LostXOR

Yeah I got lucky with my battery; it’s at 800 cycles currently and still holds plenty of charge for my daily use. A replacement kit is also only $50 so I figure there’s not much point in trying to be efficient for a marginal lifespan improvement. I’ll probably end up replacing it when it hits 1000.

I think a two disk dual boot is safe. I’ve had that setup for a while and Windows hasn’t broken anything yet (though I only use it maybe once a month).

You may be right, seems like it only shows you posts by number of likes. But a burner account is nearly effortless to create anyways.

Is that a problem? You could already just view their posts without an account, or create a burner account. Might be a hot take, but I think someone with a public account shouldn’t expect to be able to hide it from specific people.

An alternative argument: Water generally makes things “wet” due to it forming hydrogen bonds with said things. Water also readily forms hydrogen bonds with itself. Therefore, water is wet.

Do you have a source for that? I am unaware of any modern hard drives that support reading individual bits; the minimum unit of data that can be read is generally one sector, or 512 bytes. If the sector fails to be read, the drive will usually attempt to read it several times before giving up and reporting a read error to the PC.

Data recovery companies can remove the platters from a damaged drive and put them in a working drive, as long as the platters are in good condition, preventing further damage. (If the platters themselves are damaged, you’re screwed either way).

If your data is really important, you should send it to a reputable data recovery service. Using the drive any more (even with a tool like SpinRite) risks further damage.

If every one of those users uploads one 10MB file, that would be two petabytes of data. At S3’s IA prices that’s $25k/month. And people are uploading far, far more data than that.

I’m tired of people ascribing any sort of intelligence to AI. It’s not thinking, it’s not seeing you as a threat, it’s just predicting a probable response based on its training data.

Seems like a reasonable donation prompt; it’s infrequent, unobtrusive, and can be easily dismissed and disabled. Some people are so sensitive to the idea of any sort of soliciting that they forget projects do need money to function.

Now that’s an interesting idea; basically external regenerative braking. Not too helpful on a highway, but I suppose it would be useful in the situations you described.

That’s a fair point, a device could theoretically harvest energy that would have otherwise been wasted, and that would be green energy. I imagine a wind system could work, though it might result in cars experiencing additional drag from slower wind speeds.

However, the piezoelectric generators mentioned in the article quite clearly do not use waste energy. They compress under the weight of the cars, turning a small amount of gravitational potential energy into electricity. That energy must be made up with extra fuel.

Finally, even if all of the vehicles on the road were powered by clean electricity, it would still be a useless system. Piezoelectrics are nowhere near 100% efficient, so you’re just taking electricity from the vehicles at a loss.

Last year the California Energy Commission posted the results of a study aimed at assessing efficiency of deploying piezoelectric systems to generate clean electricity from roadways.

“Based on the laboratory evaluations and road tests, the application of the piezoelectric energy harvesting system in one lane of a one-mile-long roadway has the potential to generate 72,800 kilowatt-hours of energy per year,” the team reported.

How is that clean energy, in any sense of the word? Any system that gains some energy from a passing car must necessarily decrease the (kinetic) energy of the car by an equal or greater amount. And the vast majority of cars get their kinetic energy by burning fossil fuels. Sounds like a more expensive, less direct, and less efficient version of a gasoline generator.

I saw a comment back when they announced they were “canceling” it, saying the same thing. It seems they were right. Microsoft will do anything to get their grubby hands on as much user data as possible; of course they’re not going to give up that easily.

Almost as if a browser company that’s not also an advertising company has no reason to fight ad blockers.

Whatever you do, make sure you have a backup! There’s always the possibility of screwing something up, no matter how careful you are (or your hard drive deciding to spontaneously self destruct).

Does this have any benefit over just using friction to convert the rotation into heat? I suppose it would suffer less wear, but it also seems way more expensive.

Even better, use an AI to generate the misinformation to save you time (and get even dumber misinformation).

Don’t waste your money. If the data is really important, send the disk to a data recovery service to avoid risking further damage. If it’s only somewhat important, use a (free!) tool like ddrescue to attempt to recover the data.

That’s definitely possible, but is way more expensive than using an existing system like GPS.