And google forum search, which is pretty great overall, is often full of facebook comments. I don't mind the reddit results, since they still usually (somehow) contain the best answers to my queries. It would be great if it could be further filtered for actual forums.
Conceptually it’s difficult to explain to most people why this would not benefit them.
Like, I don’t maintain the delusion that I can’t be precisely identified by the apps I use. I just am vehemently opposed to it being tied to my government issued identity, which could be arbitrarily revoked and controlled by people who dont have pure profit as their motive. A lot of people probably find that overly paranoid.
I've wanted to try this on my old Pixel 5, but it has the dreaded screen/motherboard failure. It appears there is no solution for that short of replacing the screen/mobo, which i've already done once after cracking it.
I'm glad there is a name for these. I remember once driving past one[0], but the combination of terrain, road curvature, sunlight and foreground/background around them made a pair of these antenna look like a pair of giant hawks perched in a fire tower. For a split second it was a bit creepy.
Wasn't this the original basis for their justification of being a monopoly? And that the concession to the public was their mandate to operate bell labs and give fruits of their research to industry who did not participate in the monopoly?
Getting call records from the phone company, a private business that collects it's users' data, used to require a warrant. Why is it different now? Only because it's so trivial to hand over access to the database? I think in the past, the only thing that provided protection from illegal searches and seizures was the physical impracticality and friction involved in doing so. The warrant just allowed LEOs to dedicate their limited resources to a particular search. That is no longer a constraint.
Yes. I catch myself all the time when I wonder how people are so willing to place these spy devices inside their home. But, "oh yeah, I have a phone on my nightstand every night :-/".
BepiColombo [0] uses 581 kg of Xe gas for its electric propulsion. I remember reading at the time this was being built that it consumed a measurable portion of the global xenon production for that year. This post reminded me to look that up, and it seems to be only ~1% of the ~50 tons, which is quite a bit less than I remember but still quite significant for a single application to use a non-trivial amount of the supply.
Given that ~100 million tons of oxygen are produced annually, extracting all the xenon from that air would yield about 170 tons/year. So there's a bit of room for growth.
The BepiColombo number is similar, I think, to the amount of xenon made annually in nuclear reactors (where it occurs in spent fuel as the result of fission.)
I think it might have taken a larger percentage of high-grade ultrapure xenon, a narrower market than the global bulk supply. A 1% impurity is fine if you are using xenon for welding, not so much if you are firing zenon plasma at a grid carrying a few hundred volts. A little bit of o2 in there and your grid would be rust very quickly.
Inert gas in welding isn't used to carry heat, it's used as shielding to prevent oxidation, nitridation, and ingress of hydrogen. In any case, the heat capacity of the noble gases are almost identical. What xenon might do is reduce diffusion of heat away from the weld, as its thermal conductivity is just 1/3rd that of argon.
In practice I think a combination of argon and CO2 is typically used for inert gas welding of steel.
It depends on the process. Argon/CO2 is used for MIG welding, while TIG generally uses pure argon. In some situations that justify the expense, helium is used instead as it allows deeper weld penetration.
I wish I could properly cite it, but one of my favorite HN comments recently was, to paraphrase, "thing, but from the Internet". Which is to say that old rules don't apply, for some reason.
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