Or places which are already heavily inhabited/productively used. Inland river valleys are some of the most desirable real estate, in human habitation terms.
Major river dams are often only feasible in countries which either have lots of sparsely populated wilderness (like North America), or which don't have a problem with displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying whole communities (like China). Takes it off the menu for a lot of the world.
Would it particularly affect the performance if the sphere ends up covered in barnacles or coral? It's what's inside that matters (it's just a big hollow tank).
You've pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.
You can't force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that's a different matter.
What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple?
People in the FOSS community constantly talk about the best ways to minimise use of Google, Apple and Microsoft products. That is an absolutely valid motivation for choosing to use one project over another.
If someone is willing to use the behaviour of a company or its owners as a factor when choosing a software stack, presumably it's valid to apply the same sentiment to development teams of smaller projects too.
I don't know how they do it in the US, but in the UK most big companies outsource application checks to several big clearing houses. They handle the logistics of checking qualifications and obtaining references from previous employers, plus the optional enhanced checking that some companies need (such as DBS/criminal record checks).
In the UK there is a single official centralised system for checking degree qualifications which covers most major universities. It's also only a 5 minute job to email a university registrar directly. I think most big companies would consider this a bare minimum task when recruiting for any role where a qualification is in any way important.
What's the consequences of being caught lying on your resume? you lose your good job.
I used to work as a trade union officer representing people at disciplinaries. I've represented several people over the years who were sacked for lying on their CVs.
Not only did they lose their job, but they'll get a "sacked for gross misconduct" reference from that employer making it much more difficult to get another job. Those in regulated roles also ended up with gross misconduct records with the regulator, making it essentially impossible to work in that field again.
I'm currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can't be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.
If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.
I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then "catch up" by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.
Not to detract from your point (because you're completely correct), but just an FYI that Vauxhall/Opel has been European owned for some time now. General Motors sold it to Peugeot back in 2017, and it's now part of Stellantis.
Ford had (and still has) essentially the same arrangement, only in their case they use the same brand. Ford Europe and Ford USA are pretty much entirely separate companies, owned by the same parent; hence why their European car lineup looks mostly nothing like their US lineup.
That's encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don't have any control over what happens to it.
Fundamentally, if you don't trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.
“Species concepts are human classification systems, and everybody can disagree and everyone can be right,” she says. “You can use the phylogenetic [evolutionary relationships] species concept to determine what you’re going to call a species, which is what you are implying… We are using the morphological species concept and saying, if they look like this animal, then they are the animal.”
"If they look like this animal then they are the animal" really doesn't sound like a particularly useful (or scientifically rigorous) position.
Not least because there are lots of animals that look alike but aren't the same species.
In my limited experience experience, Gemini responds better with flat, emotionless prompts without any courteous language. Using polite phrasing seems more likely to prompt "I can't answer that sorry" responses, even to questions that it absolutely can answer (and will to a more terse prompt).
So I think my point is "it depends". LLMs aren't intelligent, they just produce strings based on their training data. What works better and what doesn't will be entirely dependent on the specific model.
I want you all up in my 'nities, fam.