According to TFA:
"The bill defines a three-dimensional printer as a âoedevice capable of producing a three-dimensional object from a digital model.â

Umm, that sounds like a CNC mill to me....

There is a very primitive Rust utility called btop that is clearly little more than a proof of concept at this stage.

Nevertheless, thanks for the link -- btop looks quite cool.

I'm not a corporation with IT staff and a DC. I'm just a human with two or three computers in my house. It's gotten more complex over the years to easily network them and share files (Yes, I remember and used WFW). This sounds like the death-knell for my usage.
Oh, well, I guess people will never really have "personal" computers anymore anyway.

>>> and if Israel were to start losing, they could believably use nuclear weapons.

I don't think you can tar only one side with that. Israel is the only state there currently believed to have nuclear weapons, but a losing Arab state could believably use nuclear weapons also - perhaps ones currently hidden from the world, perhaps ones borrowed from a known nuclear power who has an interest in propping up the birthplace of Islam, or who simply has an interest in watching the world burn.

Where an exchange of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would spread to is an...interesting question. What would happen to the world in the case that roughly 1/3 of world oil production was disrupted is also...interesting.

Identifying obviously encrypted messages is pretty easy - especially from well-known apps like Signal and WhatsApp.

What they're selling is the connection map - who's exchanging encrypted messages with whom. Tells a government about 90% of the people that they want to surreptitiously monitor, and provides some intel based on traffic statistics - "The 'terror cell' in western downtown is sending 3 times as many messages as normal, after the leadership exchanged twice as many messages as normal last week".
What those statistics really mean is that the Mom's group that opposes the mayor is organizing this weekend's cookie sale at the park, but hey, you gotta break a few eggs to crush an uprising.

Google authenticator worked as intended [ ... ]

"NOTABUG: Working as designed."

Yeah, we know, Sparky... The design is fucking idiotic!

It seems clear that one of the OTP codes got them into the rube's account -- the second OTP code allowed them to copy out his Google Authenticator database. If that copy hadn't existed -- and indeed did not exist until Google decided to make copies for itself -- then they would have had to keep pumping him for OTP codes, and the damage would likely have been more limited.

The first compromise can be laid at the feet of the dopey employee. Google bears partial responsibility for all subsequent compromises -- for making and keeping a copy of a sensitive database that the entire security community told them at the time was a STUPID FUCKING IDEA!

Ignorant, as Pinky's Brain didn't claim energy capacity in GW, but instead referenced 500 GW for 5 min, which is approx 42 GWH, a perfectly cromulent measure of energy.

Sea Dragon is an interesting idea, but the concept of a "simple" 350 MN engine is a bit disingenuous. The Saturn V F-1 engine had about 8 MN of thrust, and they had terrible difficulties resolving combustion instability in the chamber, a problem that gets worse as engines get bigger. With modern computers and CFD codes, they might have luck doing so on an engine with 45 times the thrust, but I'm having trouble with that. Avoiding combustion instability is one of the main reasons for SpaceX developing the smaller, cheaper Raptor engine. With a small chamber, combustion instability is a tractable problem, and they expect to be able to build them for about $0.25M apiece - compared with a roughly $40M cost for the RS-25 (used on the Space Shuttle and SLS), which has roughly the same thrust as Raptor.

Remember that SpaceX intends to launch 9M dia SuperHeavies for a per-launch cost of a couple of million dollars - basically, the cost of the propellant. You're not gonna build a 23M diameter expendable two-stage rocket with enormous engines and fill it with fuel for that cost per launch.

To be fair, AirBNB isn't a hotel chain, they're a booking facilitator [ ... ]

"Well, actually..." Let me summarize their so-called argument:

"We are Craigslist. We only list one kind of thing: Rooms for short-term rental. Like items listed on Craigslist, any transaction between rentee and renter is completely private, and any difficulties that may arise are exclusively between them -- we are nothing more than a listing agent and payment processor, and take a small cut of the transaction as our listing fee."

Same "reasoning" with Oober and Lypht, except they only list ride shares.

Looks like all the employees on LI use stock photos:

Gee, it's a real shame that LinkedIn doesn't have the resources of a true software giant, who could dispatch a couple of interns to kluge together a few functions that would compare uploaded profile photos to images available on stock photo sites, and flag them if they find a match...

Yes... Truly a shame that is, evidently, far beyond their capabilities...

What's your favorite tech innovation?

• Illegal cab company
• Illegal hotel chain
• Fake money for criminals
• Plagiarism machine

Yes, sand grains contacting whatever your heat source is will come into thermal equilibrium quickly. I posit that the rate of heat flow in a solid material is vastly faster than the rate of heat flow in the same material broken into sand-grain sized chunks, as the contact area between grains is vastly smaller than the contact area between grain-sized areas in solid rock.

If you're adding heat by using low-pressure hot water or air, then sand is probably better because air/water can surround each grain and quickly transfer energy. But that limits your storage temperatures to a bit above 100C if you use water, higher if you use air (but you have to use a LOT of air). If you're adding heat by piping industrial fluids through the medium, avoiding direct contact, then solid rock is probably your best option.

So a sand "battery" is simply using the thermal mass of sand to store heat. Great. I guess if I had a source of high-grade heat that I wanted to store and turn into low-grade heat, it's not a bad choice. But if all you want is thermal mass, why not use blocks of granite? You'd get roughly twice the mass density, which would give roughly twice the thermal density.

The question really is, how big of a block of stone do I need to store enough heat in the summer to heat a neighborhood of homes in the winter?

...Twitter is the hot and popular bar that everyone goes to [ ... ]

"Nobody goes there anymore; it's too crowded. (Also: It's full of Nazis.)"

...who wants to hang out at some smaller bar with no crowd?

Um... Maybe because the drinks are better, made by actual bartenders who know what they're doing (instead of a computer pumping pre-measured servings out of a spigot), and made using decent, fresh ingredients instead of bathtub gin and lime-flavored high-fructose corn syrup? (And because the place isn't overrun by Nazis?)

I mean, if all you want is a Long Island Iced Tea, fine, I'll empty a bar mat into a pint glass for you, but don't try to pretend you're engaged in some higher appreciation of mixology -- you're just getting wasted.