Here’s my guess. I don’t know anything about this particular device, but I have worked with medical devices.

A powered exo-skeleton sounds like it might be a class II medical device. Being a medical device, the OEM was required to produce a safety risk analysis per ISO 14971 in the EU and 21 CFR 820 in the US. I don’t know what all was listed, but probably one of the safety risks was thermal runaway from the (assumed) lithium ion batteries.

Lithium ion battery packs have a well known problem with occasionally overheating and catching fire. This famously delayed the launch of the 787 Dreamliner. This is also why you can’t put your phone or laptop battery into your checked luggage.

In the original risk analysis, there will be a number of mitigation steps identified for each hazard. For the lithium thermal runway, these probably include a mix of temperature monitoring, overheat shutdown, and passive design features in the battery pack itself to try to keep the impacts of over temperature and fire away from the patient.

So how does the price get to 100k? It could be some kind of unique design features that are now out of production and the original tooling is not available. The 100k cost is probably something like to redesign the production tooling, particularly if you have to remake injection molds.

You can’t just use any off the shelf battery pack, because that would invalidate the risk analysis. You’d need to redo the risk analysis, repeat at least some amount of validation testing, and possibly resubmit an application to the FDA.

TLDR: you can get some MEs and EEs together to solve this problem, but once they’re on the case, you can blow through 100k real fast.

Are these hippo sprint speeds, or real proper endurance speeds?

Medical devices are required to comply with 21 CFR 820 in the United States, which establishes quality management standards. This includes minimum standards for the software development lifecycle, including software verification and validation testing.

In the EU, broadly equivalent standards include ISO 13485 and IEC 62304.

If an OEM wants to do a software update, they at minimum need to perform and document a change impact analysis, verification testing, and regression testing. Bigger changes can involve a new FDA submission process.

If you go around hacking new software features into your medical device, you are almost certainly not doing all of that stuff. That doesn’t mean that your software changes are low quality–maybe, maybe not. But it would be completely unfair to hold your device to the standard that the FDA holds them to–that medical devices in the United States are safe and effective treatments for diseases.

This may be okay if you want to hack your own CPAP (usually a class II device) and never sell it to someone else. But I think we all need to acknowledge that there are some serious risks here.

Another aspect to this is that Android is Linux, but it is not GNU / Linux. This is true both in the literal sense of not using GNU coreutils or glibc, and also in the broader sense.

What I mean by the “broader” sense:

• no X or Wayland
• GTK or Qt support is something an application has to bring with them.
• filesystem is substantially reorganized
• users and system permissions setup substantially differently

To the application programmer Android / Linux looks like a completely different ball game.

I think Silver. Nate left FiveThirtyEight and now the site doesn’t even publish any kind of predictive model.

The President can do a lot of macro things that affect oil supply, like exercising some control over leases in public land, choosing to regulate or deregulate fracking, or invading a foreign country to obtain more oil.

In a more micro scale the President has fairly direct control over the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and can decide when to release and when to replenish.

Israel has already been fighting a war with Hezbollah that Hezbollah declared. These attacks were fairly specifically targeted at Hezbollah’s military equipment. They have been arguably successful at disrupting Hezbollah’s communications, and likely command and control systems. That by itself is a valid military objective.

To the extent that these attacks directly hurt Hezbollah personnel, and to the extent that they damaged Hezbollah’s morale: those too are valid military objectives.

So “war crime” gets thrown around here quite a bit just because there are high civilian casualties. The facts are twofold: Civilian casualties have always been a part of warfare; and there is no specific number or proportion that makes some act into a war crime. That’s just not how these kinds of laws are written.

I have not yet seen a strong argument for a specific war crime rooted in a specific basis in international law. A lot of people bring up protocols 1 and 2 to the Geneva conventions, but Israel and the US have not ratified those.

There are other conventions that regulate weapons of war, but I’m pretty sure none of them are going to address pager bombs directly. An argument there would have to be at least somewhat creative.

The US has a few thousand miles of land borders, and there are some neat places to visit along them.

I’m not at all sure where this gentleman went or why.

I thought they catch fire and burn down slowly.

Correct. Both the recent pager and radio attacks, and the 1996 cell phone attack, were performed by planting military explosives inside the devices in advance.

There is no magical way to hack the electronics to make a lithium battery straight up explode.

TPS is a lawful status in federal law. But it’s also not a regular immigration status that you’d get with an actual immigrant visa.

The idea is that TPS recipients are going to ship back out just as soon as Haiti (or wherever) gets its act together again. It’s not a very secure status and does not lead to green cards or naturalization.

Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.

And historically leads to stuff like putting the one final screw in domestically so you can slap that Made in America tag in it and avoid a heap of tariffs.

Technically I think that’s still “put us first on the search bar” money. You’re giving the real under-the-table explanation.

attempts on presidents’ lives are not rare in US history

And that’s why the Secret Service is as comprehensive as it is. Ultimately, the democracy responds to problems.

The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.

Well you see, every February is egg laying season, and he needs those warm sandy beaches to incubate his spawn.

Usually, he can just go down to Galveston and get what he needs. But that year was a very, very special case. It’s not easy being cold blooded.

SpaceX is beating the pants off every other domestic launch provider unfortunately. All because Musk took some fantastic risks with his own money, and they paid off handsomely. And the worst part is SpaceX is a private company: no public shareholders to keep Musk in check.

You may have heard about ULA having a wee bit of trouble with some capsule thrusters. They have lost some truly epic amounts of money on that program.

Trump is only entitled to ex-President and candidate protection. It’s a lower tier of protection with fewer resources expended.

Fracking has granted the United States independence from OPEC, and turned the US into the largest exporter of oil. The US now has the pricing power on the world oil market. This has huge geopolitical implications.

Back in the 2000s it was completely different. All of the geopolitical wonks were pushing renewable energy as a means of OPEC independence. And now that independence has been granted, but we still have the oil.

Meanwhile, as others have stated on this thread, the immediate problems from fracking have been mostly fixed, including the earthquakes. Long term, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going to happen with all of that dirty wastewater going back into the ground.

So on balance, there’s a good reason for the leadership in both parties to be on board with fracking: oil still rules the world, and fracking lets the United States rule the oil markets.

This is the only way to legally vote by remote electronics in Texas. Must be registered in Harris County. And must be voting from outer space.