By then, I don’t think that the use of earth’s orbital period around the sun would make sense as a unit of measurement. It is important to track the seasons if you’re living in an agricultural society. But the orbital period of the earth is not consistent across time, nor the time it takes for the earth to rotate. It doesn’t make a good unit of measurement. And don’t get me started on leap years, leap seconds, negative leap seconds, timezones and daylight saving times…

I’d prefer to base the new unit of time based on “Plank time”. About 10^44 of these are about one second. Now if we switch to the duodecimal system we can define 12^41 × Plank time to be our standard unit. It’s about a third of an earth second. 144 of these (12^43) equal roughly 3/4 of a minute. 144 of these (12^45) is about 1.8 hours. 12 of these (12^46) could be the equivalent of a day, 12 of that could be an equivalent of a week, and you can find an equivalent for a year. The duodecimal is unnecessary, but it makes division a bit neater. Now peak a date well before the beginning of human history to avoid the need for negative years (BC / AD) and that’s it.

That way you get a single number that you can manipulate arithmetically. Not like yyyy/mm/dd format where each part is a different length.

This proves nothing. Of course there would be people who wish for any deal regardless of the conditions and it is not surprising that they will confront the government about it.

Israel cares a whole lot about its hostages. Evidence for that are the prices they were willing to pay in the past.

But sure, let’s go with your logic. Why can’t Israel just go carpet-bombing the crowded part in the south of the Gaza strip that all the refugees fled to? It would be a very effective way to eradicate them all. They are so crowded in such a small area that it’s possible to kill a couple hundred thousands in a single day. Wow, Israel has a lot to learn on how to ethnically cleanse a region.

This is simply not true.

There were talks about up to 15 hostages, of 239 in demand for 4 days of ceasefire. Hamas needs this ceasefire desperately to regroup and assess the damages. The chaos now serves Israel well and apparently it puts much more pressure on Hamas. The ground invasion proves very effective. Maybe as Hamas becomes more desperate the “price” for the hostages will drop. Alternatively, if Israel will allow them to regroup, the war will take significantly more time because it will be much harder to eradicate them. Maybe the Israelis know where the hostages are held and after a ceasefire the hostages will be transferred to a different hideout, or smuggled via the tunnels to Egypt and from there to who knows where.

It’s intentional. They’d like to drop features to cut on design and manufacture costs, while taking out features most of the target audience doesn’t really care about. Some of these are just greedy. Phones used to rely on microSD expansion, but once you drop this option you could charge for additional space much more than what the equivalent microSD card would cost. You can also stop shipping phones with chargers because most people have them anyway. This is pure profit as the customer is paying the same price, but doesn’t get a charger.

As for other features, they probably dropped them because people just didn’t care enough.

It seems to be incredibly difficult to design a phone from scratch, and that’s why we only see a handful of manufacturers, with the small endeavors being able to make something that looks obsolete by the time it rolls out and even then it takes a few months to overcome all the bugs and glitches. Fairphone is the closest we’ve got, but it’s still far off and strays further with each generation.

There are gaming phones, phones with crazy cameras, and iPhones where the lack of features is a feature. What I wish to have is a phone with as many features and functionality as possible.

That includes (but not limited to): IR blaster Headphone jack MicroSD card slot FM Radio RGB Notification/Status LED

Rather than a slim phone with a glossy finish that will pick up scratches right away unless wrapped in a phone case, the outer cover of the phone should be rugged and replaceable. Like with old Nokia phones. I don’t care about few extra grams, or another millimeter of thickness. And I’m sure I’m not the only one.

I was hopeful about the Fairphone at first, but they started removing features as well.

I really liked the times when features were added and not killed off.

10 years ago you could purchase a flagship phone with IR blaster for controlling whatever you couldn’t find a remote for, or trolling people in public spaces by turning off their TVs. Cloud storage wasn’t as popular, but if your phone died, the images were safe on the micrSD card. Bluetooth headsets were a thing, but you could always just use a cheap pair of headphones to stick in the headphone jack. People who desired it could install a custom ROM with all kinds of optimizations and less bloat. It used to be a lot more popular back then. Other than cameras, battery life, and reversible and more robust USB-C connectors, there isn’t much innovation. I used to feel like I owned my device much more back then. Now I only use the stock ROM, can either use wireless headphones or ones that use the charging port. I can’t insert a microSD, or test new features for Android ported from other devices by someone on XDA Developers. I’m not using the phone the way I want, but the way the companies who made it decided on.

Out of all types of space junk, I’d be least worried about stuff on the surface of the moon. If anything, these piles of human waste contain the gut bacteria of the astronauts and was exposed to decades of radiation, temperatures and extreme conditions. It will be an interesting thing to study once they’ll be able to create a research lunar base.

HP can make good printers. It has the right hardware, capabilities and price (Of the printers, not the ink) to be a very good product. It’s just their obnoxiously asshole-design software that is designed to make you to keep paying for using a product you already own.

Yup. Just like Spez predicted. The site is maybe less popular, but it will survive. The protests will die off eventually. The Reddit clones will never be as popular and active as Reddit once was. Maybe eventually the investers and advertisers will return, and it will be seen in hindsight as a smart move. The quality of the content may take a drop, but it was a calculated risk of making it more profitable.

Back when I was a kid and got my first computer, I was mostly offline except for the occasional dial-up session. I didn’t have much to do on the internet anyway and it was quite expensive. I remember being amazed the first time I have set up to meet a friend over ICQ, rather than a phone call, of being able to communicate with other computers from mine. It didn’t matter whether these computers were at a neighbors’ house, a different city or entirely different country. I was looking forward to the internet giving us ways to connect like never before. No barriers, just directly communicating and bridging cultural differences and whatnot. Little did I knew that this was just one phase, as the internet gets more and more segregated. Rather than connecting with people, it gives you the ability to filter out whatever you don’t agree with, while staying connected with those who share your beliefs. It’s like we are no longer living the same reality and can’t even agree over fundamental things. I miss the old naive days of the internet when we feared viruses and the occasional pedophile in a chat room. Nowadays it’s the possibility of spreading misinformation that could overthrow a government. Either having it going uncontrolled and unregulated, or having a private company in control of such power.

Personally, I think that this should be the choice of an individual user rather than the platform.

I don’t think that Lemmy will ever be as popular as Reddit used to be. The recent events deflated the platform, and Lemmy will grow in popularity on their expanse. At this point Reddit is in decline while Lemmy is not mature enough as a community. Times are changing, and users who left Reddit either in protest of the recent changes, due to a decline in content quality or because of both of these things will find a different platform. It might be the end of the glory days of link aggregators in the style of Reddit, of AMAs, announcements and celebrities lurking and commenting. It was so nice to stumble across comments by Rick Astley or Peter Mayhew (The original Chewbacca), or your favorite YouTuber. I don’t expect Lemmy to be able to replicate that.