The legislation introducing tax breaks and similar subsidies for PHEVs was argued for by larger savings in gasoil use. They don't realize, so what's to do about the subsidies? Why should PHEVs in some places get the same subsidies as EVs, despite only saving 19% instead of 100% in local emissions?

Before flash was even practical, computers kept BIOS on true ROM and used a small persistent storage commonly called CMOS for configuration. It could be a pain because the button battery that maintained it could die.

These days, you could use a small flash for configuration and a larger one with write disabled in hardware for the boot code.

On the other hand, by far the greatest threat to your laptop is someone wanting to steal it outright and sell it off. They're not going to bother with anything on it, just blow it away with a bootleg copy of Windows and call it a day.

The people looking to profit from information on your laptop will do it from half a world away while you are using it.

This can be used to regain access to laptop you won that has been hijacked by DRM you don't want. Since it requires physical possession of the laptop, it doesn't pose much risk to the end user.

I just disable secure boot. If the device leaves my control long enough for someone to do something with it, it has to be treated as potentially compromised with or without secure boot. Why create an additional recovery roadblock for myself? Security is a funny thing if you think about it carefully enough.

Always lock your car so when someone steals your $5 flashlight they also break your $500 window. Always install security lights so criminals can see what they're doing when they break in.

No, that's exactly not what chatbots are doing. Chatbots have no concept of right and wrong. Chatbots know that given the frequency of words already in the conversation and their probalistic neighborhood to elements in their body of data, which words are most probable to come next. And if there is not enough data fitting their current state, they randomly add words, because no possible next word presents them with a high probability.

So the faster we help them develop, the slower the world population climbs.

Let's face it, many evangelical Christians have voted for an administration that would instantly deport Jesus to El Salvador if he appeared today.

The upshot of my comment is that OEMs do have an easy option to not chain their devices to their cloud. They WANT to chain the devices, but then don't want to maintain the server and cry about the cost of their own self-imposed obligation as an excuse to brick features.

It's a scam.

ESP32 isn't all that new, and has never been expensive. Most of the OEMs doing rug pulls these days had the option easily available at design time.

You can put a web server on an inexpensive ESP32 these days. That server can be a lot simpler than the one in the cloud since instead of having to maintain many accounts, it only needs to handle 1.

Once you have a plant cover, it starts to be self-reinforcing, as the plants already grown provide shadow cover for the next generation. The pioneering plants get replaced by other species later, once the local micro climate has changed, and then you get an even more complex and more stable ecosystem. Of course, this takes many decades to establish completely, but it might be that it is self-sustaining much earlier.

Biologists study this all the time. Spoil tips, abandoned crop fields, volcanic ash, or the charred remains of a bush fire, they are ideal research objects on how Nature reclaims those areas. And the time line is vastly different depending on the environment, between a few years, and centuries. Until an oak forest has naturally regrown and gets into balance, it takes about 1000 years.

In the U.S., "champagne" simply means sparkling wine, in other places, it means "wine grown and produced in the Champagne region". Same with Parmesan or Budweiser or something.

And there isn't even a clear cut difference between the two, and especially in German, where many food items have different names depending on the region (don't you ever trust a dictionary, because for many food items, there is no Standard German word), a vote like the one the European Parlament just did does not work. The famous "Berliner" (jelly donut) is a prime example, which is not called "Berliner" in Berlin itself, but a Pfannkuchen (pancake), while the pancake is called Eierkuchen (egg cake) here.

Grützwurst, Erbswurst, Bettwurst - all words using the German word for sausage (Wurst), but none of them is made primarily from meat or does even contain any meat at all, and the Bettwurst is not edible, but a bed accessoire. And Burger? How about Bitburger (a beer) and Burger (a bakery and a trademark for different types of bread)? Do they have to change names? What about Schnitzel (cutlet)? How do we call Rübenschnitzel (sugar beet pulp) and Holzschnitzel (wood chips) going into the future?

This was a vote where the main goal was to "own the Left", without any thought about the consequences.

The problem is that in German, it's not Hamburger Steak, it's Hamburger Beefsteak, something everyone in Hamburg would understand. In German, Steak means the meat, and Beefsteak means the patty - quite confusing for someone native to English, for whom "beef" means meat from a cow. But when the words were borrowed by the Germans, they moved their meaning.

Problem with your calculation is that it is already outdated. Germany right now is at 57.4% renewables for the whole year of 2025, and not just a good month. The worst month in Germany in 2024 was November with only 45.1% Renewables, but two month, February and April (yes! those two!) came in at more than 60% Renewables. The whole of 2024 finished at 55.8% Renewables for electricity production.

By the way, February 2025 was the worst so far at only 42.1% - completely different than February 2024. On the other hand, June 2025 broke the record with 73.4% Renewables, while all three, August, September and October 2025 so far are above 60% Renewables.

If you want a look at the numbers, here they are.

That's not exactly right. Engineering is Applied Science. You don't have many scientific breakthroughs by engineers, because that's not what they are trained for. They are very good at combining things we already know into new technology. They are not very good at spotting where we don't know things. There are many similarities though. Both need a solid background in Mathematics, and a thorough overview of Physics as we know it right now, as it applies to their field of work, and many problems can be solved with both the engineering and the physics approach, but calling Physics "obsolete" because we have Engineering, is like calling R&D in a company "obsolete", because we have skilled craftsmen.

While this part is correct, the second

has nothing to do with the article at hand.

What you are describing is a genetic drift within a species, like the Peppered moth, caused by changing environmental conditions.

What the article is talking about is species disappearing completely, and the fact that it's the most colorful ones. The Peppered moth never disappeared. It even changed back to a majority of lighter colored specimens when industrial smoke no longer darkened the birch bark.