It was kinda thought of in the '50s. Ford’s concept the Nucleon was to use a fission reaction to heat water, which was used in a steam turbine engine. One of the issues folks worried about was, what happens in a crash? No, no one with a clue worried about a nuclear explosion, but the release of radioactive material would have been a real concern.

Some of this might change with the use of fusion. But, it’s going to be a long time before a fusion reactor would be small/light enough to slap in a car. At the moment, we haven’t really demonstrated a reactor which can commercially produce a net output of power. There has been some small scale experiments which technically produce more power than is used to initiate the fusion; but, that also relied a bit on an accounting trick (they only counted the energy of the lasers themselves, not the total energy used).

Also, when you get down to it, this is the ultimate goal of electric vehicles. Maybe someday, most of our electricity will come from grid scale fusion reactors. Those will charge the batteries which drive EVs. Moving the reactor into the car itself could happen some day. On the other hand, considering how poorly some folks maintain their cars now, would your really trust them to maintain a reactor? Again, not worried about explosions or anything silly. But, the release of radioactive material might still be a concern. It’s probably safe to just use batteries and keep the reactors locked up in large facilities.

We dun fucked up when we made tarring and feathering CEOs illegal.

Why do you expect to receive someone else’s work for free? Part of the reason the web has become so enshitified is that no one is willing to pay for anything anymore. We all expect everything to be “ad supported”, and then we act shocked when everything is covered in ads.

That said, there are usually open source alternatives for most software packages out there. They may not have complete feature parity or have quite the same slick UI as the commercial products. But, they do tend to be both free in terms of cost and ads. E.g for image editing, there is Gimp. It’s not going to replace Adobe Photoshop in professional spaces anytime soon. But, for a home user who isn’t willing to shell out the Adobe Tax, it’s a reasonable choice.

But, the reason so much is paywalled is because everything takes time and money to create. Someone has to pay that cost. Maybe it’s advertisers, maybe it’s a dedicated team of volunteers. But increasingly, creators are asking users to pay directly.

Decades ago, my father would have some fun with the receipt checkers at Costco. After a shopping trip, we’d commonly have lunch at the cafe in Costco. When leaving the store, he’d hand the receipt checker the receipt for lunch rather than the receipt for the items bought. More than half the time, the checker would just swipe the receipt with a highlighter (their way of marking it “checked”) without noticing that it was the wrong receipt. So ya, it’s complete security theater. Anyone with a modicum of thought can figure ways around it, and it only accomplishes inconveniencing the people who aren’t trying to get away with anything.

Always look on the bright side of life

If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of the skill sets of salespeople and politicians, it wouldn’t quite be a circle, but I suspect it’d be pretty close. Politicians exist to convince you that they are going to represent your interests in whatever level of government they are running for. Once there, they need to negotiate for their policy positions with the other elected representatives. The main difference is that the currency of politicians is votes, instead of money.

Sure, some of them might actually believe the bullshit coming out of their mouths. But, even then, they have to convince others to vote for them and then vote with them. That requires skills like negotiation, and persuasion, much the same as sales. Though, politicians probably have a greater emphasis on public speaking.

It depends on what your goals are.

• Ventoy is good for having an alternate OS on a Thumbdrive. Even with a USB 3 device, you may encounter I/O blocking and find this isn’t suitable as a “daily driver” OS. However,. for booting something like Tails or Windows/Linux for OS specific hardware/applications, it can be a good solution.
• Dualbooting is a good way to “test drive” an alternate OS and also have a way to fallback to the other OS if you regularly need access to some software which only runs on that OS. This is likely to have better performance than the USB/Ventoy setup at the cost of Windows fucking up the bootloader config from time to time.
• Windows/Linux with a Linux/Windows VM is useful when you know what OS you want to run on a day to day basis, but have some reason to reach into the other OS on occasion and aren’t too worried about performance and hardware access in the alternate OS.

Ultimately, it’s going to come down to what you are trying to do and why you want to run multiple Operating Systems. For example, my main system is running Linux. But, I want the ability to run Windows malware in a controlled sandbox (not a euphemism, I work in cybersecurity and lab some stuff for fun). So, I have KVM setup to run Virtual Machines, including Windows.

