There was already this kind of invention in Shark tank years ago (or could've been the British version). And they did it based on a study showing exactly the same results as here. It was basically a filter in the lid ( that would allow air through but stop and neutralize pathogens. The biggest reason for the lid not working in typical toilet seats is that the only way for the air pressure to even out is for air to move through the gaps between the seat and the lid. But the investors were not interested enough to make bids for it. There is a product called STERIL-IS, but it doesn't replace the lid and thus I don't know if it really makes any difference.

... "Only because I already loosened it for you"?

Exactly this! I've also said this. Somehow many people think that it is fine to break into software if they just can, even if they think it is not okay to break into buildings etc. I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that you usually cannot be seen during the act, while you usually cannot break into buildings without at least the risk of being observed.

You can store the start of videos on SSDs, then spin up the HDD and load from there. Or simply spin up during the ads, and the spin up time is not even that long, a few seconds. Also, one HDD doesn't consume *that* much power, and can replace multiple SSDs. And HDDs consume less energy when manufacturing, which is why they are cheaper. One HDD vs two SSDs (comparing to Nytro 15 GB from Seagate) uses less power at idle. And then there are virtual computers, which aren't guaranteed huge I/O, but maybe then other resources. Cloud storage for individuals - no point in storing that on SSD (maybe at most have the metadata and thumbnails on an SSD).

Yeah, this was what I immediately thought when I heard of this accident. Impeccable timing, I hope the FAA will not yield here. Boeing's argument was basically that "the part coming off hasn't yet happened so it won't". Well, the windows hadn't fallen off earlier either. There's a first time for everything.

This all sounds almost as if it was a bad thing to allow the company to self-monitor. Kind of like unregulated free market wouldn't be a silver bullet to humanity's problems. Who could've thunk.

Yeah, I don't pay for any cloud services myself. They end up costing so much more than just one-time payments, and the seller, uh, I am mean service provider, may cancel the product any time. I can understand leasing a car or renting an apartment, as there is cost to owning things, they are big investments, and may lose their worth, and it is a hassle to sell and buy a new one. But none of the arguments hold for software. People perhaps don't get that, or they are terrible at math. Of course, the companies get greedy and only sell stuff as cloud services, Adobe being a "good" example of this. But fortunately there are free or one time purchase alternatives to most things, and often, they are as good as the competition. There is just the learning of using a slightly different interface.

If the manufacturers actually want to sell more devices, I have a free idea for them. Lower the prices. The manufacturers already have admitted that the flagship phones cost so much just because they can get people to pay that much. Yet at the same time they complain about stagnant market. How dumb are they if they cannot connect the dots?

Also, if they just sell the same product with slightly tweaked exterior and a couple of additional software features, and have slightly faster CPU that is slowed down to the same speed by more bloatware, and the same goes for the battery (larger capacity, same battery life) who is interested in upgrading?

Though it is better for the environment I guess. I slowly went from upgrading once per year to having the same phone 5 years (and counting), just needs an occasional battert swap. And fortunately we will soon go back to user-swappable batteries, making that even cheaper and even less of a hassle.

There was a major turning point in the health of most countries already in 2020. The C-word. The thing that turned life expectancy down in almost all countries (somewhere sooner, somewhere a couple of years later). The thing that doesn't become the F-word no matter how many times you repeat it. The thing that increases your risk to Alzheimer's disease, dementia, diabetes, heart attack, Parkinson's, you name it, by tens of percents. Yeah, it's COVID, and it is not "just" a flu. And even the flu is not that benign.

Infectious diseases are one of the biggest health burdens to society even as such, even without their long term complications. The most frequent ones spread through air. And we do not need CRISPR, AI, quantum computing, wonder pills, individual genomic sequencing or anything like that to massively reduce them. We need air hygiene. We need ventilation and air purifiers (I'm an advocate of respirators, too, but we can improve greatly even without them). Microbe-free air can bring just as big health revolution as microbe-free drinking water has brought. But it is ironic that governments are spending billions on clean drinking water campaigns abroad, and don't do almost anything on clean breathing air campaigns domestically. Yet we end up paying much more for the consequences, and not all of the harm can be undone with any amount of money.

So what is the theoretical limit of battery energy density? I'm not talking about just lithium ion batteries, but any batteries.

However, not being able get to places quickly enough is not really any of the main challenges of the humanity. The biggest issue is climate change, and at the moment any usage of biofuel cannot be offset by more biofuel production. So unless we at some point achieve abundance of biofuel, then the supersonic jets might be a good thing. Until then, they are mostly a bad thing on the bigger picture.

You might want that until you realize that the rare regions that became increasingly habitable instead of the opposite will be flooded.. with climate refugees. Like they say, be careful what you wish for. Even if your region might directly benefit from something, it may be indirectly harmed by it. Not even to mention all the other global problems caused by the climate change being reflected everywhere somehow.

I think the bigger problem was that even on regular days, you would get 10,000 microplastics per day. I don't know if the mass really makes a difference in understanding the effects. Is a microgram per square meter per day bad? Or a milligram? A gram? I don't think anyone knows yet for sure.

Not the first time people invent something great only to figure out way too late that when solving a problem, we greated a bigger problem. Lead added to gasoline prevented engine knocking, but polluted the environment. Arsenic in wallpapers helped to make a vivid green color, but was toxic. Asbestos was great for many things, including causing lung cancer. Cadmium made nice red color to plastic dishes, but was not equally nice to your body. Fossil fuels helped humanity to gain so much, but are also helping the Earth gain excess temperatures. PFAS are wonderful for so many uses, but the opposite goes for the environment. The list is endless.

The sad thing is, for most of these, we knew way before stopping about the harms, but the good old normalcy bias in us first needs to really see the negative consequences with our own eyes before taking any action. We are now repeating this with microplastics. We should really stop using plastic where reasonably good alternatives exist, invent new alternatives, reuse and prevent plastic going to the environment.

Of course, the optimal scenario would have been no eruption, then the eruption happening far away from any habitation or infrastructure, but considering the eruption was going to happen near where it did, an Icelandic geophysicist Bjorn Oddson actually said this was the best place for the eruption to happen of the expected possibilities. Scandalistic media of course needed to state the opposite to get more clicks. I understand that the situation is severe, and it is terrible for the whole country, especially those living in Grindavik, but it could also have been much worse. Of course this is likely just the beginning.

I'm pretty sure they are still storing the data on the cloud. It's just that you will have to pay to get access to it. Earlier there was a similar setting to disable storing history (it was perhaps on YouTube, anyway some Google product). After you turned saving the history back on, magically you could see all the history also from the time it wasn't supposed to be stored.

A minor correction: capitalized K stands for Kelvin, lowercase k for kilo. So it is kW and kWh.