Only the Scottish could think “caffeinated wine” is a highly desirable beverage.

I love chinotto so much. They used to sell the San Pellegrino one here in the UK, but it got discontinued.

It’s great. Like a Campari and soda without the booze.

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.

I’ve never heard of them. What does it stand for?

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.

I like OSMAnd, and want to love it, but its public transport route finding is still very flakey for me, irritatingly.