Overzeetop

And, unlike engineers in manufacturing whose deep-pocket corporations bought an exemption, Engineers in the A/E/C field are licensed. And if you screw up you can lose your ability to work in your field…forever.

You could say the same for a finite element model. A junior engineer with just 4 years of training can solve, explicitly, the deflection at the center of a slender, simple-simple beam of prismatic section and produce an exact (if slightly incorrect) answer. Building a FEM of the same can solve the problem and take longer (to make the model) with similar accuracy, both of which are good enough for design work.

Only a fool wouldn’t have a FEM around though, as it can solve problem that would take centuries for a human to solve. They may as well make a cartoon with the child digging a 3” hole in beach sand and then showing a backhoe making a jagged edged hole of the same size.

I have own a rift and Q1, 2, and 3 (plus some older, but polished, Cardboard products) but have NOT had a VP demo. The jump from fresnel to pancake lenses - for productivity purposes - is substantial and I expect the VP’s moderately higher resolution to be enough to make the headset actually productive (Q3 is close but still resolution handicapped). I expect the tight integration with OSX to be useful and, if I were (a) on OSX (b) didn’t already work on an 8K monitor and © was a digital nomad or had no dedicated office/room in which to work, I could see a use case for them. Having attempted to work in i(Pad)OS professionally as a remote platform, the standalone capabilities might be useful for a blogger or journalist but is utterly unsuitable for professional work, even less so without a dedicated keyboard and mouse/advanced multitouch track pad. Again, I’ve not used the VP hand-sensing for advance selection* but my expectation is that it is still in its infancy, even with (and perhaos hindered by) eye focus selection.

My hope is that $3500/pop will allow more research, more fine tuning, and advancing to vision limited resolution (Apple is still a factor of 4 short in pixel count, and a factor of 6+ short of my desktop monitor) for future headsets.

* multi-functional, 3D manipulation of, say, finite element model components or full building/industrial models in a program like Revit or multi-assembly models in Blender or Fusion360, where you have 4+ key modifiers plus 3 buttons and two scroll wheels for fine manipulation and hundreds of quick-key commands)

I’ve yet to find a modern use for usenet as I’m not in the habit of downloading everything as it comes out, nor of looking for content within a few days of release. Often I’m looking for 2-5 year old content or back catalog, and usenet has been a uniform landscape of incompletes, even with two blocks on independent providers (or they were when I bought the data blocks).

A llama?!? He was supposed to be dead!

[Raises hand]

I don’t have time to fuck with managing a seedbox to make ratios and community participation bullshit (looking at you, abt). I don’t even have time to fight incompletes on a usenet block. Let me drop a Benjamin in your “donation” box every couple of years and I’ll cover part of the server as long as I can find what I need, when I want it, in the quality I’m looking for.

I have subscriptions to a few of the big boys through legal cross-marketing deals; it’s still better to know that my shows will be waiting for me on my server if and when I ever get around to watching them.

If I spend half an hour to find an implement a workaround (because finding ways around YT’s advertising is not my hobby) then I’d have to watch 60 unskippable 30 second ads to break even, every single time they upgrade their cat-and-mouse. I don’t watch that much youtube in a month, probably not in 3 months.

Re: reasonable levels - You can have fail safe or fail secure. Those are two mutually exclusive options. Locking people out of content, whether it be consumers or a partner organization (like a theater) is the price of security (fail secure).

There is no condition where mild DRM is valuable to anyone. For consumers it constitutes a hurdle to use of content they have purchased without hindering non-purchased copies from being reproduced and distributed. No DRM allows the latter; unbreakable DRM ensures the former will be substantially affected at some point.

Yeah, US is a real backwater when it comes to data - availability, privacy, you name it. Heck, my ISP will let me install for free, but I either have to buy my own modem or pay them $15/mo to rent one of theirs. I technically get wifi roaming with the company I use, but it’s rarely useful. I won’t torrent without a VPN; my ISP is a hardass for torrenting.

There are decent plans in some areas in the big cities in the US, but outside of that it’s pretty bleak…and there’s a lot of “outside of the cities” in the US.

Knowing who your provider is would (might) help. Xfinity has a 1TB or 1.2TB soft cap, which you can exceed once or twice a year without concern. Beyond that you fall into their top (I think it’s) 1% of users and may be asked to scale back or to pay an excess usage fee (which was non-trivial the last time I looked - something like $10/50GB).

Wait, really? I’m going to have to go check next time I log into my torrenting box.

Oh, it definitely does. A copy does not need to be verbatim - derivative works, of which even an inaccurately memorized copy would certainly apply - to be infringing. Otherwise a re-encoded copy of a video - having been entirely changed through the encoding process - would be a new work. When I sing a song from memory, it’s effectively reproducing the equivalent recorded copy from my brain. Of course, the performance is yet a new copy - and I can be sued if I were to change the lyrics or notes outside of the specific contract under which I perform (performance) or record (mechanical). Broadway show owners do this all the time (prohibit changes of words and characters, among other alterations) - and generally they win in court if challenged, shutting down shows and cancelling performance rights

Would not the act of memorization an infringing copy? Copyright itself does not allow a provision where a non-ephemeral copy may be stored, regardless of the medium or duration. You would, of course, have the positive defense of fair use - if you were sued for your infringing copy, you could mount a defense that the storage falls under the fair use provisions, but you would still be required to defend yourself at your own expense. Would it make a difference if we, one day, developed a method of reading memories. Someone with a photographic memory could then be used to recreate the work from their copy - clearly a violation, and hence the storage is a violation (excepting backup/fairuse - which is still an infringement, but a special case of permitted infringement)

I love piracy like I love electricity - it makes my life easier, and I will extoll the virtues when asked. It doesn’t rise to a core political belief for me, though.

Huh, my page is empty.

Put one in the win column for Surfshark. (and a tip of the hat to TopCashBack, who is rebating me 80-90% of my recent 2 year renewal)

yes(?), but it appears to have open signups at the moment.

I’m on private but don’t have a seedbox, so I’m 100% pay to play. I pony up $100 every couple of years and my ratios don’t matter. On a personal pride level I make sure my old favorites say seeding, esp now that they only have a couple of seeders, but for torrents with 30-100 seeds I’m not needed and my contribution with a 10Mb cable pip against Gb seedboxes is always nil.

So…we’re flying through a universe filled with ghosts and the appear as we happen upon them as we glide through space. Which is truly fascinating since most ghosts people see appear to be humans or humanoids clad in local clothing from the most recent three centuries of Human fashion. It’s mind boggling to think how many recent-development earths must have passed just in front of us over the billions of years of universe for us to see such spirits.

Either that or there are a lot of liars and hallucinations out there. I know which one of these options I believe in!

nice

Almost better off with tmobiles 5G

Yeah…except we’re 5 miles from the closest interstate, so T-mo home service puts us in the “Lite” option. If you’ve never looked, the “Lite” option is not “Lite” because it’s cheaper - they charge you the same (more if you’re a Magenta/MegentaMax subscriber) and cap you at 50GB. LOL Someday I’ll move and get better internet. :-/