Or places which are already heavily inhabited/productively used. Inland river valleys are some of the most desirable real estate, in human habitation terms.

Major river dams are often only feasible in countries which either have lots of sparsely populated wilderness (like North America), or which don’t have a problem with displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying whole communities (like China). Takes it off the menu for a lot of the world.

Would it particularly affect the performance if the sphere ends up covered in barnacles or coral? It’s what’s inside that matters (it’s just a big hollow tank).

You’ve pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.

You can’t force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that’s a different matter.

What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple?

People in the FOSS community constantly talk about the best ways to minimise use of Google, Apple and Microsoft products. That is an absolutely valid motivation for choosing to use one project over another.

If someone is willing to use the behaviour of a company or its owners as a factor when choosing a software stack, presumably it’s valid to apply the same sentiment to development teams of smaller projects too.

I don’t know how they do it in the US, but in the UK most big companies outsource application checks to several big clearing houses. They handle the logistics of checking qualifications and obtaining references from previous employers, plus the optional enhanced checking that some companies need (such as DBS/criminal record checks).

In the UK there is a single official centralised system for checking degree qualifications which covers most major universities. It’s also only a 5 minute job to email a university registrar directly. I think most big companies would consider this a bare minimum task when recruiting for any role where a qualification is in any way important.

What’s the consequences of being caught lying on your resume? you lose your good job.

I used to work as a trade union officer representing people at disciplinaries. I’ve represented several people over the years who were sacked for lying on their CVs.

Not only did they lose their job, but they’ll get a “sacked for gross misconduct” reference from that employer making it much more difficult to get another job. Those in regulated roles also ended up with gross misconduct records with the regulator, making it essentially impossible to work in that field again.

So no, it’s not a risk free game.

Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.

So these and a couple other types of bricks I’ve seen (ones with multiple holes to for masonry bees(?)), have surprisingly high costs for what they are.

Really not sure where you’re getting that impression from.

I’ve just looked it up from a supplier; the cheapest swift brick they sell is £11.50, and they have multiple around the £30 mark. A few larger ones for more money.

The same supplier sells bat bricks for similar, and bee bricks for £25.

Bearing in mind that the cost for a regular normal brick can be north of £1, depending on the specific colouring and design.

Considering the cost of building a whole house, an extra £60 on wildlife bricks doesn’t seem that unreasonable.

As someone who spends an inordinate amount of their life reviewing planning applications, it’s notable that most new properties include swift bricks (and bat bricks) pretty much at standard now, even without the regulations. They’re incredibly cheap and entirely non-obtrusive; from a conservation point of view it’s a no brainer.

I imagine most that don’t include it is more through either laziness or ignorance rather than a strategic choice to omit them. Having them in the regulations would seem an easy win.

I’m currently reading Babel by RF Kuang, which definitely can’t be described as woman-centric (indeed, a major criticism is that its female characters are relatively shallow and few and far between). Good book though.

If you want an old classic to try, give Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees a go. Very unique and fairly influential cult classic from 1926.

Red Hat doesn’t own Fedora

Yes, they kind of do.

Red Hat own the Fedora name, brand, and logos.

They own and maintain the website, the servers, and all physical infrastructure used by the Fedora project.

The Fedora Project Leader is a Red Hat employee (constitutionally they always have to be). The Fedora Operations Architect and Fedora Community Architect are also Red Hat employees.

7 of the 9 Fedora Community Council members are Red Hat employees.

The upshot of it all is that Red Hat has full effective control of the project, is the sole main funding sponsor, and has full control over the use of the name, brand, and public image. And of course the main downstream beneficiary of the Fedora codebase is Red Hat/IBM.

Technically they don’t own the code itself (because it’s open source), but if that’s your metric then no FOSS project can be meaningfully owned by anyone.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

I’d be inclined to see them as a European company which trades in America, rather than a company with American ownership. The reality is that if you buy a Stellantis European marque in Europe, it’s almost certainly made in European factories, designed by European engineers, and the company’s corporate HQ functions are also in Europe. If you buy a Ram truck from them, though, it’s probably originated from their US operations.

No, Chrysler and Dodge are Stellantis. Which is Peugeot, Citroen, Fiat, Opel and others.

Maybe I’m just tired at the end of a long day, but I’m also completely unable to parse that headline. Somebody’s mum is fingering what now?

maybe turn the three sisters

Two of the three precogs were boys, by the way.

That’s encryption in a nutshell. A message is encrypted until it reaches its destination, and then by necessity is unencrypted in order to read it. Once your recipient has the unencrypted message, you don’t have any control over what happens to it.

Fundamentally, if you don’t trust the recipient (or their system provider), no amount of encryption will protect your message.

In the spirit of Britishness, there’s also: https://sheffieldknives.co.uk/

I’m not an “outdoor knives” sort of guy, but I have and greatly enjoy a couple of kitchen knives from them, and they have a full range of outdoor knives that…er…look like knives to me.

FFIX is my favourite FF game (yeah, fight me on it), which means this news is either very good or very bad depending on how the remake ends up.