You can't get sunburned from far-UV like you can with normal UVC. It doesn't penetrate deep enough to reach living skin cells (e.g. the (dead) stratum corneum is 10-40 microns on most skin, up to hundreds on e.g. palms and soles) - in human tissue, 222nm penetrates only a few microns, with most of the energy deposited in the first micron; the deepest any degradation was seen in one study was 4,6 microns (for 233nm, it's 16,8 microns). As mentioned earlier, the only cells it can kill are the outermost layer of cells in the eye (corneal epithelium), but they're constantly being shed regardless (the entire corneal epithelium is 5-7 cells thick and has a ~1 week turnover, so on average just over 1 day per cell on the surface).

The comments about material degradation probably are also not true with far-UV. It's certainly ionizing, but again it doesn't penetrate deeply into surfaces . Paint is generally many dozens of microns thick (a typical two coats of interior paint is ~100 microns), while epoxy is typically millimeters or more, so you're only going to be affecting the extreme outermost surface. I doubt you could even tell.

Also, contrary to popular myth (and indeed, our pre-COVID medical understanding), most common communicable diseases (influenza, COVID, most cold viruses, etc) spread by direct airborne transmission, not fomites (surface transmission). So how well surfaces are cleaned has no bearing on this primary means of transmission. That's not that surfaces don't matter - said diseases still *can* be transmitted from fomites, and some other diseases (esp. fecal-oral route ones like norovirus) are still believed to be primarily transmitted via fomites.

Again, honestly, the only thing I would have concerns about are plants. Most plant cuticles are only like 0,1-1 micron thick. Xeriphytes (desert plants) can be thicker, though, like 1-20 microns, and are in general adapted to more UV exposure, so might be able to deal with it. But I'd think a plant with only a 0,1 micron thick cuticle and a 0,1-0,3 micron thick cell wall will get its leaves pretty badly burned by far-UV. I'd expect any epidermis and stomata exposed to the light to be almost entirely killed. But if you had a cactus or plant with really waxy leaves, it might be fine.

That we should be cool with them blowing through billions of our taxpayer dollars so that they can throw shit at a wall and see what sticks.

SpaceX has saved the US government an immense amount of money. What are you even talking about? Falcon 9 / Falcon Heavy is by far the cheapest launch system out there, and is also, FYI, the most reliable launch system out there. And it go that way by exactly the process above. And that process cost far less than NASA spends to develop its super-expensive launch systems.

Tesla has been at approximately mass parity with its closest class/performance competitors from BMW (with a full tank of petrol) since 2017 (the 330i vs. the SR, the 340i vs. the LR, etc). This "EVs are super-heavy thing" is a myth. I mean, sure, if you're terrible at your job you can design a really heavy EV (*grumbles in Hummer*). But usually, if the designers did their job right, the weight difference is small when matched up on class/performance competitors.

And beyond what others pointed out - that PM emissions are only a fraction of pollutants, and that they come from both brakes and tyres, and EVs have far lower brake emissions - it should also be pointed out that tyre PM tends to be mainly *coarse PM*, not fine PM. Both are harmful, but fine PM is significantly more harmful per amount produced. Brakes have a higher ratio of fine to coarse than tyres do, exhaust is higher still.

Cars also have air filters which capture PM. Generally well less than is produced, but I've seen a proof of concept where they amped up the air filtration so that the car was net negative. If you really wanted to, nothing is stopping you from mandating that. Still, economically your best bet is surely on taxing tyres (esp. studded ones) to incentivize people to choose durable ones and ones that don't wear down the roads, to limit hard accel / braking, etc.

Other than that new versions of mainstream operating systems and web browsers make it harder for the owner of a device to trust the root certificate of a particular private CA. I seem to remember, for example, that iOS and Android put a scary warning on the lock screen if one or more user-trusted root certificates is installed, and Android application developers have to opt into user-trusted root certificates through a "Network Security Config".

Different machines can respond to the same IP address as seen from the Internet vs. from a coffee shop's guest WLAN. Let's Encrypt sees only the former when evaluating an http-01 challenge. If you associate to a guest WLAN and connect to https://42.42.42.42/ and it offers a certificate issued by Let's Encrypt, that means you're seeing the same server that Let's Encrypt saw through the Internet, not a server on the guest WLAN that's intercepting your connection.

Unless the studio wants a tax break and the series gets Willow'd.

I see.

