ivanvector

This would literally work. If one station has $9.49 (/gal) on its sign and the station across the street is $3.79 (/L), there are absolutely enough dumb Americans who will line up for the more expensive gas with the lower number.

A&W nearly went bankrupt because Americans couldn’t figure out that 1/3lb is more than 1/4lb. This is a good idea.

There’s not a whole lot of entertainment value in having a bunch of people sitting in silence texting other people off screen with the occasional loud video being played to nobody. Even if they are in space.

The company is Dutch but the phones are mostly manufactured and assembled in China. The company is transparent about this and discloses on their website their efforts to do this as ethically as they can.

Fairphone 6 has an IP55 rating. Some resistance to water spray but can’t be submerged.

Well, cancelling successful products is pretty on-brand for Netflix.

The “modern electronics” you mentioned are very low-power devices in the range of things you can power from a household socket. They’re also low-voltage DC, which means that no matter what voltage/frequency you can get from the wall it is being converted, and converting AC to DC is electrically very simple. The difference in circuitry between converting from 110V or 220V is just a transformer with a center tap, and the frequency doesn’t matter at all since DC is 0Hz anyway.

With high-power devices, pretty much anything with a motor or a heating element, the device is designed to match the voltage and frequency available in the region they’re going to be used. An AC motor’s speed depends on the frequency of the power supplied to it, and a heating element depends on voltage, which is why electric kettles and ranges boil water much more quickly in 220V regions. Travel adapters are basically just a transformer, which changes the voltage but not the frequency. The difference between 50Hz and 60Hz isn’t that big so most motors will still run but with impaired performance and maybe timing issues, but others will fail in spectacular and dangerous ways. Supplying a heating element with the wrong voltage will make it either not heat up, or heat up too much and start a fire. The different plug types ensure that you don’t plug in a high power device to power it’s not designed for.

If we were going to standardize on one plug type, we would also have to standardize on one power signal. Ignoring the political issues, that would mean that any region that doesn’t already use that standard signal would have to immediately retool all of their power plants, their entire transmission system, every industrial facility, and adapt or replace every AC household appliance. And there’s not really any good reason to do it, other than convenience.

To elaborate: in 220V countries a kettle can pull 3,000W. The spec for USB PD 3.1 is max 240W and requires a specialized cable.

Using an online calculator: a 1m cable capable of handling 3,000W at USB-PD voltage would be almost 9mm in diameter.

Nicolas Cage had a small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as one of Judge Reinhold’s coworkers at the burger joint. Credited as Nicolas Coppola.

Tobey Maguire had a part in Empire Records. His scene was cut but he still appears in the credits.

Jacob Wysocki (of Dropout) has a small role in Pitch Perfect.

I’m not a civil engineer but did some civil engineering in university and have a bit of an interest in urban planning. Still, I’m mostly guessing.

Regardless of where storm drains are placed on a street, they don’t have infinite capacity. In a heavy enough rainfall event, they will flood. The placement or frequency of drains isn’t the limiting factor, it’s the outlet capacity. In nature, rain falls on the ground and is absorbed, and finds its way into the watercourse slowly. In urban areas, storm drains gather up rainfall over a wide area and channel it towards the watercourse much more quickly, and if that outflow isn’t controlled it can lead to catastrophic flooding and erosion downstream. Look up 1952’s Hurricane Hazel and its effects on Toronto for what that looks like. If more rainfall flows into the system than the outlet can handle, there’s nowhere else for the water to go and the drains flood.

With a crowned profile and drainage at the sides, excess water will pool only up to the height of the gutter before overflowing and finding ground or another low spot away from the road, so the road will only be partially obstructed at least until the flooding is much worse (and by then you’re probably well into an evacuation). If the road were sloping towards drainage at the centre, then floodwater fills the entire road basin before overflowing, and your road is blocked, and stays blocked until the drains can take the water again, long after the rain has stopped. Blocked roads make managing an emergency much more complicated.

In North America we’re being conditioned to accept ever-larger vehicles as normal, and it’s working beautifully (for car makers, much less so society or the environment).

My mom drives a Mazda something-or-other crossover, and gets annoyed when I call it her truck. She insists it’s a “car” and “not that big”, both arguments made foolish when I roll up in my Nissan Micra.

A while back I was comparing the 1987 Ford Ranger (what I learned on) with a more recent Ford Maverick, out of curiosity. The Maverick is nearly the same size as the Ranger (the box is a bit longer) but thirty five hundred pounds heavier. No doubt a lot of that is battery, but holy shit.

Nice to know Toyota still has a hatch. Nissan stopped selling the Micra in Canada and almost nobody has anything that small in their offerings now.

If you’re using the dongle that came with the mouse, that’s a proprietary wireless connection made between the mouse and the dongle. The device your computer sees is the dongle, which is connected to the computer via physical USB connection. It doesn’t use the computer’s Bluetooth radio, so turning off Bluetooth doesn’t affect it.

If you want to test if your computer’s Bluetooth is truly off, you can probably find a Bluetooth device sniffing app and see if it detects your computer when you’ve disabled it, but I don’t know of one to suggest. You can pretty well trust that if you’ve turned it off in software, it’s off.

Forced mass deportations. Of non-white and/or non-Christian populations whether immigrant or not, though immigration is almost always the scapegoat.

I only sub to Deezer, a French streaming service that actively filters AI music and blocks it from their algorithms and search results.

If you’re using one of the clients that supports piefed (Interstellar does, not sure about others) you can use piefed’s /r/random feature to find new communities. I can’t figure out how to do it in the app, but https://piefed.social/r/random should work.

I’ve been running games that advertise they run in linux for a few years, but only within the last 6 months or so started trying out made-for-Windows games, and it’s really incredible just how good the Proton compatibility layer is now. All of the games I’ve tried are at least playable - most run perfectly, a few are a bit slow, and some you have to tweak settings but there’s a big database of how to get different games to work at appdb.winehq.org. Not one of the games in my library don’t run on linux at all, other than a couple with kernel anti-cheats that I don’t play any more anyway.

I was dual-booting but a couple months ago I deleted my Windows partition and now I just run linux full time. If a game only runs on Windows, I just won’t buy it.

Ahh, I remember the first time I heard the intro music to Star Control through my Sound Blaster instead of through my motherboard’s piezo speaker. Like the audio version of The Wizard Of Oz switching to colour.

The Chipmunks Movie, not the live action one but the animated one from the mid-80s. I had nightmares for years about a scene where their hot air balloon gets blown around by a hurricane, which I watched I guess around the same time as Hurricane Hugo.

It’s also very possible that my brain invented the whole thing.

If you enjoy the original Civilization, be sure to try out Freeciv. Basically the original game but with expanded gameplay and updated for compatibility. It’s OpenTTD to Transport Tycoon, if you’re familiar with those games. It also has multiplayer features, and there are sites that run turn-per-day MMO events.

The same EA that was recently sold to and is now part-owned by an investment firm owned by Jared Kushner and with ties to Donald Trump? Yeah, that’s not getting kernel access to any of my systems.

I’ve read the same argument in the other direction: that repeated thermal cycling of electronic components degrades more than keeping them at operating temperature constantly. I’m sure there’s some truth to both arguments and the best approach depends on particular use cases.

As far as needing to power down to reset the state of the hardware and the OS fully, that’s totally unnecessary with linux.