Fuck my 15 moderator points, you should be ashamed that this was allowed at all. What a load of shite.

I'm really disappointed.

Q: "And this, Bond, is your pee bottle"

Bond: "My what?"

Q: "You can't stop and relieve yourself at any time during this mission, Bond, you MUST pee in the bottle!"

Bond: "Does it do anything else"

Q: "Yes, there's a laser in the cap, be careful - if you pee on the cap, you'll short-circuit the laser's battery and blow yourself up."

Even embedded fonts is no guarantee.

"They also look better than anything that Word generates."

Sharper typefaces, perhaps?

Better keming, too?

Off to pihole I go. It already blocks resolution of telemetry upload URLs, we'll have to track down just who Copilot is talking to.

I think I'll go and read "Footfall" (Niven/Pournelle) again, to refresh my space battle tactics.

Project Orion, shuttles armed with missiles, fission-pumped x-ray lasers, it's a helluva ride.

That's great, good on you.

I joyfully anticipate your report on replacing banking and insurance mainframes with "non-mainframe strategies to zero-downtime, relative to the workload"

Or not. If banks, insurance companies, airlines, and others with a nine-nines uptime requirement could replace their mainframes with "non-mainframe strategies", I'd be happy to read about it.

Really? You don't think banks would have moved off the mainframe world if they had been able to find a replacement that was just as reliable for the same price or cheaper?

It's been decades, and it's never happened.

"The vast majority of no-downtime experiences in the modern era don't have mainframe involvement."

LOL. You have no idea.

I was referring to mainframes WRT to downtime, not VMs on commodity hardware.

There are a few pumped hydro projects in the pipeline, but a recent change in the Qld state government canned one of the proposals.

Yes, it was a right-leaning government that canned it.

"market-distorting subsidies"

Ok, sure. As long as you remove all subsidies from fossil-fuel sources, too.

There are also hybrid split systems that run off dedicated solar PV while the sun is shining, and switch over to mains* when the sun goes down.

*or your battery that was being charged during the hot part of the day. So you get solar-powered aircon for most of the day.

We've just signed a contract to supply Singapore with electricity generated near Darwin.

Either chemistry will pay back quickly under the current pricing arrangements in Australia.

Charge your batteries with cheap PV during the day, then switch to the batteries after 3pm or 4pm when the tariff goes ^ that way.

Which also coincides with the time we like to have aircon - late afternoon/evening.

Then switch back to the grid after 10pm - which is when all the cheaper hot water tariffs switch on.

One nice thing about domestic batteries is resilience in natural disasters, and we get a lot of those.

There's designs that run collector tubes on the rear of PV panels, and you circulate your pool water through it.

Swimming pools are an enormous thermal sink, although if you heat them too much, it's not a refreshing swim.