It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

By that logic, you should object to cheese being labelled as “cheddar” cheese, because that’s a place too and you’ve almost certainly never seen cheese which came from there.

It’s a stupid rule

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

That’s going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There’s no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn’t attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven’t federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that’s just not possible

The assesment that he’s the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

Normally that’s fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don’t spend it?

There are also people who’s wealth isn’t held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can’t neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon’s horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn’t be comparing like for like

Fair enough, I didn’t consider compute resources

The actual length of the password isn’t the problem. If they were “doing stuff right” then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.

The fact that they’ve specified a limit is strong evidence that they’renot doing it right

HARM is a category of weapon which seeks things like radar or jammers. They weren’t suggesting that the jammers are literally harmless.

In unrelated news: the jammers are, in fact, harmless unless you’re making a habit of riding on top of the tank. The radio energy isn’t going to penetrate a significant thickness of conductive material, such as armour plating. Or unless you’re the person being jammed, in which case they’re a different category of harmful

While that sort of analysis probably isn’t impossible, it is computationally unrealistic to do in realtime on a language which wasn’t designed for it.

It’s the sort of thing which is simple in 99% of cases, but the last 1% might well be impossible. Sadly it’s the last 1% you need to worry about, because anyone trying to defeat your system is going to find them

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

GNU Terry Pratchet

Also, it’s probably possible to fix the partition so that it’s as big as it used to be. It’s likely that some of your data is corrupted already, but the repartitioning won’t have erased the old data except here or there where it’s written things like new file tables in space it now considers unused

What they’re suggesting is to back up the whole disk, rather than any single partition. Anything you do to the partition to try and recover it has the potential to make a rescuable situation hopeless. If you have a copy of the exact state of every single bit on the drive, then you can try and fix it safe in the knowledge that you can always get back to exactly where you are now if you make it worse

It depends on what exactly gets cut or punctured, of course, but my understanding is that without proper surgical intervention it can be an exceptionally slow and painful way to die.

The organs in the gut are mostly intestines. You’re not going to die just because they’ve spilled out, but you’re going to be bleeding pretty badly and if whatever caused them to spill out is still around then you’re pretty screwed.

The bigger problem is that it’s unlikely they’ve just spilled out, they’re probably also sliced open. Now you’re in serious trouble, because there’s lots of blood in there so now you’re bleeding really badly. You’ve also got blood and the content of your digestives system mixing together, and that means some very nasty bacteria which are normally safely contained now have access to your blood.

I suspect the most likely dangerous situation is a stab wound. In that case you’ll probably experience internal bleeding. There are no shortage of places for blood to go inside your body around there, including into your digestive system. I don’t think there’s anything much to stop blood from flowing endlessly into there, and you could bleed to death even if the external wound doesn’t look like it’s bleeding all that badly.

In summary, getting stabbed in the gut will contaminate your blood and lead to potentially endless bleeding which can’t be treated with bandages because it’s inside. Even if you avoid bleeding to death, you’re probably going to die from a massive infection

Not exactly. There are some species which haven’t changed all that much for millions of years, and those have certainly managed excellent adaptability.

Others, though, might find themselves evolving to cope with the climate right now at the expense of being vulnerable to some future problem. Say the climate is very hot, but in a few tens of thousands of years there’ll be an ice age. An animal which is well adapted to the ice age will probably go extinct before it arrives, having all been eaten by an animal well adjusted to the heat which is here right now.

“In the end” isn’t useful if you get outcompeted in the meantime

Yeah, this is fake. The contactless payment system depends on a loop of wire running around the whole card (or, at least, taking up much of the card’s area). There’s no way a phone could communicate with it after chopping that off