AnyOldName3

This isn’t really the same kind of bug. Those bugs made instructions emit the wrong answer, which is obviously really bad, and they’re really rare. The bugs in the article make instructions take different amounts of time depending on what else the CPU has done recently, which isn’t something anyone would notice except that by asking the kernel to do something and measuring the time to execute affected instructions, an attacker that only had usermode access could learn secrets that should only be available to the kernel.

The $5 Windows keys have never been legitimate - either they’re just people selling keys they’ve generated with a keygen or bought with a stolen credit card, or it’s students reselling free keys they’ve got from Dreamspark or a sysadmin selling keys from their employer’s enterprise licence, which, in Microsoft’s eyes, are all piracy. An OEM copy of Windows 11 Pro is about €150 and can’t be transferred to a different motherboard, and a retail copy which can be transferred is about €300. A one-time purchase copy of Office is about €120 (it’s also available as a subscription). These machines either have at least €270 of software on them, or €0 worth of pirated software on them.

It can’t be legitimate because licences for the bundled software cost more than the machines are being sold for. Also, the hardware included isn’t officially Windows 11 compatible, so selling it with Windows 11 installed is misleading the customer into thinking they’re buying something much more recent than they really are. For a decent number of people buying these, they’re likely to own something just as new already, and could get a free upgrade to Windows 11 by doing the same configuration tweaks as the sellers did.

Originally, that was from Dave, which is owned by the BBC.

AGPL is a full-on FOSS licence with strong copyleft requirements, not a measly open-source licence like Apache, which could be pivoted to proprietary at a moment’s notice. We’re communicating through an AGPL-licensed system right now as it’s what Lemmy’s licensed as. If they were going for a corporate-friendly licence, AGPL is the last thing they’d choose as it forces you to share source code with even more people than the regular GPL does.

Wikipedia management shouldn’t be under that pressure. There’s no profit motive to enshittify or replace human contributions. They’re funded by donations from users, so their top priority should be giving users what they want, not attracting bubble-chasing venture capital.

It could still be to cover up war crimes that the BBC team hadn’t got quite close enough to discover yet, but the IDF were concerned that they might have if not scared away. It could just be for opsec, but them having been competent at stopping the BBC seeing whatever it was they were hiding isn’t proof that the thing being hidden was benign.

Even accounting for disasters, coal power puts more radionuclides into the environment into the environment than nuclear for the same amount of energy. If you dig lots of stuff up and spew it all into the air, the small amount of radioactive material that’s in coal and the rocks around it is much bigger than the tiny amounts of nuclear fuel a nuclear power plant gets through. If the only concern is radiation that persists on geological timescales, then swapping all coal for nuclear is an improvement. Other things that release surprising amounts of radiation include making things out of granite (it’s usually got uranium in) and importing bananas and Brazil nuts.

If it’s changes on a geological timescale in general, then as fossil fuels form on a geological timescale (the clue’s in the name), digging them up is going to take unfathomable amounts of time to undo. It won’t even be as quick as the first time around, as most coal formed before ligninase evolved, so trees fell over and didn’t rot and usually became coal, buy they’re biodegradable now so need specific fossilisation-friendly conditions to become coal.

That problem isn’t unique to nuclear. It wouldn’t be newsworthy if a worn-out wind turbine blade was incinerated unsafely, and that’s something that happens routinely and is much more damaging than dumping this quantity (about a beer crate full) of depleted uranium. The reason we’re hearing about this incident is that the nuclear industry is held to a much higher standard than anything else in the energy sector. There are good reasons for that - the worst case scenario for a single fuckup is much worse - but a lot of it is just fear-mongering by fossil fuel companies who needed to lie to make something seem more dangerous than what they do, even before climate change was recognised.

Nuclear is so much better than fossil fuels that even if we cut every corner and accepted a Chernobyl-scale indicent would happen a couple of times a year, it’d still be preferable over the gradual phase out of fossil fuels and resulting climate crisis we’re on track for.

Then I’ve got some bad news for you about Putin, too.

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.

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.

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%.

You’d expect musk of all people to know you need to spend 45 billion to buy the server first.