For another example, prior to making the switch to Linux, I had Windows as my primary OS and booted Linux on a USB stick (not Ventoy, but close enough). This let me gain confidence that I would be able to make the jump.

I don’t have a good example for dual booting. Maybe something like a SteamDeck where you want a stable, functional OS most of the time; but, have some games which will only run in Windows.

17 and 19 is a two-year gap, that’s totally fine.

Might want to check the laws in your local jurisdiction. In the US, in some States this may be OK under Romeo and Juliet Laws (check your local laws if the whole “kill yourself from a misunderstanding” bit of the story is required). But, some States do not have such laws. No idea if/how this applies in other countries.

Did it a couple weeks ago and already received my refunds.
Ideally, I would balance by tax withholding such that I owe a small amount some tax time. And that payment would then be delayed as late as possible to provide the largest marginal value for that money. But, I’m lazy and instead have gone mostly with the defaults and that results in me getting a refund regularly. So, why let the government hold onto my money any longer than necessary? As soon as I have my documents in hand, I file.

Yup, learned as a child and was absolutely bewildered as a teenager when I met people who couldn’t. Made sure my kids knew how as well. Child drowning injury and deaths are sadly high in the US.

At least on Android (I’d assume iOS does it as well), you can set Do Not Disturb (DND) to turn on and off automatically, based on the time. You can also designate certain contacts to be allowed to bypass DND, so the phone will ring normally. I setup DND a long time ago, because I don’t want to be bothered by random shit while I am trying to sleep. However, my job is such that I might reasonably be called at 03:00 and need to roll my arse out of bed and start working. So, the number they call from is set to bypass DND. My elderly mother and brother are both similarly set to bypass. It all works out quite well and if some random marketer figures out my number and calls in the middle of the night, I don’t get woken up to talk about my car’s warranty.

This has become my theme song.

At this scale, the stick isn’t as solid as your intuition would lead you to believe. Instead, you have to start thinking about the force at the atomic scale. The atoms in your hand have an outer shell of electrons which you use to impart a force to the electrons in the outer atoms of the stick on your end. That force needs to be transferred atom to atom inside the stick, much like a Newton’s Cradle. Importantly, this transfer is not instantaneous, each “bump” takes time to propagate down the stick and will do so slower than the speed of light in a vacuum. It’s basically a shockwave traveling down the length of the stick. The end result is that the light will get to the person on the other end before the sequence of sub-atomic bumps has the chance to get there.

It makes little sense why it works on an offsite WiFi, but not mobile data.

I’d agree with unbuckled above, it’s a DNS issue. If your mobile device is capable, use nslookup or dig to see what responses you are getting in different scenarios. It’s possible that your VPN software is leaking DNS queries out to the mobile data provider’s DNS servers while you are on mobile data and only using the correct DNS settings when you are on wifi. Possibly look for split tunnel settings in the VPN software, as this can create this type of situation.

You can also confirm this from the pihole side. Connect to the VPN via mobile data and browse to some website you don’t use often, but is not your own internal stuff. Then open the query log on your pihole and see if that domain shows up. I’d put money on that query not showing in the pihole query log.

I owe my soul to the company store…

I work remote and my work has a pretty loose policy on webcams for meetings. If you don’t want it on, don’t turn it on. That said, when I am presenting or speaking, I like to have my webcam on. I personally find that the level of engagement is higher for speakers with their camera on, and so I try to extend that back to the people I am speaking to. I also find that the inclusion of visual cues helps with communications.

As for political spaces, my local congress person holds a regular townhall via telephone (not sure if she’ll keep this up if she wins the governorship this year) and I have never really felt the need to stare at her as she talks. I actually like the format as I can listen with my earbuds while doing something else. So, different situations can merit a different response.

Honestly, I think some folks make far more out of using or not using a webcam than it really merits. For those of us who are more introverted, having a camera on us can make us feel self-conscious. Though, I think using the word “trauma” to describe this is being overly bombastic. At the same time, I think there are some folks for whom the visual connection with a speaker or listener is also important and the lack visual of feedback from the other participants in the conversation makes the conversation more difficult. It’s just another of those areas where we are each going to need to make a decision based on the particular conversation and context. Interacting with other people is messy and is going to involve some level of discomfort from time to time.

