Good to see the FCC going after this kind of thing. Put them in jail even better.
I have my phone set up so the only numbers that chime the phone are those in my contact list. The abuse of voice and text on the cell network is rampant and it's equivalent to trespassing.
Microsoft’s name was basically equivalent to dogshit from the mid-90s until maybe the mid 2000s.
I'm old enough to remember well the Microsoft hate. It's not so much they've changed their ways, but Google has now taken the trident and diverted attention away from them.
Fusion and fission are quite different. A practical fusion reactor does not exist. It's outside our technological capability right now. Current fusion reactors are only experimental and can not maintain a reaction more than a small fraction of a second. The problem is plasma containment. If that can be solved, it would be possible to build a practical fusion reactor.
The fuel for a working fusion reactor would likely be deuterium/tritium which is in effect unlimited since it can be extracted from seawater. Also the amount of fuel required is small because of the enormous amounts of energy produced in converting mass to energy. Fusion converts about 1% of mass to energy. Output would be that converted mass times the speed of light squared which is a very, very large number, in the neighborhood of consumed fuel mass times 10^15^.
Fusion is far less toxic to to the environment. With deuterium/tritium fusion the waste product is helium. All of the particle radiation comes from neutrons which only require shielding. Once the kinetic energy of the particles is absorbed, it's gone. There's no fissile waste that lingers for some half life.
Funny, when I was a little kid my grandmother had a Zenith TV with that exact remote. I still remember the long throw and clank of those buttons. TV remotes were uncommon then so I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Yeah dating myself here.
1000 billionaires, sounds like a great plan. They did so well last time.
Getting the flotation is actually not that difficult in terms of engineering since Venus has a crazy thick atmosphere. Not hard to float a balloon at an altitude of a few Earth atmospheres. Problem is your life is dependent on the reliability of the floatation system. It would take a lot of attention to fail safe design. That OceanGate organization would be like "the wrong stuff".
There's other engineering challenges in colonizing Venus such as solar radiation. Venus has no magnetosphere to protect against ion radiation from the Sun and being closer it's much more intense than Mars. Then you'd have to tether the balloon somehow, Venus has some strong vertical winds. That's going to be like thirty miles of cable to the scalding 900F surface. Venus has clouds of sulfuric acid so that's going to present a materials challenge. It's a tough sell, greatly easier to colonize Mars.
It's like when Elon started blowing smoke about colonizing the moons of Jupiter. If not already aware, Jupiter emits the most radiation of any solar body second only to the Sun. The moons around Jupiter are seriously toxic to human life. They can't even get a probe to last more than a year around Jupiter due to radiation exposure, let alone a manned spacecraft.
I'm still using Chrome, but it keeps getting shittier. At some point they'll push me over to Firefox. Hope Firefox can avoid getting shitty.
I recently watched a documentary about the USA power grid and was surprised to find we have three, East, West, and Texas. How weird is that.
Anyway Texas set out to be independent early 20th century because they did not want to be subject to federal regulations. Unfortunately that leaves them vulnerable. They can't tap into the national grid if there's a deficit, which has happened several times due to extreme weather. Texans just have to go without power and it's always at the worst time. They know they have this vulnerability and are not dealing with it for whatever reason.
Also they can't sell surplus to the national grid because they're not connected to it. I mean nobody can force them to hook up, but if I was a Texan I'd want my state to suck it up for the sake of having redundancy in the system and sparing the catastrophe.
A smart sort would be great. Maybe even some custom settings for it, like weights for community, upvotes, replies, etc.
Aside from any moral or political views, it amuses me when people do criminal acts and fail to realize police can inspect personal data like text messages, email, and social media. I think people smart enough to realize that are smart enough to avoid committing a crime in the first place. Though there are smart criminals that get away with it, you just don't hear about them because they don't get caught. In any case I tend to think being stupid is prerequisite to being a criminal.
That article has been posted a lot lately. It's a looming threat, Meta is coming to destroy the Fediverse in a preemptive strike. It would take a long time for the Fediverse to grow big enough to threaten them, but they're not taking any chances.
Probably monthly active uses would be the best gauge. It's somewhat over 50k for Lemmy compared to around a half billion for reddit. That would be .01% or one ten thousandth. So even if all those were the result of people leaving Reddit, a graph on paper would not have high enough resolution to register a difference.
In any case it only matters that Lemmy has a big enough user base to make it worthwhile. I'd be more concerned about it getting too big than being too small.
It's pretty ironic how companies will spend so much money on advertising to gain brand recognition, but then throw it away on a whim.