Yeah. I'd expect journalists to know basic grammar and not use present tense when talking about last year.

It might make more sense to use the hydrogen to produce methane, which is considerably easier to store and manage.

>And then of course, there's the whole matter of your car often being
>on the road or parked somewhere else when other people in the
>house might need it to be parked in your garage.

But this is about California, where the obvious solution is to raise revenue by requiring advance purchase of a permit to remove the car from your garage!

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.

Yep. This, like many problems associated with regulated utilities, is one where the right answer is also pretty simple: Just make the prices reflect the costs, then let the market sort it out. But the "just" in that statement belies the political challenges of making such changes.

>followed by sci-fi itself which generally revolves around some
>Earth/Solar System/Universe threat which only one man (it's almost
>always a man) can solve.

That would generally be "space opera".

There are notable space opera protagonists who are at least nominally female: Weber's Honor Harrington (probably the most successful modern series in the subgenera), Moone's Kyla Vatta, Shepherd's Kris Longknife.

Of those, the first two could pretty much flip the sex of pretty much every character except Harrington's pregnant mother with no real rewriting, while the latter might be an exhibit for why male author's *shouldn't* try to write actually female characters.

Then again, there bulk of SF male protagonists aren't male in any more than name, so . . .

hawk

note that the pendulum has swung back.

Note, for example, the 2000 Morrison case, in which the USSC choked on the notion that a violent act a woman was inherently intra-state act.

While the overreach of the Commerce Clause still needs to be reined in, it doesn't (over) extend nearly as far as it used to.

hawk, esq.

You assume. You should consider that people with an inside view who see what data is actually collected, how it's secured and managed and how it's used, may have a very different perspective on that. I mean, without an internal view you understandably have to assume the worst, but they (we) don't.

Speaking for myself, I very few concerns about Google's privacy violations today. But with respect to the future, you and I are in the same boat, neither of us can know what a future version of the company might do. And on that score I suspect you and I would find ourselves in strong agreement on the potential for serious harm. Where we might differ again is that I see the work being done to limit Google's access to user data so I'm cautiously optimistic that before all vestiges of the old corporate culture are lost and the bean counters take over completely, Google will largely have ceased collecting and using data for advertising and what remains will be easy to limit and make safe.

So many posts are clearly marketing campaigns, not sure that AI is needed to make it much worse.

Re: your subject "Not true", the data doesn't lie. The fact that you're an outlier doesn't change the situation.

Me too, though usually it's audiobooks for fiction and certain types of non-fiction. Being able to "read" a book while mowing the lawn, or whatever, has made chores far less annoying and opened up big blocks of time for reading.

I meant that the wider market. Even if Apple's strategy isn't going to be profitable, a subset of Meta's efforts can be (the devices can be profitable, but they spent way too much money on certain projects that will not pan out).

Apple may make a return to the market with an amended product that fit the business case.

There's a market, it's viable, but it's not set the world on fire. Apple's device aimed for a market that seemingly wasn't there (too expensive particularly for an unproven ecosystem). But other devices have done well enough to have a business justification.

KDE has been in Fedora a while, a lot of Fedora gets dropped on the way to RHEL. Fedora 34 would become RHEL9, and dropped KDE on the way.

I suppose I don't know the particulars of this protest, but *most* protests I see aren't standing up for Hamas but pointing out the broader treatment of Palestinians, whether it's as collateral damage in Gaza or continuing behavior in the West Bank, which is widely recognized as wrong by the UN/ICC/EU/various nations.

Broadly speaking, the muslims I have known personally are good folk. Extremists under any religious cover misbehave similar, though admittedly some Islamic extremists have more formally recognized power than is typical, but as it stands none of this is in evidence in the West Bank. Gaza may be more tricky by virtue Hamas, but most major powers have expressed a belief that Israel could have been more surgical but are instead inflicted way more collateral damage than should be acceptable.