Yeah yeah, it's an easy shot to just say, "Trump would harm the environment if he knew there was progress made somewhere"...and for the record, I have *never* voted for him. ...but I think the fact that a number of comments in the thread echo the sentiment reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. The ban on CFCs worked effectively due to global cooperation, but also because of another reason: it was an incredibly easy transition.

There was no ban on in-home refrigerators or freezers. There was no mandatory removal of existing home refrigerators. There was no mandate that cars were sold without air conditioners. There was no fine for using hair spray. Industry had drop-in replacements that worked at least 90% as well, were of similar cost, and worked with existing systems which required those chemicals for operation.

Had the CFC ban required buildings to do six-figure HVAC replacements, or mandate that new cars didn't have air conditioners at all, or perform a blanket-ban on aerosol products completely, or require everyone to replace their refrigerators, or if HFCs were a.) ten times the price, b.) required a top-off once a month, and/or c.) only got half as cold, it'd still be a wedge issue and that hole would be triple the size.

Peel back the layers of rhetoric and sensationalism, and you'll see that there is an element of truth behind a lot of the pushback. Did anyone like drinking through those paper straws that tasted like toilet paper tubes? No; they were about as universally unpopular as a colonoscopy, and I've never once seen a report that they nudged the needle on improving the environment.

My state is talking about banning gas cars and gas stoves and gas furnaces...but over 80% of the electricity generated in my state is generated by...burning oil and natural gas. Does burning oil pollute less when my local power plant does it instead of my car? ...So why is the Red Team in my deeply-blue state so backwards-thinking for pushing back against a ban that won't meaningfully improve its carbon footprint while *also* causing homebuilding prices to go up, *and* gas prices to go up, *and* insurance prices to go up, *and* electric rates to go up?

The CFC ban was easy *because* it was trivial to implement, and caused little to no impact on consumers as a result. I'm pretty sure that *most* environmental regulations would receive bipartisan support and consumer acceptance if they were that easy to do...but somehow, the Red Team are the curmudgeons who don't care about the environment because they don't want to drink cardboard or give up gas stoves to achieve no meaningful improvement on climate change numbers. They're terrible, uneducated, backwater hicks for saying, "build enough climate-friendly grid capacity to handle the expected increase in usage and THEN roll out the mandates", especially when those who shame them suddenly start saying, "not in MY backyard" when windmills and solar panels start getting proposed in THEIR neighborhoods...

...so yeah, Trump's rhetoric on the climate is terrible, no argument. The Republicans *generally* give more pushback on climate initiatives than Democrats, fair. But the CFC ban worked because HFCs were cheap, easy, effective, drop-in replacements, ready to go by time the bans took effect. When climate solutions look like that, they get implemented. When they look like an expensive headache for nominal improvements, they get pushback.

Want proof? Who was the US president who signed on to the Montreal Protocol in 1987? Ronald Reagan. Who was president when it went into effect in 1989? George H.W. Bush.

It's becoming quite clear that semaglutide works by reducing the addiction component of eating, but also affects other addicting substances.

And the nausea discussed apparently counts if you have one episode of nausea or vomiting in a given year. I've had that without semaglutide often enough.

That it doesn't work on Alzheimer isn't a huge surprise to me, the latest research indicates there is a far higher likelihood of Alzheimer being caused by an immune response gone wrong, than by being fat. However, the things that make you fat may also moderate that immune response.

I got a desktop computer in 1995. It had a 686 Cyrix at 166MHz, 16MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM, 1.6 GB hard disk...and it was one of the fastest computers in my circle. By 2001, it was unusable. USB was on its way to replacing serial and parallel peripherals, which Windows 95 didn't support. 166MHz was slow, compared to the 600MHz P3's that were available (and a year later, they'd hit 1GHz). 48MB of RAM was nothing (64MB was common, 256MB was available), and while 1.6GB was a bottomless pit when Word documents was all I was creating, and 50MB installations for video games were considered pigs, 10GB drives were available...and needed for the CDs I was ripping into MP3s. Six years of computer progress was clear, obvious, palpable, and using the old computer had a clear feeling of constraint.

Today, unless you're doing local AI, 8K video rendering, or a handful of other niche applications, a 6-year-old computer will be perfectly usable. Six years ago, SSDs were already the default, 6-core CPUs were the default, and it was right at the cusp of when 16GB became mainstream. A six year old computer is perfectly usable for most tasks. It runs current iterations of OSes (admittedly a 6-year-old Mac might not because of the OSX shelf life on Intel), it *might* need a RAM upgrade, and it *might* benefit from a newer SSD to some extent...but while a 6-year difference was night-and-day in 2000, it's turned into "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

And, so too it is with phones. The difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 8 was readily understood and appreciated by most users; the storage capacity increases, camera improvements, FaceID implementation, Apple Wallet/NFC, bidirectional lightning cable, and screen size increase were all understood, palpable, and basically sold themselves. I went through the Wikipedia page to get a feel for what changed between the 13 and the 17...and the answers were the satellite connectivity (that may-or-may-not-work depending on carrier), Apple Intelligence (that they famously are still trying to get off the ground), the dynamic island, a few more camera improvements, and colors...oh, and they are more expensive now.

Samsung is kinda the same deal; the foldable phones are nifty, but at $2,000, one can get a phone, a laptop, *and* a tablet for the same price...and the difference between an S21 and an S25 is similarly uninspiring for a $1,000 upgrade.

So yeah, phones have gotten "good enough" for most people, they've been that way for a while, despite the price tags more frequently involving commas. So...yeah...makes perfect sense that with more money expected for less improvement...that 3-year-old phones are the norm now.

It's just below IRC and just above Usenet.

Hate to disappoint...but it was exactly that for longer than it was the P2P network from which it got its notoriety.

