Hopefully this will make helium supplies last longer for medical and industrial applications

See: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Finally, a distribution for Microsoft apologists

The idea is that it maximizes simplicity.

Little fish get eaten by bigger fish

Thank god. Now I can finally sleep at night.

I could see it being useful for when you want an easy way to get a high voltage spike out of a 5v power supply. For example, if you wanted to build a board for igniting the gas in a potato gun that ran off of a USB power bank.

Then you want something like one of these instead:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/DC-3V-5V-Arc-Generator-High-Voltage...

You also want to use the gas dispenser from a Paslode impact gun, an air mattress inflator and a Zodiac check valve for the air purge.

Speaking of power banks, what would happen if you plugged this device directly to one?

Only one way to find out!

most power banks don't have the data lines, and as far as I see this device uses the data lines to destroy the host. So I'll guess nothing would happen.

You could design one which did destruction via the power lines if you wanted to.

That's much harder though because power lines tend to have big-ish capacitors on them.

It's possible that it could actually work, meaning, average Joe thinks its kind of cool and buys some pepsi.

There are some people it will work for. I believe that too.

It is the much larger set of people who see the implications. And who see average Joe bag of doughnuts will already have had plenty of Pepsi impressions, if not Pepsi itself.

Driving some spurious sales with night sky pollution is not something to be rewarded.

I made a chatbot for the website Omegle one time. It just randomly selected messages to send from a list. It was sort of like the emacs psychotherapist but dumber. Some people would talk to it for minutes before skipping.

It would be interesting to actually port the emacs psychotherapist to Javascript or wasm.

Interesting that money is not even on this list

Its on the list twice - 10 Paid software offers an open quid pro quo 11 It takes steady income to sustain long-term R&D »

Those are not "because it allows us to get more profit." They are arguing that non-free Mathematica is completely in the best interest of their users. Of course it's not. At the end of the day, Sagemath is there for everybody to use and a person can't even use Mathematica unless they're connected to a university. They've sabotaged it with legal barriers and DRM.