A truly non-lazy person, then, would have to conduct a detailed spectrographic assay of all of the pipes (or at least sufficient samples from each lot) to accurately determine the precise composition of each, because all of them contain impurities and aren't merely copper and phosphorous.

In general, getting a truly pure sample of almost any element is incredibly-hard, and outside of laboratories (and even in laboratories, most of the time) it just doesn't matter. In the case of transporting anti-protons, standard "pure" copper is apparently inadequate, because it's not pure enough.

Even with the reduced precipitation there's still plenty of water for residential and commercial use. The problem, at least where I live (Utah), is agriculture. 80% of our water goes to agriculture. It would be one thing if we were growing regionally-appropriate crops for local consumption, but nearly all of that agriculture is to grow alfalfa (a water-hungry crop that isn't appropriate for the high desert climate), and nearly all of that alfalfa is shipped out of state, much of it out of the country, to feed cattle elsewhere. China is one of the biggest buyers. Essentially, our farmers are selling the contents of our aquifers to the world.

If we had plenty of water, letting our farmers buy it at a deep discount and sell it to willing buyers elsewhere would be fine, just another commercial use of a local resource, which is what trade is all about. But we definitely don't have plenty of water.

The solution is simple and straightforward (though legally complicated): Don't discounts. Set the same price for water across the board, residential, commercial and agricultural. There can and should be minor differences in delivery cost, and surcharges for purification, but the base cost of the water should be set through a single government-managed market, probably at the state level, probably divided up by drainages (drainages with more abundant water will have cheaper water; if this creates an arbitrage opportunity for someone to pipe water between drainages, great!).

Yes, this would probably put the alfalfa farmers out of business, but that's good because growing alfalfa in the desert is a bad idea. It might also raise the price of local produce, but that's as it should be, putting agricultural water use directly in competition with other water use. If prices go up, people will find ways to be more efficient. Farmers may switch to drip irrigation. If you build too many houses for the available water supply, well, those houses are going to have very expensive water and residents are going to want to find ways to conserve -- and maybe the high cost of water will disincentivize new move-ins.

The bottom line is that efficiently allocating scarce resources is what markets are good at. The problem with water isn't that there are too many people or not enough water, the problem is that we don't properly allocate the water or encourage conservation in the right places. Trying to fix this through regulation rather than market pricing will always be subject to regulatory capture and will never be as efficient or as effective as just enabling a competitive market and letting it work.

This is part of what Colbert wants to fix. His proposed film will cover the largely-omitted chapters 3-8 of The Fellowship of the Ring, including the barrow wights and Tom Bombadil.

No idea. It's fine so far, but I've only had it for a few months. Honestly, I'm pretty brutal on devices. Odds are high that I'll break it in some other way before the flexing causes a problem.

In a case like that I think Claude is "smart" enough to push back. Claude often catches my mistakes. It's also pretty easy to add rules like "Request confirmation for any purchase requests that are unusually large or otherwise out of the ordinary for the user. Review past purchases to determine user purchasing patterns." to make this explicit.

Claude is far, far smarter than Alexa.

OTOH, it sometimes does do stupid things. On balance, I think I screw up more often than it does, but you can't just assume it will make the right decisions, so adding rules that require doublechecking with the user is a good idea.

Without a foldable phone, I'd agree. With the foldable, I can unfold it and have a reasonably large on-screen keyboard, which I can type on with both thumbs. And of course my phone is always with my, while a tablet would be an extra device to carry -- and if I'm carrying an additional device, the laptop is more functional.

Me too. I looked! Termius + tmux works reasonably well, but an app specifically for this purpose would be nicer.

>"Would be nice to be able to use it for actual work."

Would it? How would it be better than existing Linux distros with tons of high-performance native apps AND the ability to mimick whatever GUI the user is familiar with AND use WINE to do better at running MS-Windows programs?

ReactOS development has been going on for decades and still doesn't have much to show for itself. I see ReactOS as a kludge to try and make a free and open version of inferior technology. We already have a free and open OS with superior technology and with a tremendously larger installed user and developer base.

>"If anything will get people to move to Linux, increases in gaming performance will."