Perfect, we’ll just spin up an image of your machine in EC2, give it a public IP, set the default network rules to “allow any any” and we’re good. And I have no idea why the security team just all quit.

Most of the folks I talk to hear agree with me that things are going wrong

That’s not surprising, though be careful on what the definition of “going wrong” is. For example, Emerson College recently put out the results of some polling part of which found that 67% of voters think the US is on the wrong track. It’s highly likely that 67% includes voters from all over the political map. But, while both a hardcore Trump/MAGA voter and a Bernie Bro voter might each say that the US is on the “wrong track”, we’d probably have trouble getting those two voters to reconcile on the color of the sky, let alone what the “right track” would be. Also, be wary of coworkers who actually just want to be left alone and will “go along to get along”. They will tacitly nod and agree with just about anything, so long as you go away and let them get back to work.

or that x,y, or z is a problem, but not enough to do anything about it.

Ok, but what is the ask? What are you expecting them to do? And why do you believe that they should be the ones doing it? Again, going back to my previous comment:
Maybe they do care about your thing, but they have their own “most important thing” and if your thing and their thing are in contention, they are going to pick their thing.

You may view things as so bad that everyone should be out in the streets protesting 24x7. They may not see it that way. They may put “protecting themselves” at a higher priority than protesting whatever it is you are upset about. This might be especially true if they have families to care for and that can drastically change how people prioritize things.

Once again, I’d go back to understanding their beliefs and priorities. Why won’t they do the thing you want them to do? It probably comes down to those beliefs and priorities being more important to them than whatever it is you are promoting. And again, I would note your complete dismissal of their point of view. They have given you some insight as to why they aren’t taking action:
" I want to do something, but I have to protect myself."

It’s clear they prioritize their personal well-being over the perceived value of whatever you are asking them to do. Why is that? What is it that you are asking them to do that they see it as risky? If your goal is to organize something, can you work to provide them the perceived safety that would get them over that hump? Do they have other issues and their answer is just a proxy to avoid an argument? I’m afraid I’m just repeating myself here; but, you need to really understand them if you want them to change their minds.

The first thing I would ask is, have you made any attempts to really understand what motivates them and why they believe as they do? Given your flippant dismissal of their belief systems, I suspect you have just mentally bucketed them and, instead of really trying to understand them, you fall back on your per-conceived notions of what you think they believe. Without that understanding, you will never be able to “make people care”, because you are not treating them as fully formed people with their own beliefs and priorities. You expect that, if you just yell at them loudly enough, they will come around. They won’t and, if anything, they will just dig their heels in further. To them, you’re this guy:

Not everyone has the same priorities you do. What you see as “the most important thing in the world” may fall much further down the list for someone else. They may not even see it in the same framing you do. Maybe they do care about your thing, but they have their own “most important thing” and if your thing and their thing are in contention, they are going to pick their thing. This is part of the reason we have politics in the first place, once you start dealing with other people and trying to decide what and how things should be prioritized and run, you are going to run into differing beliefs and priorities. It’s why most government polices generally suck and don’t get everything done. Because those policies are the result of compromise between people with different and often competing priorities. And yes, it may be that some of those other priorities come from bad information, though more often they will come from radically different base beliefs. And not understanding what those beliefs actually are means that you will not have any sort of basis for convincing them of anything.

Changing peoples’ minds is hard. But, it starts from a place of understanding people and not dismissing their beliefs. Step back from your outrage for a moment and try to really get in their heads. You may not agree with their position, but you need to understand how they got there before you have any chance of getting them out of it. And, maybe you can’t. It may just be that they have some foundational beliefs which are completely at odds with what you want to convince them of. But, if you know and understand that, it becomes much easier to walk away from the situation and not waste time and energy on a hopeless fight. And while it feels good to yell at people, that basically never works and only serves to push them further away.

Sir, we got the responses back for the RFP for a new strategic bomber.
Great captain, what did you get?
We got three proposals back. Two of them are direct copies of the B-52, but made by a different company.
Ok, and the third one.
Well sir, it’s from Boeing, so it’s just the B-52 but the bomb bay doors may fall off during flight.