Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Ya, no. (Score 1) 29

It can be easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of subscription emails clogging your inbox: Daily deal alerts that are basically spam, weekly newsletters from blogs you no longer read, promotional emails from retailers you haven't shopped in years can quickly pile up," Chris Doan, Gmail's Director of Product, wrote in a blog post.

I literally can't remember the last time I got the kind of crap he's taking about.

Not saying it doesn't happen to people, but sounds more like (a) a solution in search of a problem and (b) another avenue for Google to (legitimately) scan peoples' email.

Comment Re: The "Screw Red States" bill (Score 1) 229

To be fair, they have to use these shenanigans to (a) pass Senate reconciliation and (b) keep the debt/deficit from exploding and triggering Pay-Go. As a bonus, if they retain control of the Executive and Congress, they can re-up and continue and if they lose, then Democrats will be the ones raising taxes, etc... Pure dickery, especially purportedly from the party of fiscal conservatism and responsibility.

Comment Re:Ten years?! (Score 1) 77

I have a 2001 Honda Civic Ex (mine) with 133k miles and 2002 Honda CR-V Ex (wife's, who died in 2006) with 60k miles; they both run great, everything still works, and they still get mileage similar to when I bought them. As a bonus, I no longer have to pay annual property tax on them as they're over 20 years old. They will need re-painting at some point as they're kept outside and the clear coat is failing in places. Bigger bonus, they both have 5sp manual transmissions, which is almost impossible to get with a new car now -- Honda only offers it in the Civic Si and Civic Type R.

Comment Re:Will this make glowing watched cheaper? (Score 1) 51

Was tritium production really a concern in the first place? From what I've seen there's plenty of tritium produced in heavy water fission reactors like Candu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Several articles I found via Google noted that there's currently only about 20kg of Tritium in the world. Much more will apparently be needed for fusion reactors, and on a continuing basis.

Submission + - UK Scientists Achieve First Commercial Tritium Production (interestingengineering.com)

fahrbot-bot writes: Interesting Engineering is reporting that Astral Systems, a UK-based private commercial fusion company, in collaboration with the University of Bristol, has claimed to have become the first firm to successfully breed tritium, a vital fusion fuel, using its own operational fusion reactor.

The milestone came during a 55-hour Deuterium-Deuterium (DD) fusion irradiation campaign conducted in March. Scientists from Astral Systems and the University of Bristol produced and detected tritium in real-time from an experimental lithium breeder blanket within Astral’s multi-state fusion reactors.

“There’s a global race to find new ways to develop more tritium than what exists in today’s world [currently about 20kg] – a huge barrier is bringing fusion energy to reality,” said Talmon Firestone, CEO and co-founder of Astral Systems.

Astral Systems’ approach uses its Multi-State Fusion (MSF) technology. The company states this will commercialize fusion power with better performance, efficiency, and lower costs than traditional reactors.

A core innovation is lattice confinement fusion (LCF), a concept first discovered by NASA in 2020. This allows Astral’s reactor to achieve solid-state fuel densities 400 million times higher than those in plasma.

The company’s reactors are designed to induce two distinct fusion reactions simultaneously from a single power input, with fusion occurring in both plasma and a solid-state lattice.

The reactor core also features an electron-screened environment. This design reduces the energy needed to overcome the Coulomb barrier between particles, which lowers required fusion temperatures by several million degrees and allows for higher performance in a compact size.

Comment Re:The "Screw Red States" bill (Score 2) 229

What scares me is that there was absolutely no attempt to sell this bill to the voters.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) is on video saying she didn't like the bill, but voted for it after getting carve-outs for Alaska exempting it from strict new food stamp rules for two years - the state with the highest SNAP error rate in 2024. Though, because of reconciliation rules, they had to write it a little more obscurely. From Republicans' Absurd Food Benefit Policy Could Reward States Who Waste Money

Because Senate Republicans passed the bill using a special “budget reconciliation” process that doesn’t allow “extraneous” provisions — such as policies directly targeting individual states with only incidental budgetary effects — they had to write the Alaska SNAP carveout so that it didn’t look so obvious.

So the bill would delay the crackdown for any state with an error rate above 13.3%. (To make it even less obvious, instead of setting the threshold at 13.3%, the text says the exemption applies for states whose error rates exceed 20% when multiplied by 1.5.)

According to the SNAP error rate numbers posted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture this week, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon and the District of Columbia would win a delay of the cost-sharing burden if it were based on 2024 error rates. ... They are the ones with the MOST ERRORS in administering the program.

[States that worked to lower their error rate would be subject to the new stricter rules.]

Comment Re:The "Screw Red States" bill (Score 1) 229

This bill seems tailor-made to fuck red states. It will massively suck, but the reactions will at least be entertaining for a little while once people start noticing what happened.

Yup. Also, apparently, many people are unfamiliar with what's in the bill, and will probably be very surprised.

To any rural USians - I sincerely hope you stay healthy, you won't have a hospital soon enough.

And this will affect everyone in those areas, not just people on Medicaid / Medicare.

Slashdot Top Deals

Always try to do things in chronological order; it's less confusing that way.

Working...