Does step data just mean the number of steps (and timestamp, I assume), or do you actually track the routes walked, which would mean gps coords/ tracks.

Cause the first is much less invasive and problematic than the latter option.

Even worse? Senior devs that are confidently incorrect but are trusted completely because they created an “amazing” VBA macro for Excel 97 once.

The device needing more power won’t get it, simple. Depending on what device it is, it will automatically throttle down so it needs less power, but obviously it will also deliver less performance while so throttled. And if the power is missing during a very sensitive part of a process so there’s no time to throttle down, your PC could blue screen or restart.

It’s very unlikely to suffer any long-term damage from this.

Game passes exist for PC as well, and offer even more variety there.

Boot time should never take 30sec on PC as well. But most consoles are actually not much faster in boot and loading times. People tend to compare a PC booting from cold with a console just booting from sleep/hibernation mode.

Boot times on PC however can easily be further optimized, especially when not using Windows for gaming. A gaming Linux distro will be faster by leagues, even in a cold start.

You actually have gotten a bad explanation. There’s no such thing as being “a little too fast” which would cause this effect, and there definitely is no “spiraling out” due to inherent speed/momentum.

An object in orbit of another remains in orbit as long as its horizontal velocity is high enough to not be pulled into a collision with the parent, but low enough to not escape the gravitational pull altogether. The closer to the parent, the stronger gravity affects the object, so you have to go faster horizontally to keep “missing” the parent, making gravity only pull you into a circle around it instead. That’s why it’s also called orbital speed: the object is not going straight in a line, it travels at speed in an orbit.

If you want to change an orbit, you need to accelerate or decelerate. This energy has to come from somewhere. And obviously, the direction you accelerate in matters. If you speed up horizontally, increasing your orbital speed, you’ll get further away from the parent, but by moving further away, your orbital speed will decrease and be lowest at your furthest point. Then, if you don’t keep accelerating, you’ll start to get closer to the parent again, which makes you go faster. This is an elliptic orbit.

If you go fast enough horizontally, you eventually can get so far away that the parent’s gravity influence becomes negligible, and the gravitational influence of another parent matters more. This is called reaching escape velocity. If you leave earth orbit, this is usually the sun.

If you were to simply slow down the object in its orbital speed, the object would get closer to its parent until it collides.

If instead of accelerating the object “forward”/horizontal to human observer on earth, you’d accelerate “up”/away from the earth, you interestingly would not cause the object to get further away from its parent. Yes, you’d move higher up, but that would also mean that you equally slow down along the “forward” axis. So as explained before, if you stop accelerating, the object will start being pulled by gravity again until it reaches its now even closer than before proximity to its parent, half an orbit later on the other side. Because it’s now closer to the parent, it has sped up and will then start moving away again, another elliptic orbit has been achieved.

And if you accelerate “sideways”, so neither away from the surface nor forward along the orbital path, you actually change very little: you only affect the inclination of the orbit. Usually we think of objects going around the equator, but they don’t have to. An orbit can go any which angle, even rotating around the poles, going South to North or vice versa.

So long story short, how does the moon speed up? It doesn’t have and rocket engines or similar. The reason is the vast difference the earth and the moon rotate around themselves. The earth takes 24h to rotate. The moon takes roughly 27.3 days to rotate a single time. This causes the Earth to “push” the global tidal waves around its oceans much faster than the Moon gets pushed. This actually causes the moon to get “dragged along” a tiny little bit on every tidal rotation. This not only speeds up the rotation of the moon itself: the moon is so slow that it doesn’t have time to transfer all that rotational energy before the tidal wave on Earth has moved on the surface to be a bit on front of the Moon. This is the moment where the Earth’s center of gravity is a tiny bit “forward” of the middle of the Earth. This in turn pulls the moon forward along its orbital path, speeding it up horizontally. Obviously, this also means that Earth’s rotation gets actually slowed down by the same amount.

All these effects are incredibly tiny! The moon moves “away” at 3.8 cm per year, whereas it will take 50 years for an earth day to be a single millisecond longer.

