Everyone knows SSDs are more expensive than spinning disks when measured per byte stored, whether you care about dollars or CO2, but strangely they're very popular. SSDs have speed advantages that make them worth their costs but this article ignores those. If my workload demands high IOPS then I might be able to get by with ten or more times less SSD terabytes than spinning disk terabytes.

as compared to data centres The biggest demand for cooling is mostly going to coincide with sunny days when solar power should be plentiful. The match isn't perfect---there are plenty of hot evenings after the sun has gone down---but it's better than data centres which tend to power on 24/7 to pay for all that expensive IT hardware ASAP.

The difficulty and expense with renewable energy is the storage needed to align generation with demand. Solar panels are dirt cheap but grid-scale batteries and pumped hydro are still very expensive. So A/C might use more electricity than data centres but still be less of a problem.

Absolutely not. Semantic drift hasn't taken us that far. Originally, if you used multiple cannon to batter down a castle wall, that was called a battery of cannon. When electrolytic cells were developed, they soon chained them together and called the result a battery. And we have 9V batteries still, and they're just batteries, not battery packs.

Now consumers describe things like AA cells as batteries and that's become common, accepted usage. The pedants have lost that one. But people trying to tell us that a group of cells connected together can no longer be called a battery, but only a battery pack, they're going to lose that one.

The public transport system in Canberra had a planned upgrade from its MyWay to MyWay+ in progress many months before the 3G shut-off. Its main purpose was to modernise the ticketing system, allowing tapping on and off with ordinary credit cards or using your mobile phone. That fact that they ran close to the 3G shut-off was due to the usual government IT project delays.

Aircraft know their speed and altitude pretty well, even without GPS, so this would seem to be easy to correct for. Wind would be the largest uncertainty, because it makes airspeed different from the ground speed, but I guess you could still reduce the atomic clock drift due to these effects by an order of magnitude.

Australia's political parties are firmly in election mode though the election date hasn't yet been set. Nobody wants to be telling voters now that they're going to be making cars more expensive. There are perceived issues, like: the Chinese knowing where we drive or even remotely disabling vehicles; and wanting to suck up to the Trump administration for favourable trade and defence deals. Especially if the conservatives win the election, there's a good chance we'll see some barriers for Chinese vehicles, though not necessarily tariffs. Home Affairs recently declining to comment is a sign that the current situation could change.

The biggest issue is orbital velocity. Going fast enough to stay in orbit needs 40 times more energy than just reaching the altitude of space and then falling back down. These minutes-long tourist flights are not even close to relevance for the practical applications of space.

Looks like France is trying to make so that, when I VPN into France with, say, ExpressVPN, I can't connect to, say, TorrentFreak. Maybe just DNS blocking is required.

So why would the VPN services dump their French network presence, or do they mean also dumping all their French customers? There are a heap of other reasons for wanting to VPN into a country. This doesn't appear to be a case of a government attempting to snoop on encrypted traffic. If ISPs in France have to block, it seems no surprise that VPNs providing a French IP address have to do the same.

The movie business is ... business; they care about profits. Someone just just bet a billion dollars that audiences will continue to pay for something that's not original. Sometimes artistry, creativity and originality pay off, which is great, but formulaic and franchise movies are undeniably a safer bet. Even if audiences claim to prefer new things, they hate bad movies more, and it's simply hard to be original and good at the same time.

The biggest challenge for Google here has been to not make it blindingly obvious that blocking ad-blockers is the goal here. The article says "back in 2019 Google insisted it was not trying to kill content blockers" but what else would they say. If Chrome's market share dips because Firefox becomes known for better blocking, how long before Google starts to leverage their support for Mozilla?

These guys say the 2024 Tesla Model 3 Performance takes 2.8 seconds for the 0-60 and has an 11.0 quarter mile.

Starlink is betting pretty big that your thinking is wrong, and they've probably even done the link budget calculations to back this up. Those direct-to-cell satellites are worth much less if everyone needs custom hardware for access. Expanding the range of handset models they're testing also sounds like they're pretty confident about how testing is going so far, though they did originally hope to have the service operational by the end of last year. Those traditional satellite phone companies look to be in trouble.

They have bigger antennas and, most importantly, directional antennas which can focus much more tightly onto a particular handset. In comparison, cell tower antennas use a pretty wide beam. Starlink also needs to modify the frequencies it uses depending on how quickly it's moving towards or away from each customer, because of the Doppler effect. There's some very fancy signal processing going on to make all this work.

Good luck getting your insurance to pay out if your house is ever robbed when using such a lock. If there's no sign of forced entry they're just going to say that you must not have property secured the door: claim denied.

If they miraculously recover the cockpit voice recorder and/or flight data recorder, there could be many more clues. After that long they'll need another miracle to access any of the data.