Salt water is more than just a better conductor than fresh water. Pure water doesn't conduct electricity at all; it's an insulator, and it's used as such in some specialized applications. Tap water will conduct electricity, but that's because of various impurities, many of which are intentionally introduced for practical purposes, like the chlorine ions that kill microbes and the fluoride added to remineralize your teeth.

A minor nitpick, I know, but I've always been fascinated by the way what we think of as water's conductivity isn't actually a property of water itself.

There are extremely few people who make a living as independent artists. The few who manage to do so -- like my daughter -- make most of their money from commissions, do so full time, and still don't make anything close to a middle class living from it. Almost no one is getting paid to just follow their bliss. In any case, there are three reasons why this is unlikely to change, and Patreon can't do much about either of them.

First, there are vastly more excellent artists than there are people willing to pay for their art. The few who manage to be picked up by one of the marketing behemoths of the entertainment industry and maintain a following are mainly just lucky. Anyone who follows independent artists in any medium knows that there are more fantastic artists out there working shitty day jobs right now than there are in all the world's museums. Even if the general public routinely sought out and supported unknown artists, the balance wouldn't change significantly.

Second, the general public isn't routinely seeking out unknown artists. Most of them are simply adopting the preferences of their peer groups. As a result, most of the money flows to an infinitesimal fraction of the working artists in the world, often without regard to actual quality. See also, television and pop music.

Third, artists who are getting by do so through a large number of venues. They end up selling in a bunch of online outlets, as well as local venues -- clubs, art galleries, etc., in addition to conventions, regional shows, and every last commissioned private sale they can get. And they're always networking and on the lookout for new markets. It's hard, but it can be done, and even then, you'll probably still have a day job.

Patreon can't change the economic fundamentals or human nature. I don't know if there's anything that can, but if there is, it's probably not a retail website.

Mattel's management is plainly asleep at the wheel and ought to be taken out to the woodshed by its major shareholders. All the money that resellers are making off this cheap chunk of plastic is money that Mattel could be making simply by increasing production. Some secondary markets are not important enough to worry about, but if you have a product that is being resold at a price two full orders of magnitude above its retail price, that is definitely leaving a giant mound of cash on the table. It's a rare instance of a situation in which the manufacturer could be nice to the kids and still make record profits.

Ticket scalping isn't even comparable here. Tickets to an event are an inherently limited resource: there are only so many seats, and the show is for one night. Regulating ticket scalping makes sense. But in the case of Barbie merchandise, Mattel's trademarks give it a monopoly, and absent a sudden shortfall in the supply of polyethylene, there is no limit to production. There's no reason everyone who has the money to buy it at retail prices can't have one, and more importantly, there's no reason Mattel and its shareholders couldn't be making that money. The Fingerlings are just the latest seasonal fad, but Barbie is a well-established product line with predictable demand -- given adequate warehouse space, there's no danger of overproduction.

I'm ordinarily pretty open to the idea of regulating trade, but this is one case where it's just sheer incompetence on the part of the manufacturers, and that's hard to correct with legislation. What this situation needs is a revolt by activist shareholders.

The general public has never before misused a technical term. Surely this heralds the end times.

I'm ordinarily okay with scams preying on ignorance of basic mathematics. Most of them are cons where most of the participants get what their irrational greed has earned them, and the state-run affairs like the lottery at least pour money into schools and -- one hopes -- more people who understand simple statistics. Nuclear accidents, on the other hand, affect those who know better as much as those who don't. Gamma rays will be gamma rays, after all.

When someone says that a population of 30,000 people will lose an average of 9 months of life, that doesn't mean everyone loses 9 months of life evenly. This is an average, and injuries from radiation follow a Gaussian distribution. Half of the population will lose less than 9 months, and half the population will lose more. Some will lose a *lot* more than 9 months of their lives. Many may live out their pre-accident life expectancies but do so with various impairments.

The only reason we're talking about nuclear at this point is that there is a shit ton of money invested in uranium extraction and processing and a handful of companies that stand to make billions off of building and running the plants, never mind the enormous sums that the arms industry makes off of the great powers with their wars to secure supply lines.

