Simply nuking the shit out of everything wouldn’t really make for an interesting story.
It did for the Killing Star. Not nukes, but R-bombs which are probably the most insane WMD-s and unlike strangelet bombs actually feasible even at our current tech level. All you need is a light-sail and a big-ass solar-powered laser.
But, yeah, for dune:
In 2006, it became possible for anyone to search WorldCat directly at its open website [REDACTED], not only through the subscription FirstSearch interface where it had been available on the web to subscribing libraries for more than a decade before.
So how is this “hacking” if the information is publicly accessible for all?
Looks pretty and is stable, but two fatal flaws:
Browsing by genres displays individual pieces/songs, not albums. Browsing albums or artists doesn’t allow any filtering by genres, years or any other metadata. Haven’t found a way to change that behaviour and as someone who listens to albums, not songs, and has thousands of albums this is a complete dealbreaker for me.
No support for UPnP/DLNA to stream from my phone to my stereo (or, for that matter, any modern AV receiver/streamer/network stereo receiver all which support UPnP/DLNA).
Somehow all the dry foods that are shipped internationally in carton boxes seems to do just fine…
Most entry level and midrange phones are still USB 2.0, even if they use USB-C physical port. USB 2.0 is 480 Mbit/s max, even old Wi-Fi 5 allows 1 Gbit/s speeds or even more. At this point the limit will be the writing speed of eMMC/SD card so even USB 3.0 becomes superfluous. After setting up my NAS, Jellyfin, Navidrome, Syncthing and Tailscale I haven’t ever connected my phone to a PC for file transfer—photos get synced automatically, music/videos get streamed and if I need to move files manually I can just do it from/to the SMB share over the network.
Counterpoint: my eyes are not what they used to be 20 years ago and 6,5…7" screens hit the sweet spot for useability. Especially since bezels are super thin these days so a 6,7" phone today is barely larger in total dimensions than a 5,5" phone 6 or 7 years ago.
it can’t be a bag for dry food because it won’t keep the food dry.
What dry foods actually need to be in a watertight container and how often do you immerse your packaged dry food in water or leave it in a humid environment? Back when I hiked a lot our circle of friends packed all the dry food we took into reusable fabric bags and had no problem keeping it dry for weeks in snow and rain.
Quite a lot of dry food is packaged in paper or carton—flour, cereal, couscous, sugar etc. For some reason (at least where I live) most dry food that are my staples like rice, pasta, buckwheat is packaged in plastic but could just as well be packaged in paper. It’s not like rice or pasta is more vulnerable to humidity than couscous or sugar (packaged in paper/carton).
Oldskool FPS. There. That’s the correct term. Now, who’s up for some DM-Morpheus with instagib mutator?🤘
With Celsius it’s all nice and round numbers unlike the mess called fahrenheit:
0°C—black ice, snow, be careful on the road and you probably want to wear gloves and a hat
0…10°C—a bit chilly, but you can leave your hat home
10…20°C—pleasant, but not quite tee-and-shorts yet
20…30°C—nice summer weather
30…40°C—holy crap it’s hot!
40…50°C—are you fucking kidding me?
50+°C—my proteins are starting to denature…
100°C—good sauna
110°C—finns think it’s a good sauna
120+°C—finns think it’s getting a bit too hot in the sauna. Italians tend to vaporize in sauna (speaking from experience)
…
0…-10°C—a pleasant winter weather
-10…-20°C—getting a bit frosty
-20…-30°C—finns think it’s a pleasant winter weather
-40°C—vodka freezes. Russians and finns agree it’s getting a bit frosty
-50°C—getting a little hard to start your Uazik in the morning in Siberia due to engine oil solidifying
-60°C—researchers in Antarctica all agree it’s getting a bit frosty and someone should close the window
Most likely the module, if it is a separate module and not part of the SoC of the infotainment system or whatever, works over CAN bus and the car will throw errors when it doesn’t detect its presence, or doesn’t detect the SIM card. Might even refuse to start if that module is missing. Might be possible to remove the antenna so the car thinks it’s just outside of the service area, but if it’s built into the PCB and the PCB is cast into resin/silicone for waterproofing, even this might be extremely difficult. Probably the module is also serialized* so replacing it with a “dummy” module or a module from a junkyard won’t spoof the system, either.
