Amazon can afford solar panels and batteries, so their electricity unit cost is going to be extremely low. Even when they need to pull from the grid, they can do it overnight when prices are lowest.

EVs cost a lot less than fossils to maintain. No engine oil or filters, no exhaust system, no spark plugs, no fuel pump or injectors, no water pump, no variable gearbox (on most), even the brakes hardly get used thanks to regen. For commercial operators with fleets of vehicles, those savings add up fast. You can bet that the vehicles Amazon uses are very simple, and the only complexities are things they would fit to a fossil like telematics so they can see where they are and how they are driving.

As for consumer EVs, there are loads of simple ones. The Nissan Leaf is a good example, one of the first and a very straightforward machine. It's easy to replace or upgrade the batteries, the BMS handles it without any reprogramming. It all works fine without the infotainment unit even being installed, and the base models didn't have telematics.

Might be worth looking at variable tariffs. For March-May the demand for electricity generation goes to zero in California on a regular basis, and even more often over the summer. While you might not pay $0 for it, the price should go way down.

Or get some solar panels and charge from those. Unfortunately it's the people who can't afford such things or shift their demand to cheaper times that end up paying the most as well, exacerbating inequality.

Maybe it's different in the US, but in the UK large consumers of electricity pay a variable rate based on demand. It's fairly predictable over a period of 48 hours, but it does vary. It's only retail customers that get a fixed rate, although with a tiny bit of effort you can save a lot of money by opting out of that.

Secure Boot ensures that the OS boot files have not been modified. One popular technique malware used was to replace ntfs.sys (the NTFS filesystem driver) or the SATA driver with one that hid the malware's own files. Virus scanners could tell you were infected, but couldn't remove the infection. The only way to get rid of it was to boot a Linux CD with anti-virus software from someone like Kaspersky, which used its own NTFS and SATA drivers. Or move the HDD to another machine for scanning etc.

That became impossible once Secure Boot was checking that those parts of the OS were not modified. To be honest, I would talk someone into installing Linux over the phone if they couldn't disable Secure Boot in the BIOS, chances are I'd be stuck doing tech support forever. Unless their PC shipped with it, you can guarantee something important will be broken.

Hold on, what animator gets paid a subsistence level income? Is the studio hiring?

Have you had even a cursory look at China's infrastructure projects? Two thirds of the entire world's high speed rail lines, with the project only starting in the mid 2000s. They are now upgrading some parts to maglev at 600 kph.

Same thing with metro systems and other light rail. Then you get to roads...

For all it's faults, China is undeniably the leader in infrastructure projects. No other country comes close. And I say that not as a fan, but as a warning that we need to get our shit together if we want to compete. China built all that high speed rail in the time the UK was talking about maybe doing one short line and then cancelling most of it.

https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...

I quote someone else saying: "The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

And my comment on that included (removing all the supporting links):
      "We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO. ...
        But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyrights and patents which set the stage for that. We still have choices, and we can still pick different ways forward. [With] the free and open source software movements, we are in a sense returning to older ways of sharing knowledge that were more popular before artificial scarcity was so broadly thought to be a good idea for promoting progress. One should always ask, "progress in what direction"? ...
    Bill Gate's could have spent his lifetime writing free software. That being born a multi-millionaire was not enough for him is a sign of an illness that causes "financial obesity", not something to be emulated. But, in the end, it is not Bill Gates who has destroyed our society as much as all the people who want to be the next Bill Gates and support regressive social policies they hope to benefit from someday. ..
      Those who have the impulse to share and cooperate more than hoard and compete are still stuck trying to navigate the economic mess we have made of today's society through artificial scarcity, the growing rich/poor divide, the diversion of so much productivity into weapons and consumer fads, and so on. The late 1960s and early 1970s when Kildall, Moore and Kay/Ingalls were having their breakthroughs were a more hopeful time in that sense. ...
    Still, the web and HTML5/JavaScript/CSS3 are a new hope for sharing via open standards, and they have been a big success in that sense. I'm moving more of my own work in that direction for that reason (even for all their own issues). Like has been said about JavaScript -- it is better than we deserve considering its history and the pressures that we all let shape it."