It's not because wind and solar aren't well on their way to supplying our needs or that we don't already have current and near-future energy storage technologies to avoid shortfalls. It's because a small number of institutional investors can make an insane amount of money from maintaining the current highly-centralized power generation business model, and there's no danger of fed up consumers cutting some or all of their profits by installing their own household nuclear reactors like there is with solar.

This changes the moment we have practical fusion power, but fission is not only a pointlessly dangerous scam, it's an entirely unnecessary one.

Programmers have strong preferences about programming languages, and the popularity of languages rises and falls like the rankings of Top 40 pop tunes. Film at eleven.

Six or seven years ago, when I first started using Facebook, it kept suggesting a landlord I'd had five years previously as someone I might know. He was an okay guy, but we never socialized beyond pleasantries when I handed him the rent check and we had no online connections at all. I presume FB is either searching through municipal records or purchasing banking data.

We're not running out of ideas. What has happened in CPU development is that we have made all of the relatively easy advances in transistor miniaturization, and further advances are becoming incremental as progress runs up against the asymptotic curves imposed by the laws of physics. Further advances in processing power are therefore coming to rely upon increasingly multicore designs and sophisticated caches, mainly because that's a less risky business proposition than investigating architectures other than the von Neumann and (occasionally) Harvard architectures.

It's also worth noting that most of the several orders of magnitude increase in processing power over the last three decades has been consumed by increasingly inefficient software as a way of keeping software development costs down.

Nature only provides so many free rides, and humans have proven themselves very good at exhausting them quickly. Ideas, even good ones, are always cheap and plentiful. It's a willingness to do hard (and therefore expensive) work that is in short supply.

The whole idea that SF predicts the future is just marketing speak for SF books and movies. It succeeds occasionally, but so does religious prophecy: make enough predictions, and you score some hits, but at the cost of many more misses.

As far as Blade Runner (and most SF) goes, the writers seldom sit down to prognosticate. Most of them think of an interesting premise and see where it goes.

Or you're resisting a totalitarian regime that might put you in prison or a labor camp for purchasing an unapproved ebook.

The problem with this argument is that some of the geniuses under discussion were polymath generalists, not specialists in one thing. And even with the specialists, people like Tesla and Erdos covered an enormous range of topics within their specialization. The common factor with most of them is an enormous amount of energy bordering on mania, coupled with enough intelligence to make productive use of it instead of repeatedly rearranging the dishes in the kitchen at 3am.

I suspect that our knowing about their weird habits is just a side-effect of self-confidence in some (Newton, Franklin), and an utter disregard for social convention (Tesla, Erdos) in others. Lots of people have weird habits -- and I'm looking at YOU, fellow Slashdot users -- but prefer to be discreet about them.

According to the linked PYPL rankings, Java is at the top with less than a quarter of the market at 22.7%, and other ranking methodologies return different results with lower percentages for everyone. I like Python, along with several other languages on the list, but the reality is that the language market is highly fragmented and, for obvious reasons, overwhelmingly likely to remain so. There is no dominant language now, and arguably hasn't been one since the early days when there were relatively few languages, so why would there be one in the foreseeable future? Could Python become the most popular of many languages by a few points? Sure. But does that matter in any meaningful way?

If Reddit strikes you as a troll-free safe space, it is possible that you are a troll.

Identity verification is not necessary for moderation. It is simply necessary to give new users a probation period during which their posts are invisible until cleared by a moderator. This -- and moderation in general -- is labor-intensive, but labor is the difference between a forum and a dumpster fire.

The echo chamber effect happens when moderation goes beyond preventing abusive and uncivil behavior. Most community moderation systems tend to fail in this way, especially on political blogs. There's an old saying about management that a fish rots from the head down, and this is just as true for moderators as it is for any other kind of management.

Maybe AI will eventually automate this but, for now, if you want a fair, unbiased forum full of polite, well-informed participants, you need human moderators with those same qualities putting in time and effort. It's not magic, but it is hard work, so we rarely see it.

This is probably a function of the age of corporate executives, i.e., older folks who don't actually browse the web very much. Advertising around unmoderated comment sections is like placing ads in bathroom stalls. It's done, and it can be done successfully, but generally for local businesses and only in certain categories.