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  • There are people who have genuine medical reasons to not take vaccines (e.g. an allergy to a common ingredient) or who are so immunocompromised that a vaccine won't keep them alive, and they rely on other people getting vaccinated to avoid dying. It's not just antivaxers who antivaxers kill.

  • Humans with two working eyes can tell the difference between a flat painted surface and a 3D world. Humans with only one eye might crash, though.

  • It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it's stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who's been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren't much use.

  • Someone was telling me the other day that the cheapest new car available in the UK was an electric Dacia. Obviously, you can get a used car for less than a new one, but electric cars are within reach of normal people, or at least normal enough people to not have Mr Moneybags budgets.

  • Ethereum's been proof-of-stake rather than proof-of-work for couple of years now, so it's no longer energy intensive.

    There inherently can't be a way to make proof of work lies wasteful as long as there are people who want to do the work. If you make hardware more, then it makes it cheaper to do the same amount of work, so people buy more hardware and do more work and more power gets used. If you make hardware less efficient, people just use the old hardware. You have to abandon proof of work altogether and switch it to something else that isn't inherently tied to energy usage.

  • Towards the back of the machine normally counts as up for upwards-facing sockets, unless it's a case with feet on the side, in which case it'll be away from those feet so the sockets would be the right way up if it were sideways and on the alternative feet.

  • Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don't like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don't even have to look.

  • Plenty of plumbing is done with moulded plastic pipes and fittings, and I've 3D printed garden hose fittings (things like GHT to BSP adapters, which aren't easy to buy) with success, so it's not like moulding is the only way to make plastic good enough.

  • Most of the languages you've mentioned aren't systems languages, so don't make being a good language to write an OS in a high priority. More languages might be accepted in the future, but if they are, it'll be ones that are a natural fit for the problems they're solving.

  • Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they're getting something straight from the developers, so they're not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

  • People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can't climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it's comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind's a little worse than nuclear, and solar's a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

    The article's talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you've got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you've got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn't exist with fusion. It's so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you'd just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they'd cooled down. It's impossible for fusion power, once it's working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

  • PowerShell has a system to sign scripts, and with its default configuration, will refuse to execute scripts, and with the more sensible configuration you should switch to if you actually use PowerShell, refuses to execute unsigned scripts from the Internet.

    I suspect that most of the scripts you're referring to just set -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to disable signature checking and run any script, though.

  • That's misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won't notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there's no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it's not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.

  • It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.

  • You've got it backwards. The phaser's pointed directly away from the warp core, so the safest possible direction. Geordie's at the phaser end, and Data's the one relying on a tiny little target getting hit and using his own body as a backstop.

  • If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything's Unix. You'll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that's the one that's ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There's no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.

  • What are you insinuating? It was perfectly justifiable to put our own soldiers right next to every single nuclear test we did, including flying aircraft and sailing ships through mushroom clouds, then withholding the soldiers' medical records so they couldn't prove radiation exposure and still to this day aren't eligible for compensation.

  • They're connected to an RCD, as modern UK wiring has all sockets connected via an overall RCD in the fusebox, but the switches on the socket are just basic on/off switches.

  • It's pretty plausible that Epstein would be suicidal after being locked up and would have killed himself if left unattended in his own jail cell with some rope, especially as giving him some rope would signal that he wasn't going to get saved. The more sensible conspiracy theory is that he was taken off suicide watch intentionally to give him the opportunity.

  • All modern wiring in the UK has every socket in the building connected via RCD (the more common name for GFCI outside America), but they're usually in the main fusebox/consumer unit rather than individually per socket. These are just normal on/off switches for the convenience of being able to turn things on and off.