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Comment Re:Coming soon... (Score 2) 19

Average consumption is ~250mg annually. That's half of one tablet, which makes it 1/4 of a regular dose, and it's not entirely clear how much is retained and what the conversion ratio is. I wouldn't be surprised if other byproducts were more dangerous.

You're allowed to take 8 paracetamol tablets per day, which means it's safe to purge 16 YEARS worth of microplastics per day, assuming a 1:1 ratio of plastic to paracetamol and no other side effects.

Unless you convert an entire lifetime of microplastics in a day or two, the risk of overdose is essentially zero.

Comment Re:FFS, Redundant Redundancy? Uh, yeah. (Score 1) 43

It is a meaningful distiction.

It doesn't apply to terrestrial telescopes, of which there are many.

It doesn't apply to spy satellites, geomapping equipment, and the like, which also have telescopes but are designed to observe the Earth.

So we have a distinct group of items with materially significant differences in properties from the rest. And the definition does need to be available online with citations because even NatGeo will either prefer layman's terms or screw it up.

Comment Re:Beware the economists (Score 1) 23

You're missing the point.

When you're analyzing a market or demographic segment, you can't make a sales pitch for a particular company or product. You don't care about the individual products. It's a bigger question about how the groups, classes, or properties interact and the outcomes of that interaction.

In this particular case, I have questions about the "larger employment". Is it domestic or foreign employment, and how do those jobs compare to the median wages locally?

If that employment is larger domestically and offering equivalent wages, then the native-immigrant is objectively improving the economy of the host country. On the other hand, if the employment is largely foreign or offers subpar compensation, then there is little benefit to the host nation.

Unfortunately, I don't have access to the full paper, so I can't see if it addresses the issues that matter to the working class. The headline/conclusion only matters to professional investors.

Comment Re:There's been a lot of market consolidation (Score 1) 71

Most businesses would be fine with either Nutanix or XCP-ng.

There's also Microsoft and Citrix. I am reluctant to even mention them in a post about escaping miserable corporate behavior, in spite of their long-established footprint in this market. Still, they are better than Broadcom.

Comment Re:Is it really worth it at $25 million per mile? (Score 1) 105

It appears that the outdated monitoring system is limiting capacity and reducing efficiency.

If an upgrade (and periodic tech refreshes) are necessary to meet transit demands, then what else can they do? This is far cheaper than digging new tunnels, assuming new tunnels are even possible.

If they implement a protocol that depends only on basic sensors and simple communication protocols, they could configure replacements cheaply as equipment reaches its end-of-sales or end-of-life age.

Comment Idiot-Led Effort (Score 4, Insightful) 259

Tape was designed for archival use, and there is even a special long-term archival variant. The LTO format is backward-compatible at least two generations according to the spec, and often more than that in practice.

Instead of dealing with a slightly slow yet highly reliable technology, they chose something quick and cheap. Anyone with archival experience could have told them it was a bad idea, and I strongly suspect they were told repeatedly.

Corporate execs aren't that brilliant. They deserve neither unchecked authority nor massive paychecks.

Comment They're Still Assholes (Score 5, Insightful) 110

Note that they "waived [their] right" to arbitration in this case.

Disney still believes they have the right to force arbitration due to their Disney+ TOS, and their language deliberately maintains that right. They are simply letting it go this time due to the backlash.

If they screw you over next time, you'll have to fight their lawyers over the arbitration clause before a court will ever hear your actual case. Unless you can provoke a public backlash.

They're not interested in playing fair with their customers. They're just stepping away from a PR disaster---this time.

Comment A Deal with the Devil (Score 5, Insightful) 21

I used to work for a mejor telco. Don't give them an inch.

If they can't bargain with city and county officials, let those areas remain underserved.

They will abuse every last phrase, word, or letter in the law to get what they want. And they only care about profit. If anything, they're downright resentful of the fact that they should be providing quality service to earn that profit.

This is the one industry that I am categorically against empowering. We do want good internet service, but telco monopolies are not the way we get it.

Comment Fine Them, Heavily (Score 2) 43

Imagine having a network so pooorly segmented that some random dunce can download malware that spreads to your billing, inventory, and records systems.

I know "zero trust" is almost a management buzzword at this point, but we have the technology to prevent these kind of attacks from hitting critical infrastructure.

Sure, a bunch of workstations within a broadcast domain may infect each other, but anything beyond that is negligence---in my opinion, we should demand better in health, safety, and finance sectors at a minimum.

Comment Re:DNS is still a single point of failure. (Score 1) 44

This scenario is mostly fearmongering and nonsense.

Further assume one of the CAs operating out of an authoritarian state is pressured to generate a cert for windowsupdate.com. Now each and every time a resolver pulls new glue you roll another D13 to find out if you've been hacked. Eventually just one compromised root can hack everyone.

Why would you ever trust a CA operating out of an authoritative state?

Every modern OS or browser--even Windows--allows you to choose which CAs you'll trust. If you are vulnerable in this situation, it is because your system is misconfigured.

If you want to be very careful, you can prune your trusted certificate store to the bare minimum or configure pinning for critical certificates. Or both.

Comment Re:Until.... (Score 4, Insightful) 288

Oh look, it's the same stupid questions every time renewable energy comes up.

And it's the same answers:

1. Storage is getting better and feasible in more scenarios, but everyone understands it is a limitation.
2. Solar isn't the only form of renewable energy; it's just the easiest to deploy in developed residential/commercial areas.
3. Replacement of fossil fuels is a long-term goal. Reduction is the immediate goal.
4. If batteries are recycled properly, their environmental impact is low.

On a cloudy day, those "10 nuclear reactors" may only provide the energy of 2-8 reactors, depending on the severity of the cloud cover, but it is still a much better than 0.

Also, if your panels are spread enough and connected to a distribution grid, then it doesn't matter. It can't be cloudy everywhere. Distribution may be the real-world answer to the "storage" problem.

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