25
Piroko 25 points ago +25 / -0

It's because their product is so utterly unnecessary.

It's light beer. You don't drink it because it tastes good, none of it tastes good. Dunno about Bud but Busch light is cornbread flavored water. You drink it because it's cheap and you can drink it all afternoon. People were already making their decisions on Bud vs Busch vs Natty based on which case was cheaper per can. There's no loyalty there.

13
Piroko 13 points ago +13 / -0

If (and that's a big if) you could devise a superconductor that can operate at room temps, and IF it could be made with reasonably affordable materials...

The main impact would be on electric motor and generator efficiency, at least initially.

A typical copper wound AC generator peaks out at about 91.5% efficiency at converting mechanical force to electric power (and often can be as low as 85% under real world conditions). For superconductors, the theoretical peak is around 99.5%.

"That last three percent, it may not sound like a lot, but it is. It's tremendous." -Gale, Breaking Bad

8
Piroko 8 points ago +8 / -0

The third season (seaQuest 2032) was absolutely terrible. The actors wanted out of their contracts and it only made it 13 episodes before being shut down.

6
Piroko 6 points ago +6 / -0

I can recall two shows with the distinction of having been cancelled twice (Star Trek and seaQuest) and still coming back, as a rule, the third time around was always the worst by far.

6
Piroko 6 points ago +6 / -0

If you haven't watched Dick Tracy you should. In its own way it's even more over the top than Speed Racer was.

10
Piroko 10 points ago +10 / -0

Films should be brave enough to be as weird and campy as Speed Racer or Dick Tracy.

3
Piroko 3 points ago +3 / -0

Why not just make a Golden Compass movie that isn't terrible?

14
Piroko 14 points ago +14 / -0

Statue monuments have never really been an American thing. Sure, we have them, but they're not prominent, not like Nelson's Column or the Victoria Memorial.

The prominent monuments in the US are all too fucking big to be harmed by mere vandalism. People can hate the arch all they want but the arch doesn't fucking care, it's 600' tall and made of steel.

17
Piroko 17 points ago +17 / -0

Well, yes, but not in the way you think.

It's surprising how consistently bad the Diet is at economics. The one sector of their economy that isn't completely moribund, where people can at least imagine a future where they aren't living paycheck to paycheck, and they want to move in and make it as bad as everything else.

The LDP is very good at making all equally miserable.

2
Piroko 2 points ago +4 / -2

You aren't familiar with how bureaucracies work, are you?

To you, the military is one big well functioning machine that works better than the government, isn't it?

Yeah, no. That's not the military at all. The military is second only to the DMV for unhelpful layers of insulating bureaucracy between you and the goal.

The following is hypothetical, but entirely consistent with how our government works.

The incident and story broke late Sunday. White House would have asked SecDef that monday morning to look into that. SecDef asks Navy (prob CNO) monday afternoon in a meeting they were already going to have about something else, someone suggests checking the sonar, and CNO "gets right on that" , sending it over to NOPF Atlantic by the end of the day.

Choose Your Own Adventure, Path A CNO actually sent it to the right inbox, and it reaches the night shift guy at the desk at NOPF. But he has no idea how to pull the data because he's never had to do it before, so the email sits until his boss gets in the next morning.

Choose Your Own Adventure, Path B CNO didn't send it to the right inbox, it goes to the NOPF's commander rather than the operations desk, and so it isn't seen until the next morning.

It's now Tuesday, and by now you have people actually pulling up log data and going over it. They're quick about it and find it in that shift, putting together a report that goes back out to SecDef that afternoon... but he doesn't see it till Wednesday morning, and sends it over to the Coast Guard as soon as he gets in.

By the end of Wednesday the report is actually in the hands of the search commander.

That is your government at work dekachin.

It is the Adeptus Administratum with fewer cybernetics.

3
Piroko 3 points ago +4 / -1

the US Navy detected the Titan implosion on Sunday but

But it was an isolated, transient event that was recorded but didn't meet the computer's search criteria to flag human investigation, so it wasn't even known they had it until word came down to pull up the data and see what they heard.

15
Piroko 15 points ago +15 / -0

So apparently... Titan was based on a composite hull technology from Spencer Composites that Steve Fossett used on DeepFlight Challenger.

But it had a caveat that the carbon fiber was rated for the maximum pressure for only one dive; each successive trip would weaken it further. Richard Branson wanted to buy and use the thing after Fossett died but the rest of the DeepFlight team refused because they knew it wouldn't handle what Branson was proposing.

Depending on what Spencer Composites did or didn't say to OceanGate, they could be liable.

21
Piroko 21 points ago +22 / -1

That's the most meme worthy of their mistakes, but walking-in-stations, which was their tech demo for the cancelled World of Darkness mmo, melted 1080's in the wild by trying to run at 700+ FPS, because they hadn't tested it with shaders & HDR turned off.

And they were proud of it.

3
Piroko 3 points ago +3 / -0

For that depth there really aren't COTS solutions. There are companies that make ROVs for that depth, but anything manned is going to be a custom built with WHOI and FNRS having the most experience at it.

As a side note, the Alvin is now 100% ship of theseus; nothing on it remains from the original 1964 build.

2
Piroko 2 points ago +2 / -0

WALL-E still had a very clever subplot, IF you'd already seen Hello, Dolly!

3
Piroko 3 points ago +3 / -0

If it makes more sense, the subtext of A LOT of Iowa supreme court rulings can be read as "do it again, but properly this time".

If you have any doubts about the court, just remember they also came up with this ruling...

3
Piroko 3 points ago +4 / -1

If you are complaining about the Iowa Supreme Court then you won't be satisfied with anything that resembles a court.

I'll admit the Iowa court sometimes reaches seemingly odd conclusions but if you know anything about the composition of the court, you'd quietly take the L and then go back to the drawing board.

"In our view, it is legislating from the bench to take a statute that was moribund when it was enacted and has been enjoined for four years and then to put it into effect."

What the court is basically saying is that just because the court is MORE conservative now than the court that ruled against the ban, doesn't mean the court won't stand by its previous decision.

Because the Iowa court is first and foremost a lawyer's court (composed of lawyers and picked from a short list drafted by lawyers). And one thing the Iowa court will almost never do is say it was wrong.

The state will have to go back and look at what the court actually disagreed with about the ban.

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