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“Is it ethical to purchase a lithium battery powered EV?”
Is it ethical to purchase a lithium battery powered EV? - CFACT
With most of the exotic minerals and metals to build EV batteries being mined in developing countries, is it ethical to support the environmental degradation and humanity atrocities occurring in developing countries?
It should concern you that all those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each EV auto battery, you must process 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, you dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth’s crust for just one battery.
A SQLite Blessing
Credit to Ace of Spades HQ for pointing to this beautiful, thoughtful blessing in SQLite’s GitHub repository’s main.c:
** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of
** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
**
** May you do good and not evil.
** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
** May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
**
Nicely done, SQLite team. Nicely done.
2021 Wasn’t a Great Year for Your Data
“According to IBM, the average cost of a data breach has now reached over $4 million, while Mimecast estimates that the average ransomware demand levied against US companies is well over $6 million.”’
The biggest data breaches, hacks of 2021 | ZDNet
As COVID-19 continues to cause disruption, cyberattacks haven’t let up, either.
“Is my cat Turing-complete?”
Answering the questions that need to be asked…
As humorous as the article is, it does so to make a legit point at the end:
Jokes aside, cat-computing is the name I give to this generalized practice. In my experience, it happens quite often that when someone discovers a new feature of a language, they begin to use it everywhere, just because they can and they want to.
However, just like you can execute code using a cat but shouldn’t, it’s not because you can use a feature that you should.
P.S. The kitty in the image is Opal, before she grew up. She would even hide inside the bottom of the Christmas tree. 🙂
Cross-posted on my Data Guy (Me) blog…
This. Is. Great. (But Kind ‘a Scary)
Whiny Baby
Maybe some of Amazon’s complaints against SpaceX are legit, but they sure seem like a whiny baby:
Amazon slams SpaceX, tells FCC that Musk-led companies are rule-breakers
SpaceX insults competitors and acts like “rules are for other people,” Amazon says.
My question for Amazon: What is SpaceX doing that is preventing you from launching your satellites?
“The Perl Foundation is fragmenting over Code of Conduct enforcement”
Sad News About a Great App
🙁
Not important enough: 1Password abandons its native Mac app
If you can’t move the preferences window because it’s fake, you might be running an Electron app like 1Password 8. I’ve used AgileBits’s 1Password for more than a decade. I&…
1Password is one of my most-used Mac apps and I install it on all my devices, Mac or not.
It is just sad that an app that came into this world as a Mac program will no longer have a native Mac version.
Analog Summer?
This summer, turn off your screens and boldly go out into the real world
In the early days of the pandemic, I wrote with gratitude about our screens, which kept us connected when things were locked down.
Sometimes kids need to veg out,” I’d tell them. “Screens are OK (in moderation)!”
But Americans struggle with moderation generally…
Apple Hi-Res Audio
I really enjoyed this video (from John Darko) about why the CD-quality and hi-res audio Apple is going to offer probably won’t be meaningful for most of us. (Biggest reason, in my view? Bluetooth.)
My Thoughts About HostGator
Well, that’s where that acronym came from…
I never know why it was called a CAPTCHA. Now I do, thanks to a Cloudflare blog post!
Why CAPTCHAs?
In many instances, businesses need a way to tell whether an online user is human or not. Typically those reasons relate to security, or abuse of an online service. Back at the turn of the century, CAPTCHAs were created to do just that. The first one was developed back in 1997, and the term (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) was coined in 2003 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper, and John Langford.
Humanity wastes about 500 years per day on CAPTCHAs. It’s time to end this madness
An experiment that uses hardware security keys (like a YubiKey) to replace CAPTCHAs completely. The idea is rather simple: if a real human is sitting at their keyboard or uses their phone, they can touch their security key’s button or bring it near their phone to demonstrate that they are human.
Power BI Nibble #2: I Live for CSV Files!
Oops, I forgot to to post my second Power BI Nibble (about working with CSV files):
Verdict: True
My First Power BI Nibble
At work I use Microsoft’s Power BI quite a bit for reports and analysis (it’s an awesome tool). Last night I recorded my first “Power BI Nibble,” this one about the biggest thing people should do…”Use Parameters!”:
Kudos to Microsoft
Credit where credit is due…Microsoft 365 for Business is a ridiculously inexpensive, robust offering:
