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This has the potential to be a big hit. Go on your Craigslist or Marketplace and search for printers. You will find lots of free or very cheap working printers being scrapped just because they don't natively work with iPhones. With a little more setup refinement, polish, and support, this could be "dropbox for printers".

In Europe and Asia there was once popular Canon LBP-1120, a 2002-2004 model. You can't use it in modern OS as the driver is for 32-bit Windows only, hence these devices could be bought as low as $7 on flea market.

These printers are still great! They sturdy and unkillable. And they are supported in the print server :P


Exactly my first thought as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkqiDu1BQXY

We're living in the 80s version of the future. We have Star Trek today.


Because telemetry is a privacy invasion, the UX is constantly worsening, artificial update barriers exist, and finally the entire concept of an app store for a PC OS is simply the cherry on top of the FU cake.

> and finally the entire concept of an app store for a PC OS is simply the cherry on top of the FU cake.

macOS has had an App Store for quite some time which according to what you're saying, should lead to a dwindling market share, some how.

Not that the author provides any of their assertions are factual, so there's that.


If macOS was IBM PC compatible, I would agree.

Lots of people with Hackintoshes.

macOS is a Personal Computer operating system.

> Because telemetry is a privacy invasion

I wish his was a major reason for more folks to dump windows, but the majority of "normies" don't even know what telemetry is or that windows is sending data, let alone what data it sends.

Windows will fall, eventually, but not because of some sudden end-user awareness of its enshitification, it will fall because overall desktop/PC sales are falling as more and more people continue to use and have only mobile devices as their primary computing device, whether phone, tablet, or maybe a Chromebook.

The last niche for computers are devs, gamers, and users of pro tools (video & photo editing, audio production, CAD, etc.). Time will tell who wins these spaces, but I sure hope it's not going to be windows.


Yes, also being 10x the mass of Earth that far out hints that it may be an interstellar object captured by the Sun.

I wanted to get a sense of what that MEANS relative to the rest of the gas giants. Apparently it’d be roughly the size of Uranus or Neptune.

I guess I’d always put all the gas giants in the same “very, unimaginably big” bucket. I knew Jupiter was the biggest, then Saturn, but I didn’t realize just HOW big they were compared to the rest. At the risk of stating the very, very obvious, Jupiter is huge!!!

Masses of gas giants are: Jupiter, 317.8 earth mass; Saturn, 95.2 earth mass; Neptune, 17.1 earth mass; Uranus, 14.5 earth mass

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Unit_of_mass_in_a...


The Sun is 99.86% of the mass in our solar system. Jupiter is 0.1% and everything else fits in that last 0.04%

So Earth-mass orders-of-magnitude go something like: [big] 3 Juno, [balls] Ceres, Io, Moon, Mars, Earth, [gas] Uranus-Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter and super-Jupiters, [fusion] brown dwarfs, stars... .

Forgive my ignorance but how is that different than the rest of the planets?

The rest of the planets are theorized to have condensed from the protoplanetary disk that formed the same molecular cloud the Sun did. I. e. they have formed at approximately same time as the sun and from same material, sans gravitational separation.

Ah, so a captured body would be quite different and alien. Really old too. Like, first generation of stars.

Would likely be older than the solar system itself. Probably not first gen star old, but likely would have formed before the sun did. Don't know how different it would be though. Would have formed out of maybe different ratios of elements than what was in the molecular cloud we formed from, but otherwise a large body like this would have undergone similar geological processes as our own planets.

Not at all implied. It could be boring and younger too.

10x earth masses usually implies a gas giant.


The other planets formed from material in the same nebula (cloud of gas and dust) that collapsed to form the sun. The idea here is this planet would have been moving through the interstellar medium and just happened to pass close enough to the sun’s gravity well to get captured in a (very distant) orbit.

Capture would be like a reverse gravitational slingshot? This planet happened to meet the sun at an angle where it lost enough energy to fall into orbit instead of slinging back out like those comets that come around on long cycles?

It would be like a reverse gravitational slingshot, in a different way.

There is no way to capture with just 2 bodies - it would have to leave on gthe same hyperbolic orbit that it arrived on. However if it drove by and had a close enough interaction with a third body, like Jupiter, it could lose angular momentum to the planet, resulting in entering an orbit around the Sun. Further gravitational interactions with planets could then smooth that orbit out over time.

