Yes - exactly this. Stop subsidising gas, but to do this they'll need a transition to move all the gas central heating in the UK over to heat pumps instead. Grants for doing so exist, but also increasing pressure on the gas price side would push people in the right direction as well.

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

The torture did end - he was eventually freed by Hercules.

Dupe or not, worth leaving this here as a reminder that no, China EV sales are not imploding. Debunked rubbish.

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

Motorola/IBM too, same time period. I talked to the head of their chip division at the time. POWER (not PowerPC) was doing investigation into vertical chips.

Mind you, this guy also told me there would never be a chip faster than 2Ghz due to thermal limits so...yeah.

Or laundering.

I'm not American, but I know there already is an asteroid defence programme. I was listening to people involved in it on a podcast, Science Friday, the other week. Interesting stuff.

On the 2.5Bn years bit - yes, but don't start don't finish. We have no idea how long it will take to develop the techniques required for this, and there will always be a good reason to put it off until tomorrow. Needs to start and just become so embedded over time that future generations don't even question why we're doing it - it's just patently obvious to them. Won't happen in my lifetime, but then a lot of things won't happen in my lifetime that are getting worked on today and that's fine.

There's often a "we should fix problems on earth before looking to space" theme. We can be as equal, progressive and fair as we like and an asteroid still wouldn't give a damn and wipe us out anyway. Should we survive asteroid attacks, the sun will expand and burn the planet dry anyway.

We have to do both. Defence of the Earth (dramatic phrase, but see subject above...) has to be studied, funded and run. Along side that a long, probably multigenerationally long, programme of "how do we survive when the Earth is uninhabitable" including the ability to leave Earth and live elsewhere. These programmes are fundamental to long term survival of the human race.

I think one of the problems is that it all sounds very dramatic, big and sci-fi. But it isn't - we have direct evidence that the risk already materialised once and wiped out most life. We also have evidence of the expansion of the sun. All these things are certain, so we have to look at them as reality and not fiction.

Interestingly, I would regard never learning how to write PHP over 21 years as one of my greatest successes.

So AI ingests the text books to learn about the subject so it can...create text books?