AnyOldName3

Plenty of plumbing is done with moulded plastic pipes and fittings, and I’ve 3D printed garden hose fittings (things like GHT to BSP adapters, which aren’t easy to buy) with success, so it’s not like moulding is the only way to make plastic good enough.

First, someone has to email [email protected] 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.

Most of the languages you’ve mentioned aren’t systems languages, so don’t make being a good language to write an OS in a high priority. More languages might be accepted in the future, but if they are, it’ll be ones that are a natural fit for the problems they’re solving.

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.

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.

It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.

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.

It’s pretty plausible that Epstein would be suicidal after being locked up and would have killed himself if left unattended in his own jail cell with some rope, especially as giving him some rope would signal that he wasn’t going to get saved. The more sensible conspiracy theory is that he was taken off suicide watch intentionally to give him the opportunity.

I don’t think it’s guaranteed that Linux will be a viable kernel in a future where NT’s forced to be abandoned unless it’s simply because Microsoft refuses to maintain it. Linux is older than NT, so if age alone killed kernels, it’d die first. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that Linux can be kept viable for a long time, so if Microsoft wanted, they could keep NT viable for a long time.

Even by crypto standards, Bitcoin Cash is dodgy. Its origins were a temporary hiccup in the Bitcoin network which forked the blockchain into two branches. As blockchains are designed to tolerate this, the network quickly decided that one branch was worse than the other, so everything switched to the good branch and Bitcoin continued chugging away and consuming enough power for a small country. However, a few people were cross about this because they had more Bitcoin on the dead branch, so manually configured their wallets and mining hardware to use that branch, and tried encouraging other people to do the same. That didn’t work. They then decided to provide a preconfigured wallet and mining software that would prefer the dead branch but claimed it was its own new cryptocurrency and everyone who had Bitcoin already would get some of the new one for free, and that was enough to get some people to sign up.

Nintendo used to have a page on emulation on their website incorrectly claiming that it was always illegal and all emulators had solely been created to enable piracy. This new claim is not compatible with their previous action of having that page.

Unless your local cinema got a good deal on a projector from a 1980s theme park 3D movie, it’s definitely using circularly polarised filters. If you’ve tried tests like putting the lenses from two pairs of the glasses or one pair of the glasses and one pair of regular polaroid sunglasses next to each other and rotating them, that’ll still make them get brighter and dimmer like with linear polarised filters, as passing through the filter can change the polarisation to elliptical, and that means it’ll be affected by rotation when it gets to the second filter.

Anaglyph 3D (with the red/cyan, or lower-quality red/blue filters) has been around since the 1800s (3D films predate talkies by decades), but was much more of a gimmick and wasn’t used for big-budget serious films as it ruined the colour quality, mainly being used for 1950s B movies. There were a bunch of other methods used between the 50s and 2010-ish like regular Polaroid filters (which did stop working when you tilted your head like in the comic and were a hassle for other reasons) and active shutter (which relied on expensive and heavy glasses with electronics in). The newer kind that relies on circular polarisation became available since the turn of the millennium, with Avatar in 2009 being the film that made most cinemas buy new projectors. Those glasses made 3D films viable as the standard for a few years, before people generally decided that most of the time, being 3D didn’t add enough to the viewing experience to be worth paying extra for and studios decided it wasn’t elevating their art enough to justify the extra production costs if people weren’t going to pay a premium.

It’s really easy to disguise a campaign to wear out moderators as respectful debate, e.g. by sealioning, especially if you’re not working alone. The new rules don’t have any provision to distinguish between respectful debate and bad-faith posts, so it’s not unreasonable to worry that this change will do a lot more to promote bad-faith ‘debate’ than respectful debate.

It can make it look a bit weird (and be one of the things that makes people nauseous), but most people’s brains are good enough at figuring it out that it’s not a major problem. It wouldn’t make a difference to the situation in the comic, though, as in that frame, they’re talking about making both lenses match to pick between two 2D movies, so there’d be no offset anyway.

Tilting your head shouldn’t make a difference as ‘modern’ (as in the ones that cinemas started using fifteen years ago) 3D glasses use clockwise and anticlockwise circular polarisation filters, and obviously, turning something 90° doesn’t change whether it’s clockwise or anticlockwise. Other kinds of polarisation filters do care about being rotated, which is probably where the artist got the impression it applied to 3D glasses, but it would be dumb to try and use that kind as obviously, people tilt their heads.

Sometimes when a product is whitelabeled and can be bought directly from its real manufacturer for much less, there’s still a good reason to buy the expensive one. The main one is that sometimes the ones that pass QA are sold via the whitelabeler and the ones that fail QA are sold directly, so the cheaper ones are known to have something wrong with them and you’re gambling that it’s something without symptoms.

Wet water is the water with added wetting agent used for firefighting. That stuff shouldn’t be coming out of your household plumbing.