• 0 Posts
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 12th, 2023
  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    9·
    11 months ago

    Which will just push people towards file sharing. If your DRM makes your service less convenient than copyright infringement, people will infringe copyright.

    If companies start getting too draconian, the ad-blocking/circumvention/copying/sharing technologies will start getting smarter and harder to detect and circumvent. It is a battle that cannot be won.

    I’d say the main obstacle in the short term is that as Google controls both client side (Chrome) for the majority and server-side can manipulate web standards to make ad-blocking harder, by exploiting their near-monopoly. They’ve already done this to an extent by modifying browser extension APIs. But people can just switch browsers. I’ve already done that on mobile. And if ChromeOS prevents it, I’ll be erasing it and installing native Linux.

  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    30·
    11 months ago

    If its possible to watch the video, then it’s possible to watch the video without ads.

    Worst case scenario: videos can be downloaded and adverts stripped from them. (If you can watch it, you can copy it.) Would you be prepared to trade, say, a 20 minute timeshift delay on your YouTube videos’ initial publish time for no adverts? I would.

  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Which do you use: Lead pencils or normal pencils?
    3·
    11 months ago

    Lead pencils are normal pencils. A “lead pencil” is any pencil with a fixed lead running down the centre.

    However, the “lead” in a pencil is not made of lead, the chemical element. It is graphite and clay, and other materials depending on the type of pencil.

    Modern-style “lead pencils” have never used actual lead as the pencil lead.

    However, it should be noted that lead paint has been used in the past for the coating, which could lead to toxic effects when chewed or sucked, but this stopped by the mid 20th century.

    Do you perhaps mean mechanical pencil? (Where you can feed out the lead mechanically and refill, reusing the casing.)

  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Is it possible to train cats to group-walk with you like a pack of friendly wolves that consider you part of their kind/group?
    15·
    11 months ago

    It is possible to an extent with certain breeds, e.g. Egyptian Mau. However, they are curious and skittish so may not follow you everywhere if they find something interesting or get spooked. When you get too far from their known “territory” they may stop and wait for you to come back, (while also yelling at you to come back to the concern of passers-by!).

    I used to go for walks with my gf and her egyptian maus. They would follow along like a pride of tiny lions but spread out a bit, so while we walked on paths their parallel routes would go through gardens, over roofs, fields, fences, etc.

    In fact it was more of an effort to train them not to follow us everywhere, e.g. to the shops, work, etc. They would often follow neighbours’ children to school and back (and sometimes follow the wrong child home and get lost!).

    Maus are also more amenable to being on a leash than most breeds, although you need to get them used to it early in life.

    The main problem is if they decide to run away from something they are blazingly fast and near impossible to catch and recover from whatever inaccessible perch or hidey-hole they run to. My gf’s cats had been trained to return to the sound of jangling keys, but that only worked most of the time.

  • zero_iq@lemm.eetoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Why has the world started to mine coal again?
    0·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as that. Theoretically, if everyone was using state-of-the-art designs of fast-breeder reactors, we could have up to 300,000 years of fuel. However, those designs are complicated and extremely expensive to build and operate. The finances just don’t make it viable with current technology; they would have to run at a huge financial loss.

    As for Uranium for sea-water – this too is possible, but has rapidly diminishing returns that make it financially unviable quite rapidly. As Uranium is extracted and removed from the oceans, exponentially more sea-water must be processed to continue extracting Uranium at the same rate. This gets infeasible pretty quickly. Estimates are that it would become economically unviable within 30 years.

    Realistically, with current technology we have about 80-100 years of viable nuclear fuel at current consumption rates. If everyone was using nuclear right now, we would fully deplete all viable uranium reserves in about 5 years. A huge amount of research and development will be required to extend this further, and to make new more efficient reactor designs economically viable. (Or ditch capitalism and do it anyway – good luck with that!)

    Personally, I would rather this investment (or at least a large chunk of it) be spent on renewables, energy storage and distribution, before fusion, with fission nuclear as a stop-gap until other cleaner, safer technologies can take over. (Current energy usage would require running about 15000 reactors globally, and with historical accident rates, that’s about one major nuclear disaster every month). Renewables are simpler, safer, and proven ,and the technology is more-or-less already here. Solving the storage and distribution problem is simpler than building safe and economical fast-breeder reactors, or viable fusion power. We have almost all the technology we need to make this work right now, we mostly just lack infrastructure and the will to do it.

    I’m not anti-nuclear, nor am I saying there’s no place for nuclear, and I think there should be more funding for nuclear research, but the boring obvious solution is to invest heavily in renewables, with nuclear as a backup and/or future option. Maybe one day nuclear will progress to the point where it makes more sound sense to go all in on, say fusion, or super-efficient fast-breeders, etc. but at the moment, it’s basically science fiction. I don’t think it’s a sound strategy to bank on nuclear right now, although we should definitely continue to develop it. Maybe if we had continued investing in it at the same rate for the last 50 years it might be more viable – but we didn’t.

    Source for estimates: “Is Nuclear Power Globally Scalable?”, Prof. D. Abbott, Proceedings of the IEEE. It’s an older article, but nuclear technology has been pretty much stagnant since it was published.