A mesh surface is not automatically longer lasting. Quite the contrary, actually:

Mesh is “less material per surface”. This means more stress is put on the strands than for a full cover upholstery.

Mesh is open, which over time means that dirt and grime will start gathering in the cushion beneath the mesh. This can end up pretty nasty over the years of heavy usage.

In the end, it’s always about proper materials: good quality foam exists and are used by some, but obviously it’s usually more expensive. Same for the surface material: there’s super cheap PVC leather that will start flaking off in weeks, and there’s high quality PVC leather that will last a decade. Or just go for real leather if you got the money. All of the closed surfaces have the advantage of being incredibly easy to clean and maintain: simply wipe them with a wet towel. For real leather, only a tiny bit of extra care is needed ( waxing ).

Technically true, but I think everybody knows exactly what kind of dlc is meant, and because they still make up the majority of dlc content and addon-sized dlcs are so rare, it’s fair to call them that.

Moneygrab empty dlcs ( shiny horse armor! ) are stupid, and history has shown that people are not fiscally responsible enough to not be lured into spending absurd amounts of money for very shallow or plain empty content. “Vote with your wallet” doesn’t really work in the face of more and more insidious marketing efforts.

*rogue Roguelike

Though rougelike certainly sounds like an interesting genre too 😉

Regarding the profit incentive: providing free school lunches or medical/ hygiene supplies does not hurt profits. As the meals/supplies will still have to be sourced from the market, it probably will now be a few big contacts with big suppliers that will cover entire school districts.

The costs of these contracts will be a public burden unless they implemented a specific focus tax to pay for it, so it will come out of various broad tax pools. This means everyone pays a little bit so every kid has something to eat. Even if you don’t have any kids or if your kid gets homemade lunch packs. This is where the “social” aspect comes in.

Other countries, many of them European, actually go a step in the other direction: if you do not have kids, you actually pay a premium on your income tax. And that is generally accepted, because for society to live on, obviously kids are necessary. And if you don’t support society by raising kids, you at least help cover some of the associated costs. These premiums are explicitly used to fund kindergartens, schools etc…

An often valid capitalist criticism of public large contracts on infrastructure such as this is that the public offices tend to be notoriously bad negotiators, accepting worse deals than private companies would. This is because there’s little to no incentive for them to reach good terms. It also makes the process more vulnerable to corruption and politicking on a grander scale. These are not guaranteed to happen, good governance can definitely avoid this. But public governance simply isn’t that great to begin with in many areas.

If you have to say it often, it might indicate you have trouble formulating your initial advice in a way that is acceptable to people.

Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong, so it helps to be empathetic about it. Packing your advice or instructions into a tactful and diplomatic approach doesn’t cost you much, but makes it much more likely for your advice to be accepted and implemented. And the recipient will usually end up being grateful for having avoided a mistake. They might even start to look for your and ask advice in the future. And if you keep doing that, he might even consider you a nice person or even a friend.

An arrogant and condescending approach will only do harm, even if you are factually right.

Id2 is the actual successor. It’s planned to be the first VW “affordable” EV with a starting price below 25000 euros when it releases in 2025. At least they now try to target the budget market, but I’d never recommend a VW. They have done so much bad quality cars since the late 90s…

Laying even 10 times the cable should not be more difficult when you have 60 times the total population (335mio in US vs 5.6mio in Finland) and hence more resources.

And sure, Alaska definitely it’s expensive and inefficient to service, having a pop density of about 0.5 inhabitants per km². But unlike Northern Finland, most of Northern Alaska is in fact entirely void of human life and more akin to a desert. There really mostly are a handful of oil industry clusters and native communities. And still, the extremely low pop density means it’s only 730 000 people living in Alaska. That is 0.2% of the entire population of the USA. If you were to completely ignore and not service Alaska, you should have a an even easier time providing service to the vast majority of the US population in all the main states. I think it’s pretty clear this is a political failure and not a matter of financial resources or natural obstacles.

You are absolutely correct that distribution matters. However, Finland has an even more uneven population distribution than the US. 75% of the population lives in the costal cities, with 30% of the entire population living in the capital region( density of 193 persons/km²). The entire rest of the country is not empty dessert ( which would require no services), but very sparsely populated rural woodlands, down to 2 people per km².

