AnyOldName3

Solar actually overtook nuclear as least-killy-per-gigawatt about a year (maybe even two, now) ago, although obviously killing people isn’t the only bad thing a system of power generation can do.

There’s at least one company that does tweak (iirc used) airliner turbofans by taking the fan part off so they just have the turbojet (which is already tuned to mostly generate rotational energy to drive the fan turbine rather than produce thrust itself) and use that to spin a generator. Obviously, it’s a bit more complicated than that in reality, but there are quite a lot of old engines no longer certified for flight out of an abundance of caution but that still work fine, and a market for high-power generators that don’t need to be the pinnacle of efficiency (originally as backups just for occasional use, and now because of AI companies caring only about speed and not about cost).

Whether or not that’s true at the moment (obviously, the status quo has changed because in 2020 UPlay changed to Ubisoft Connect, so the alleged incident happened years ago, and it’s alleged that Ubisoft were forced to stop selling something, so they wouldn’t still be selling it), the article specifically says:

Uplay featured a $15 USD Rainbow Six Siege Starter Pack, but this version was not available on Steam, making the cheapest option on Valve’s platform much more expensive.

The obvious way of parsing that is that it was the UPlay version of the game, but even if not, it’s generally not viable to sell Steam keys for things not available on Steam. The only time you can is when a game’s delisted but you’ve already generated keys for it, and then Valve can just wait for Ubisoft to run out rather than making the alleged threat.

That’s not what the article says. It’s about UPlay keys sold by Ubisoft through UPlay that have nothing to do with Steam, and Valve threatening to remove a game from Steam unless the UPlay keys sold through UPlay became the same price as the Steam keys sold through Steam.

He was murdered by a second, much larger, knife, which wasn’t covered by the allowance for ceremonial knives for religious reasons, so the killer was already breaking existing knife laws. It’s not like Steven Yaxley ‘Tommy Robinson’ Lenon and his supporters will ever care about this, though.

A laptop that’s been driven over or smashed with a hammer or otherwise crushed.

I’ll copy the bit here that I just edited into my reply after you edited the first post:

In the face of your edit, I see that you’ve misunderstood the exploit. You need write access to the System Volume Information directory of your own USB stick, not anything on the target machine. It’s much easier to get access to things on a computer than it is to get access on one particular computer, and this exploit lets you jump from one to the other.

By exploit standards, that’s not especially hard. I don’t think there’s really anything blocking accessing it at all if an NTFS volume is mounted on a typical desktop Linux distro, as it’s just NTFS permissions blocking it, and they’re not typically obeyed by Linux in the first place.

In the face of your edit, I see that you’ve misunderstood the exploit. You need write access to the System Volume Information directory of your own USB stick, not anything on the target machine. It’s much easier to get access to things on a computer than it is to get access on one particular computer, and this exploit lets you jump from one to the other.

Reform got a shitload of votes in this week’s elections, and one of their few actual policies is repealing the online safety act, so it’s not even particularly safe to say that voters don’t want their kids seeing porn if it means it’s any more inconvenient for adults to see porn.

It’s not really appropriated, as it’s still the same thing, just being used for a purpose other than the one it was originally invented for. Plenty of things end up useful for things other than why they were invented but retain a name based on the original very specific use case that doesn’t make sense for their common use case. USB’s name isn’t appropriated when a device charges over USB-PD and uses resistors on the channel configuration pins to set the current limits without a serial connection, despite serial bus being part of the name.

That’s not the kind of privacy that the phrase is referring to. One of the main uses of VPNs is to make it so people not on a local network can see devices as if they were on the same local network (e.g. to access an office intranet while working form home) without having to open those devices up to the public internet. For that kind of VPN, everyone involved typically knows who everyone else is and exactly what they’re using it for, but the office printer is still kept private within the group.

You’ve probably created something that would be considered a DRM circumvention device under the DMCA, so possessing it would be illegal unless it’s covered by one of the exceptions. If you think it might be, then you’re probably in a legal grey area as there isn’t case law settling whether the exceptions override the parts about DRM circumvention, but it’s fairly widely accepted that they probably do - DRM-era console emulators like Dolphin rely on it being legal to bypass the games’ DRM in order to interoperate with other computer systems, and no one’s been brave enough to sue them for that interpretation yet.

If it is illegal, the most likely outcome is just that someone does a DMCA takedown request and GitHub would take it down and that would be the end of that, which is pretty much the same thing as would likely happen if anyone didn’t like it but it was legal, as it’s easy to submit takedown requests, but hard to appeal them if they’re unjustified.

Sometimes, evil corporations want to use a FLOSS tool for exactly the same things as its other users do, so if they give money to the developers to use to do what the users want, everyone benefits. Other times, evil corporations want to buy some of the good reputation of a FLOSS tool and/or infect it with their toxic reputation as a marketing strategy, and only evil benefits.

They issued some shares when their share price was high and didn’t have huge amounts of debt compared to other companies of a similar value.

To add to this, when forks do succeed, it’s typically because they’re either making very few changes which can easily be reapplied to new versions of the original project, or because a significant number of the existing developers disagree with the project lead and are just doing what they were already doing before the fork, just without having to obey one specific person.

Yes I am, because that’s a safe assumption, just like assuming gravity will keep working. We’d need to discover new physics to make Lithium and Sodium plausibly form different compounds as our current understanding of physics predicts them to behave nearly the same. At this point in time, there’s nothing to indicate there’s anything wrong with that part of physics.

Lithium’s energy density is largely the cause of its flammability - if you accept density and capacity comparable to another battery chemistry, you can get it down to a comparable fire risk, even if there’s not much point bothering.

Chemically, Sodium and Lithium are very similar, so any improvement that applies to one should be pretty applicable to the other. That’s actually one of the main strengths of Sodium batteries - most of the research that’s already gone into making Lithium batteries can be reapplied with minor tweaks. However, Sodium is inherently larger and heavier than Lithium, with fewer atoms fitting into the same space and those atoms weighing more. If research for Sodium batteries catches up with Lithium ones, they’ll still be worse just because of that, and at that point, research would get easier gains from improving Lithium batteries than Sodium ones.

Sodium batteries aren’t seriously expected by anyone to supplant Lithium ones. The two things Sodium can theoretically do better than Lithium are being cheaper as a raw material, and working well at low temperatures, but it’s always going to be heavier and larger for a given capacity. Most applications for batteries care about their size and weight, and so the extra cost of Lithium will be worth paying.

Under modern physics, Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of. Anything else that might be better won’t be a chemical battery, and it’s not like there’s any reason to suspect some new magic thing will be created like a pocket-size fusion reactor that will make chemical batteries totally obsolete any time soon. Decades more of lithium batteries being relevant are as close to guaranteed as can be.