AnyOldName3

That kind of bioplastic tends not to biodegrade naturally, instead requiring a heated industrial composter with specially engineered enzymes added. If it’s disposed of properly, it’s great, otherwise it’s no better than traditional plastic but costs more. Also, not all bioplastics biodegrade at all as all the word means is that the source material is biomass rather than oil.

Partially restore it. At best, you put about 60% of the water into the starch crystals that the bread had when it was fresh. It’s a massive improvement, but it’s not hard to tell which is which in a side-by-side comparison.

Lots of ad companies and other data harvesters who wanted to keep being evil put out a lot of misinformation about things the GDPR would outlaw, and some of it stuck, so plenty of people think the GDPR says things it doesn’t. In general, you’re safe as long as you don’t do anything obviously dodgy or send data to a company likely to do evil things with it, but in a world where nearly everyone uses Google analytics to monitor if their site goes down, everyone had to change something and there was plenty of opportunity to scare people by telling them they needed to change more than they really did.

I was meaning that the blade count and detachability was the difference in definition between turboprop and propfan/open turbofan, not that it was necessarily the thing making the engine more efficient.

I’ve seen turboprops in museums and on the internet with around six or eight blades. When I looked on the Wikipedia page for propfan engines, which seems to be another name for an open turbofan, the distinction seemed to be mainly how the blades were shaped (like propellor blades or turbine blades) and how tightly-integrated everything is (you can swap the propeller out on a turboprop).

How many blades do you have to add to a turboprop before it’s promoted to an open turbofan and touted as a major new innovation?

There are people who have genuine medical reasons to not take vaccines (e.g. an allergy to a common ingredient) or who are so immunocompromised that a vaccine won’t keep them alive, and they rely on other people getting vaccinated to avoid dying. It’s not just antivaxers who antivaxers kill.

Someone was telling me the other day that the cheapest new car available in the UK was an electric Dacia. Obviously, you can get a used car for less than a new one, but electric cars are within reach of normal people, or at least normal enough people to not have Mr Moneybags budgets.

Towards the back of the machine normally counts as up for upwards-facing sockets, unless it’s a case with feet on the side, in which case it’ll be away from those feet so the sockets would be the right way up if it were sideways and on the alternative feet.

Also, the overwhelming majority of USB plugs have the logo on the side away from the plastic bit, and sockets have their plastic bits towards the top of the device. You want the plastic bits on opposite sides (as physical objects don’t like to overlap), so that means that if you can feel the logo with your thumb, that side goes up when you plug it in, and you don’t even have to look.

First, someone has to email licensing@xkcd.com to tell Randal Munroe that there’s a potential licence violation so he can file a suit.

xkcd comics are available under a CC-By-NC 2.5 licence, so you’ve successfully pirated by not including attribution (as long as people can’t tell at a glance that it’s xkcd from the art style or comment thread you posted it to), but to seal the deal, it’d be a crime to sell it.

A Spud apologist! Sabotage by a scarecrow was beyond Bob’s control, and the cause of most problems.

Arch is at least more likely to update to a fixed version sooner, and someone getting something with pacman is going to be used to the idea of it breaking because of using bleeding edge dependencies. The difference with the Flatpak is that most users believe that they’re getting something straight from the developers, so they’re not going to report problems to the right people if Fedora puts a different source of Flatpaks in the lists and overrides working packages with ones so broken as to be useless.

People fall off rooftops fitting solar panels, burn to death repairing wind turbines that they can’t climb down fast enough to escape, and dams burst and wash away towns. Renewable energy is much less killy than fossil fuels, but per megawatt hour, it’s comparable to nuclear, despite a few large incidents killing quite a lot of people each. At the moment, over their history, hydro is four times deadlier than nuclear, wind’s a little worse than nuclear, and solar’s a little better. Fission power is actually really safe.

The article’s talking about fusion power, though. Fission reactions are dangerous because if you’ve got enough fuel to get a reaction at all, you’ve got enough fuel to get a bigger reaction than you want, so you have to control it carefully to avoid making it too hot, which would cause the steam in the reactor to burst out and carry chunks of partially-used fuel with it, which are very deadly. That problem doesn’t exist with fusion. It’s so hard to make the reaction happen in the first place that any problem just makes the reaction stop immediately. If you somehow blew a hole in the side of the reactor, you’d just get some very hot hydrogen and very hot helium, which would be harmless in a few minutes once they’d cooled down. It’s impossible for fusion power, once it’s working, not to be the safest way to generate energy in history because it inherently avoids the big problems with what is already one of the safest ways.

PowerShell has a system to sign scripts, and with its default configuration, will refuse to execute scripts, and with the more sensible configuration you should switch to if you actually use PowerShell, refuses to execute unsigned scripts from the Internet.

I suspect that most of the scripts you’re referring to just set -ExecutionPolicy Bypass to disable signature checking and run any script, though.

That’s misleading in the other direction, though, as PhysX is really two things, a regular boring CPU-side physics library (just like Havok, Jolt and Bullet), and the GPU-accelerated physics library which only does a few things, but does them faster. Most things that use PhysX just use the CPU-side part and won’t notice or care if the GPU changes. A few things use the GPU-accelerated part, but the overwhelming majority of those use it for optional extra features that only work on Nvidia cards, and instead of running the same effects on the CPU if there’s no Nvidia card available, they just skip them, so it’s not the end of the world to leave them disabled on the 5000-series.

If you write cross-platform software, the easiest solution is usually to pretend everything’s Unix. You’ll hit some problems (e.g. assuming all filesystem APIs always use UTF-8 will bite you on Windows, which switched to UCS2 before UTF-8 or UTF-16 were invented, so now uses UTF-16 for Unicode-aware functions as that’s the one that’s ABI compatible with UCS2, and passing UTF-8 to the eight-bit-char functions requires you to opt into that mode explicitly), but mostly everything will just work. There’s no XDG_CONFIG telling you to put these files anywhere in particular, as Windows is Windows, so most things use ~ as a fallback, which Windows knows to treat as %USERPROFILE%.

Illegal numbers are so illegal that you just linked a Wikipedia article containing a bunch of them, i.e. not very illegal. For an AI company already skirting copyright law, they’re not a concern at all.

They’re connected to an RCD, as modern UK wiring has all sockets connected via an overall RCD in the fusebox, but the switches on the socket are just basic on/off switches.