23 meters tall and 5 meters wide... what are you going to steal that with, exactly??

So if something manages to tip over this giant cylinder, to near 90-degrees (enough that friction alone would counteract the force of gravity)... while submerged in a pool of water? Seems extremely unlikely, especially if the pool is sized correctly such that it could never get to more than, say, a 45-degree angle.

Safer, cleaner power production like this is going to be critical if we ever hope to move away from fossil fuels more completely.

You seem informed on this, with an appropriate background, so I was hoping you might be able to address a couple of questions I've been pondering:

- Obviously antibacterial soaps are not help in this situation, as it is a virus, but what about alcohol-based "hand sanitizers"? Are those effective against viruses like COVID-19 at all, or should we focus on soap and water? And you specifically mentioned bar soaps... are liquid soaps not as effective or something?

- Are there any necessary characteristics to gloves to be effective in this situation?

There are some options like that, though they aren't universal. For example, I happily pay for YouTube Premium (I think that is what its called, but the name may have changed) because I watch a lot of videos there and never having to see an add on there (regardless of device / platform) is soooo worth the $10 a month it costs. Plus, I know that I am still helping to provide financial support to channels I watch, which an ad blocker alone would not do.

It would be nice if more sites & services had things like that, but honestly I don't find the ads on news sites and such very bothersome. I have mostly learned to ignore them, and just focus on what I want to read / see. The ones that come up and cover the site until closed, though... those can be burned in a fire, please :)

I had the ability to play synchronized music in multiple rooms in my home across various Logitech Squeezebox speakers about a decade ago. I'm not 100% certain, but I think that pre-dates Sonos offering multi-room audio. I only switched because Logitech stopped supporting that ecosystem and I had a speaker that was having trouble staying on the network reliably (and Sonos has been better about that so far, over the couple years I've been using it). Google Assistant on the Sonos speakers has been nice too, since we already used Google Home devices in other rooms... and I hope this lawsuit nonsense doesn't end up with those devices no longer playing nicely together :/

Time to adopt a new word: "overcentury" :)

But seriously, I think that the need for an equivalent to gas stations would not really be there... or would be needed far less. Anyone with a garage can charge at home, removing them from the pool of folks who regularly need a shared charging location. Then, since as you noted it takes a lot longer to charge than to pump gas, having a lot of places where people stay for an hour or more install a handful of charging stations each would go a long way toward solving things. Hotels, restaurants, malls, superstores... if all of those had a dozen or so charging stations each, with a small fee to use them (enough to cover their upkeep but far less than paying for a tank of gas) then that would take another huge chunk out. Some quick-charge locations with convenience stores could stick around too, I'm sure, but combining that service with others to avoid people feeling like they are wasting time would be ideal.

This may be a crazy idea, and it just popped into my head, but perhaps if the cost to a business (or government, or even individual) was higher if they pay the ransom - via fines, prosecution, etc - then maybe they would not do it. And if no one pays the ransoms, they *will* eventually stop. But it has to be 100% or very, very close. If just some people stop paying, but others continue, then it just encourages more ransomware (because they will need to increase the overall number of victims to keep profits, if the percent of victims who pay goes down). But if you get to where almost no one pays, eventually they won't do it anymore because it won't be worth their time.

Fascinating - may I ask how you know they accessed your data? It would be extremely helpful, and I didn't see it in the article (though I only skimmed it), if there was a way to find out if FB has this specific set of data on each of us. I am under the impression that you can request a dump of all the data they have on you, but pouring through that much information just to find out if they have phone call & SMS metadata seems like a lot of work :/

Not all of us have garages - certainly not most folks in apartments, and even many homeowners (myself included). Plus, there are pretty cheap ways for thieves to hack electronic garage doors too:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

Fair enough - I guess you can make voice calls through it too. I know video calls are restricted to the non-Lite app, and I've never wanted / had a reason to make a voice call through Facebook before, so I wasn't thinking about that aspect of it.

I've never had much trouble with it on mobile, but I do sometimes find it starts to scroll through the newsfeed upon opening, until you scroll up to stop it. Not a huge deal, though.

However, it just occurred to me that they probably pull the same permission crap on the Messenger app. I use the "Lite" version, since it at least doesn't hog resources as badly, and checking the app permissions - sure enough, SMS, Phone, and Microphone are all listed there - despite there being no reason for such things in a text-based messaging app. I went ahead and turned those off on my own phone, which hopefully helps. I left Camera and Storage on so I can take and send pictures to contacts, and Contacts as well since that seems safe enough.

This makes me wonder, though, how many other app vendors are also pulling similar tricks? Maybe I'll go through all my installed apps at some point and turn off the things that don't seem like they should be necessary :/

Facebook is also available as a website, so why bother installing an app for it that just intrudes more on your privacy? If you must use it, just use the mobile website within a browser like Chrome. That way they should not be able to monitor what is going on outside of the website. Or is there some way that they can still access that info, even from inside a web browser, which I am not aware of?

Photoscan and other photogrammetry applications, when working with large image sets (1000+ photos) and high quality settings.

After Effects uses RAM to store rendered frames, so increasing from 64 to 128GB means you can have twice as many frames stored in RAM preview at a time.

Video editing with 6K and 8K footage, though usually in those situations you would want a CPU with more cores anyway (so a Core X processor, which can already support 128GB of memory without more dense modules.

That is just what I can think of off the top of my head, and that others in this thread haven't already mentioned.

What nonsense is this? The first colonies of Europeans in what is now the United States were a combination of business ventures (like Jamestown) seeking wealth and religious groups (like the Pilgrims at Plymouth and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay) seeking a different way of life and belief. Later colonies, and especially those further south (below New England) did indeed have large populations of indentured labor... but even then, it wasn't like there were whole colonies of criminals - which is what the term "penal colony" usually indicates. Most indentured servants were not in that position because of criminal conviction. That was not how or why this place got started :)

Regardless, this doesn't seem to have any bearing on the topic at hand. Were you just trying to add in some (slightly mistaken) history? Or was the idea of there being some criminals sent to the New World supposed to have a bigger impact on the discussion above?

Many elements of US law are drawn from where our nation originated (as colonies of England) - yes - but we also have a lot of legal protections which are not provided to citizens of other countries by their laws. The extent of our free speech rights, for example, or the right to keep and bear arms. I wasn't sure off the top of my head if presumption of innocence might have been another element that was added on top of or increased from what was brought over from England.

Moreover, I would point out that it isn't like the English came up with all of those legal concepts completely on their own. Almost all legal systems inherit aspects of the societies that came before them, all the way back to the Code of Hammurabi (and possibly before, since that may have drawn on other oral traditional). So should I start in on a tirade about how English laws developed as a merging of Anglo-Saxon and Norman tradition, along with some influence from the Catholic Church and Roman history? I think I'll pass on that, and certainly on the use of unnecessary colorful metaphors :)