*Manufacturers have been serializing even airbags for years, making replacing a faulty one with one from a junkyard impossible.
Privacy and anonymity are two very different things. Meta et al very much tie your real world ID to your online persona plus track, analyse, store and sell everything you do on their platforms (and possibly what other sites and apps you use).
Your posts on Facebook can be set to “private” (only Meta and you/your friends see them), but they’re never anonymous. Eg if you start saying unwanted stuff if you live under an oppressive government, you will have IRL trouble.
Your post on Fediverse can be public (everyone can see them), but anonymous (no-one can tie your IRL identity to your online persona). Eg you can make an account here and say things about your oppressive government and if you use basic anonymity tools (VPN-s, e-mail aliases etc) you cannot easily be tracked down.
You can also be private and anonymous, eg tipping off journalists about stuff going on under your oppressive government by using anonymous, E2E encrypted message service like Briar. That way no-one can eavesdrop on your comms and only you know your real identity.
Still not as scary as this:
If you somehow got rid of your rest mass to move at the speed of causality, two things would happen: first, you’d experience no time; second, you’d instantly crash into your destination and die in a rather energetic way. That’s the neat thing about photons; from a photon’s POV time and distance do not exist. A photon, from its POV, is emitted and absorbed at the same time in the same place.
Much more interesting is having rest mass and moving at a high fraction of c: http://gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower-speed-of-light/
Blindsight by Peter Watts. It’s the quintessential modern take on cosmic horror. First there is the “external” horror of a truly alien spaceship that is compared to a “crown of thorns” and “devil’s baklava” with its strange inhabitants, and then there is the “internal” horror of musings about the nature and relationship between conciousness and intelligence. Then there is the transhuman main cast, including Jukka Sarasti the vampire and the AI of the ship Theseus. The sidequel Echopraxia is also great, expanding on the concepts and introduces concepts like human hivemind, militarized zombies and Portia-like alien intelligence.
Killing Star by Zebrowski and Pellegrino discusses the Dark Forest hypothesis with various subplots about scientific ambition gone wrong, personal loss, paranoia and religious zeal (some nutjobs cloned Jesus and Buddha, and the clones, after raising their eyebrow in amusement, went “Nah, we’re outta here!”). The novel starts with 99.9% of humans and life on Earth wiped out in relativistic bombing, and then it gets worse. The attacking aliens and their technology is well thought out and the way they hunt down the last remnants of humanity is harrowing.
Wrong. Vivaldi has had local translation for half a year now.
I’ll just leave this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VeFMdVIFsgs
Should, yes.
We lost a summer-long experiment back in the uni. Everyone knew someone should come in at least one time in an evening to check whether the mission-critical timer actually works. But no-one bothered to do it. Was a lot of head scratching before the heads of the experiment figured out why the data was all out of whack.
Or many service providers competing on price, quality of service and features, not competing on exclusivity like they do now.
Like grocery stores. Imagine if only one chain has the exclusive rights to sell potatoes and another one has rights to pasta. They can ask whatever price they want, because what you gonna do? Go to another store to get your 'taters cheaper? Hah, you’ll cry and you’ll pay what we ask! (BTW, growing your own potatos and sharing them with your neighbor infringes on our rights and is illegal. We’ll sue you to oblivion if we catch you doing it.)
Wouldn’t any off the shelf temperature+humidity sensor work? I use Sonoff and Aqara ones with Sonoff Zigbee coordinator and Zigbee2MQTT, both are somewhere around 15€ a pop, integrate painlessly and do the job. Aqara is a bit smaller and has air pressure sensor, too.
How does one find out what chips are in what USB sticks? Manufacturers don’t make this information available. At best you just find read and write speeds, usually just the max possible read speed and nothing else.