The real economic value of sodium-ion batteries is as an alternative. When you have alternatives, it drives the cost of both down.

This makes sense, if all we had was Li-ion, then it would be used by utility companies for mass storage and by individuals for home backup, reducing the supply of lithium available for high-end purposes like EVs, driving Li-ion prices up.

To look at it another way, we go from just utilizing the world's lithium supply for energy storage to utilizing both the lithium and sodium supplies.

Rereading the thread again...yeah, I did miss the point. Sorry!

That's not how allergies work...it's a complex multi-factor condition, which means many genes that are not individually culpable and the environment both play a huge role. Identical twins living in the same household often have different sets of allergies.

You very well could have the same "genetic weakness" and not know about it, even if you are not allergic to penicillin.

You can also not be allergic to penicillin right now and become allergic later in life.

At least Oklahoma City got an airport out of the deal...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The main problem is that chemical grade ISRIB is not necessarily medical grade.

While the chemical purity might be pretty high as a percentage, toxic (unless it's also food grade) or infectious agents might be present.

Infectious agents in particular are hard to eliminate, a few years back hospitals were running out of medical grade baking soda. While they could run down to the corner store, they risked giving their patents horrifying infections from the way they were using the baking soda, unless it was completely sterile.

Oh, and of course you would need the medical knowledge to administer it appropriately.

The "scorched earth" exit has been going on since before the election:
https://news.slashdot.org/stor...

While you're right that you can get 90% of the way to a backup by using the techniques you outlined (and these "mostly backups" would be a good solution for most people most of the time), one last crucial property of backups is that they are offline.

Consider what would happen if a malicious attacker got into your system and ran ransomware software on all your online drives. You'd lose all your data even if you had multiple backups, including off-site backups.

Obviously, the backup has to be online at some point to do the backup (in a truly ideal setup you'd have 2+ offline backups you switch between to close this window of vulnerability), but other than that your backups should be offline.

I suppose you could have your separate ZFS system turned off when it's not doing backups or restoring data.

Though as long as you can turn it on remotely, an attacker could use that mechanism to get to your data.

You're talking like mRNA vaccines alter your genes, but that's not how mRNA works. If mRNA impacted your genes, it would be useless at its biological purpose of transmitting genetic data, because it would be doing unwanted writes all over the place. One of the advantages of this kind of vaccine is that it doesn't enter the nucleus.

Additionally, triggering an adverse immune system reaction is a well known potential side effect. This is why we have safety trials.

Every new technology has had to go through a "never used on humans before" phase, and it's not entirely accurate in this case as the technology has had 3 decades of clinical trials in humans, including the trials required for this specific vaccine. By the time the general public is getting this vaccine, there will be plenty of humans who have had it. By the time it gets to younger people, an enormous number of older and at-risk people will have had it for a while.

You don't have to put all your personal data in one container and put it online, that would indeed be ridiculous.

The point is to have your public (or mostly private but sharable) data in different pods. They even call them pods to emphasize that you can have multiple pods for different purposes.

Eliminating CO2 from enclosed area is a pain in the butt, and is very useful in undersea and space applications. Creating usable fuel is a plus, and particularly in space the electricity/heat needed to jumpstart this process is plentiful.

Added plus, you can run rocket engines off the methane!

Alternately, it looks like it can also be used as feedstock for fertilizer if you want to get it back into a stable habitation loop.

Other dumb aspects:
* How do you get keys with the backdoor registered with devices, without revealing the backdoor key?
* If there's a breach, how do you get replacement keys registered with devices? You can't send them encrypted by the old key, because an attacker would be able to find out your new key if they ever breached the old key. If the old key is breached before replacement, an attacker could also send devices a spoofed key that the attackers control, and likely this would allow them to permanently subvert the device software as well.
* What if you have a breach that isn't detected promptly? The amount of damage done could be staggering.
* Quantum crypto can't be backdoored (or even copied for possible later decryption due to the no cloning theorem)

While I personally agree that secrets can be kept...for a long enough time to be useful. This situation is nothing like nuclear launch codes (and I wouldn't be surprised if those have become known after the fact, even if they were kept secret while active).

Maybe this could be kept secret if this were only available to, say, some very specific part of the FBI that only investigated the most serious crimes. However, do you really think that's what they're proposing here? To be useful to LEOs broadly, this "secret" will need to be available to all sorts of LEOs all over the country, meaning that a leak is inevitable. It'd be like if the nuclear launch codes had to be available to the local deputy, which isn't going to end well.

If tech companies are running this and LEOs are just making requests for information, then does this mean that you can't use encryption on a network unless you're a big tech company that can keep up with the encryption regulations? Plus anyway, you have the same fundamental problem: many actors (tech companies) have access to the backdoor or backdoors, and if a key is compromised you have an epic breach on your hands.

