Crozekiel

What are you, HR?

There are so many factors playing into this. Also, I don't want you to think this post is suggesting we should give up on alternatives, because that is not my belief. We need to transition to something, and really we should have started this process much earlier. This is more to illustrate why it is a slow process.

1. Energy density is unbeatable. Around 100 pounds of gasoline (15-ish gallons) will push most small road cars 300-400 miles. To get close to that range from an electric car you are going to need 1500-2000 lbs of batteries.
2. Transportability. We have yet to really figure out how to get several thousand kilowatts of electricity from where it is easy to produce to where it is needed without losing a good percentage of it. You can fill a tank with Gasoline and haul it across the planet and lose basically none of it.
3. Safety. Batteries can be very nasty things if damaged, the fires they can cause are astronomically harder to put out compared to traditional gasoline fires after a nasty car accident. Hydrogen is so much more violent in a fire/explosion than gasoline as well.
4. Economics. Yes, Oil Companies have a huge grip on massive chunks of the world. MANY countries entire economies would collapse if fossil fuels were removed from the equation. And those countries are powerful, and scared, which is a dangerous combo. They are fighting tooth and nail to maintain their GDP as there is not a good replacement. It could be a civilization crumbling event if all money tied to fossil fuels just stopped in an instant.

Our habits need to drastically change as a society. Fossil Fuels are not the only problem we need to change, as an example, industrial farming is also pretty catastrophically bad for the environment (as we are currently doing it). We need to consume less (both power and stuff), we need to travel less, we need to eat less meat, and we need world governments on board for these changes in a meaningful and peaceful way. Or we need someone to invent a way for us all to survive the problem or reverse it without us changing a damn thing, but that sounds like magic.

Amazing, thank you for the in-depth (but simple enough) explanation!

OH. So like, it's a situation where the "lock" has 2 keys, one that locks it and one that unlocks it. You keep the "unlock" key on your person and never let it out of your sight, but let the "lock" key just gets distributed and copied anywhere because all it can do is LOCK the door, and it really doesn't matter who locks the door so long as only you can unlock it.

That is very interesting. I still don't quite understand how it technically works, because I thought if you encrypt something with a key, you could basically "do it backwards" to get the original information... This is probably due to getting simplified explanations of encryption though that makes them analogous to a basic cipher (take every letter, assign it to a number, add 10, convert back to new letter - can't be read unless someone knows or figures out the "key" is 10) and now it is obvious that it is significantly more complex than that...

But I am much more confident that I understand the 'mechanics' of it, so thank you for the explanation!

Considering they don't want your address or name, how the hell would that work anyway? This had to be a joke...

I find the best way to torment Linux ISOs is using the live environment exclusively to:

1. Bing search "how to burn iso to usb" 1a) immediately change search to "how to burn iso to usb linux"
2. Bing search "windows 11 install free iso" 2a) download the first link that is an iso
3. Follow instructions from step 1a 90% to the letter using the iso from step 2a, changing the 10% ignored until it "works".
   3a) bonus points if you try to write the image to the same USB the live environment is on - if the "chosen" method allows this, congratulations secret ending unlocked, skip to step 6.
4. Bing search "is windows 11 free install safe" 4a) change search to "is windows 11 free install safe reddit"
5. Either unmount the live USB while it is still running, or just hard power down the computer, without even closing the browser.
6. Plug USB drive directly into USB power wall adapter and never plug it into a computer again.

Now, before you ask, yes, you absolutely could do all of this in a VM, but I've found it is more tormenting if there is real actual hardware wasted and/or at risk of damage. Linux is the natural enemy of consumerism, so buying a 12 pack of flash drives just to do this on a thinkpad over and over until the thinkpad dies really hurts the linux ISO to their core.

Okay, but like, if the carrier sees all your texts, don't they also receive the public keys and can then also decrypt the messages?? I'm genuinely curious how this works. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced I don't understand how any encryption works because the intended recipient needs the key to decrypt it, and if I'm giving them that key, but my traffic is also being watched... doesn't whoever wants to snoop get the key too??

I feel like I have to be missing something because this just sounds like having an encrypted flash drive that you leave out in the open for someone else to grab, but it has the password written on the side of it in sharpie.

We run Arch, BTW.™