Maybe? I know few people, personally, who have much interest in gaming at all. Even fewer who are seriously into gaming. Gaming is an important market, for sure. But there are tons of people who don't game under MS-Windows. They use it because that is what they know, that is what was loaded, or that is what is required for package XYZ to run needed by work, school, or hobby.

As long as it is easy, "free"/included (it isn't free, in any sense of the word, but consumers don't know that), and not too painful or annoying, Microsoft will be able to carry on as always.....

But recently, Microsoft overplayed its "control" hand and it is biting them in the *ss. They are scrambling to try and undo some of it in time to save what is left of their eroding platform. I was kinda hoping they would keep doubling-down.... it has been one of the best boosts for people to finally seriously explore non MS-Windows options.

>"The problem is multiplayer. Very few games run under Linux with multiplayer because of the anti-cheat software."

If people start flocking to Linux, there will be so much pressure to drop anti-cheat or to have it use Linux-friendly methods, it won't last or be a barrier.

>"If anything moves people to Linux it's going to be America turning into a fascist hellscape"

Yawn. There is little difference from that perspective of now compared to a few years ago. Or a dozen years before that. The word "fascist" is mostly meaningless, like so many other words now, since it has been twisted to be whatever is needed to suit whatever political view you believe. And it was never really a great term in the first place. As for Europe, they are no bastion of freedom in comparison. They have plenty of their own issues.

Moving to Linux *is* about freedom, and all countries could benefit from more of that, including ours (USA). I wouldn't want the USA reliant on EU software control anymore than I would expect than to be reliant on ours.

I use the Termius app on my phone, SSH to my workstation, run tmux attach -d to attach to the tmux session in which I'm running Claude, then tell it to do stuff. It can only do stuff that can be done via the command prompt, HTTP requests or MCP integrations (Gmail, Drive, Confluence, Jira, etc.), but that covers a lot of ground. "Only what I can do from the command prompt" is not much of a limitation.

I've told Claude to write a design doc in Confluence (which I reviewed and shared with others to get feedback); then implement the feature, including tests; build and run the code and tests on two hardware platforms (the host and an attached embedded QNX board); commit the code to a feature branch and push the branch upstream (where I reviewed it and told Claude what to fix); create a pull request; respond to reviewer comments; and merge the PR, all from my phone while a thousand miles from the workstation. I've only done the complete cycle from the phone once, but I've done pieces of it many times.

To make this work well, it helps to have a phone with a big screen. I have a Pixel 10 Fold, unfolded for Termius use. A tablet would be better... but if I'm going to lug a tablet around, my Macbook is better yet, since it's not that much bigger than a tablet and has a keyboard. And, obviously, I do reach for the laptop rather than the phone if I have it. But I can get a lot done from the phone.

This new feature is basically "Let poor GUI users do what command-line jockeys have been doing for a while".

From what I see, Iran is completely offline at this point, right?

And maybe that's exactly what the creators of that malware want you to think.

This isn't true.

Members of Congress and congressional employees are not exempt from the insider trading prohibitions that apply to everyone else. Trading on non-public information is a crime. In addition, if they're trading on classified information, the mere act of making the trade could constitute public disclosure of classified information, which could constitute several additional felonies, potentially including treason if the disclosure aids enemies of the United States.

However

While what you said is patently false as a matter of law, in practice there's basically no enforcement of the law against members of Congress. So, while your statement was wrong, you could say "Insider trading is ignored when done by a member of Congress" with near 100% accuracy.

The fix I would propose is not to ban members of Congress or their staffs or immediate families from trading, but instead to require them to disclose all trades 48 hours in advance. This wouldn't change the legality of trading on insider info (it would still be illegal), but it would serve to eliminate most of the benefit of acting on insider info, because their disclosure would move the market. Violating the disclosure requirement or failing to follow through on a disclosed trade would incur a fine equal to 150% of the value of the trade. This should be coupled with a requirement that members of Congress put their prior holdings into a blind trust and refrain from trading in any security over which they have a direct regulatory role.

I think that's a terrible white vs blue collar crime example. Sports betting with co-workers is ubiquitous, but if anything is even more common in blue collar workplaces.