deftnerd

I've had the same experience in general. my lips often get chapped in sub freezing weather, but that hasn't happened this year.

The problem with drug prices isn't because of the drug manufacturers, it's with the middle-men and private insurance companies. At least, that's what the manufacturers are saying

For instance, with the manufacturers of insulin, none of them are American and they offer to sell the insulin to everyone at the same price.

The problem is that the large insurance companies use just three middle-men drug buyers called Pharmacy Benefits Managers (PBM) who DEMAND growing discounts every year from drug manufacturers, so the drug manufactures have to raise the prices to the US market every year to keep making a profit.

Novo Nordisk is willing to sell insulin much cheaper, but the drug buyers demand about a 75% discount off of the wholesale cost or they'll make the product not covered by the insurance companies they represent. To compensate, they raise the wholesale price in the US so after the forced discounts, they still make the same amount of money.

The people who suffer are the ones who don't have insurance.

The solution, at least in the case of insulin, isn't cheaper prices from the manufacturer, it's for the US to pass a law that prevents insurance companies from dropping a product based on the refusal to discount the product if it's under a certain price-per-month.

This article seems to cover the finger-pointing between the manufacturers and PBM's and insurane companies very well: https://www.healthline.com/diabetesmine/pharmacy-benefit-man...?

I've long desired the functionality that the Echo & Echo Show provide when it comes to audio playback and intercom/video chat functionality. Unfortunately, I'm too suspicious of Amazon (and Google, for that matter) using me and my data for their own purposes. I hope to find an off-the-shelf solution some day.

If this does grow, it might be worth getting another domain just for email purposes such as "read-cv-email.com".

What seems most likely to me is that kook negotiated an employee agreement where the Navy would provide the same level of patent expertise and pressures to any personal patents that he wished to file.

You could make the same argument about so many different things. E-cigarettes or junk food is not a net win for civilization. What about addictions to video gaming? Donating to political parties that you think are against progress?

It boils down to the fact that you're wanting to let opinions on "how things should be" steer availability of core economic infrastructure, rather than relying on the legal system which is more properly setup to come to these conclusions.

I usually freeze my jam into large blocks using tupperware and then transfer them into vacuum sealing bags. After sucking the air out, I let them defrost and then they stack nicely as flat packs of jam, ready to be cut open. No glass to break, no worry about not getting all of the air out, and easy to inspect from all sides to see if anything has started growing in there.

Also works well for other "liquidy" things people usually put into jars.

I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.

The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.

Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey.

I use Plex to store my TV, Movies, and Music. One nice feature is that you can have your own music AND integrate Tidal to augment your music collection. It works pretty well.

There is a lot of case law regarding digital media, such as movies, tv, books, etc, stating that the digital version doesn't lose value despite the ease of copying it.

It's an interesting conundrum that "big business" claims that personal data being copied doesn't necessarily have value, but entertaining data does.

I'm surprised they weren't stopped by police to investigate a very suspicious heavily loaded cart on the Subway. It easily could have been 300lbs of explosives on that cart.

that's incorrect, you're allowed to also have access to evidence the prosecutor doesn't reference directly. For instance, if there is some evidence that someone else committed a crime such as existence of security footage or DNA evidence, they're required to produce it along with all the other evidence during discovery. Of course they might not use that conflicting evidence in court, but it was gathered and thus is legally obligated to be given to the defense.

Withholding evidence from the defense is very incompatible with our justice system.

I was once approached to develop a darknet market. I spent a few weeks scoping out the work, unpaid, before I turned down the opportunity due to the legal and ethical problems.

I did spend that time pondering and scoping out the work because I found it a fascinating challenge to design an ecommerce platform with very heavy requirements for user privacy and anonymity.

The source code for an existing platform that I was granted access to view showed me that a lot of encryption techniques were just smoke and mirrors. Mostly, everything was stored unencrypted or using symmetric encryption with the encryption key stored on the same filesystem as the server generating the pages.

It was fun designing an asymetric multi-key encryption system, where a user's "second password" with a hash (stored with a microservice API on another server in another data center) generated one of the multiple keys required. Even server seizure wouldn't result in anything usable.

Another challenge was how to prevent servers from being overwhelmed with DDoS attacks. That would have been achieved by using the Tor API to generate custom onion addresses for each user and vendor that they could bookmark. The only site that could be DDoS'd would be the landing page. It also allowed for an easy route to horizontal scaling.

The old system also didn't properly delete stuff, it just flipped a boolean "deleted" field to prevent it from being visible anymore... Not very smart for data hygiene.

I've been wanting to use what I planned out to build a product for the last few years, but I can't think of anything legal & legitimate that would have such strict security requirements that also has potential for profitability.

> Actually it's pretty easy to generate intense neutrino beams. You just have to accelerate protons and smash them into a lead wall. This produces all kinds of particles, including for instance muons. Since muons are charged, you can filter and focus them into a beam using magnets, and then they rapidly decay in flight, producing a beam of neutrinos going in the same direction.

That's pretty fascinating. When the protons hit the lead wall, are there any other "messy" particles created that are problematic? Filtering and focusing the muons might be relatively easy to handle, but what about the other kinds of particles that will be created?

It's quite common for people's places of business to be distant from the place they live. For industrial farms, forests, and mining operations, there is no need to the workers to live right next to it. They can live in the nearby city and commute or the company can provide a shuttle bus.

