It's actually specific to mobile applications.

I would argue that no application on my phone should have any insight into whether I just took a screenshot or not -- that should be between my phone and me and nobody else -- but I can certainly understand why apps like twitter and snapchat take advantage of this data that the OS lets them take advantage of.

I do wish I could prevent this from happening, however.

It's an exceptional thing for Debian -- they've made a big deal out of this for a long time, and that has nothing to do about if the FSF considers them to be sufficiently *free* or not. They may look to the FSF for inspiration, but at the end of the day they make their own decisions.

Either way, the FSF seems to think more highly of Debian than any other commonly used distribution --

This change will probably cause the FSF to be more critical of Debian, but I do have to agree with Debian's stance on this -- right or wrong, these blobs are difficult to avoid, and have been for many years -- this isn't a new thing.

The source for the "14 second figure people were using" is the top-level comment of this thread :

(and the robot's time was 24.73 seconds.)

Your link isn't really clear, but it definitely seems to give average times for runners who actually enter 100m racing events, not average fat slashdotter level humans, who probably for the most part don't ever run at all unless there's an emergency.

So, in 14.73 seconds? An average slashdotter, let alone a fat one? Doubt.

Either way, give them some time. I suspect they'll be beating Usain Bolt sooner rather than later -- at least in raw speed under ideal conditions, anyways.

Bike snobbery. How fun!

Either way, I'd suggest that e-bikes probably aren't aimed at *you* so much.

Instead, they're a better fit for aging cyclists who want to be able to continue to keep up with their friends, or for people who want to replace trips that they are currently doing with cars with something that's more like a bicycle. Or maybe they just want to start riding, but aren't blessed like you are to live in a flat area or in general don't want to be *that* slow.

And as for being less of a workout, sure, but it's totally up to the rider how much less of a workout it is, and I'd suggest that the ideal comparison isn't with a geared bike or a fixie, but instead with just staying home, or taking thear car somewhere instead of the "almost like a real bike".

I should expand on the "if the lake's water is evaporating" part.

As I understand it, the loss of water is being attributed to human use. But humans mostly want fresh water, not salt water -- so what we're probably doing is mostly taking the fresh water that would normally replenish what the lake loses to evaporation, which would have the same effect. (If we were removing salt water and not putting the salt back in the lake, then we'd have less of a problem with salt water coming from the ocean to replace it.)

Either way, the idea is worth considering, but ... I don't know how practical it would be or if it would actually solve the problem without creating new, possibly bigger problems.

Siphoning water only works up to a certain height, as the pressure available is one atmosphere or less, which limits it to about 10 meters. These folk say they got it working up to about 15 meters, but I suspect that this required a very narrow tube, unsuitable for large amounts of water -- and if so, the limit is going to be the classic 10 meters.

Either way, the mountain range would be way higher than 15 meters, so they'd have to pump it up one side and then they could collect the power on the other end -- siphoning would not work.

But there's another, more fundamental problem: salinity. If the lake's water is evaporating, that means it's leaving its salt behind, so if we add salt water to replace that, we're making it more salty than it was before. I've no idea how big of a problem this would be, but I don't think we want to turn it into another Dead Sea.

Texas has two nuclear power plants, with two units each: Comanche Peak and the South Texas Project, 40 miles SW of Fort Worth and 90 miles SW of Houston respectively.

It's a real factor, but let's put some numbers behind it :

To pick a worse case scenario, suppose we've got a solar panel temperature coefficient on the high end, of -0.5%/C. And we've got the highest temperatures seen by them -- 65 Celsius, 149 degrees Fahrenheit.

That works out to an efficiency loss of 20% -- significant, but it's not like it makes the solar panel useless. And remember, this is a worst-case scenario.

Picking a case where the solar panel has a temperature coefficient of -0.3%/C and 130 degree Fahrenheit temperatures at the panel, that works out to a loss of 9%.

Minecraft servers (well, at least the java ones -- that's the only ones I'm familiar with) have always validated that the client connecting is logged in with a valid Mojang, er, Microsoft account.

That said, this could be turned off, but it opened the server up to abuse as accounts were not validated in any way. (Of course, this also allowed people to play even without an account at all -- they just had to download the client from somewhere, and now they can play Mic

Since Microsoft controls the authentication servers used even by private servers, they should be able to deny service to abusers.

That said, I haven't looked at this stuff in a long time. I see no reason why the developers of the modded private servers couldn't rip out Microsoft's authentication service and add in their own., and maybe they have.

Either way, from what I've heard, Microsoft is moving away from the java Minecraft version, but this is the version that's been modded by everybody and always has been the most interesting version because of this, even if the non-java versions probably perform better.

So they're probably locking down the non-java versions more, but the java versions will offer the server operators more options, for example if they want to permit banned users to play they could do so.

I'm pretty sure /proc/{pid}/whatnot is all read-only, so you can't delete a directory in there.

(There are a few things under /proc that are writeable, but I don't think any of them are under /proc/{pid}.)

"Zombie" processes could be another case where the process appears to ignore a kill -9 -- though the process is not working anymore and it's just stuck waiting for its parent to reap it.

Either way, there's nothing special about ignoring signals (well, the ones that can be ignored -- which isn't all of them) -- lots of programs do it, for good or for bad -- and I'm surprised that this was worth mentioning in a summary.

It's a potential requirement for smartphones, not all devices in general.

So the cable is going to be mostly for charging, and the power requirements can't go up too much more from what they are currently, and USB-C already supports things like voltage negotiation -- the USB-C spec already goes a good deal higher than the highest smartphone chart rates (which are around 25 watts).

Now, it can also be used for data, but smartphones have leaned towards wireless data rather than wired data for at least a decade. That said. USB-C is awesome in the data department as well.

Maybe in the future we'd regret such requirements, but it would require an unprecedented sort of change in smartphone technologies. And there's nothing stopping them from making a phone with *two* ports, and it wouldn't surprise me if some manufacturers go for *zero* ports -- wireless charging only.

Either way, for the foreseeable future, the only thing "that a device manufacturer wants to do" that this would stop is requiring proprietary and expensive chargers for their smartphones.

Ted Cruz went to Cancun to avoid the blackouts in 2021.

Ted Cruz was last up for re-election in 2018. so no, he hasn't been re-elected anyways -- because he hasn't been up for election again yet.

That said, Ted Cruz will be up for election again in 2024, and I fully expect that Texas will re-elect him at that time, but it hasn't happened yet.

Using the same criteria used there, in Texas, the first $2499 worth of thefts is jail free.

That said, this criteria is wrong/has been misrepresented -- $950 is simply where theft goes from misdemeanor to felony in California, where the same thing happens in Texas at $2500, and jail is still an option in both states for smaller amounts.

That said, $950/California and $2500/Texas is where *prison* becomes an option. (Actually, to be more precise, in Texas theft of $2500 is a "state jail" felony, so you still aren't going to prison -- that happens at $30,000.