considering the NUMEROUS recent cold-weather debacles, solar and batteries are probably the best responses possible. Those are the most cold-resistant things on the grid. (wind is pretty resistant too but I don't think Texas gets a lot of wind?)

For how reliant they were on natural gas and nuclear, neither had been hardened against cold. Batteries are pretty foolproof there. And since they've voluntarily isolated their grid, batteries are the only safety net option available to them.

don't forget Thing from Munsters

I remember my Apple //c booting up in about five seconds, off a 5.25" floppy. I'll never forget the distinctive sound Apple DOS made when booting.
B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.. chk-chk, chk, chhhhhhhhhk
(I used FaskDisk, which helped quite a bit with disk access speed by optimizing sector interleave)

Times were probably the worst on the Mac Classics, booting off their 2.5" discs could take 20-30 seconds before the desktop appeared, and another 20 seconds of really sluggish user interface while the rest of the bits loaded and launched in the background.

Nowadays a reboot can take about 20 seconds to get to the desktop and be responsive, though MOST of the time I reboot is due to an OS update, which can take 10 minutes to install and reboot a few times.

I wonder how many cars ran into buildings that same day? or that week, or that month?

The only reason we hear about this is it's novel.

It's like comparing airplane crashes with car crashes. Frequency of occurrence: 1:10,000. Frequency of media coverage: 10,000:1

It's impossible to tell how unusual something is baed on whether or not it made the 6:00 news.

"If you continue to behave lawfully, we will continue to arrest you!"

alrightie then.

The latest news I've read on these is they generate milliwatts in square meters of space, and are about as useful as those "nuclear batteries" people were scamming around (again...) recently.

The only application for tech with that low of a power return is satellites?

Anyone familiar with AI is painfully aware that AI models are ONLY good at what they're trained to do. If you train it to pass your interview, then of course it's going to be very good at that. But as soon as you take a step or two away from what it's been training on, it will be anywhere from bad to horrible. And what's worse, they often have an absurdly high level of confidence in their wrong answers when you go off training.

that's what I'm assuming. Their recent hike from $10 to $12 seemed entirely reasonable. And then this HUGE hike they just pulled off is just off the charts.

I gave up hosting my own mailserver a few years ago due to the obsessive mail server security hikes that basically made it impossible to host my own mailserver at my own house anymore. RBLs, certificates, etc. So I just gave up and went to Rackspace because their prices were reasonable. $10 a month for basically just an email is a bit high, but reasonable. And now i have to change again.

I've had my own email domain for decades, and I have NO intention of changing my address to a Gmail. But I only have a few weeks to hunt around, make a choice, and make the change. It's likely they'll be getting a month of their blood money from me before I can get my exit plan figured out.

Like you, I'm assuming they're doing the collosal hike to get out of the consumer email business. When I did a text chat with them the rep flat out refused to acknowledge that I was a private individual and not a company. Even after I'd told him several times that I was an individual with a personal domain, he still continued to talk with me about "your company". So I have to assume they've been told to ignore anything the customer says and treat everyone like a company / business. If you're not a business, they no longer want you as a customer, you're not made of money.

Their service has been good, it's a shame they don't want to do business with us anymore. Who's a good alternative for "the common man"? I'm looking for 2-3 email addresses, with capabiity of handling hundreds of aliases. (used for controlling spam and tracking places I sign up for / sources of spam and marketing emails for easy disconnection)

We don't know enough about how the brain works (at a higher level) so we can't make something that WORKS like the brain. The best we can do is make something that BEHAVES like a brain.

LLMs and other AI implementations can be thought of as "brain emulators". They're trying to achieve similar behaviors any way they can. Our current technology could be looked at as "serial", where as brains work almost exclusively in parallel. It's still possible to build a neural network that works like a brain at a low level, but it's hideously inefficient and has absolutely no organized higher functions, so there are almost no practical applications for that approach.

The brain is the result of millions of years of random mutations being selected for what produces the best results. There was never any plan, no design, no intent. And we're trying to plan and design for specific intent. That approach will never produce a working brain. We'll continue to get better at emulating a brain, but we're never going to design one, because it can't BE designed.

In some ways China has much better consumer-protection laws than the USA. Big business over there doesn't have nearly as much control over legislation and government operations.

It's rather ironic that our basis of government, originally intended for personal freedom, has been so heavily leveraged by big business that it can block the majority of common-sense limitations on market control.

What shocks me here is how long it took to become such a popular thing? Parking domains isn't that expensive, but certainly isn't free, especially in large numbers. The people doing the parking are basically squatting on property they speculate will have value down the road. They may as well collect a little "rent" on them while they squat?

I can remember when "domain tasting" first became a thing, I looked at it and thought, "This is a TERRIBLE idea, it's going to make it more expensive for people to start up their own web site and 'interesting' domains are going to be unobtainable by the average person just because some squatter thinks they're parked on gold." No random person is going to pay thousands of dollars for a domain name they fancy just for a hobby, so it's just going to stifle small private sites.

I don't know how it currently works, but back when it started you could "taste" a domain for months almost for free, and there was nothing stopping you from "tasting" it again the instant your current taste expired, So you could squat domains for an unlimited time almost for free. "gee, nobody would ever abuse that!"

Though now with the explosion of TLDs, it's widened the market so far that the squatters are finding it hard to cover all the bases. Raise their rent! (and make the price go up exponentially to KEEP it parked) Watch the squatters scurry away like the cockroaches they are!

Within days of the trade-secret-protected algorithm being leaked in 1994, a researcher demonstrated a cryptographic attack

ah yes, that. Don't DO that.

Anything that can be destroyed by public review deserves to be destroyed by public review.

So if you're afraid of releasing your security code, your code is probably TRASH.

"We generated mountains of AI slop, and then spent countless hours turd-polishing and searching for clips that weren't completely terrible to bring you the best slop we could manage!"

When someone says "they lost an engine on takeoff", ths is not what they usually mean...

It's amazing to see that we're only just now discovering we can use the power of wind to move boats around!