Most states and towns in the USA do not have building codes for residential off-grid battery storage.

I thought that was in the National Electrical Code (NEC) section on solar, at least if they're on the 2017 version (or some earlier versions). Most jurisdictions adopt some version of the NEC (and occasionally move to a later version - my county is on 2017 as of a year or so ago) and then maybe add a few changes, rather than write their own electrical code.

Main remaining downsides, if you want to keep your fire insurance, are finding listed (by an NRTL such as UL) systems (there are a few, even some that are rated for elevations over 1,500 meters - about 79 feet short of 5,000) and that the code now requires a cert for solar systems installers, so if you want to install it all yourself you have to drop a couple hunderd bux on a short online course or hire a pro to make the major connections and maybe do some of the design for your install.

Problem is that gas is often byproduct of oil extraction, and very difficult to transport since it's a gas and disperses, unlike oil that is a liquid and can be stored in a simple container.

So use a thermoacoustic liquefier. Bunch of plumbing and a burner regulator on a par with a water heater, which contains the only moving part. Burn off 30% of it and use the heat energy to turn the rest as liquefied propane (LP) Gas, ready to haul away. One model, about the right size to haul in on a flatbed semi, can output 500 gal per day at that efficiency.

Buybacks signal there is nothing better you can think of doing with all your cash.

Or that you have a lot of cash and other assets and a market mob madness has depressed your stock price to where it's a really good deal to spend some of the cash to take some of the stock out of circulation and concentrate the company's value in the rest of it.

Possibly it's even such a good deal that some rich outsiders could buy up controlling interest, sell off the non-money assets, take that and the cash pile, and come out ahead. That leaves the current employees out of a job and with their unvested options worthless. Better to spend the hostile-takeover bait making the rest of your stock more valueable now, and keep the company running, than wait until the hostiles are buying and screw up the company and its stockholders with poison pills and the like.

That does sound kind-a spooky, I suppose. I mean, that's what they do in StarTrek so maybe it's ok... but it does SOUND spooky.

I ate a 'Beyond Burger' once and man oh man was I sick. Never again will I eat anything like that. Remember Olean chips with the warning on the bag about 'anal oil leakage'? I remember.

That would be pointless, though.

Doing something that another country has already done long ago, doesn't impress anyone. If they want to be perceived as advanced leaders in scientific research, they have to do something that has NOT already been done decades ago by other countries, especially hated Western countries.

If there were any conceivable way they could send a manned mission to Mars, that's what they'd be doing. The dark side of the moon, is the loftiest space-exploration goal they thought they had any realistic chance of achieving.

", as is often the way they are portrayed in American media" Found your problem.

Of course not. Seriously, anyone who's not a citizen with that stance should feel free to GTFO. Employees who are citizens with that stance should not have any say at all and again, are free to GTFO of that company. Activists inside a company should not get to drive the boat.

Really though? Not selling to US Police Departments is a logical and valid stance now?

If the police themselves make that decision (or even up higher in government) that's fine. A US company deciding to BAN a service for US Law enforcement is not OK. That's not their call to make.

You miss the 'IHMO' part? Tell me why a public company gets to decide which government agencies they sell products to, while enjoying the security of said government agencies. They are being hostile to the US police force and I won't stand for it...

Are they going to ban license plate reading/lookup too if it's run through Azure? Traffic cameras? This is outside Microsoft's decision making IMHO. They either accept money for services rendered or they don't. Discriminating against US law enforcement should not be an option and should actually be illegal (again IMHO). We're supposed to trust the government. If that's an issue, then fix the root of the problem. Disallowing police from using technologies is not the right fix.

> Whatever happened to the goal of Windows 10 being the last version of Windows

That was never intended to actually be true. They said that because IT people with actual discernment were looking at Windows Ten and going "Eh, this version is pants, I think we're gonna stick with Seven for now and see if Microsoft can get their act together for the *next* release." And that would be a disaster, because then they (and more importantly their companies) might not pay Microsoft any money for upgrade licenses for Ten.

Once just about everyone who ever pays for software upgrades let go of Seven and upgraded, the "Ten is the last version" line was promptly dropped, because it was no longer needed.

There is one significant way in which Eleven is better than Ten: the "is your PC ready for the upgrade" check is significantly more realistic about system requirements. Ten will happily install on a system with 8 GB of RAM, which is less than a quarter of what is needed to run it at an even vaguely acceptable level of performance, and it doesn't even *warn* you that there might be a problem. The result, is that the system can't be used for anything because it's too busy swapping, because the core of the OS doesn't fit in physical RAM, let alone any applications (and the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem is even more pants than the NT/XP/Vista/Seven one). Eleven doesn't have this problem: it actually tells you your PC isn't good enough.

I still say Seven is the best operating system Microsoft has ever produced. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it ends up being the best one Microsoft *will* ever produce.

WhatsApp is owned by the same company as Facebook.

There has never been another company in the entire history of the Earth, that has been caught violating its own stated privacy policy and doing things with user data that it had specifically promised *not* to do, more times than this company.

I'm not saying they're the most evil company ever. They're not. There have been companies that have done worse things to people. Like, participating in genocide, for example. And there are companies that are in bed with totalitarian governments and directly exploit user data for Orwellian surveillance purposes (*cough* ByteDance *cough*). Which is not great.

But when we're talking specifically about whether the company will distribute your data to various third parties after promising that they wouldn't do that, *nobody* has ever had a worse track record for that, than Facebook/Meta. In particular, if a company comes along and offers them money for some user data, for marketing purposes, the only reason the deal would ever break down would be if they don't offer *enough* money. A little thing like "our privacy policy says we won't do that" would never get in the way.

I actually wrote my own text editor, in Emacs lisp. Unfortunately it was pretty much the first thing I wrote for Emacs back in the late nineties when I was a rank newb, so the code is absolutely terrible, and so I have never distributed it. But I do still use it. Maybe someday I'll do a proper rewrite and make the code available.

Is it even possible to run systemd on Emacs? I thought it only ran on systems with a C API. (Emacs has a lisp API instead. Which is better. Fight me.)