Crucially, damage can still be done for a much longer time. If the backdoor is compromised, then anyone who harvested data and sat on it can now decrypt and read everything they've stored up. So, if a nefarious actor has collected a bunch of e-commerce transactions, then they could get all the older credit card numbers and identifying/security information. Some of these credit cards will still be valid, and any static information will remain valid indefinitely. So, in the wake of such a breach, we'd have to immediately re-issue all credit cards, SSNs, drivers licenses, etc. We'd also have to stop using any static identifying information for security purposes, and just assume it's all known. This isn't even to mention all the information that can be gleaned from reading everyone's private conversations. It would be an intelligence goldmine for any foreign intelligence agencies, giving them a very clear picture of what's going on in the compromised country or countries.

This is really just such a dumb idea, and implementing it would be shooting themselves in the foot. It's much better to build security into your own infrastructure first and foremost, even if that security can be misused by some.

Oh yes, of course, because this approach was totally taken in those historical cases, and not totally different things that happened.

Oh wait, that isn't what happened because this approach is relatively new.

For evolution/intelligent design/young-Earth creationism, you had religious people pushing for "equal time" in school. This didn't privilege the fact-checked answer of evolution and enshrined creationism in the institution of learning, rather than having it just be something someone said on the Internet. Also crucially, the main conduit for creationism is direct transmission between believers. Even in most countries and states without creationism in their curriculum, belief in creationism hovers around 20%. Censoring creationism isn't going to be effective, and it makes sense not to give the viewpoint equal time in schools.

As for climate change, first of all, most people in the US actually do believe in climate change at this point, and belief in it being a serious problem that needs action now is the majority viewpoint as well. As for the techniques used to stall public belief in climate change and sow uncertainty for many years, they were oriented around publishing a minority of scientific papers and paying a minority of scientists for support, which could be cited as evidence against climate change (again, hijacking trusted institutions to push a narrative) to introduce uncertainty into the discussion, as well as using alternative channels of information which didn't present the majority fact-checked viewpoint at all and instead focused on the anti-reality viewpoint. This isn't the same as presenting fact-checked information prominently over misinformation that someone on the Internet is saying.

Side note: while researching current belief levels in climate change, I found out that China has been pushing that climate change is not a crisis, so belief that climate change is a problem is very low in China. It seems like the party line narrative is that the Chinese government has it under control, which is ridiculous as this is an international problem that China can't fix by themselves. This is an example of the party line being anti-reality, which can happen too.

Anyway, if the only choices were full censorship or taking no action, wouldn't the wealthy, politically motivated groups behind these issues have gone straight to using the tool of censorship? I'm sure the creationists would have loved it even more if in some states they could have removed evolution from the curriculum entirely, and the success of this measure is quite plausible. The battle over climate change also would have gotten much uglier too, with full censorship of climate change being at least attempted. This is most plausible to have succeeded in the early phases, where fossil fuel companies knew about the problem but the public didn't and even ideas like global cooling were mainstream. After all, if global cooling is the problem then you would be causing harm by cooling things further. While I'm sure this would have eventually fallen apart as the warming became more obvious, it might have made our situation today even worse. Instead, the fossil fuel industry accepted a less aggressive plan, since they were more worried about their short-to-mid term profits and a more aggressive plan would have been expensive and messy.

Personally, I think the "soft" way to handle these situations that Twitter had to develop to deal with the sensitive situation of the POTUS spreading misinformation on Twitter is a great improvement over the "hard" way of straight up censorship.

Think about it, by suppressing dissenting views entirely (even if most of these ideas are terrible or stupid), you drive them underground. Thanks to the scarcity heuristic, rare views seem more valuable to our brains, even when they're not. I mean, why do "they" not want you to know about this stuff? Additionally, if you're getting this information from an underground channel, you aren't going to be getting any counter-viewpoints like you would in an open forum. Once you're hooked by a piece of "secret" special information, then an ideological group can easily pull you in further and work on indoctrinating you further.

While presenting the counter-viewpoint along with the misinformation does allow the misinformation to spread through normal channels, it shuts down the scarcity heuristic. It's just more information on the giant pile of information. While this could trigger one's availability bias, the availability of the counter-viewpoint will trigger the same bias, preventing one from overcoming the other on bias ground alone.

Also, as some other people have pointed out, sometimes people arguing against the misinformation get flagged too. Having their same viewpoint repeated by the system is harmless, while having it censored could cause harm.

Lastly, if a reasonable minority viewpoint is being suppressed, this system allows it to exist and possibly gain traction, even if it is going to meet resistance from this system. Just because the "party line" is being pushed in your face doesn't mean you'll believe it if the mainstream view is the anti-reality viewpoint. The point shouldn't be to shut down opposing views but rather to make them have to compete on a more rational basis.

Kotlin users get more developers using the JVM, so it should be a net win for Oracle. So why are they against developers jumping ship to Kotlin?