Circa 2003, Napster came back as a legit music seller, just like iTunes. They spent a few years selling DRM'd WMA files, but they were between a rock and a hard place because Apple wouldn't license the iTunes DRM that worked on iPods, nor would they license Microsoft's WMA format, and the RIAA wasn't about to let them sell ordinary MP3 files without DRM (God knows how Amazon managed to score that deal)...so, Napster blamed Microsoft for the fact that their sales paled in comparison to Apple.

I'd argue that they were also a bit ahead of their time; Napster To Go was a monthly subscription service that used Microsoft's Janus DRM to enforce subscriptions...the Slashdot crowd hated the DRM at the time, but in a pre-LTE era, that was pretty much how subscription music on mobile was going to happen...and several years later, we have Spotify, which is basically the successor of Napster To Go, enforcing its DRM by other means. They also had a short-lived partnership with XM Radio that allowed subscribers to listen to linear streams of certain music channels, in turn allowing rental or purchases of songs that were liked while broadcast. A decade later, Shazam would do that with Apple Music and audio recognition, but Napster implemented a rudimentary version of the idea before Apple implemented iMessage.

In 2011, Rhapsody acquired Napster, but their niche was in licensing to other businesses. While they kept the "Spotify from Temu or Wish.com" setup for a while, their real bread and butter was in licensing to other companies; many of those music channels available on cable subscriptions were Rhapsody on the back end. They also did 'compliant music for businesses', similar to Muzak and other companies who pumped music into stores and bars and things. Amusingly enough, Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster, and continued on the model, going through a handful of private equity firms, until earlier this year, when once again, the company found itself in court...again...due to unpaid licensing fees.

So...yeah, while they've floundered around for a number of reasons (some their fault, some not), they were a P2P service for about three years...and a (mostly) law-abiding corporation for over 20...and most of the highlights were posted as articles here on Slashdot.

The Spain outage would have happened with Nuclear exactly the same way. It was not a problem of not enough power. It was a problem of too much power, which was not absorbed by the consumers, and caused a build-up of over-voltage, which could not be dumped anywhere. When the grid automatically switched off power sources to damp the swing, it over-corrected, leading to a power loss of more than 2 GW, which then caused the shut-down of large electricity consumers. With a fat nuclear reactor, you would not have changed anything. Still, the grid regulation would have overreacted, with the same consequences.

Where I live, a railroad crossing limits the top speed of the rail to 80 mph - definitely not high speed rail.

High speed rail is always grade separated. (How many non-grade separated roads you know which allow for a high speed above 80 mph anyway?)

Contrary to common belief, Britain has not very much rain. It just happens to rain often, but very small amounts. Rome for instance gets more rain per year than London, it just gets it in some very intense rainstorms, and is dry for other periods during the year.

A Windows 11 VM that I manage went through an update cycle and, when it was finally finished, the bottom bar was missing.

Like just about all Windows issues, I had to spend a long time googling solutions and trying them, before I eventually landed on the correct solution. I tend to avoid those tiresome Youtube videos that take 10 minutes to tell you that: 1. Their solution is simple and will work, 2, don't forget to subscribe, while failing to acknowledge that there might be other causes for the failure that you have experienced.

Surprisingly, the solution came in an AI answer with the right set of search terms. In my experience, the hit rate for accuracy of AI searches is poor, but this time, it worked!

Usually, you do. Our digestive tract has evolved to extract the energy from our food as good as possible, given the parameters. It's not easy to fool it into ignoring available energy, and the methods to do it aren't very healthy.

Actually, no. Transporting 13 kT of explosives to Hiroshima by plane and dropping it there alone would have amounted to a lot of energy consumption compared to transporting a single 4 metric ton device. You would need 3000 planes instead of one. Imagine the energy required to build 3000 planes and fly them all at the same time to Hiroshima! And 13,000 metric tonnes of TNT aren't cheap either. The US did not even had to mine the uranium for the bomb. They got it from Germany in April 1945, when they raided a nuclear research facility in Central Germany.

Additionally, the nuclear energy content of U-235 has not to be put into the uranium. It sits there since the Uranium was created during that supernova, which created the space dust that formed our Solar system 4.6 billion years ago. For Antihydrogen, you have to actually provide any energy that is then confined in the antimatter. It is more or less an antimatter based battery which you have to charge first.

The energy you need to create a single antimatter bomb will be some magnitudes larger than the energy needed to bomb you into oblivion. No one said creating Antihydrogen was in any way efficient.

All the people saying genders are simple biology are completely clueless. You're no exception.

Gender is the way society views a given sexe. They're not the same. And sexe is not strictly binary, it's trinary. We do have trisomies in our genes, although it's a small minority it's very decidedly not zero.

Calling the mix between gender roles and sexe simple just means you don't understand the biology to begin with. And you will likely keep ignoring that "simple" biology in order to make a political point of your prejudice against a small group used as scapegoat by, oh irony, a convicted sex offender.

I can explain it very easily. I don't want to talk to a machine. I don't want my car to listen to my conversation with the people riding with me. I don't want smart home assistants listening to my TV program. I don't want my tools telling me what to do. I don't want YouTube to automatically translate video titles.

Just because something is impressive does not mean I want it around me. That we can build a nuclear fusion device is impressive. But I don't want a hydrogen bomb exploding in my backyard.

Your whole argument hinges on the idea that long distance trucking happens within an European country.

And that's plain wrong. Long distance trucking in Europe mainly means transporting goods from the large harbors in the Mediterranean (Genoa, Piraeus) and at the Northern Sea (Rotterdam, Hamburg) to the large industrial centers and back. Additionally, trucks are transporting raw materials, furniture and similar goods from Eastern Europe to the West and machines and machine parts to the East. This means crossing borders all the time.