It got boring when Slashdot disabled (broke?) the message center so it is now impossible to see when someone has replied to your posts. That was the thing that, early on, allowed Slashdot discussions to be discussions and not just disjointed monologues. Since it went away, the quality of discussions has gone way down. The AC spam was just a symptom of this.

Nope. Note in TFS the key phrase: 'In its default configuration'. The university that I used to work for bought Office 365. This was even before the GDPR, but the university deals with a lot of confidential commercial data from industrial partners and with health records in life sciences departments. Google's stock T&Cs were completely incompatible with this and they refused to negotiate. Microsoft's stock T&Cs were also incompatible (which is why this ruling is completely unsurprising), but Microsoft was happy to negotiate a contract that gave much stricter controls over data.

For Germany in particular, the German Azure data centres are actually owned by a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft and so out of US jurisdiction. Companies in Germany (and the rest of the EU) can buy an Office 365 subscription that guarantees that their data doesn't ever leave Germany.

What do you mean by 'a cycle life of 1000 cycles'? Most batteries that I've seen are rated as a number of cycles after which they are guaranteed to retain 80% of their initial charge. That number is typically 1,000-3,000 cycles. After that, most of them don't die, they just have a lower maximum charge, which continues to degrade.

It gets more complicated when you factor in partial charges. LiIon batteries are most efficient if you never fully charge or discharge them. If you use around 40% of their total charge cycle each time then they last a lot longer, but then you have to increase your up-front costs in exchange for the lower TCO.

Solar cells are now very cheap. They are a negligible part of the cost for a small-scale installation. The cost of deploying rooftop solar is dominated by the installation cost (putting up scaffolding and having competent people climbing safely around on the roof is not cheap). The second largest cost is the storage and the alternator system to drive AC mains. Both of these costs are amortised significantly in larger installations. Most large installations are at ground level, so require a fraction of the manpower to install each panel. They use much larger alternator installations, which also come with higher efficiency.

TL;DR: Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.

The problem is not GOG, the problem is a credit card that charges a fee based on the location of the transaction processor. The fix is to get a credit card from a reputable company.

And all of that composting material is composting because bacteria are slowly breaking it down, releasing methane in the process. So, good job reducing the greenhouse effect...

Every day, we hear people who read tabloid news reporting instead of scientific papers complaining about the lack of scientific rigour in the things that they read about climate change.

For transatlantic flights, it would be a horrible idea, but there are other routes (e.g. a lot of European short-haul flights with carriers like Ryanair and things like the 30-minute NY to Boston run) where a perch would probably be more comfortable than the existing non-reclining awful seats. Especially if they made it possible to board faster so you're spending less time in the plane...

That's technically true, but not practically true. Most software gains very little (more entropy in ASLR) from moving to using 64-bit pointers. Most software gains a lot from moving from x86-32 to x86-64 as the ISA. In particular, it gains a lot more registers (and, importantly, loses the restrictions on which instructions it can use). It gains cheap PC-relative addressing (i.e. shared libraries are a lot faster). It gains SSE2 as a baseline, so floating point operations and calling conventions are cheaper.

There's a good argument to be made for using the x32 ABI, but generally speaking x86-64 code with the 64-bit ABI will still be faster than x86-32 code using any ABI.

The value of a publicly traded company is the price of the last sale of a share multiplied by the number of shares. The price of the last share is dependent on what the person buying it thinks that they will be able to sell it for. At and IPO, a lot of people expect the demand to be high and so hope to sell it quickly before it eventually drops in value. Others expect that a newly listed company will grow. Slack is in a market that is growing and is increasingly able to convert subscribers into paying customers, so it's not unreasonable to expect them to grow quite a bit. On the other hand, their main competitor is Microsoft (Teams), and so another likely future involves them losing customers in large numbers to a product that many of their customers are already getting bundled with their Office 365 subscriptions.

You've inadvertently flagged the real problem with XMPP: It doesn't store messages server side, or it does store messages server side, depending on which protocol extensions a given implementation happens to have. For anything that you might want to do with XMPP, there are 2-10 different XEPs with varying levels of support, that describe how to do it.

XMPP badly needed a high-quality reference implementation of a server and a library for implementing clients. Instead it got two crappy reference implementations (that were so bad even the standards editor didn't recommend using them) and a load of partial implementations of the client part of the spec.

Why would one US corporation being acquired by another US corporation make any difference to the laws that apply to it?

That's not true for most carriers. If you ask for a SIM-only deal, they will sell you something a lot cheaper. Someone did the analysis of these phone-and-plane deals in the USA 4-5 years ago and found that the best ones worked out to be the equivalent to a loan with an APR of around 40%, a lot were even higher. You can almost certainly get an unsecured personal loan from your bank with better rates than you can get a phone bundle from your network provider.

It's not surprising that a lot of people are unaware of this difference though - when providers are making so much money from selling overpriced loans to people wanting to buy expensive phones, they have a great incentive to hide their good-value plans.

The fact that the people who wanted to leave had no plan and promised a large number of mutually incompatible things (e.g. access to the common market, freedom from EU regulation) and any time they are given some of the things they demand they complain that they don't have the others. Among the things that were promised in the referendum campaign:

• Membership of the common market.
• Freedom from EU regulation.
• Freedom from the European Court of Justice.
• 'The easiest trade deals in history' with numerous other countries.
• £350m/week more available to the exchequer.

If we lose regulatory alignment with the EU, then we can't have freedom of movement over the Irish border, so we're in violation of the Good Friday Agreement. Good luck conducting trade deals when you've just violated an international treaty. If we remain in the common market, we have to remain aligned with the EU for regulation and answerable to the ECJ.

The only Brexit that doesn't involve completely killing the economy (losing 44% of exports and 53% of imports) involves remaining closely aligned with the common market. This means losing our seats in the EU Parliament, Commission, and Council, but still having to follow their rules. That's practically the exact opposite of 'take back control'.

There is no set of compromises that will keep the 51% (closer to 46% now) happy because they voted for an impossible set of constraints.

There was a case on Slashdot a few years ago where someone had a camera and microphone in their porch, which they used to record the police. They were charged under wiretapping legislation. I don't know what happened to the case in the end, but if they were successfully prosecuted then I can imagine that Bezos and Pichai would be liable for a few million counts of the same.