Alternately this could be the more straightforward scenario of interstellar object hits planetoid, they merge, and the new combined object is now in orbit.


AFAIK, it could be in a 2 bodies slingshot, multi-body interaction with some other stuff on the Oort cloud, or tidal interaction (what could happen way more easily with a nebula).

A comet coming back on a long cycle is an orbit

gravitational capture

You don't need to lose energy to enter orbit any more than you need to lose energy too roll a ball down a hill.

But a ball needs to lose energy to not roll right back up a hill to the same height it came from. And if that "ball" is a mass from outside our solar system, it will roll right back out of the solar system just as easily as it rolled in unless there is enough forces to slow it down enough to capture it.

Not true. An obit is not an infinite "plain" with a finite "hill" on but rather a finite "valley". The ball will exit the valley on the other side unless it loses excess kinetic energy somewhere in the valley.

Correct, but my point is you don't need to lose energy to enter orbit.

You don't need complex reverse slingshot interactions. You just need a low enough relative velocity to not shoot off the other side.

I would expect this to be the norm for capture, not some exotic phenomenon.

A ball doesn't need to lose energy to be captured in a valley either.

You just apply a radial force to turn a line into a circle.

Anything that approaches the sun slower than escape velocity will be captured.


Anything that approaches the sun will do so with faster than escape velocity because the gravitational potential energy gets converted into kinetic during the approach. Newtonian mechanics is time-reversible - just like it's impossible for an object in orbit to spontaneously escape without gaining energy from somewhere first, it's impossible to enter orbit without losing energy to another body.

Small nit: this is for objects approaching from infinity in a two body system. Otherwise the object can be in orbit and already be “captured” there. For example, the moon also approaches earth slightly over the month while speeding up, then slows down while moving away. Or it could just be a 3 body system, which is chaotic and can’t be modeled accurately and can have objects spontaneously eject from the stable system (even though the physics is indeed reversible)

Your first nitpick only makes sense with a weird definition of "approaches" for the context, so I think it just adds confusion. They're pretty clearly talking about something that is headed in the direction of the sun and not already in orbit.

And the comment you're responding to already mentioned that other bodies can make a capture happen. Nobody was saying capture is impossible.


That is not true. If it approaches with less than escape velocity it will gain all the velocity necessary to escape in the process of approaching the Sun.

You could think of it as speeding up as it falls toward the sun, it then slows down by the exact same amount as it leaves the Sun.

In order to stay near the sun it needs to lose some of that speed, and given that momentum is conserved, the only possible way is to either hit the Sun or send that momentum to a third object.


To all other readers: this is wrong.

Sorry, but there is still no chance it will land. It's safe to bet your house on it making a nice crater or just disappearing from radar into the drink.

Sounds like you have different definitions of landing.

Lithobraking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking is very reliable but a bit hard on the equipment.

Sorry, I had assumed that a crash landing was obvious from what I said. I don’t know how it could be unclear since there’s no parachute.

How can the left remain unbiased to truth when the right is constantly making things up? If the right is constantly lying about their agenda, is it responsible reporting to constantly report the unobjective lie? Is it unresponsible to lean out of direct regurgitation, acknowledge the pattern of hypocrisy, bring objective analysis of it, and continue to monitor it?

Water is why life never left Earth. We would already be living on Mars or the moon if there was just a lake or two of water. Water got what plants crave.

https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/scientists-grow-plants-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAqIJZeeXEc


plants also like sun and gravity, and wind

And CO2. They need at least 120ppm. The moon has none. Mars has plenty, but very low atmospheric pressure, and too much wind.

I also distinctly remember having a late afternoon sit to think very hard about my future, with a conclusion of 'this is just about the end of childhood, it's time to start becoming an adult with some hard responsibilities' result. I was 12 or 13, and there was absolutely no pretext for doing that. For a long time, I assumed many people had this direct kind of enlightenment, but now I think the opposite. So I'm not the same person I used to be due to simply having the drive to change for the better and correct my bad assumptions.

Google, Apple, Facebook all receiving judicial face slaps these past few days! Let's continue with Amazon, Microsoft, and the other supergiant corporations.

Woosh. It's always been allowed to call a fat person fat. File a complaint under the 1st amendment if you don't like someone asking the question. File a complaint under the 5th if are being forced to answer the question. File a complaint with Supreme Leader if this question is bothering you and these rights do not apply to you.

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