It's a consumer thing. If they have to set a password they will either use "password" or "12345", and then forget it anyway and call tech support. So you might as well generate a good password at the factory and have it on a QR code on the device, or some kind of authenticated way for your app to request it from the device. Then it magically just works, and it's all fine until someone figures out how you generate the passwords.

You have to think like a business. Security is a factor, but not as big a factor as reducing support overheads and customer returns because they couldn't set up their printer. If you check Amazon reviews people do say that they had difficulty with Brother devices initially.

After WW2 people could see how well the government directing these large projects worked, and wanted more of it. In the US you had things like the GI Act that got a lot of people into new homes. NASA was funded because of the Cold War and developed a lot of really valuable technology.

Then in the 80s the people who benefited from all that stuff decided that it was unfair that now some other people were getting a hand up too, and created the myth that they themselves got it all through personal hard work with no help from the government. Things have been getting worse ever since.

Obviously the wind will keep blowing around the UK so we won't miss out on being able to harvest it, but the technology is racing ahead. That means patents, it means all the low hanging fruit is taken and R&D will have less of a return, and it gives them time to ramp up mass production and reduce costs before we have barely started.

China's and Germany's usual strengths are suited to wind turbines too. China produces massive amounts of steel, the supply chain is extremely agile, and they have the experience and continual building programmes to get deployment done anywhere very quickly. Germany also has a strong manufacturing base. Both have big domestic markets for their products too.

For some reason the UK tends to follow this path very often. Aircraft are a good example. We went from leaders to a relatively small aerospace industry, and no domestic models. Trains too. The BBC recently posted a documentary from around 1970 on their YouTube channel, about the future of high speed rail and how we were about to leapfrog past the Japanese. Of course the opposite happened, we ran our railways into the ground, cancelled all the R&D just as it was getting results, and now import the trains we need.

Yea I thought of that as well. So for some reason Georgia ships a much larger fraction of their waste to Malaysia than California. Is there an explanation for that? Just logistically it seems like Malaysia is more convienent for California than Georgia.

It wouldn't be something that we rely on, just a way to reduce our energy costs. We have some of the more expensive energy in the world because prices are basically set by gas generators, so the less gas we use the cheaper it will get. If Putin does damage the cable, we will have to fall back to fossil fuels or import more from elsewhere, until it is fixed.

There are a few projects like this around the world. There is some risk, nobody knows for sure if they can be protected well enough to be viable, but if they can work then there are huge opportunities.

The UK is wasting huge amounts of money on a couple of nuclear reactors that aren't needed and which only supply extremely expensive electricity. If the investment was going into renewables at the rate it should be going in I'd be okay with this decision, but it seems more likely that it wan cancelled to divert funds to these nuclear projects.

We could have been world leaders in renewables, particularly offshore wind. I think we have already missed that boat though, with other European countries, and of course China, surging ahead. Our steel industry is in trouble yet again, despite there being a huge read-made domestic market for it just waiting to be exploited. Wind turbines are about 60-70% steel.

Windows moved graphics out of the kernel when Vista was released back in 2006.

Even just moving them between my main machine's SSD and archive hard drives is rather slow over gigabit.

And yes, people do edit video off their NAS, it's a fairly common set-up these days. One reason is because Apple shafts you so badly on storage upgrades, and for some reason they like Macs.

Georgia produces more plastic waste than California?

Is this the state or the country? Actually either way, this seems really hard to believe. Any explanation?

Why not put links (and not just tiny icons, but Wikipedia-like links of whole words or even sentences) to wherever the AI got the information?

Then it is *both* a search engine and an AI overview.

Assuming Fedora goes ahead with removing 32-bit multilib, how would a 64-bit Steam client run 32-bit games whose (non-Valve) publishers have not released a 64-bit executable?

I don't mean just since 2008, I mean since the 1970s. In the UK the price of an average home went from about 2.5x average salary to about 10-12x average salary, depending on location. So even adjusted for inflation, houses got about 5x more expensive.

Of course if you got on the ladder in the 1970s or earlier you did well out of it. Hugely valuable asset that you can leverage or cash in by downsizing/moving somewhere cheaper when you retire. If you are buying in 2025... Well, by 2075 I doubt that house will be worth 50-60x average wages.

It screws up so much else as well. People end up putting everything into a mortgage, instead of a pension, and pensions are crap now anyway. Boomers got defined benefits, but they proved unaffordable, so now you get defined contributions, and your fund has to cover the defined benefit costs for those lucky enough to get them.

The issue isn't demand either, it's supply. NIMBYism and house builders manipulating the market. Again, boomers benefited for massive building after the war. New towns, lots of new houses, new infrastructure. We can't build any of that now, because of NIMBYism, green belt wankery, and incompetence at all levels of government.

The summary sounds like a district-scale counterpart to Cloud&Heat, a German firm that colocates server racks running OpenStack in businesses needing heating. See "Germans Can Get Free Heating From the Cloud" from November 2014. Interestingly enough, the summary of the Cloud&Heat story mentions Qarnot as well.

You need it to be considerably hotter than 100C to produce useful steam. A typical kettle's heating element will be around 200C.

The housing crisis really has shafted a lot of people, and it seems like it is a permanent problem now. Those huge increases in property values that make people wealthy are not going to be repeated. If you buy a house young somehow, it won't be worth 5x as much, adjusted for inflation, when you retire. That was an offer for boomers only, and some select members of gen X.

Can't easily be undone either, because of course people who already own these expensive assets don't want to see them devalued. Some are still paying the mortgage on them, and could be in negative equity.

Apparently the only solution politicians have is to start another sub-prime mortgage bubble.