Cost or no cost, IoT should not be able to brick devices on the whim - or unexpected dissolution - of a faceless corporation.

Unfortunately too many people are trusting of monolithic entities which promise the moon and then decide what they really meant was "bend over".

I may be channelling a bit of Louis Rossman here.

That said, the other comments here suggest that the device in question still has all features when accessed from the front panel, which is a step up from a lot of other IoT behaviour. Owners who don't want to pay for the app should still disconnect it from any connectivity and keep it that way just in case the manufacturer decides to remove that functionality as well.

And if it stops working altogether without network connectivity, take the L and maybe mail it back to the company's head office with no return address. Let them deal with the e-waste.

Best as I can make out, no. Current MRI tech apparently needs temperatures as low as 9 Kelvin and nitrogen freezes solid at 64. Since Kelvin units are an absolute scale, we could say that it needs to be 7 times colder than nitrogen can provide.

What I can't make out is whether nitrogen is any more dangerous than helium if it gets too warm and explosively decompresses.

Helium does have the advantage that it would escape straight up and through anything even vaguely porous, where nitrogen would just hang around displacing oxygen, causing more of a suffocation risk. How much more, again, I'm not sure.

Not counting novelty balloons, MRI machines are probably the biggest "real world" use. Gotta keep those superconducting magnets superconducting and helium is just the thing. And every time an MRI machine has to be quenched (such as when some idiot leaves something metal too close to it), or decommissioned (which is surprisingly often) all the helium tends to be released because it's difficult to impossible to collect it.

Not sure if hydrogen could also be used, but in our high-oxygen atmosphere, having that much hydrogen in an enclosed space with spinning, sparking electrical motors is just asking for trouble, especially if the above release protocol has to be used. Fireballs are generally a no-no. Risking one in a hospital is plain insanity.

Most other uses are even more scientific, and helium has a few properties that nothing else has, so without it, the science that would use it either has to go the dangerous hydrogen route, make do with a heavier unreactive gas or just... stop.

I tried that and found myself pondering the cylinder whose height is its diameter. Half way, you might say, between orb and cube, but is neither. The orb would fit inside it and it would fit inside a cube of similar height three different ways.

Most people don't need multiple profiles either.

Dude, if that's all-caps HARD, then I don't know how you'd classify, say, compiling things from source and fixing any problems that might crop up along the way. Or fixing missing DLL / OCX hell when trying to get an old Windows game running under Linux, because let me tell you, I've done both of those and had to give up. firefox -P is heaven by comparison.

You could even put it into a shortcut and you wouldn't have to type it any more.

Yes the interface sucks, but HARD is not it.

Curiously, there's an alternative version on their website: https://www.twonks.co.uk/?pgid=j9zl8qi9-2dd9b5a3-0264-4c8f-99fe-6c2994ca575a

"Hard" is a strong word. It's not built into the default interface, granted, but it's not that hard to use FF's command line: firefox -P

They have said they're thinking about rejigging the whole thing though.

Authoritarian perspective: "I fail to see the difference between these perspectives."

Have you ever read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books? There's a minor almost-protagonist in one of the later ones who works as a truck driver, and everywhere he goes, rain follows. Turns out - and this isn't much of a spoiler - he's a bona fide rain god, and rain, sentient as it isn't, loves to be near him, wherever he goes.

Now, murder may be an even more intangible concept than rain, and we could argue all day whether a murder has a mind of its own outside of the perpetrator, but let me tell you this: Jessica Fletcher is an unwitting murder god. Like the truck driver, murder wants to be near her, no matter what. It wants to be soothed by her solving, and to be written about.

"Why do people keep inviting her to different places?", you might ask. They're as unwitting as she is, and murder somehow manages to dull their senses when it comes to its actions. I mean: It's murder. It's not exactly a pleasant, charming thing like the rain can be.

At least the truck driver was allowed a level of self-awareness towards the end of his protagonism. Jess Fletcher wouldn't have got that until Death himself decided to call time on it.

The stereotypical pirate "accent" derives from the west country (south west England) accent of one man who played Long John Silver in an adaptation of Treasure Island.

Though regional accents are dying out, you could probably still find a handful of people in the south west who will answer in the affirmative with "(y)arr".

... which is the second fact, I guess. "Arr" means "yes".

My Simpsons reference is also named Bort.

Well, it could be you, or it could be me, as I've hit the same waypoints.

fedia.io wasn't taking sign-ups at the time I went to kbin.run, but they are right now, so that's where I've ended up this time.

If this one dies too, I guess I'll take the jinx with me back to Reddit and see what happens there.