Apple's market dominance in the U.S. means that people with Android phones face significant headwinds. Being the only Android user in a group chat is its own special Hell. That lack of interoperability works against Apple in places where Android phones are more established. It is hard to convince people that your phone is so much better than theirs when every time you put a picture in a group chat it looks like you took the picture on a flip phone from 1995. Everyone else's pictures look fine. In these cases Apple is clearly the problem, and it is a bad look for Apple.

That doesn't stop iPhones from being a status symbol, and there are certain parts of the population, where all of the rich and powerful people have iPhones, where being part of the crowd is worth the price of entry. However, in a country where 90+% of the population is using Android you have to be pretty darn snooty to justify buying an iPhone. I suspect that is a very hard market to sell into.

woke, adj. - "Not a knee-jerk reactionary like me."

My thought experiment is, what if two black holes were approaching each other very rapidly on a not-quite-collision course, so that the sides of their event horizons briefly overlapped as they passed. Would they stick together?

ISTM that if anything was inside the overlapping area they'd have to stick, since otherwise that thing would be escaping from one of them. But is there anything there? Maybe something that just now fell in and hasn't had time to fall to the center? Or, is there quantum foam inside a black hole, and if so, would that count as "something" that would force the black holes to stick?

Well I was another one, and google only pointed to a handful of posts as satire posting as them.

But...
K'Breel is a fictional character from the science fiction universe created by Isaac Asimov, specifically from his "Foundation" series. K'Breel is a member of the species known as the "Seliwonks," an alien species within the Foundation universe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I was hoping to learn more about the physics of sex.

By something that's not alive, I suppose?

I thought Empress already did it? Feb 2023.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

S what makes his work so special? (not saying it's an easy thing) But I don't recall her cracking it making news here

Ah, thanks. I didn't know you could borrow shares.

The only surprise is that he isn't selling autographed Trump bibles.

Perhaps I don't understand shorting, but I don't see how you could make a buck shorting this unless you owned shares before the IPO.

The article actually does a good job of talking about this. It even mentions recent problems that they had in Alaska with a cable that got cut because the ice got thicker than they thought possible. I actually think that this is a pretty cool idea (pun totally intended), and I am glad to see these guys making 23 million euros to look into it. Good on them for getting paid to study a very interesting problem.

However, I would be surprised if the cable actual got laid, assuming that the current forecasts are remotely accurate. This fiber optic cable is already forecast to cost 4 times as much as a cable that took the conventional route. It is also going to be considerably more expensive to maintain. The main selling point appears to be that it is less likely to sabotaged (unless your adversary has access to nuclear submarines, I guess), and it is also less likely to be cut by an errant anchor.

There's a reason that so many of the undersea cables follow essentially the same routes. That reason is cost. No one wants to sink hundreds of millions of dollars into a cable that is going to have a serious price disadvantage.

Whereas the correct conclusion would have been that it is not caused by anything that causes physical damage that we can detect.

Also, Abraham Lincoln was a vampire slayer.

are going out to the investors.

Not to be a wet blanket, but no investment decisions have been made. If you read the article carefully you will realize that they aren't even to the survey stage yet. What they have done is that they have hit the EU up for 23 million euro in funding.

So far the estimated costs of the project are 1 billion euro, and that's projected to be considerably more costly than non-Arctic routes. So they have a lot of fund raising to do if they want to actually make this happen. And, let's face it, the easy money has already been raised. The EU is more than happy to pay 23 million euro, much of which will end up in Nokia's hands, to study this. Actual business people, spending their own money, are likely to be more skeptical. Especially considering the fact that comparable cable that doesn't take this route would only cost 250 million euros.

This article is really just a fancy advertisement for something that is probably not a good idea. The article actually does a good job of covering that part of the story. You have to read down a ways, but it is worth it. True to form the EU has already invested heavily in this project. I personally think that says more about EU spending than on the viability of the Northwest Passage for fiber optic cables.

If, on the other hand, you felt strongly enough about the direction that the climate was headed on this planet that you wanted to make a big bet on the Northwest Passage becoming a viable route for fiber optic cables, I suspect that their is an opportunity here to put your money where your mouth is. These people are going to need a lot more money than they currently have if this is to get off the drawing board.