So, while you and others who are posting here are no doubt right on technical limits and marketing issues, I would say the "downfall" story is more complex socially than one man and his decisions with one design.

I'll again echo a key point about Gary by someone else quoted at the start: "But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man." We need to build a society and an economy where people who make that choice get more support and respect.

The Japanese have demonstrated precision landing on the Moon without GPS. They used various sensors, including cameras scanning the horizon to match it to the expected view.

The race for sample return is now on with China. They are likely to do a simple mission that aims to just get something back, rather than maximize scientific value, much like Apollo 11. Starship might be in that race, it's not really clear yet. They are contracted to put astronauts on the Moon next year, although it looks like it will slip to 2026, but either way they really need to put a lot of effort into getting that milestone done before looking to Mars.

Landing on Mars is very different to the Moon, due to Mars having more gravity and an atmosphere. Plus the spacecraft needs to survive a much longer mission just to get there, and you can't iterate so rapidly due to less frequent launch windows and the long transit time before you discover that something doesn't work right.

The other issue is fuel. If you have a small lander and ascent vehicle you can take all the fuel with you. Something the size of Starship may need to produce fuel on the ground.

The Chinese have not announced how they intend to do it, but since they aren't developing anything like Starship it seems like they will probably go the small lander/ascent vehicle and in-orbit rendezvous method.

That's demonstrably untrue. Look at the Windows XP days, an OS that launched without even enabling the firewall. Then there was Vista that everyone hated because Microsoft beefed up the security model, resulting in large numbers of security warnings. And now the same people are moaning about Windows 11 requiring TPM 2 for securing the boot process, which was of course one of the favourite attack vectors back before Secure Boot became mandatory for OEMs.

Meanwhile, as Linux's popularity increases, so does the amount of malware. Not because Linux is getting worse, just because there is more effort to exploit it now.

It's not clear that Linux would fix anything here. If the feature you need happens to be open source and actually works, great, but if it's some proprietary extension that your vendor offers or you didn't pay them to fix the bugs, you are on your own.

That is assuming that the software you need is even Linux native. If you are running it in WINE then good luck.

Why would air and sea freight be impossible to make green? We have alternative fuels like hydrogen and (for boats) wind. And remember that it is net zero, so even if they emit some CO2 it's okay as long as the same amount is captured somewhere else.

Are you saying it's impossible *today*? Well yes, it is, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing everything they can to get there. And just because delivery vehicles is a relatively small part of the total, doesn't mean it isn't significant. Aside from anything else, fossil vans emit the pollution literally outside your front door.

I believe that Rivian is using Chinese LFP batteries, which are the best. They last a long time, especially when you only ever AC charge them (what TFA calls "level 2").

The trucks are stationary while loading anyway, but I imagine the main charging will be done overnight when deliveries are not being made anyway. Amazon will likely generate a lot of the electricity itself, e.g. via solar on the building rooftops. It's the cheapest way, followed by overnight cheap electricity due to low demand.

Rapid charging on motorways is already as expensive as petrol in parts of Europe, but most people charge at home or at work where it is much cheaper (standard domestic/commercial rates).

The cost to you is based on demand. Can you invest in generation? In the UK, as well as getting your own solar, you can buy a share in a wind farm, and then get a return from all the electricity it generates. You can also get a battery or car that supports V2G and sell energy back to the grid at peak times.

I know it's annoying but you are externalising some of your costs at the moment, so you can't expect to be subsidised forever. It's cheaper if you become part of the solution, but unfortunately some people can't afford the up-front costs. We should address that, but in the US you don't like socialism so I hope you have the cash.

Any form of coercion to agree to non-essential use of data, such as a discount, is not allowed under GDPR. Consent must be freely given, with no exchange.

No, but privacy is. Even if Facebook offers a free tier, they still have to respect that right.

If respect for human rights is too much for Facebook, they can withdraw from the market.