I got the 6 million from this link: https://www.chemanalyst.com/industry-report/helium-gas-market-578
The issue is not how much can be produced right now, but the rate at which we are depleting it.
I found different estimates on how long earth’s helium supply will last, and most of them are between 10 and 100 years. That’s not a long time, considering that it means we will lose access to a whole element.
But not nearly the required amounts. We currently use about 6 million metric tons of helium per year.
If fusion plants ever become a commercially viable thing (and that’s a big if), they will never be able to supply anything close to that.
There’s quite a large amount of the usage which could be labelled “for fun”.
But we are consuming about 6 million tons per year (https://www.chemanalyst.com/industry-report/helium-gas-market-578).
The 3000 tons are just a drop in the water and it’s pretty much impossible to get to all that.
Not in a way that could be scaled up to even cover the childrens birthday parties of a medium sized city.
One relevant part that I couldn’t really find in the article is that helium is so light that it escapes Earth’s atmosphere when released into the air.
So any helium that is released to the air is permanently gone.
There is also no known way to synthesize helium, and it also doesn’t renew itself at all on Earth.
It’s also the only substance we have to cool stuff really far down. That’s why e.g. MRIs depend on it.
And we put this precious, finite and often life saving substance into kids’ balloons to make them bobble nicely through the air.
I totally disagree with Stallman’s views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.
But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.
We have real courts and real police, we don’t need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.
If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.
I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.
Probably that was before Samsung offered 5 years of updates. And if the tablet was a bit outdated, it would have easily been outside of the software EOL date.
That’s why you should always go for phones/tablets that have been released this year and not take an outdated one. Not for the specs, but for the software support duration.
Over here there is a food discounter that also has a tiny electronics corner, where they have “great” deals. You can often get phones and tablets for less than half of the MSRP. The issue is, that all of them are either out of software support or close to it. A while ago they sold a cheap iPhone that had one month of software support left. And on iPhone, most apps only run on the currently newest iOS version. So a month after buying that iPhone, the user would lose access to most of their apps.
Yeah, I wanted a bit more performance than what the Titan provides. I wish there was a decent midrange version of the Titan pocket.
Yeah, all of the keyboard phones on the market are ancient and/or total crap in every regard but their keyboard and/or super expensive. Some of them are all three at the same time (looking at you Planet Computers and F(x)tec!).
I believe I might have the most up-to-date and highest specced keyboard phone currently on the planet ;)
there is 100％ a niche market.
There totally is, as is proven by Unihertz still existing. But I fear, the keyboard market is a little fragmented, and just a handful of devices won’t really capture it. People like side sliders, top sliders or portrait candy bar,. They might want a large or a small phone. They might like privacy/secure phones or hacker phones, or just cheap phones with a keyboard and nothing else. Or maybe a flagship phone with all bells and whistles and a keyboard…
The Fairberry is adaptable to pretty much any phone on the market (as long as it supports external keyboards). Foldables might be challenging though ;)
But that allows you to use any phone you like with a keyboard that anyone can make for ~€50, or maybe €100 if you get someone to do the soldering/printing for you.
I get 55 WPM without errors on the physical keyboard, compared to 45 WPM on the touch keyboard where I also have a significant amount of typos.
But tbh, typing speed is not the main reason. With the physical keyboard, I am much more accurate. I can use key combinations like CTRL+A/X/C/V (the microphone button is mapped to CTRL). There is an alternate mode (activated by pressing both shift keys at the same time) that remaps WASD as cursor keys, which makes e.g. selecting text (SHIFT + Cursor key) much easier. Also I can type while walking and not looking at the phone. And don’t get me started about how much of a difference it is when I use a command line, e.g. with SSH.
The shaped keys of the Blackberry Q10 keyboard help a lot. But picking up a physical keyboard after years of touch-only typing does take a few days to get used to it. But once you are used to it, there is no going back.
I have the direct comparison, since I have to take off the keyboard for charging, and if I want to use it while charging I need to use the virtual keyboard. It’s a pain, compared to the physical one.
It is a looong phone :)
But it still fits into most of my trouser pockets
On a similar note, sometime a year ago I spotted a guy using a Q10 at a shopping center in LA. Had a quick chat which was fun.
As someone who is on the other side of that conversation a lot, I do appreciate it whenever someone asks me about that weird thing I have in my hands ;)
I got this a lot more when I had it in copper/wood (top part was wood filament, bottom part copper filament), but I only have these colors in PLA, which is not durable at all. So I switched to the plain-black PETG and now people don’t notice it any more. I’m considering reprinting it in transparent PETG.
The hybrid physical/virtual is a great touch
The original reason for this was that I didn’t want to spend all that time getting pass-through charging to work, so for charging the keyboard needs to come off.
But this “quick release” design has the advantage that you can use the phone without keyboard when that’s advantageous, e.g. when I want to type really quietly while in bed.
This also gives me a direct comparison between physical and virtual keyboard, that you usually don’t get on a pure keyboard phone. And I have to say, typing on the screen is a PAIN compared to the physical keyboard.
and the ability to customize what’s in those top two rows would be amazing.
For the two virtual rows? Yeah, I’m using the Gr8ly customizable keyboard for that (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=symbolsshortcuts2.gr8ly.co.za.symbolshortcuts2) which allows me to put whatever symbols I want on there.
So cool what you can do with modular open design!
Thanks!
I really miss the remappable 5 button nav I had in Android 8…
That would indeed be very helpful. But if all the other usages keep draining the supply, it will only help extend artificial reserves.