AnyOldName3

Campaigning against coal in the UK is just a distraction. No one wants to still be using coal. Today the final shutdown of the UK's last coal-fired powerstation happened (and it's not been running most of the time for several years) and the UK's last steel mill that made virgin steel was closed, too. There's nothing major that still uses coal left after today.

I was reinforcing your point about using a monitor and a Linux PC not being able to replace all the things a smart TV can do. You said streaming would work, but regular TV channels wouldn't, and I pointed out that even streaming would be limited as the major streaming services don't allow full quality via a browser, especially on Linux where HDCP can't work.

I'm not arguing for anything in the post above, just pointing out that a broken (or badly repaired) insulin pump is genuinely more dangerous than having no insulin pump. That doesn't have to count against the right to repair one, as if you've got the right to repair an insulin pump, and do so badly, it doesn't mean you're legally forced to use it afterwards, just like I've got the right to inject all the insulin in my fridge with an insulin pen back to back, but I'm not legally forced to do so.

I do think the right to repair should be universal, but as I think that medical stuff should be paid for by the state, NHS-style, that would end up meaning that the NHS could repair medical devices themselves if they deemed it more economical to do so and recertify things as safe than to get the manufacturer to repair or replace them. The NHS is buying the devices, and gets the right to repair them, and that saves the taxpayer money, as even if they don't actually end up repairing anything, it stops manufacturers price gouging for repairs and replacements, and if the manufacturer goes bust or refuses to repair something, there're still ways to keep things working. It doesn't mean unqualified end users can't use their new right to repair their medical devices and risk getting it wrong, but if you've got an option of a free repair/replacement, most people would choose the safe and certified repair over their own bodge.

Sorry, streaming from a browser on a Linux PC is limited to 540x860 due to an inability to establish an HDCP chain. Have you tried using the TV's native Netflix app instead?

If you've got a broken insulin pump, assuming you're in a country with a functioning healthcare system, you should have been given a spare pump with the original, and probably some insulin pens, so when one breaks, you fall back to the spare, and get given a new one to be the new spare (or could get the broken one repaired). Using the spare is completely safe.

If you don't have a spare, your sugars would go up over several hours, but you'd have a day or two to get to a hospital and potentially several days after that for someone to find you and get you to a hospital, so it's not safe, but also not something you'd die from if you had any awareness that there was a problem.

If you've got an incorrectly-repaired pump, you could have it fail to give you enough insulin, and end up with higher sugars, notice the higher sugars, and then switch to the spare. That'd be inconvenient, but not a big deal. However, you could also have it dump its entire cartridge into you at once, and have your sugars plummet faster than you can eat. If you don't have someone nearby, you could be dead in a couple of hours, or much less if you were, for example, driving. That's much more dangerous than having no insulin at all.

Prosthetic legs don't have a failure mode that kills you, so a bad repair can't make them worse than not having them at all, but insulin pumps do, so a bad repair could.

The article says they were claimed to be found in his car by a then-girlfriend who took $10,000 reward money to testify, not that they were found by law enforcement and collected as evidence and checked against a list of things that were known to have been stolen. It's plausible that nothing was found and the whole story was made up for cash, or that it was just some stuff he'd bought at a yard sale that was misidentified, or something he'd stolen from somewhere else. Someone saying someone had junk in their car isn't strong evidence of anything.

Even if the AI bubble pops spectacularly and Microsoft aren't training any new models in two years, Microsoft still have massive datacentres that need to compute loads of things, and loads of things they'd like to compute, but don't because they don't have the capacity, but might end up doing if they're suddenly not training AI models on lots of machines. Having free electricity for twenty years is useful for a tech company with or without AI, and nuclear is a good way to get back on track for being carbon neutral soonish like they were going to be before all the recent AI stuff.

Nuclear is even less killy than hydroelectric (dams sometimes burst and drown a bunch of people downriver) and wind (sometimes technicians fall off when fixing a turbine) per kilowatt hour, despite the potential for really scary failures, largely because it generates so much power when it's working.

In real life, all quantum entanglement means is that you can entangle two particles, move them away from each other, and still know that when you measure one, the other will have the opposite value. It's akin to putting a red ball in one box and a blue ball in another, then muddling them up and posting them to two addresses. When opening one box, you instantly know that because you saw a red ball, the other recipient has a blue one or vice versa, but that's it. The extra quantum bit is just that the particles still do quantum things as if they're a maybe-red-maybe-blue superposition until they're measured. That's like having a sniffer dog at the post office that flags half of all things with red paint and a quarter of all things with blue paint as needing to be diverted to the police magically redirect three eighths of each colour instead of different amounts of the two colours. The balls didn't decide which was red and which was blue until the boxes were opened, but the choice always matches.

The US government asked the big ISPs how much it would take to wire everyone up to high-speed Internet, then passed a bill to give them a ludicrous lump sum to do so (IIRC it was hundreds of billions). The money was split between dividends, buying up other companies, and suing the federal government for attempting to ask for the thing they'd paid for, and in the end, the government gave up. That left loads of people with no high-speed Internet, and the ISPs able to afford to buy out anyone who attempted to provide a better or cheaper service. Years down the line, once someone with silly amounts of money for a pet project and a fleet of rockets appeared, there was an opportunity for them to provide a product to underserved customers who could subsidise the genuinely impossible-to-run-a-cable-to customers.

If the US had nearly-ubiquitous high-speed terrestrial Internet, there wouldn't have been enough demand for high-speed satellite Internet to justify making Starlink. I think this is what the other commenter was alluding to.

That was basically because you could die from pretending to do it. The challenge was to eat a laundry pod. That's really obviously not safe, but biting a laundry pod and spitting it out after pretending to swallow and die for the camera seemed like a reasonable way to freak people out while skipping the dangerous part to a handful of teenagers. The biting step was the real dangerous one, though, as concentrated laundry detergent can corrode tongues and throats and windpipes really quickly, and you'd lose the capacity to decide what to swallow, what to inhale, and what to hold in your mouth and spit out within seconds. This kills the teenager. The news generally reported this as Teenager dies attempting Tide Pod Challenge instead of Teenager dies attempting to fake Tide Pod Challenge, which didn't tell teenagers it wasn't safe to pretend to do, but did make pretending to do it seem like a better prank, so overall only made it more tempting.