The exact opposite.

Aether was an idea about the nature of reality which, as soon as Michelson-Morley got experimental data, was shown false.

Dark energy is experimental data which as yet has no explanation about what it truly is. All we say is "there must exist some underlying reality which will explain these observations, even though we don't yet know what it is".

Clarification: the Tennessee bill explicitly bans *geo-engineering*. It does not mention chemtrails. It was spurred by a government report last year on solar engineering. I think you fell for a clickbait headline from the BBC.

You don't have to be ignorant, backwards, corrupt or inept to be concerned about geo-engineering!

Depending on how you interpret it, it's possible that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change already prohibits geo-engineering. Or possible it mandates it. Hard to tell.

First off, I'd love to pick the algorithm "show only stuff from my friends, in chronological order". I'd hope they'd offer a simplistic no-brainer like this, and it'd be easy to understand.

Second, I'd rely on journalists or academic researchers to study the moderation+recommendation algorithms and I'd go via trusted sources. I'd wait until a review article comes up in Ars Technica and pick there. I think non-technical users would only pick if the question becomes significant enough to filter through to general society discussion. Maybe there'll be some viral videos of TikTok from "influencers" who noticed that they preferred one or another algorithm, and it'll spread through that and word of mouth amongst friends?

Do you have any friends who say "I used to follow instagram but there were too many political articles and I switched to TikTok because it's more fun"? They were switching partly because they discerned a difference in the recommendation algorithm. (which is more or less the secret sauce of TikTok's success).

Third, I wonder why you think end-users are fine at picking up differences between the algorithms used for internet-search (google, bing, altavista), and for map-routing (waze, google maps, apple maps)? How are they basing their choices? Why won't the same kind of end-user choice about subtle and complicated algorithms also apply to feeds?

As for using boron and expecting nuclear things to happen, there is something similar that is already a thing. It's called boron-neutron capture therapy. It involves a chemotherapy medication that is not yet active. It incorporates boron in its structure, but is not actually active until the boron captures a neutron and transmutes into carbon. The idea is to inject the medication then aim a neutron beam at the tumor. The substance is transmuted at the beam and becomes active - but only there.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

So transmuting boron really is a thing. Whether it captures a proton as easily as it captures a neutron is another question.

For me, I don't have any need to monitor my kid. I'm only offering it as a means to let her text a small number of friends if she wants. For the other parents who give their kids a cellphone for tracking but only allow messaging and nothing else, then the Garmin Bounce would save the same need and have the same advantages and disadvantages for their child as a phone. None of our kids in 10th grade have a device with their whole life.

My oldest is 10yo, in 5th grade, so we coordinate closely with parents of her friends to make sure we have a common understanding of mobile device rules. None of her friends have a full-time personal device. Some of them are allowed to message, but only to a small handful of friends and only on a few days a week. One of her friends is given a device for contact-purposes when going out, but she's the exception, and I think they'll reduce that.

Personally, I hope to use a Garmin Bounce to delay cellphone. It allows location-monitoring, and allows texting to a small number of pre-approved friends, but there are no social apps. I'll see how that goes.

My school is looking at the Wait Till 8th campaign.
https://www.waituntil8th.org/

The idea is that enough of the parents agree to wait until 8th grade to get their kids a phone, the kids will face less peer pressure.

I think that phones are one of those things, like sex, cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, where a child perception of their prevalence is systematically higher than their actual prevalence. The mind focuses the fewer kids who did get their phones early, rather than the larger group who didn't get one yet.

Hardly a "weirdo" situation. One Azure subscription is Microsoft Azure AD (or Microsoft Entra whatever it's called now).

So if you have an Office 365 account, or someone with an exchange email address you would have to stop using Microsoft 365 to cancel all of your Azure subscriptions. In a modern organization that's effectively impossible.

My impression of the iOS app store is that it's got an EXTREMELY low quality bar. I don't trust that my searches are getting the authentic app because (1) search results are swayed by advertising, (2) people publish "lookalike" apps that look like they're official but aren't. Say I want to download the safeway app to get coupons? I already do an internet search for Safeway, search for the app on their site, and click on the deep link "get it on the app store" just to be sure I'm getting the right app.

Why is downloading random crap a bad idea?

Is it because the random crap will abuse your privacy? -- already happens plenty with app-store apps. The "privacy notice" that developers write for their apps in the app store are largely useless. The only thing I trust is built-in OS level protections in the operating system, e.g. "can this app access your pictures/location?", which will be the same for app-store downloaded vs externally-downloaded.

Is it because the random crap will add a virus? -- this is something that should be at the OS level, not at the app-store level. No excuses. And iOS seems really good in this respect.

Is it because the random crap will be power-hungry? -- already happens plenty with app-store apps.

I think it's definitely possible to build an OS where "downloading random crap" is actually fine because of OS-level sandboxes and other protections. And I think iOS is already mostly there.

I recently read where the majority of the microplastics that we're finding every, including inside our tissues, in placentas, and such is coming from. Tires. Perhaps the car really is killing us, and the US is more in love with cars than almost anywhere. I wonder what these stats are like in Germany, possibly the only place more car-happy than the US?

I'm Australian (resident in Seattle) so I'm not eligible for global entry.

Maybe it's because my flights to Seattle are international from London, hence a large sudden influx of lots of people and lots of luggage all at once?

If I asked a cheater for a written assurance that they would never cheat on me again, and they provided a written assurance (i.e. a promise) that they'd never cheat on me again, then they'd have fulfilled exactly what I asked of them. Shame on me for asking for a dumb thing.

If I asked them for something and followed it with "in plain terms ", then shame on me for being duplicitous: I wasn't providing them with a plain terms restatement of my request, but instead sneaking in an escape hatch for myself.

It's clear that Epic did provide written assurance exactly per the letter of Apple's request. Apple asked for written assurance. A written assurance is an unsupported "trust us", nothing more, nothing less.

Apple's request was two-faced -- their "in plain terms" was not a restatement in plain terms of their request, but something new and altogether vague.