We could go live nestled up close to a red dwarf that has tens of billions of years of life left. We could dyson sphere it.

I'm using "could" very loosely here.

German's Decry Influence of English As 'Idiot's Apostrophe' Gets Official Approval

I once read a story about a kid who did this. It's been a while so the details may be foggy. Digging into it, the parent worked at a national lab or someplace, they found discarded materials to make the chamber and other bits and pieces. It's truly a great technical achievement even if you only make plasma but your average kid, even highly motivated and educated genius kid, doesn't have access to an awesome scrap pile like that.

One torr is approximately 10^-3 LoC/Pitch. That is based on the size of the LoC collection, an approximate mass per item, and excluding the building itself, and using the area of a typical soccer pitch of 7000 m^2.

I'm not a bot, but you piqued my interest, so...there you go.

I find it amusing an airline would even consider the possibility of reimbursement for a "cancellation" that wasn't their fault.
I hope they get nothing.

Map makers have been doing this for centuries.

People hand themselves over to Apple in toto. People hand themselves over to some "cloud" or other, in toto.

Why?

Why would any presumably sane person ever do such a thing?

It's already plenty more than bad enough to give away such little as I'm giving away here and now with this comment.

But to hand it all over?

How can people possibly bring themselves to believe things like this could ever end well for them?

I cannot fathom the least of it. It is beyond senseless. It is beyond imagining.

And yet people do it. Every day. In droves.

Because the protections in Section 230 are directly modeled after the protections from other Common Carrier regulatory schemes. "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"

The shield from the inherent liabilities of the content being hosted is predicated on the understanding that the platform is simply that - a neutral platform. It does not create content, it only removes content that is unambiguously illegal, and by continuously maintaining this neutrality it is rewarded with a shield from potential content liability lawsuits and criminal actions.

Those sponsors that pay the bills will need to understand that their advertising rates may go waaaaay up if the platform they are advertising on gets caught removing not-illegal material that corresponds to a particular viewpoint (political, religious, etc.) and they lose their shield of immunity.

Being able to send the court a letter that is essentially a Get Out Of Jail card, one that says "Yep, you need to dismiss that suit because we can't be sued for this" is an amazingly powerful tool.

You are correct - if you aren't paying for the service, *you* are probably the product.

Except that they are. When they decide that there are (otherwise legal) topics which shall not be discussed on their platforms, they have strayed away from the concepts that brought us the protections of Common Carrier.

"I'm not liable for the content on my platform" , "I'm protected from liability for the editorial decisions made about content on my platform" and "I have Free Speech Rights to make whatever editorial decisions on any content posted on my platform" are not concepts that can coexist. Something has to give. If you want to remove content, fine... but you no longer have immunity from either civil prosecution (you are taking action against a group of people you disagree with and they sue you) or criminal action (you just so happen to take down all content posted by a particular protected class of people).

The shield of immunity is supposed to come with significant strings attached. These companies are trying to cut those strings.

If the content doesn't break a law and you make an editorial decision to remove it, then you have moved beyond the role of Common Carrier... that's the short-short-short version of the "this is the line that must be crossed" I've heard from legal experts in the past.

Being immune from prosecution and/or civil suit because you are simply the medium the information flows across is a huge thing. The protections come with huge strings, those primarily being that you don't make content-based or viewpoint-based moderation decisions. Your decisions to remove content are based on criteria that do not help or hinder any particular political or religious or (insert other component) here... but that do clearly prohibit material deemed against the law.

It's when you stray into prohibiting a particular topic of conversation when you get into danger. I sat and watched test Facebook Messenger conversations on people's phones disappear when they mentioned Hunter Biden and laptop in the same discussion. A conversation between two individuals, not posted to the world at large, disappeared. That was an example of a "subject that will not be discussed on this platform". That's a clear violation of the concept of Common Carrier protections.

If you don't want the protections of the Common Carrier concept, you don't have to pursue them. But if you do pursue them, that inherently means your platform will be carrying opinions you may disagree with.

The trap we've fallen into is not understanding the difference between "Hate Speech" and "Speech I Hate".

You can't simultaneously argue "We're immune from being prosecuted for taking down protected speech because we're just a middleman, - treat us like a Common Carrier" and "We have First Amendment Rights as a company to promote or suppress the viewpoints according to our opinions".

You can't say you're claiming immunity because you treat everyone fairly, and then argue that you also have the right to treat one viewpoint differently than another.

They still have the mp3s I uploaded. I was surprised they made the transition from GPM to YTM. And I know they are still mine because it's a defunct local band that has no streaming/online presence.

I know for some time, there were concerns from the power companies about end users feeding power back onto the grid. Anyone have any insight into the current state of this? I know I remember hearing "the power grid, at the edge, was designed for flow in one direction only" or something to that effect.

I was told by a commercial electrician at a previous job that it was a bad idea to use breakers as routine switches. They are not designed or rated for the constant make/break cycles on live equipment.

He was telling me this as he was replacing breakers we routinely used to turn on/off the lights in a good sized space, and said he was in there every few years to do the same thing because for whatever reason the lights had been installed without regular switches, or they were inaccessible, or had been removed due to tampering, or some similar issue. Two we had at that point were intermittent when turning on, and one had failed by releasing the magic smoke with a sizzle.

Based on what I read here it seems it takes special breakers to be used as switches. Apparently...not the ones we had.