It's not like the X server needs a lot of major changes, at this point. It certainly doesn't need new capabilities; it *has* all the capabilities it needs. A bit of optimization, maybe? But honestly, XFree86 ran just fine on 1990s hardware, so unless you're constructing a Russian nesting doll of multi-layered virtualization or some similarly wacky pathological case, you're not going to have user-noticeable perf problems in 2025 that are best solved by changing the X server. There are some changes I would like to see in the desktop environment that I use; but none of them would require any changes to the X server itself. Apart from any security issues that come up, most of the changes it actually needs, are related to changes in other things that it has to work with: newer video cards, newer compilers that are stricter about what they will compile, newer security systems that e.g. require the software (as well as the user) to have permission to do various things, and so on.

If he's trying to make Wayland-inspired changes to the X server to compete with Wayland, he's an idiot. *Wayland* needs changes, or better yet a complete from-the-ground-up rethink, to meaningfully compete with X11. Changing the X server to do what Wayland does to compete with Wayland, would be actively counterproductive.

Microsoft tried to do something like that before with the Windows Experience Index in WinSAT. It didn't last long: the GUI was displayed only from Windows Vista through the first release of Windows 8.

If next to nobody signs up for Microsoft's curated store, this curation will be ineffective. The only thing that encouraged third-party developers to publish through Microsoft's store is that Xbox consoles are cryptographically locked down not to run games from anywhere else.

Plus the cost of buying the rest of the computer around it. This can prove more expensive if you want a case that looks more attractive in the living room than a big noisy tower.

I'm curious why it took over 14 years after Red Dead Redemption was released for Xbox 360 for it to get a PC port. Rare Replay and several other respected Xbox One games still haven't been ported.

In 2012, the consensus was that most users were unwilling to either build a second PC, cart a gaming PC back and forth between the living room and the computer desk, or run cables through the walls, to use Big Picture mode in Steam. (Source: adolf's comment) When did this change?

The incentives to collecting are 1. ability to watch if you rely on wireless Internet (satellite or cellular) with a harsh monthly data cap, 2. ability to watch a particular movie or TV episode again after you have switched to a different streaming service for the month, and 3. ability to watch a particular work again even after its publisher has destroyed it for an "impairment" tax deduction or the service it's on has ended (particularly for game consoles).

Wait, so let me see if I can get this straight: because Wayland is an inherently pointless project championed principally by the same people who have been systematically removing all useful features from Gnome since just before the release of version 1.0, this guy decided, based on that, that the main X11 implementation that almost everyone uses, that has absolutely nothing to do with Wayland, needs to be forked again, because... because WHY?

Where is the logical connection between those two entirely unrelated ideas? I agree that Wayland is not now and probably never will be a viable substitute for X11. That premise, is fine. What I don't understand, is how that leads to the conclusion that the X server needs to be forked yet again. Frankly, I'm still not even entirely sure I understand why XFree86 needed to be forked the first two times, but at least those times there was a stated reason for forking. It didn't make any sense to me (as far as I know, there's no particular reason for other software running on the system to _need_ to be license-compatible with the X server), but at least there was a reason given. This time... what was the reason again? Because Wayland is bad? What does Wayland have to do with anything? If Hurd is still useless after all this time, will you fork the Linux kernel, as well? What?

ED: Looks like it's 24(!) hives per beehome, and they charge $2k delivery ($83/hive) plus $400/mo ($400/hive/yr) for maintenance.

Clearly not something of use to amateurs, and I'm not sure whether you can make that economics work out for professionals, either. I guess it depends on how truly independent it is, vs. your local labour costs.

There is little correlation between "presence or absence of pollution" (what a general term to begin with...) and CCD. There is a strong correlation with the presence / absence of varroa. And this system treats varroa.

I've been thinking about getting into beekeeping (I first need to increase the accessibility of my ravine where they'd be), and had been thinking about a sort of high tech solution, with electric blankets, heat-exchanging baffles, a flow hive, and maybe some mass and/or noise sensors for monitoring colony health. But this is WAY more high-tech than I envisioned, and honestly I'm scared to even look up the price ;)

The best correlation between the presence and absence of CCD is varroa. CCD is probably not single cause, but if you had to pick only one, varroa is that one.

And glyphosate is probably WAY down on the list. At least pick an insecticide as your culprit.

Not with far-UV (~222nm) you didn't.

Leaders aren't there out there e.g. building the rockets or doing the vast majority of the engineering. Musk doesn't get credit for that. But they do set the culture and direction for their companies. And in this regard, the "build quickly, launch quickly, fail quickly, learn quickly, and iterate quickly" culture developed for SpaceX happens to be very effective. Musk gets credit for instilling that. Another thing he should get credit for is the broad design strokes such as "focus on designs that are cheap enough that they can be mass produced, gaining you economies of scale and the ability to iterate quickly during testing, but are still capable of being reused" (this differs from the two previous predominant paradigms, either super-expensive low-volume reusables, or cheap high-volume disposables).

I don't like the guy, but absolutely, credit where it's due.