What I haven't seen is an analysis of how long it'll take for the temperature to rise enough for the permafrost to be entirely thawed. The freeze/thaw cycle wrecks havoc on infrastructure and buildings.

Bringing infrastructure to these newly suitable lands will be a massive engineering challenge.

Great article here: https://nsidc.org/cryosphere/frozenground/people.html

I was quite fond of Kuro5hin.org, a discussion community that just kind of petered out.

They are only strong at specific points, namely the corners and to a lesser extent, the edges. If you have a load on top, or an impact on the sides, they deform easily and that can cause structural collapse.

In situations where people bury the containers, they often have to weld in additional squarestock steel pillars and ceiling joists to improve the structural integrity of the roof, and the pillars often add needed support to the walls that face substantial forces from the weight of the earth

Even if 222nm has its purposes, the market is crying out for inexpensive and plentiful UV-C 253nm LED's.

You can get UV LED's in different wavelengths, but 253nm is the very effective for disinfection (even though it does suffer from the other UV damage that you mentioned). It's slightly wider wavelength might make it more possible to make using existing LED manufacturing techniques.

This would open up a lot of possible germicidal sanitation technologies from integrated germicidal LED's on door handles, bulbs used with home automation to disinfect a whole home once everyone has left for the day, to Roomba-like devices that disinfect floors.

Not just decreased usage of diesel, but it'll make those remote units less vulnerable to supply route attacks.

Presumably, if the reactor generates enough power, it could also be used to supply power to the surrounding community and hopefully earn some goodwill.

This has been a feature that I wish existed. I often like to 'favorite' a post, and wish there was an RSS feed so I could use various automation tools to easily combine those favorite links into bookmark collections.

CH4, aka Methane, is one Carbon atom and four Hydrogen atoms. There is no Helium in Methane, just Hydrogen.

It feels like there might be other possibly uses of old or unwanted foam mattresses. Perhaps they can be cut down to standard sizes for home insulation batting? As insulation between raised garden bed containers and the ground? Insulation between the ground and a fish tank in an aquaponics setup?

While there might be better solutions for all of those things, if these materials are going to end up in the landfill and can be provided for almost no cost, it seems like a waste to not utilize the resource.

Sunrise Studios, who made the Anime, has a streaming agreement with b-ch.com - But the entire site is in Japanese, and I don't know if they have any regional IP blocks.

https://www.b-ch.com/titles/3225/

The "conspiracy" portion of my brain makes me wonder if it's possible that Apple phones have lower power levels if the location services determines that the phone is in a location with a known anechoic chamber. There can't be that many of them.

Such behavior has already been shown by automobile manufacturers during the "diesel-gate" incidents.

In a bright environment, a bright LED is useful. Instead they should also have a light sensor used to determine the ambient light level, and then adjust the status LED display accordingly. My Samsung TV does this with its "powered on" light.

Of course, that adds to the BOM and manufacturers love shaving off fractions of a penny. Asking them to add an extra 50 cents of parts for something consumers don't think about prior to purchase is a lost cause.

Makes me wonder if there is any roll-over with the additional cores. If you have a dual processor machine, with 34 cores in each processor, you would have to get 4 licenses, 2 of which only cover a combined 4 cores. It seems less than ideal.

I don't personally believe that non-ionizing radiation can cause any damage, but if I put on my "brainstorming" hat, I can think of some things to test to at least rule them out.

Non-ionizing radiation doesn't have the power necessary to remove charged particles like electrons from atoms, but it does have the energy necessary to physically move or manipulate atoms. It's probably not enough to actually remove atoms from molecules (although, I'm curious how much energy would be necessary to do that)...

But, if certain atoms are able to have their motion or position in molecules affected, even in minute amounts, could that affect biological processes such as the energy necessary for cellular machinery to split DNA? Or to work with RNA? Or could it affect protein folding? Just how sensitive is our biological machinery to small adjustments of those reliable constants? And would that cause any problems, or just make our cellular machinery use a tiny bit more or less ATP?

Overall, I think the cellular processes in all the life on earth are likely very robust. the tiny amount of inefficiencies (possibly) brought on due to an increasing background RF level likely has no effect at all, but it wouldn't hurt to check it out.

It would be like asking "how does the introduction of a single drop of water in a car gas tank affect performance". The answer is probably "pretty much not at all", but it gives an opportunity to design some exciting and useful testing methods that could be used for other purposes in other experiments.

Learning how to determine energy used by cellular machinery with that kind of precision could be very useful for a lot of biological science and drug research. Learning how, and what kind, of RF can affect different atomic bonds might yield useful information like how to slightly strengthen or weaken molecules temporarily, which might open up possible chemical reactions that were previously "almost possible".

I'm of the personal belief that most likely, non-ionizing radiation has no affect on living tissue, but I don't see anything wrong with more open and peer-reviewed research into the subject.

It would be nice to know what dangers the most extreme amounts of non-ionizing radiation causes living tissue and biological systems to at least get a modern perspective on the range that things are finally being affected (if at all).

Then we'll be able to more easily say "no effects were found until X amount of energy, and this phone puts out 0.000004% of that" to calm the public down. Until there is a documented reference point that is actually dangerous, people are hesitant to believe any figures showing how safe something is.

Similarly a hand-wavey "the time portal is sparked through the physical quantum entanglement of the same particle through different points in time"