Anyone reliant on cloud offerings is stuck.

There are multiple public clouds. AWS is not the default choice a company uses for a public cloud offering anymore.

The Dead Sea Effect

Full quotation from Generations: What we leave behind is not as important how we lived.

That is a really bad take IMO. Each of us is only here for a fraction of a section in cosmological time. “How we live” is much less important that “what we leave behind” because subsequent generations only get what we leave them. As an example, the philosophy encapsulated in this quote is a great argument that we should ignore climate change because continuing to use carbon based energy would make the lives living today better in an easier way.

Yet more evidence that Generations is a bad Trek movie.

Its been quite a while since I’ve taken a proctored exam, but then all the proctors would clear all the memory on your calc before they’d let you use it for test. Is that not the case anymore?

I like the end result that ISPs are pushing back on this, but don’t mistake this for altruism on their part.

Their businesses make money selling internet service. Were they to support cutting off those accused of piracy, they would be losing paying customers. Further, the business processes and support needed for this to function would be massively expensive and complicated. They’d have to hired teams of people and write whole new software applications for maintaining databases of banned users, customer service staff to address and resolve disputes, and so much more.

Lastly, as soon as all of that process would be in place to ban users for piracy accusations, then the next requests would come in for ban criteria in a classic slippery slope:

• pornography
• discussions of drugs
• discussions of politics the party in power doesn’t like
• speaking out against the state
• communication about assembling
• discussion on how to emigrate

All the machinery would be in place once the very first ban is approved.

This is my new head canon.

There were multiple weddings that day. That was from a prior ceremony for bit players that weren’t important to the story.

Yep, for decades. They used to be much larger consuming the space of a large table. Now they are small units like this:

Just search for “surface mount rework” or the nickname “hot air pencil”.

I always thought the “fix” to a traditional soldiering iron was a hot air pencil.

Kale has a naturally high pH, so it’s basically just an antacid.

I have mild reflux, but know what triggers it after what time of day and can make easy diet adjustments to avoid those triggers too late before bed. For whatever reason, I never considered looking at the alkaline level of the foods I eat. In just doing so now, I see a whole bunch of my regular diet. Have I been unconscious choosing these to mitigate my reflux? I mean, I seek out these foods (that I now know are alkaline) because I like them, but do I like them more than just for their taste?

I like The Loss (S04E10) where Troi loses her mental abilities and has a crisis about actually having to know how to do her job. Bonus is that early in the episode even with her powers, she was dishing out surface level platitudes to a patient who was clearly unimpressed.

How long has it been since you’ve watched that episode? What you’re describing doesn’t match what I remember about the patient behavior.

The first scene Troi had saved one of the patient’s dead husband’s keepsakes that the patient was overjoyed to receive back as a reminder of her lost loved one. The scene where patient was unimpressed, the second scene with that patient and was after she’d lost her powers. Troi was claiming the patient was in denial and not addressing the issue and the patient dismissed Troi’s analysis. The final scene with the patient was when Troi still didn’t have her powers back, and the patient admitted that (powerless) Troi had correctly read the situation and that the patient was now thankful that Troi gave the advice about denial. Only after this did Troi get her powers back.

Full synopsis of that episode here if you want to look at it.

edit: raw link: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Loss_(episode)

Only 4% of marketers overall think X ads provide “brand safety” — certainty that their ads won’t appear alongside extreme content —

The 4% may represent lumpy pillow manufacturers, sellers of freeze dried survival food, random cryptocurrency products, and Trump 2024 flag/tshirt providers.

The spokesperson added that X’s “brand safety rate is on average 99%, as validated by DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science,” companies that analyze the value of digital advertising placements.

“But that 1% remaining will have your products featured next to ads denying the holocaust, hate speech against LGBTQ+ communities, and ads discrediting proven science in favor of, oh I don’t know, phrenology or something” -the spokesperson probably

I thought exactly the same thing. If they’re not a 3D printed rocket company then they’re just another of a field of rocket companies? Why would a customer choose them. The article enlightened me to who:

In a private letter to “investors, advisors, and friends” summarizing the company’s operations after the first half of 2024, Relativity said it currently has a backlog of $2.6 billion in commercial launches and is in discussion or has signed a contract with many major megaconstellation providers (but not SpaceX). Ellis would not confirm this, but multiple people have told Ars that Relativity recently signed a deal for multiple launches with Amazon’s Project Kuiper constellation.

There is at least $2.6 billion worth of customer that wants a SpaceX like launch product, but is unwilling to buy from an Elon Musk company. With how toxic Musk’s behavior is these days, I could see that customer market growing. The US government is putting LOTS of payloads into orbit in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 because there’s nothing even close to it in price and performance. If Relativity can even get close to Falcon 9, they’ll almost certainly pick up a large chunk of US payload contracts as the government doesn’t like to have a single supplier for nation security reasons.

To people joining this thread later asking where a commercial product of this is, or pointing out that 10% solar efficiency is way below other existing products, you’re missing the point.

This is basic research to prove one single aspect of solar panel construction. That question apparently was: “We currently know that PET backsheets work for solar panels, but can we use a different material which may have less CO2 impact and still produce a working solar panel?” The answer being “yes”. That is a big step that other people doing other research and product development can build on. It may be years (or never!) that a product comes to market with sisal fiber backsheets, but the answers from the work done here are integrated into the body of knowledge that will produce the next improvement in solar panels.

But if you really want to get pedantic… you’ll probably notice the whole choking-on-vacuum-thing first.

We agree completely!

I know we’re joking here, but if you leave an airlock open exposed to hard vacuum you’re not going to hear any kind of audio alerts because there’s no air to transmit the sound.

I’m wondering if it’s not some kind of assistive thing that got turned on randomly because it was up there too long.

Boeing levering the high technology of my refrigerator automatically alerting when I leave the door open.

California announces that the policy is going to expire. People who paid more and had an expectation of never-ending special road access are angry.

This is the step where your comparison to solar (at least in California) breaks down. I’m not a California resident, but from what I understand under the NEM 1 and NEM 2 rules there is NO expectation the preferential net metering will last forever. Solar customers were specifically told that putting in solar during NEM 1 would guarantee those terms for 20 years from install date. Same thing for NEM 2, the rules would apply for 20 years from the install date. After the 20 year period, you’d be subject to whatever net meter would be offered to new customers, which could be none. source

What this proposition proposes is cutting that 20 years to 10 years from install date:

"Convert NEM 1.0 and 2.0 accounts to the NBT either upon sale of a home or after 10 years of interconnection. " source

So customers that took a large financial risk installing solar that are coming out ahead may now have the deal shifted out of their favor. How is that fair to the solar customers? Worse, the knock on effect will destroy the trust in state government incentives in the future. Why would any citizen risk a long term outlay based on policy if the state government may decide one day they don’t want to hold up their end of the deal anymore?

I’ll be the first to say de-carbonizing a home isn’t cheap to do (or the home ownership for that matter). I’m doing what I can by buying and implementing the de-carbonized solutions today to increase market demands driving the technology and solutions lower for everyone else.

I’m in Utah, and people here push back against nuclear, but we literally live next to a massive desert. Nobody cares if we dig a big hole in W. Utah or E. Nevada, we can bury it however deep we need and it’s not going to impact the water table at all (we don’t really have a water table here anyway…)

If you don’t have water nearby, you’re not going to be able to use nuclear power in any utility grade scale there.