That's right - the Australian government has bulk purchasing power and that's a big motivator for pharmaceutical companies. When companies get their medications listed in the PBS, sales in Australia skyrocket.

There are some very expensive drugs on the PBS simply because it makes financial sense from a cost of care perspective for the government to do so.

What do you expect from running 10 and more amperes through a cord?

Well , I expect enough engineering behind it that the cord and connections don't melt. I am an auto electrician, I routinely deal with 12v systems that draw much more than that without melting, using connections that aren't much bigger. It's not like it's some mystical technology, it's just that this setup has been done on a budget.

But it doesn't help that every single logic gate in a graphics card is run at a speed/currents that are literally just below meltdown.

Well, it's been twenty years since your closest brush with a relationship and you're still alive, so there is some amount of success going on in the taking care of yourself department.

I won't patronise you with the standard "find your people, hang in there!" comment. If it's really eating you up inside, you're going to have to take a few tiny steps towards society, because society won't make the first move. Otherwise just do whatever you want to do and quit looking into the past.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

"Yes yes whateverrr"

Flash chip cells are basically tiny electron traps, they consist of a tiny stored charge surrounded on all sides by an insulator. When writing to the cell you fill it with some electrons via (much handwaving here) a method of quantum tunneling. You can then read the cell by sensing the internal charge without disturbing it.

When not in use eventually enough charge tunnels out of the cell via random quantum tunneling events for it to read nothing. This is worsened when things are hotter, so maybe keeping your flash chips in the freezer would help.

Consumer flash memory, I probably wouldn't expect more than 20 or 30 years of offline storage out of it. The older chips would last longer, because their cells are bigger, and you're not trying to read multiple charge levels per cell like the newer stuff.

Added edit:

Magnetic media probably has a higher chance of surviving longer. Floppies from the 80s can still be read, for example, but they are low density media. You'd want something that separates the drive system from the actual magnetic media to stop bearing or motor failure from being an issue , so tape would be a good idea.

The problem is, of course, that you could end up with media you can't read as nobody makes the hardware for it. Tape drives have gone through a dozen revisions in the last 30 years as capacity has increased, but as long as you have the same physical tape cartridge you should be ok.

M-Disc is a blueray compatible media that doesn't use dye and should have a life of hundreds of years. But who will have a blueray reader on hand in the 24th century? I've got a USB M-Disc compatible writer for my backups, but in 30 years will I be able to pull it out of a drawer and plug it into a USB Gen 15 port and have it work with whatever software I have then?

I think we're going to have to do the manual duplication process for a while yet, until we finally settle on some universal petabyte storage crystals or something.

Every slightly unusual Windows issue that I research ends up at some Microsoft forum where this kind of post happens. Without fail.

It's really when you get into the thousands though that SI prefixes generally start to be used, you don't see deca or hecto used that often. It's mainly because we're usually happy keeping three digits of precision in general conversation (185 degrees C, 250 metres, etc). After that we get a bit sloppy and start rounding, and that's where kilo comes in and we start talking about "1.25 kilometres" and such.

Add in the fact that people rarely need to describe temperatures higher than 1000 degrees C with any precision, (they'll just round to hundreds/thousands/millions usually) and that's why SI units feel weird with temperature.

I have an Oki laser printer that I bought for $129. I've had it so long I gave it to my kids for university. Duplex, wifi, and I've bought two toner cartridges for it in the 8 years we've had it.

(Side note: If you go to an airport, you'll find that the dot matrix printer spewing out the passenger manifest at the gate is often a Okidata Microline-series printer, an updated version of the printer I had in 1992)

Basically, don't buy an inkjet printer, and don't buy HP.

I wouldn't consider this to be an on topic post for the "worldnews" or "world" communities. If you cross-post to everywhere, why even have communities?

But posting this to technology, software, AI, communities, no problem.

Yeah elemental mercury ain't that bad. It's all those organic compounds of mercury that are the baddies.

And.... you know, shiny poops that hit the bottom of the bowl with a THUNK , that would be something different. You'd literally lose a few pounds every time you went to the toilet.

Your answer was 501 words, we have uninstalled all browsers except Edge and made Edge your default browser! Enjoy using Edge!

But look how fast we can make those little fuckers go!

It's just like slot car racing, round and round, but.... you know.... faster. And yeah, it's more expensive than a regular slot car track, I guess. But still, those particles will beat any slot car you care to pick! So there's that. Welllll not those fancy slot cars with them high performance motors, I mean, that's a completely different ballgame there, we can't compete with that.

But still, those particles whizzing around, it's gonna be pretty cool. I reckon we should do it.

So anyway, thank you for reading my financial proposal for the SuperLHC.