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 wish I could figure out the code to get my T6 to control the Confortotal mini split I got off eBay. I have to think they’re using some genetic code base, but I couldn’t find a matching one.

11. When you die at the palace, you really die at the palace
12. Try the mulled wine
13. It’s good to be the king
14. A gentleman’s cuffs should be even with the tip of his penis
15. Jews can joke about whatever they want if they’re the scriptwriter

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.

When I worked in an office I’d head out to my car and lay the seat back for 15 minutes of shuteye.

Well, that and every time you touch a DOC/DOCX file it reformats itself to your local settings, fucking up the entire layout. PDF is a terrible, inefficient, poorly (or at least variably) implemented format which was proprietary for two decades but is now about the best option we have for a document to look the same at the recipient end as the sender and still include text, vector, bitmapped, semi-interactive, and certifiable/traceable contents.

What the devil?

Netflix for online journalism/news

So, like, regular removals of older material and ever increasing prices and restrictions? Oh, yeah, sign me up.

I married my wife because she was the first person to teach me to laugh at myself.

Reminder - gas prices cannot be hiked by suppliers because they don’t own the gas. Petroleum products are bought and sold on commodity markets before they’re ever refined or even removed from the ground. These “futures” are bought and sold and the price at the pump is related to the current price to purchase the product from the commodity brokers, plus transportation and local markup.

There are legitimate uses for futures contracts, but much of it is just gambling and capitalistic opportunism.

They’re wrong, of course.

You don’t have to enter a license key.

The ability to make someone believe they have to go to the bathroom really bad but when they get there, nothing was really there.

So, business as usual for men over 60? (Or so I’m told)

Get me out after a couple of decades of the torture and this is the tragic backstory I need to turn evil and plot the end of humanity. Make my savior a nerdy but hot chick (Gal Gadot will work - just put some horn rimmed glasses on her) and have her die while escaping. I think we can get two sequels out of it.

We’re all here think of good things; you’re plotting nefarious powers.

Phone, flashlight, gaming system, headphones, laptop, jump start cars, watch (though the Apple Watch wouldn’t be compatible with my super power…same as in real life with all normal chargers).

The real question is if it would transfer energy magically, or would I experience a calorie deficit. That could go both ways in my book.

Is breathing underwater too exceptional? I’d settle for charging batteries by holding them, or the ability to revive/kill plants that I touch (my choice, not some random thing or King Midas curse)

IKR? For what they wanted I could get a faster full size machine with better expandability. I get the value in a small box, but unless you had some commercial application or wanted some special architectural aesthetic in your home that required that size, it was a waste of money.

That’s sort of how I do mine. I put all my data onto dropbox/onedrive. I’ve got a $100 HP USFF hooked up in my office that is a 100% online mirror for those cloud accounts, and it backs up to an 8TB external each week. I rotate that drive with a spare each month (give or take), putting the “offline” one in a firesafe. It means I have a live copy (my pc), a cloud copy (OD/DB), a second hot copy (USFF PC), a near-line backup no more than 7 days old that isn’t “live” and a cold storage copy that is no more than a month old (aka less than Apple’s deleted-pictures and Dropbox’s previous version storage time). It cost me two external drives and the mini-pc. And if all those fail I’ll probably be roaming the radioactive wasteland looking for food and losing that data won’t matter.

Oh, and that little box also runs a small FTP server and my Torrents for my Linux distro collection.