The other problem is many BEV owners can charge at home or work making a BEV the low cost and low hassle option. More so if you can charge from solar. You are never going to convince those people go to hydrogen, it simply offers zero advantages. As infrastructure continues to improve more people are going to fall in to that group.

I have always felt hydrogen fuel cells were a good option for some market segments but every year I can think of less and less places they could be viable.

Yes, those timelines are the key, I'm old enough to remember:
1980s: Magazine articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
1990s: Magazine articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
2000s: Internet articles on how hydrogen cars are the future.
2008: Tesla show BEVs can work and be fun. Toyota went "Oh, shit, we better actually make something"
2014: Toyota Mirai is launched, people ask where do I fuel them?
2017: Tesla launch the Model 3, making the case for hydrogen and the Mirai obsolete.
2023: 9,500,000 BEVs sold, 14,451 HFCVs sold.

The core problem is EV chargers are cheap and hydrogen stations are more expensive by magnitudes. You can build one hydrogen station to fuel 4 cars or for the same cost you could probably build:
- About a thousands of level 2 chargers in long term car parks.
- Over a hundred moderately fast 50 to 100kW chargers.
- About 20 to 50 superchargers that can charge a BEV is a similar time to hydrogen fueling.

The next problem is where to put them. EV chargers take little space and people are used to idea of living near electricity since they have it at home. Wait until the NIMBYs hear you want to put a huge explosion risk near them.

This meant Tesla could afford deploy many superchargers and they could be built and profitable in a short time. Toyota on the other hand needed mass market acceptance and purchases of HFCVs before they could cover the cost and delays of build hydrogen stations.

For many of us it was clear that hydrogen was a non-starter many years ago and are surprised it has take so long for other to see this.

There are two very different reasons for ageism and they vary a lot by country for cultural reasons. Disclosure, I'm in my sixties and have worked in a few countries.

The first is the usually wrong assumption that an old tech worker has stale knowledge and is slow to learn new stuff. This is untrue, unfair and usually illegal.

The second is the self inflicted problem of expecting reasonable work conditions. Old people don't want to work long hours for assholes and shit pay, so are more picky about taking jobs.

The balance of which will apply will depend on country. In the USA it will be a mixture. Not sure about China, even though I worked there for several years.

Here in New Zealand ageism in the tech sector is not too bad. Successful tech companies have worked out the first case is untrue and will employ based on your ability to do the job. In the second case abusive employers are less common, long hours are only expected when needed, as an exception, not the norm. So it usually comes to to pay rates. Older people are expecting higher pay and that can price them out of the many jobs. So when when there is a shortage of tech workers pay is better and more old people work. When there is a surplus of tech workers old people have to be less demanding, or say "Fuck it, I will just do my own thing". Here is is common to see a mix of young and old workers working together quite happily and sharing knowledge, I like that kind of environment.

The problem is you haven't actually brought any Kindle books because they are DRM'ed. You are only renting or loaning them until the real owner changes their mind about you reading them.

In the early days there were companies selling eBooks and I would buy them for all the reasons you mention. Those companies were typically brough up by bigger companies that switch to the rental model while pretending to still sell them. I would far rather have eBooks, however I only pay for physical books because if I spend money on a book I want to own it so I can read it unconditionally.

Actually I only buy books because they don't sell ebooks anymore, which is what I would prefer. Since they moved to only loaning eBooks, in the form of DRM, the only way to guarrenette you can read an eBook is by down loading a pirated PDF. So if I want to ensure the author of a book I like is paid and I actually get to keep a copy of their work, then I'm force to buy a physical book. This will soon lead to a down turn in purchases because while I have virtually infinite space for eBooks I only have finite space for physical books.

Individually, you are probably right. However for a criminal organisation to survive any length of time there will be smart people that will be able implement or acquire EE2E. I would love for it to be true that you could have decent encryption for just the good people and by-passable for the criminals, but that is not how maths works.

Well if the price is right...

Yes, they do stick together even when they know one of their members is bad. I have first hand experience with this when cop keep my motorcycle that they recovered after it had been stolen and abandoned. There was some red flags that lead me to recover it, at significant expense. Where it got really interesting was when I asked for the police file on the case. The police refused to supply it. So I went to another part of the government that oversees such things and they got the file for me. Made for really interesting reading. It was clear that many other cops were suspicious of how things had been handled but chose not to act on them and purposely did not communicate the facts they knew with me.

Back on topic, there is a reason I use Signal as my preferred IM. Not really worried about my IMs being read, but there is a principle to be upheld.

The flaw here is EE2E is not difficult to do. If you are an organised criminal operation you likely have the resources to implement your own app outside that offered by big tech. In a practical sense it would be that they are simply adding another crime to the list and I don't think the crime of "Used EE2E" is going to scare people who have committed murder or other serious crimes.

Yes, making EE2E illegal would help law enforcement catch some criminals, but it would not be the ones you list, as they would simply use illegal EE2E. The barriers to implementing EE2E are simply too low to legislate away. If you really want to stop criminals using EE2E the first thing you have to do is ban teaching maths or computer science and destroy all text books on those subjects i.e. you can't.

So proposals like this simply make to easier for criminals to access your computers and undertake identity thief based fraud etc, in the hopes of catching only dumb criminals.

If you want to really address the issues you raised you need more pragmatic approaches, much like how the Israeli security screens aircraft passages vs the FTA way of doing it. For example they do things like asking the right questions and reading body language instead of blindly using UV pens to look at passports. Basically the solutions you seek are not technical, they are in the attitude and approach to the problem.

Take your "mother selling her child to a pedophile ring" example. Breaking EE2E then searching for "selling child" is going to be far less effective than having a cop go under cover as a mother wishing to sell a child or as a pedophile looking to buy one. Difficult problems take hard worked to solve. Breaking EE2E sounds like a simple solution but is a lazy one that will simply create more problems than it solves.

While the OS itself would be suspect coming out of China from the perspective of unwanted access to you data by the Chinese government I suspect for end users an app store under Chinese regulations is not going to be popular outside China.

If you have ever compared software designed for compliance with the local Chinese markets with the original non-Chinese versions it is sometimes clear how Chinese government restrictions can make the software less appealing or functional. When those restrictions are applied to every app in the app store you may see a direct effect on the sales outside China.

Maybe they knew it does smell right but posted it anyway as a way to get a whole of geeks commenting on Newton's 3rd law etc. On that basis it seems to be a popular post.

Ok, it has been over a decade since I last used a Windows PC but back then there was what I called Windows rot. After a fresh install Windows ran fine but over time Windows would develop rot, the performance would fall off and the reliability drop. It was usually fixed by reinstalling Windows. Linux on the other hand does not seem to have the same problem.

Not sure if that is still true today as I gather Windows is fair more stable than it was when I suffered with it.

For this performance test I would be interested to compare the different results after a clean install and the same systems 12 months later.

While there will be a lot of overlap with the Slashdot crowd, the uptake of Linux desktops is pretty high for developers as it usually make their lives easier. There will be other niches. One that comes to minds is if you have the job of being the free IT support for family members. In my case those family members are going to get Linux desktops so I need to only look at their systems every year or two, not every month as was the case before I brought in that policy.