This is in itself a GDPR violation and will end up resulting in fines. Websites that default to all cookies choices tickets as default are also in violation of at least two EU directives - one that choices for contact *must* be opt-in only, and the second for not making the choices clear.

Things dropping below ambient air temperature is extremely common. The simplest examples would include nighttime ground surfaces when the sky is clear. There's a reason why the edges of fields and the areas near walls and trees is the last to get frosted up

In essence, the temperature of an object depends on the heat transfer between itself and its surroundings. This transfer can be of conduction, convection, or radiation. For objects that are not fluids, that is limited to conduction and radiation. Now, air is a pretty good insulator and a poor fluid for the transfer of heat. Noting that the effective temperature of a clear sky at night is in the negative 40 degrees or lower, it then becomes fairly easy to see that the object in question will radiate a lot heat in that direction without a balancing flow of heat back. If that object were in an enclosed room, then the room surfaces would be transferring heat to the object at the same rate the object would be transferring heat to the surfaces - no change in temperature. There is heat transfer between the air and the object by conduction, but that is a very inefficient process by comparison especially when the air is still - and heavy frosts happen more easily with still air.

Telescopes can regularly reach a few degrees below ambient and then become cold enough for dew to condense on the optics and the tube structures, because the optics can be exposed to the cold sky and the optics are not being warmed effectively by the surrounding air.

Whether one can power a steaming engine with that, well if you have a working fluid in the right temperature range of course you can. The available power though would be very small given the delta-T present. It may be possible to measure a voltage with a very large Peltier setup sinking heat by radiative cooling only, but not enough current to be practical and especially for the cost of setup..

Theoretically this would be a version of Solar, where daytime heating and night time cooling is the driving force.

Luckily I live in a regime where EULAs are completely non-enforceable as they are not contracts.. They are nothing more than a wishlist by the distributor, and are meaningless when it comes down to enforceability. Nothing the creator/seller writes in a click-through can take away from my rights as a purchaser - they can only add..

I could easily spot the difference between 60, 90, and 120 fps when playing Quake on a CRT (LG Flatron 795) that could do 120Hz @1024x768.

The difference is very noticeable when panning quickly. I can see each individual screen update as an image along the movement path - i.e. the opposite of a motion blur. The higher the framerate the more images populated the movement path for the same movement, and the better I felt I could see what was going on. Some people will of course settle for less and be happy with that.

I would easily say that certain people would see a benefit to consistent 144Hz refresh of both card output and screen refresh.

Hi, Ireland here waving over the sea at you, where English is a defined official language, second to Gaeilge.

There are reasons why American companies are looking to move to Ireland for their European points of presence, and our ability to speak English better than the English is one of those..

Citation needed on the "imprisoned for 3 days for beliefs".

No 3.5mm headphone jack == an immediate deal breaker for me. I will not purchase any phone that does not have headphone+mic capability, sans dongle, that I can use my existing headphones with. I also value a real line out, especially since Bluetooth compresses all audio plus adds latency to the signal. No headphone? May as well have no speaker or mic, and we're now back to the no-phone Ipod.

The fact that the Oculus drivers regularly call home and this cannot be switched off, makes the Rift a dead duck for me. No thank you, I do not use FB and I actively block FB at a hosts and cookies level. I would prefer to have a Vive and deal with Steam, than have anything FB-related on a hardware level.

Considering the the iDevice is pretty much rendered obsolete and unusable by the newer versions of the iOS. Update and find that your device is running so slow that it becomes difficult to use, and add the fact that Apple forces your newer app versions to require new iOS versions to remain in the store, and you then find that you have a device that you can't install the newer versions of the apps and is so slow.

Built in obsolescence, built in to the whole ecosystem, that's hard to take sometimes. I had this personally with iPhone 3 so I upgraded to various Samsung flagships since.

Last year, Google trialled the UI with lots of white boxes for desktop search results, so I went to DDG until my account's UI was eventually reset back to the normal appearance on PC. The newer UI was fine on mobile, where a large target box was more useful to me than tiny text, especially when I will be scrolling lots anyway.

On a desktop with a mouse pointer this new UI idea is worse than useless. Large rafts of empty space, less information presented. more clicks to get to where I wanted to go, less choice in things. Almost as though the Windows 10 UI was being copied. (The UI being worse is one reason I've been staying on Win7 for years.)

The redesign broke a site that was not broken, and I will not utilise that news source from now onwards until it is reverted to the known-working state.

I've already provided my feedback to Google on this, so let's see where that goes.. I'm not holding out much hope.

It is a pity that some people are happy to actively break something that is known to work well

If you break the law, you have to face the consequences. Thankfully the legal system here does appear to much more fair than across the pond, and those that unlawfully abuse their power in the market will get slapped down.
This judgement makes me happy.
(as an aside, it does also bring revenue in from an entity that appears to abuse the Dutch Sandwich tax process..)

Biometric passwords are a really dumb idea.

By all means, have a biometric username, but never have a biometric password. It's a basic rule for anyone that actually understands how to implement auth in the real world.

Easy to change a real password, impossible to change a biometric password..

Yes, it looks as though it'll be harder and harder to displace systemd from Linux distros with the defaulting to Gnome, with it's hardcoded dependencies. Long live Devuan Linux

There's no contract, other than that involved in the sale of the product.

EULAs are not contracts after all. In the EU, the manufacturer would be taken to court for actions like this, and in Ireland and the UK, there would be interesting repercussions on the manufacturer for this.

In short EULAs are not worth the paper they are printed on...

The point of the timings of the timezone is to ensure that the average transit of the Sun at the central meridian of the timezone is at 12:00. Having offsets at other times is pointless. Once you go 8.5 degrees of longitude east or west of that central meridian, you should be in a timezone +1 hours or -1 hours different. Instead of changing the clock on the wall with all of the problems associated with that, it's better (and almost certainly easier) to change the timings of schools or work shifts.
The situation where I am (western Ireland) is crazy during the summer as the sun's transit is at ~14.30 instead of the 12:30 it should be.
If we are contemplating moving away from the current timezones, we may as well standardise on UTC, and save all of the clock change problems.