I would add Antifa to this too. The fascist left organisation. Anywhere there is Antifa or BLM protest march there is property destruction and fighting.

Was it Russian or American proton?

The Russia Democrats obsession is reaching levels of group paranoia obsession. Future psychiatrists will have a new field of study.

Getting off the grid has serious drawbacks. Only part of the country has steady sunny days. In many parts of the country weather is not so good for substantial part of the year. Grid gives assurance that power is always available regardless of the household demand. Being attached to the grid also allows to sell excessive energy back to the system and earn money. Having EV car in the garage will increase power demand big time, possibly way beyond the capacity of the installed system or the system will require much more cost. For example Tesla powerwall battery has 13 kWh capacity and is scalable to 10 batteries. Tesla model S car battery has 100 kWh. Having such car would practically max out powerwall system. Most people charge their car overnight, when sun is not shining. All that 100 kWh power would have to come from the house battery. Good luck with reasonable cost.

Don't get me wrong. This is still a step forward to throw off simple malware but ...
Nice function to stop script kiddies. Microsoft is trying PR stunt to cover egg in the face and hide the fact that Windows is still full of serious security holes. The ransom-ware used by recent attacks was using holes in the OS that allowed full control of the machine. Nothing can stop such software from encoding entire hard drive any way it wants and demanding money. Software that has full control can easily undo the lock on the folders, can replace OS function that checks for valid access and that way guarantee itself unrestricted access to any folder or in extreme case just replace relevant parts of Windows OS by its own code and encipher entire hard drive sector by sector.

In such case stop using store WiFi, use 4G cell network. Spying on cell exchange is most likely illegal for private business.

Highly unlikely this is true. It is possible that for a split second during national holiday in the middle of low power demand they have touched whatever article claims.

Actually I'm a Windows user and in the long run I would rather want Windows to fail. Microsoft is drifting toward software as a service with cable TV sales model, where locked OS will only allow rental of programs from tightly controlled sources. I wish Linux on the desktop to be ultimate winner with it's open mindset allowing me to use my own hardware any way I want. The only thing that makes me Windows user is the software ecosystem. No matter what Linux fanboys say, Windows ecosystem is second to none.

I guess California is OK with outsourcing as long as it affects flyover country only.

90% of the time I do not drive the long distance so electric car would serve me well. However few times in a year I need long distance car. On average typical office space is occupied in 80%. 20% of workers are sick, attending remote meeting, traveling on business trip, etc. But try to run office with 80% of seats available and quickly some workers will find out, they have no seat available.
The other issue is "potential" for long travel. Buying electric car you need to assume that the need for long distance travel will not occur even if you do not plan for the moment.

I guess it must have been Venusians burning their fossil fuels and creating this disaster. What a piece of nonsense. No we, are not facing Venus future due to human activity. We are facing Venus future in about 2 billion years due to sun running out of hydrogen, growing in size and radiating more energy than today. Venus receives twice as much energy as Earth, has 40 times amount of gas in the atmosphere as Earth due to volcanic activity.

There are many kinds of encryption. During WWII British radio was using previously agreed phrases to activate French resistance. Can you arrest someone for sending message: "Uncle Henry is sick today" ? Where do you draw a line? What if I encode message into RAW camera image such that it does not affects how an eye see the image but otherwise has fully encoded text in the lower bits of the image pixels (text itself still encoded by cipher)? Those in many cases might be indistinguishable from normal camera noise and it will be very hard to prove that the image has a hidden message inside it and that it is breaking the law. Cameras typically have 14 bit deep RAW images and human eye only distinguishes 8 bit. So for each pixel of the image I can encode (naively) 6 bits of message and still have an image that the eye will not see the difference. Obviously the example is naive. In real life less bits with smarter algorithm would have to be used to make impossible to prove that the image has hidden message beyond noise.

My thought exactly.

Eliminating Google and forcing Cortana to be on is similar to making IE default in old Windows. EU stepped in and fined M$ for monopolistic practices. This looks like another easy target.

Since we are running permanent budget deficits nothing can really be supported.