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why isn't it ok? why????
  • USB-C is an absolute shit-show. Half a dozen types of identical looking cables all with different performance and compatability. They can be power only, USB-2 only, USB 3, 3.1, 5gb, 10gb. Some can carry 5A, others only 3A. Some may support thunderbolt. Cable sellers and manufacturers can/will claim anything.

    For people selling USB-C devices it's a massive support problem. It looks like the device is defective, but someone may just have swapped out the cable for their phone charger cable and there's no way of telling.

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    What web browser extensions would you highly recommend to others?
  • For Firefox: uBlock origin (of course)

    Privacy Badger - controls which sites are allowed to use cookies

    Mind the time - tracks time spent on various Web sites

    Video DownloadHelper - detects media and allows you to download and transcode it.

    Bitwarden - password manager

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    Labour lifts Tories’‘absurd’ ban on onshore windfarms
  • Ash only once when the filters failed. You'd occasionally get "power station frost". If the wind was in the right direction on freezing days moisture from the cooling towers would freeze to give a 100m wide avenue of thick haw frost. There's a lot of big transmission lines that aren't pretty and buzz when it rains. (wind/solar don't need lines this big)

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    Reform UK under pressure to prove all its candidates were real people
  • Electoral law should at least demand the same levels of identification for the candidates as it does for the voters. Candidates should be on the electoral register (somewhere) and they should've presented one of the recognised forms of photo ID.

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    MAGA pastor says Ten Commandments in schools will stop teachers from "raping" kids
  • I had an extremely religious teacher in secondary school. He had a habit of threatening other staff, tradesmen, drivers in front of his pupils with "I know taekwando", then relising what he'd just done and repenting/distracting with "let us pray". One morning we came into the classroom to find him in a huddle with his union rep. Turned out he'd spent the night in jail after being arrested affray (fighting).

    For almost all religious people their faith provides guidance and comfort, but you don't want to encourage the nuts.

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    Car crashes into gates of PM's Chequers country estate
  • From memory, I think the road bends just before the gates so if you missed the bend you would end up driving into the gates.

    Incidentally, the grounds are surrounded by an anti tank fence made out of old railway line yet there is a public footpath through the grounds across the driveway.

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    Confound you, WSUS!
  • It might be that the default for Windows is to sleep rather than do a full shutdown. Whenever Linux looks at a Windows partition it looks corrupted. When windows starts up again it's inconsistent as some of the data was in the sleep image.

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    Birmingham, Britain's second-largest city, is being forced to dim lights and cut sanitation services due to bankruptcy
  • I don't know how valid this is, but I heard county and district councils use government bonds to secure more favourable loan terms. When Liz Truss upset the UK bond market the cost of borrowing rose as the value of their bond assets dropped. The county council where I live is now spending as much on servicing debt as it is on fixing roads. (Roads, although not the most important responsibility of local government, are a visible indicator of their capability.)

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    German combination axe-gun, ~1580 AD
  • It looks a bit fancy but it was common for muskets to be used as clubs when they'd been fired and there was no time to reload. I guess bayonets are the modern variant of this idea.

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    Denmark recalls South Korean Samyang noodles for being too spicy - CNA
  • I've given the 3x noodles a go. Although banning them seems ridiculous, in the words of Big Clive, "why do they even say chicken" https://youtu.be/FH5vp-VyZFU "So spicy they're banned in Denmark" would look good on the packet though.

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    A year after Titan sub implosion, an Ohio billionaire says he wants to make his own voyage to Titanic wreckage
  • This billionaire, rather than trying to wing-it and design his own submarine, is enlisting the services of a company that has already designed, built, and used a number of record setting deep-sea manned submarines.

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    Falklands dispute may last decades - Argentina president
  • This seems like a playbook answer to a question about a subject that's of little immediate importance to his administration, but of some importance to a minority in both Argentina and Britain. Basically saying to his electorate "we haven't forgotten" and to Britain "we're not going to do anything".

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    AM radio law opposed by tech and auto industries is close to passing | Ars Technica
  • AM radio costs nothing to implement, that's not why it's absent from me cars. Many modern cars use some form of brushless motor in the power train. The inverters for these motors work at a frequency that interferes with AM radio reception at close range. Manufacturers can add it back to cars (probably by an over the air software update as many radios are SDR), but it'll just pick up whistling when the car's moving.

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    Soviet-era Russian map of the San Francisco Bay Area
  • Soviet maps of the UK are redrawn versions of maps from uk publishers (Ordinance Survey). This was discovered from identical locations of height measurements. Who did they copy here?

    Ordinance Survey attempted to sue the publishers of the Soviet maps for copyright violation. They were still selling the maps after the fall of the Soviet Union.

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    How would the future of internet have looked like, if web browsers had not existed?
  • Browsers made the Internet usable for the general population. The Internet as we know it would have remained a network for academia, governments and large corporations. Smartphones would not have been developed. Without a reason for everyone's homes to be connected to a high speed network, TV would remain the remit of cable and satellite broadcasting - no streaming services.

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  • Sorting communities by instance would be helpful, it would also be good to have a list of which instances are blocked by my instance and which are available.

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    Tenet

    Finally watched Tenet. After all the hype and discussion on Reddit when it was released, I was expecting some sort of neigh-on impenetrable profound piece of cinema, but it's just Primer with action sequences.

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