It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

By that logic, you should object to cheese being labelled as “cheddar” cheese, because that’s a place too and you’ve almost certainly never seen cheese which came from there.

It’s a stupid rule

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there

No, I’m arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.

Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn’t unambiguously better than what it does now.

“What is language” is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that’s not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn’t open without very good reason, and at best I’m seeing a weak and subjective reason here.

The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there’s no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn’t good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn’t ASCII. It’s also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just ‘/’ and ‘\0’, I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we’d probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

That’s going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There’s no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn’t attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven’t federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that’s just not possible

The assesment that he’s the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

Normally that’s fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don’t spend it?

There are also people who’s wealth isn’t held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can’t neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon’s horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn’t be comparing like for like

Exactly, that seems like the reasonable reading of the statement to me

While we can all agree Trump is an ass, I think you’ve misunderstood this statement.

He’s not saying “it’s important that republicans don’t vote if we fail to solve the election fraud”, he’s saying “it’s important to solve the fraud, because otherwise next time republicans won’t be allowed to vote”.

He’s claiming that republican votes won’t be counted, or that they won’t be allowed to place a vote at all, because the democrats will have rigged the system and/or deprived them of the right to vote

HARM is a category of weapon which seeks things like radar or jammers. They weren’t suggesting that the jammers are literally harmless.

In unrelated news: the jammers are, in fact, harmless unless you’re making a habit of riding on top of the tank. The radio energy isn’t going to penetrate a significant thickness of conductive material, such as armour plating. Or unless you’re the person being jammed, in which case they’re a different category of harmful

Destroying a nuclear sub, or a nuclear weapon, doesn’t lead to a nuclear explosion. It takes considerable care to cause a nuclear explosion, and smashing a reactor or warhead just leaves you with a pile of radioactive scrap.

Not saying that isn’t a problem, but it’s way less of a problem than a nuclear explosion

It’s amazing that people seem to be taking this comment literally

Can anyone explain to me what the exemption actually is? The article keeps mentioning “minimum steering angle”, but I’m not sure what that means. Is it as simple as saying the steering wheel must have at least some particular range of travel?

They should last indefinitely so long as the process of accretion which created these nodules keeps going. A battery becomes drained when the chemical interaction between the two metals uses up all the available metal, which happens quite fast in our modern batteries because we’ve designed them that way.

We’ve made them powerful and cheap by using relatively small amounts of each metal, spread thin and sandwiched together. The downside is that those things films of metal get used up fast.

These nodules, meanwhile, are lumps of metal. They won’t produce lots of power all at once, but they can generate small amounts for ages, and so long as they grow faster than the metal gets used up (it doesn’t actually go anywhere, it just changes chemically) they’ll keep going

I know that for two reasons: first, we already know that oxygen concentration in the deep ocean is generally pretty low compared to the surface, and second we can already account for the general composition of our atmosphere. There just isn’t a big chunk of mystery oxygen who’s source we can’t identify.

While it’s not impossible that we’re mistaken and a bunch of it is coming from somewhere other than where we expect, it’s sufficiently unlikely that I’m comfortable making such statements I told and unless presented with evidence to the contrary.

The article is being pretty hyperbolic. There’s no mystery here, this is just something which happens if you put two different metals together. It’s nothing more or less than a crude battery, just like the ancestors of the AA battery the article kept harping on about.

This discovery could be important for people studying the climate on very early Earth, people studying early life, and the ecology of the deep sea today.

That last one is particularly troubling, though. If this is widespread, then this might be a major source of what little oxygen is down there. If so, then taking those nodules away (like a lot of people are keen to do, since some of the metals they’re made of are valuable) could destroy an entire ecosystem.

More research is required