areas and deprive them of the resources they need to maintain their human and physical infrastructure.

While a second civil war along defined battle lines is unlikely, the historical record provides no reasons to be sanguine about the prospects of polities that reach this level of internal division. Political collapse into anti-intellectual despotism, potentially spurred on by outside help ('Russia, if you're listening....') is far from impossible.

Finally, the US has a massive problem with inappropriate investment. The US pours a huge amount of public and private money into investments that are either socioeconomically useless, or only redistribute money into the pockets of the very wealthy, instead of enlarging the economy for everyone. Maintaining economic primacy requires creating and deploying innovations quickly enough that competitors cannot catch up. The past few decades of US investment, however, have been much more greatly oriented towards profit taking, oligarchic rent extraction, and graft rather than developing and deploying innovations on a large scale.

It does no good to have invented the Internet when it's barely available in many parts of America and the Internet's primary business-to-consumer purpose is to help various economic parasites suck even more money out of consumer's pockets. The modern US falls down both on mass deployment and on maintaining enough of a market balance to ensure that the benefits of innovation aren't seized by rentiers. These are major vulnerabilities.

The US is in good shape now--in no small part because both China and the EU have their own problems--but the red flags are rising and US standing will fall if nothing is done.

Ideally, people shouldn't live in high risk fire areas. However, there's already a shortage of housing on the west coast. Removing housing stock from fire areas will reduce the fire risk to human life but will also make the housing shortage worse.

Short of resolving the NIMBY problem that prevents higher-density construction in fire-safe areas, paying residents in fire-prone areas to harden their communities is the best choice out of a selection of bad options.

Also keep in mind that keeping people away from fires does nothing to reduce the smoke problem, which is very severe in its own right. The solution needs to be fewer fires, whether they pose an immediate risk to human life or not.

Subsidized implies that the revenue from advertising defers the cost to the end user. This isn't generally true for TVs.

With TVs, the sticker price pays for the hardware. The ads pay for the extra house the manufacturer's CEO feels he's entitled to have.

I wouldn't read too much into large scale exercises nine days ago. These things do happen routinely. Further, it's a very common practice among US government departments to burn off their remaining budgets at the end of the federal fiscal year on September 30th. Large scale exercises are a good way for the DOD to get rid of money it doesn't want.

It's not cause for concern unless unusually high levels of activity continue into October--and even in that case the general purpose will be deterrence rather than fear over any real threat.

There's a middle ground between Apple's rounded corner land grab and allowing non-compliant electrical devices that can cause property damage.

Consider the situation with standard NEMA 5-15R receptacles. As far as I'm aware, the design is not legally protected, but any manufacturer who made a '5-15R' receptacle that couldn't carry 15A--or any device manufacturer who decided to re-purpose the pins such that the ground conductor carried 240V--would have legal problems if they brought their product to market.

This is where USB-PD should be: in a situation where physical connector compatibility brings with it enough design assurances that any pairing of legally-available devices won't blow up, catch fire, or burn out. Ideally, any USB-PD device pairing should work, but at the moment the bare minimum needs to be that any device pairing is safe.

In practice, the consumer-facing names of USB standards are dark patterns that allow manufacturers to scam customers without needing to make many (or any) product improvements.

For instance, take the fact that USB 3 and USB 3.1 Gen 1 are functionally equivalent and Gen 2 support (which brings with it the only actual improvements in USB 3.1) is an optional part of the USB 3.1 standard. The functional impact of this arrangement is that manufacturers could take USB 3.0 products, slap a 'USB 3.1' label on them, and market them as New and Improved for only the cost of new markings and marketing material.

Nice money if you can get it.

USB-C is even worse because every feature that end users actually want is optional and, in some cases (such as DP alternate mode lane support), isn't even listed in the fine print. Customers who don't have the awareness to spend many hours doing detailed research will very easily find themselves stuck in an expensive game of trial and error to buy USB-C devices that will actually work together.

Nice money if you can get it.

Like most modern tech products, the entire USB ecosystem reeks of the distinct smell of extractive scam.

I think there's very good justification for pulling USB-PD under the NRTLs and CE, so that non-compliant products are illegal to sell.

Compliance enforcement didn't matter much when USB was just data and low-wattage electricity, but USB-PD provides enough power to be hazardous. That risk is not currently being effectively managed.

"Buyer beware" isn't an adequate solution to avoiding device damage or cables catching fire.

Yes.

USB-PD is in a twilight zone where it can deliver enough power to cause safety risks but, due to its low voltage, is not subject to the level of regulatory scrutiny that other electrical products receive.

To date, the USB-IF's approach to safety and interoperability does not adequately protect consumers. USB-PD devices should not be incompatible to the point of damage but USB-IF has been unable to ensure this by keeping non-compliant products off the market.

USB-PD needs to be pulled under the IEC, NRTL (US) and CE (EU) regulatory systems and compliance overseen by entities with the legal authority to deter legitimate manufacturers/importers from selling non-compliant products.

"You can plug it in, but it might catch fire" just isn't good enough for a power delivery system that can provide 100W.

Do you know to what extent the short life of Japanese housing is a cultural or geographic issue?

I've read that the Japanese simply don't like living in older buildings, so their housing stock is built with the understanding that it will be torn down and rebuilt on fairly short timescales. I've also read that the frequency of small earthquakes in Japan makes building for the long term very difficult (earthquake damage to structures is cumulative) so it's easier to build housing with a short design life.

However, I don't read a word of Japanese so I have no idea if either of these stories are accurate.

In the vast majority of consumer-facing sectors, non-captive markets only exist in the pages of introductory economics textbooks.

Even in B2B, most commercial transactions are with an oligopoly, or monopsony, as one party to the transaction. Competition-driven customer service doesn't exist here. For instance, not even enterprise-level customers can get meaningful customer service out of the likes of Google.

The frequency passband on old-school analogue POTS isn't wide enough to play music with acceptable fidelity. The upper frequency limit for POTS services is 3.4KHz, which is far below the ~15Khz needed for half-passable music fidelity.

Modern digital is worse because it combines the frequency passband of analogue with combinations of codecs and bit rates that can't support the audio complexity of music.

The most likely interesting consequence will be companies burying a line in the ToS saying they can deny you service if you use a tool to reduce your opportunity costs of sitting in a hold queue.

The purpose of a hold queue is to reduce the number of customer service calls a company has to field. They will not take lightly to any service which defeats this.

Alternatively, they'll hire staff to answer the phone, say a few words to break out of Google's hold music detection algorithm, then put you back on hold, this time with ads instead of music. Repeat every few minutes to make sure you're still stuck on the line.

There's no limits to what's possible when you realize the purpose of anti-customer service is to harm customers rather than help them.