You make a fairly common mistake, which is making analogies of mechanical properties between two extremely different length scales. The contents of an IC do not have to stretch over meters or kilometers in order to be useful. Superconductivity is mainly useful on very long length scales, but "sturdiness" drops dramatically as size increases.

This discovery might be useful eventually, but probably not in the near future. More likely, by the time we would have the technology to use it, we will have discovered more practical alternatives.

To give you some extra info, a Mech. E. just calculated for me that a cylinder of diamond with wall thickness 10cm can maintain that pressure in a 1cm diameter interior (with no safety tolerances). Diamond is very brittle, so you'd need a lot of engineering and possibly materials science research for this to ever be practically feasible. I'd guess that even my children won't see this being used in their lifetime.

Oh, I hadn't realized that Sid Meier had used Helstrom's Hive in his work. Thanks for the info!

I wonder if the Feds would come knocking if you had used 192.168.1.1 instead...

> If you're depending on youtube for employment, and they pull this sort of shit, maybe you should look for another job?

I think a lot of YouTubers in that niche where they make a living from posting content on YouTube, but are not coddled by YouTube, have been looking to diversify to Patreon, live streaming, merch and other kinds of disaster recovery (more like disaster adaptation). I'm not aware of parallel posting to other VOD services, though --- possibly (probably?) that is forbidden somewhere?

> Even better - add filters requiring all EU Facebook, Twitter, etc, users to add a credit card to their accounts
> and when they post a link to an EU based news source, the poster much pay the article fee directly (as it should be).

That's an interesting solution which I did not think of. Unfortunately, it doesn't solve the "you must filter out content under copyright even though it is impossible to know what content is under copyright".

About the only solution to that problem that I can think of, is to allow anyone to register as a "creator of content to be filtered" while requiring such creators to provide a free service which checks if a given upload is theirs. Then a small business could, eventually, after clearing content through all the registered services, actually allow a user-provided upload. It would probably take a significant amount of time, though, which, like this legislation, is not particularly in line with user expectations ("I have to wait for my upload to be cleared? WTF?").

> because businesses can't afford to police any of that.

Because there is no way to check if anything is under copyright, I don't see how these businesses can actually legally allow user-posted content. The biggies will do it anyway (allow user-posted content), because they have billion-dollar legal budgets and agreements with some large content creators already, and can afford to see how this mess will actually work out in court. No one else will try, so there will be a lot of geo-blocking of the EU.

Google, Facebook and other megacorps can afford to take measures which they can afford to defend in court afterwards, while the judicial system tries to make sense of bad legislation. Sites of the magnitude of Slashdot or smaller, however, probably will not be able to budget for that, and may just geo-block Europe. Not that geo-blocking is effective. Probably may cause a small up-tick in US VPN adoptions....

FTFY

> There is *no* way to verify your vote was counted correctly with online voting.

Unless you are volunteering to oversee the paper ballot counting process (of your own polling place, which if I am not mistaken is not usually even possible in most jurisdictions with paper ballots), the exact same is true for paper ballots. So what, exactly, is your point?

If it's that overseeing paper ballot counting is within the abilities of far more individuals than overseeing online voting, then I agree.

> Sure, my house could get hit by a meteor, but I'll take my chances.

Perhaps you should consult with someone who has real knowledge of what the risks are. Even without that knowledge, I'd guess that a fire, burglary or perhaps flooding would be far greater risks. Or do you have some kind of fire-proof safe?

> I'm sticking to well-aged titles, last-gen systems and indie studios.

Appropriate for someone whose nick is "Qbertino", I suppose. (Q*bert rocked!)

People who hate advertising give the best advice? An interesting observation which seems to make sense.

I'm not sure how the "honesty" you talk about factors in.

My guess is that if its demographic is younger, then proportionally more of its users know about ad blockers, or other tech which limits the users' exposure to the advertising. Another problem with that demographic is that they are savvy enough, instead of impulse buying, to search for the cheap Chinese equivalents of any attractive product they might have seen in an ad, even if they clicked through. Or if content is in question (video games, movies, music), they are more likely to know how to get the product without paying in illegal or semi-legal ways.

And finally, I'd guess that they have less money than, say, 25-30 year olds, who have (hopefully) settled down in their work but don't have families yet. (I could well be wrong about that, and I suppose it also is quite dependent on from what cultures/economic conditions those users come from.)

None of this is well researched. Please update me with actual facts!

The "heaviness" of a Proof-of-Work alt-coin like Bitcoin or Etherium (before this change) has nothing to do with the complexity of the cryptography and everything to do with there being enormous competition between miners because of the perceived value of the currency mined.

In fact, one can characterize modern cryptography as the art of making a complex enough (to be secure) calculation as efficient as possible. And it is, typically, very, very efficient --- or it wouldn't be used.

Furthermore, AFAIK, there is no proof that only Proof-of-Work can be secure or that it is inherently more secure than Proof-of-Stake or some other, yet to be discovered, algorithm. (This comment proposes that there could be yet another "solution" to the PoW escalation problem but it doesn't actually describe enough details so that I can try to analyze if it is at all viable.)