To prevent cellphone damage from drops, the solution is simple: move to space. It's that pesky gravity that is wrecking your electronics.

...Or you could just buy a case for your phone.

Ahh... the good ol' Slashdot rationalization - "Facebook is dead, really, it'll die any day now, seriously!". Which would be funny if it weren't so pathetic - since Slashdot has been predicting the imminent demise of FB since 2007.

The Reddit administration is interested in one thing, and one thing only right now: Milking the site for as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, and fuck the users.

How do you differentiate between that and a site that wants to remain open for it's users despite the actions of few?

That means Reddit as a whole is popular (and fairly large) but popularity != influence.

Especially when you consider that even the largest subreddit is but a fraction of that traffic - much of the traffic is spread across thousands of subreddits (many of them quite small, even though they're popular among their habitues). It's essentially a collection of independent websites (though bound by a common interface and portal) ranging from fairly small (in terms of the overall web) to infinitesimally tiny.

Looking at this list of subreddits that have gone dark is instructive. Relatively few break the 100k subscribers mark, most are under 10k. And unless Reddit is very unusual in it's counting, the number of subscribers is a significant multiple of the number of active users.

Not to mention that each piece of hardware is built with the assumption of there being extant suppliers for its component parts. For Apollo hardware, this is rarely true, so you'd have to retool and test for each part. The sad thing is it'd actually be cheaper to build a brand new Saturn-V equivalent than to make an exact duplicate.

This is actually one of the sorts of cases where 3d printing (no, generally not things like plastic filament extruders... meaningful printing, like laser sintering, laser spraying, etc, as well as CNC milling, hybrid manufacture techniques and lost wax casting on a 3d-printed moulds) has the potential to really come into its own: all of these sort of parts that you only ever need half a dozen of them made but might some day suddenly want some more a couple decades down the road. Another interesting advantage on this front is also that of incremental testing - I know of one small rocketry startup that has set themselves up to sinter out aerospikes in an evolutionary fashion - they print one out, connect it straight to test, measure its performance, scrap it and feed that performance data back into the generation of the next printout, in a constant model-refining process. Combustion simulations can be tricky to get right, but real-world testing data doesn't lie ;)

Reddit has unbelievable traffic and reach, so stuff that earns popularity there gets spread to virtually everywhere and everyone.

[Remainder of tinfoil hat rant snipped]

That's what the Reddit hivemind thinks... In reality, not so much. Reddit only makes the news when it's on fire, again.

I actually lost IQ points reading that mess...

I should have stopped at the third paragraph,

Charcoal, in this case, is not the briquettes you use on your grill, which often contain no actual charcoal, but is the carbon residue left behind by organic matter (like wood) once it has been charred (or pyrolyzed)

Um, who is this moron? Yes, charcoal briquettes contain actual charcoal. They most certainly do contain (among other things) "the carbon residue left behind [etc...]". The rest of the article, breathless clickbait written at the kindergarten level, just goes downhill from there.

Looking at his submission history, he has a record of submitting equally moronic content all from the same site. (And one comment, over a year ago.) Pure slashvertisement.

Whoops, I was wrong - it's nearly 2 kilograms per person here, not 1. But you've still got us beat :) (Also, it looks like America is up to 207 million pounds of fireworks per year, a big increase... so 285 grams per capita per year).

I just think it's really weird how Americans see themselves as a major-fireworks nation when they set off so few.

Oh come on, what's New Years without an ER visit? ;) But yeah, I know some of your places have fireworks bans due to drought and the like.

In case you're curious, here's what New Years looks like here. It goes on at that intensity for at least half an hour, half intensity for maybe an additional hour or so, quarter intensity for another hour, etc. All this comes after the "brennur", which is about a dozen house-sized bonfires scattered all over town.

Basically, if one can make it burn or explode and there's nobody who objects, we'll set it on fire. Often while drinking heavily ;)

New York City for example usually sets off 20-25 tonnes of fireworks on the 4th of July. Meanwhile, little Reykjavík sets off about 300 tonnes on New Years' Eve. Americans average shooting off about 200 grams of Fireworks each over the course of the entire year, combining fireworks shows, personal usage, etc. Icelanders average about a kilogram per person just on New Years'.

And I know it's not just Iceland. I had a friend from Peru who moved to America and was terribly disappointed by what passed for a fireworks display there versus in her home country. Seriously, aren't you guys supposed to be the ones who enjoy blowing everything up? ;) Or do you get it out of your systems in the Middle East? ;)

(Note: not meant as an insult :) )

Funny how they said "We are sorry that this happened" and not "We are sorry that we did this". i.e., they are not taking responsibility.

Fukushima had generators that were floodable and a sea wall that was too low. Neither of those would be allowed for US plants (the generator issue was called out in the US and corrected years ago). The plant ran on battery backup for a day, but then was powerless. If they hadn't lost power, there would have been no meltdown.

I don't know about Besse (in fact, first I've heard his name), but at least the NRC has some teeth. I still think the nuclear lobby influences them, though. Vastly better than the AEC, however, where they had the dual job of promoting and regulating nuclear power, which created a conflict of interest.

And the article then didn't have a single thing about nuclear accidents. It was about some protesters they broke into an enriched uranium storage facility's grounds. Had these been highly skilled terrorists, they'd need to break into the actual facility, kill or disable the guards, steal the uranium and escape before reinforcements showed up... and then would have to assemble a bomb with it. A dirty bomb with uranium would be a waste of time, as you'd do vastly more damage with conventional explosives - with a dirty bomb you want a fast alpha emitter like polonium that gets breathed in or eaten or a fast decaying gamma emitter (almost certainly too dangerous to handle without special equipment) if you want to do any damage at all with the radioactive part of it, so we're talking about a real nuclear weapon. That means either smuggling the uranium out of the country and assembling the bomb and then getting it somewhere for detonation or attempting to secretly manufacture and detonate it in the country with every authority in the country looking for you. Oh, and the uranium you stole needs to be enriched enough to be used in weapons. If you got the wrong stuff, it may only be useful for power plants.

I don't know about you, but IMO we're hitting impossibly unrealistic scenarios.

Are you new to coding? Have you ever wanted to write a program or app, but didn't know where to begin? You can read books about programming, but that only takes you so far. Sometimes, you just want to see how other (successful) people do it.

Every single book I have read about C++ programming tells you how the language works, but suspiciously says something to the effect of "Using your compiler is beyond the scope of this book".

Terrific!

You can learn how to program, but you will never see the rewards of your effort because you don't know what linking/compiling is or what object/executable code is.