Density still is an overall useful quantifier given that extra knowledge, as providing services for a small population of only 5.6mio inhabitants is not easy either. Sure, providing coverage for the 75% in the cities is fairly easy. But that still leaves 1.5mio rural residents, which require huge investments in cable to supply with broadband. And due to the vast distances, you definitely cannot cover them with wireless alone, if you were thinking that.

Finland is not a small country compared to its population density and distribution.

Finland has 18 inhabitants per km².

USA have 35 inhabitants per km².

What’s your source on the reverify thing? I use matrix a lot, and this hasn’t been an issue I ever experienced anymore since they introduced cross-signing a couple years ago.

Same goes for the common clients such as element. It has been clunky in the past, but after the past major overhauls ( also years ago now) everything has been silky smooth for me, if not better than others. The one thing left I prefer from Signal is the one-time photo share.

Matrix is great, clients are great too, only the server part still is annoyingly complicated and messy. Would only recommend that for tinkerers, on that case it’s a great path to learning about the complexity of addressing lots of security concerns that others gloss over.

Edit: to add - there’s a reason why the French government and the German military decided to build their secure internal IM infrastructure on Matrix. Obviously they are hosting their own private network, but if the concept is good enough for European government and military, it is an indicator for quality especially in terms of security and privacy.

It was unusual in how far south it was visible in many regions of the world. It’s been roughly 50 years since the last time that happened. Obviously the subjective impact depends a lot on where you live. Some see it every year, others only will get the chance when the Sun explodes and strips away our magnetosphere entirely. Which hopefully will not become a centennial event.

You are swapping correlation and causation to some degree. A country does not become industrialized by people starting to have kids at a later age. Rather, people start getting kids when their circumstances allow it: in industrialized countries, you rely less on children to provide for you when old, as there hopefully are social systems in place or you can save up on your own. Downside is, without social systems you also have to provide for yourself at old age, meaning people need to build up more savings before they feel ready for the financial burden a child is for around 20 years.

In developing countries, children often get little support above bare necessities and start contributing to the household income at a much earlier age, even before hitting their teens.

I’ll still use the opportunity to voice my opinion clearly on this: Yes, forced circumcision on infants is only a very small step above the also still common practice of female genetic mutilations at birth/infancy. It does not matter what reasons you claim, only medical necessity should matter. Society should protect its infants from any religion or tradition demanding body modifications of infants.

Leave people’s bodies alone until they can decide on their own what to do when there is zero proven medical benefit to doing it before without their informed consent.

The common “improved hygiene” argument is nonsensical. You know what improves hygiene? Washing, and teaching kids how to wash themselves.

Otherwise you could cut off ears using the same logic. No ears, no need to wash behind the ears.

I was about to say… What does “suitable” mean? I grew up in the 90s, and “suitable games” ranged from SimCity or the settlers to age of empires, crusader Kings, quake, doom, unreal tournament or half life.

There is no need to over protect kids from the “simple” evils: when I was very young, I didn’t want to play violent or scary games, even knowing they exist. Later I got curious and explored them. Depending on your choice a game such as the settlers, age of empires or crusader Kings could well be classified violent and “unsuitable”. But violence is everywhere, and those were some of the games that I fondly remember for instilling a huge curiosity in history and cultures in me. And yes, we were marketing victims as well: everyone spent way too much on Magic, Pokemon or Yu-Gi-Oh cards and related toys. But it didn’t infect every part of our lives.

Help your kids reflect on their choices and wants. Help them find out why they really want to pay too much money for that shiny Roblox skin. And offer alternatives with free, open content sharing so they realize they are being swindled. Media literacy is much tougher today because companies got much more insidious marketing vectors to infect kids.

Nowadays there are thousands of games being released per week, in addition to classics such as Minecraft, Terraria, Rimworld, Eco, which still have very strong modding and multiplayer communities.

People should just stop trying to interfere with people’s private life in general. Get pregnant or don’t, how is that a concern to me?

As long as it’s two consenting adults, which should be obvious, but sadly apparently isn’t.