Before the bots, it was troll farms. Now the troll farmers have lost their jobs, replaced by software. Plus ça change, plus c'est le même chose.

I suspect the idea they are hinting at is that ancient yeast might have been living on (then-livable) Mars and got meteorite-blasted over to Earth, and survived the trip. For a temporary trip like that, survival is sufficient.

Easier is relative, though. All the nuclear weapons on Earth would still be two orders of magnitude too little to get an adequate atmosphere. As I understand, you'd need several thousand gigatons to get a low single-digit percent of Earth's atmospheric pressure.

And for humans to survive for more than about a minute even with external oxygen (the Armstrong limit), you'd need to reach about 40% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. There's probably not enough CO2 ice on all of Mars to pull that off. Best guess is that you'd need four or five times as much just to reach that limit, though the best-case estimates would result in exceeding that limit by a factor of two, so there's a lot of uncertainty here.

Whether releasing a lot of that CO2 would cause enough of a greenhouse effect to melt more polar ice is unclear, but one would assume that if this were possible, the planet would not have cooled, so that seems unlikely. Chances are, you would have to melt *all* the ice and periodically add energy from some external source to re-melt it as it forms, or else built planet-sized mirrors in Mars L4 and L5 to increase how much sunlight hits Mars.

Surviving Martian soil is the easy part. Being able to survive at near zero air pressure is the hard part.

That's not what a cancellation fee does, though. By definition, when you pay a cancellation fee, they are no longer providing service.

Because that $2,000 is consideration for the other party providing something. If the penalty clause is the entire remainder of the contract fee, then the other party should also be compelled to provide service for the remainder of the contract term, or some equivalent consideration. Otherwise, it isn't really much of a contract.

If they get out of providing service, then you should get out of paying, except for some penalty to make up for sunk costs, e.g. the prorated cost of provisioning initial service, the prorated cost of a phone that was free with contract, etc., plus some *reasonable* amount to discourage people from pulling out of the contract on a whim.

Also, understand that the company providing the service had way more power over the contract than you. You were almost certainly told "take it or leave it" when presented with the contract. That's why putting limits on what contracts of adhesion can do is generally considered to be a critical function of government.

The part you're missing is that contracts like this are contracts of adhesion, and there may or may not even be an option to sign up one month at a time. And even if there is, having a penalty clause for canceling a contract is reasonable, but having a penalty clause that massively exceeds any plausible damages isn't, particularly when one of the parties in that contract has dramatically more power than the other, and that party is the one writing the contract and demanding the penalty clause. That's why it is reasonable for governments to limit the amount of those damages through statutes. It is just compensating for that inherent power imbalance.

Also, real-world companies aren't typically selling bonds against their subscription revenue, and unless this is a very small business and the contracts are among equals (which a customer relationship almost never is), a bank isn't going to care about the difference between 1,000 subscriptions and 1,001, nor do stockholders. They care about the difference between 1,000 and 100,000. Orders of magnitude matter. A few cancellations around the margins are noise. So although you might be correct in theory, in practice, single cancellations don't matter, and if the cancellation numbers are high enough to matter, there's something much more seriously wrong with the company, and locking consumers in to a long-term contract likely serves no one's best interests, including the company's, because that just reduces the pressure on the company to fix those structural problems.

The thing is, if you stop using the service after two months, they aren't providing you a benefit, and it isn't reasonable for them to keep collecting money. And charging exorbitant fees has the net effect of forcing people to continue paying a month at a time because they can't afford the cancellation fee all at once. That's what makes it predatory.

If we were talking about a small company, where someone canceling service (e.g. a maid service) would mean that they have to go seek out other clients to stay in business, then charging such a fee makes sense. For a big company, it is really rather hard to justify.

This is doubly true if the company either does not offer a month-to-month plan or charges only slightly less for it. At most, you have cost the company the difference between the yearly contract and month-to-month price, and if the penalty is greater than that difference, that's really not right.

They will if they want viewers over age 30. I like shows where I can just keep watching episodes one after the next for a month, so nearly everything I watch is a decade old or more. It's not worth my time and effort to figure out whether I might like to watch a show if I'm going to run out of episodes in a day of viewing.

I can only think of one show that I've watched when it had fewer than 20 episodes, and I regret not waiting longer, because it would have been much more enjoyable watching three seasons instead of two a year from now. Modern shows require too much effort for too little payoff. The threshold where I feel like it is actually worth my time is about 40 episodes. And most new shows will be canceled long before they reach that threshold, which means most new shows aren't worth my time.

The article claims to measure the severity of a memory leak defect based on the amount of memory it leaked -- but most memory leaks (that are severe enough to be noticed) are small leaks that occur at regular intervals, meaning that the program's memory footprint will continually grow larger over repeated operations.

Therefore, do you want a 1MB memory leak? Run the program for a while. Do you want a 1GB memory leak? Run the program for that much longer. Keep going, and you can eventually get to any number you want, to post in your Substack article; this makes the reported numbers arbitrary and therefore meaningless.

TL;DR: Memory leaks are a problem, and they can be avoided with care and proper coding techniques, but claiming that software quality is worse now because the leaks "are larger" is silly.

I don't misunderstand anything. I don't care for people who have nothing to do with my website to dictate what is there. So they get blocked, and that is the best form of compliance, when those who want to control your content cannot see it - they cannot have a problem, it is strict no compromised unconditional compliance, just like they wanted. And if people use a VPN to get around it, it is not my problem.

And frankly, my sites are as innocuous as a bunny rabbit. All legit. Problem is the owner doesn't like to be forced to comply with silly rules

Yup. I never said it made sense. They're several years too late, and should have shut down that purchase before it happened. But I'm thinking about some quote along the lines of "The best time to figure it out was years ago, but the second best time to figure it out is today," or something like that. :-)

It's a Dutch fab company that got gobbled up by a Chinese company. It was originally part of Philips. Foreign companies didn't create jobs in this case, unless the fab grew significantly in the last six years. If anything, they've been selling off some of their existing fabs.

From all indications, the main purpose of the takeover was to prevent sending technology secrets to China, and possibly to prevent the illegal sale of their chips to Russia.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

OTOH there are actual Apteras on the roadways... only about three of them, but they do exist, at least in prototype form.