Interestingly, lithium ion batteries are endothermic while charging. They might need to actively heat the battery pack during charging.

(Most battery chemistries are endothermic while either charging or discharging, and exothermic in the other charge/discharge direction. It varies with chemistry which way is which.)

See e.g. here

Most of Australia [...] eschew it

Incorrect. NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia all do it; Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland do not.

In my state, Western Australia, there have been four referendums on the question; and the people have voted "no" each time.

There are of course people agitating for a fifth referendum.

That page contains a link to a news story on the same site:

The Honor V40 will reportedly be the first to arrive with Google Play Services since Huawei ban.

So possibly the summary is incorrect on that point.

“Using technology” is a such great suffix for a vast range of statements, if you want to increase your word count without adding meaning.

I watched TV, using technology. I phoned my girlfriend, using technology. I went down to the shops, using technology.

(a) Yes, but this is a system administrator thing — you'd have to delete it on each machine;

(b) yes, but the next security update that affected IE would likely put it back.

The Australian ABC do a good job at news, in a variety of media (not unlike the BBC). So it seems to me that if they had a go at creating a social network, they'd have a similar chance to any other startup, if they got a fair shot at it and it didn't get stuffed up by bureaucracy. Though if you look at all the tech companies that have taken a shot at any given field, the success rate is not high.

But the key problem is that you'd have to give the ABC funding to start developing that social network a year or two before you wanted it in production use.

... which just leaves the question: what actually is FSGSBASE?

FS and GS are segment registers, that (in Linux and Windows) point to an area of memory. This area is different per-thread, so when you switch threads, FS and GS need to be loaded with new values.

This new code lets that happen more efficiently, in a way that I don't quite follow, but I think it has to do with not having to change access level from user mode to kernel mode before you execute the instruction.

https://lwn.net/Articles/76935...

Up to 2015 or so, unsubsidised renewables were more expensive than fossil fuel plants. So they needed subsidies to compete.

But we've gotten better at making renewable power for a cheap price. Now, whether it's cheaper to build and operate a new renewable plant or a new fossil plant depends on the circumstances: Lots of sun/wind? Little sun/wind? Maximum output aligned with maximum demand for electricity or not?

Renewables are continuing to get cheaper in line with Wright's law (as you manufacture more of a thing, you get better at manufacturing that thing). In a decade or so, it will be cheaper to build and operate a renewable plant than it is to operate an existing fossil plant: https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/...

That leaves the problem of storage, which is also benefiting from Wright's law.

Every oil well is licensed by that nation's regulatory body. It's unheard-of for a regulator to allow bulk release of the natural gas directly to the atmosphere. (If nothing else, it would be a fire and explosion hazard.)

Different reservoirs have different mixtures of stuff in the product, where "stuff" is mostly oil, natural gas, carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, water, and sand particles.

It's uncommon for regulators to allow the gas to be simply burned on location, unless there's only a small amount of gas. Some natural gas does leak during the whole process though.

We're starting to see regulators requiring wells that produce a large amount of carbon dioxide to separate the carbon dioxide and reinject it into the ground. This separation is difficult to do well: https://thewest.com.au/busines...

The recent gas boom is mostly based on wells that have more gas and less oil than wells that were drilled decades ago.