Peak oil is a mathematical certainty. One day we will be no longer using oil. This means it is mathematically certain at some point there will be a global maximum to the oil production function.

That's just the sort of thing Hitler would say.

the Internet of Things us not only useless, but detrimental

You've got it all wrong. It's the Internet of Other People's Things That You Use To Serve Their Interests which is detrimental. But as soon as we go from there to the Internet of Your Things Intended to Serve Your Interests Above All Others, this stuff is unambiguously good. All it takes to do this stuff right, is to not buy it. Build it. Just like your desktop PC, your server, and hopefully pretty soon, your phone. (I'm surprised by how feasible that last one is getting. I bet in 5-10 years a significant fraction of "typical nerds" will be using their own phones. It might still have a spy on board, but the spy will have very limited access.)

I have dozens of LEDs and had so far only one failure in 4 years (I thought I had a new failure the other day, but there's a bad connection in the lighting circuit - the lamp works fine when put in another fixture), so "rarely last more than 4 years" seems unlikely at this stage.

The colour rendering is good enough, I replaced my kitchen lights with LEDs about 4 years ago and have not noticed any issues with colour rendering. A turn-on delay of 100ms is functionally instant (I can't imagine any case in my home where 100ms for a light to turn on will be significant - and tungsten bulbs will require at least this long to warm up and glow at full brightness), and they are full brightness immediately (unlike GU10 CFLs that take 4-5 minutes to warm up). The EM emissions are utterly trivial. At the frequencies the current regulation electronics works at, there is nothing on the internal circuit board that is long enough to act as anything remotely close to an efficient antenna, and none of the lights I have bought are "dodgy" - they have all been tested for conformance to EM emission standards. They do not interfere with any radio equipment I have.

My bike light is a seriously bright LED headlight (and tail light). The headlight is as bright as a car's headlight, and I ride on quite a few unlit roads. Once I've been out of streetlights for a while in the very white pool of light the LED headlight gives me, whenever a car comes the other way, their lights look as orange as sodium lights. Normally I'd see the lights of oncoming cars as more or less white.

The system as a whole is far from 100% efficient. Once you add transmission losses and generation losses, electric resistive heating will be probably below 25% for the system as a whole, as most of the heat will be getting made outside of the building that's being heated.

Gas heating would be far more efficient as a system, since the losses in shipping the gas to your house to burn will be less than shipping the gas to the power station, burning it there to make heat, turning that into electricity, transmitting the electricity, then turning what's left back to heat in the building.

That's surface temperature. This ocean is deep under the surface.

So the follow-up question would be: if it's deep under the surface, how will sunlight get there?

The answer is that sunlight isn't what's needed, it's the right amount of energy that's needed. The energy can come from a lot of other places. Tidal forces for example can heat the interior of the moon, radioactive decay can heat the core of a moon etc. so there may be quite a bit of subsurface energy. For example, if you look at the bottom of the oceans on Earth where there is no sunlight, there are oases of life around volcanic vents on the ocean floor (which are spewing all kinds of useful chemicals into the environment). So while the surface might be cold and lifeless, it's possible that there are significant amounts of subsurface liquid water at a temperature that's compatible with life of some description.

Constellations are not defined by a collection of stars at roughly the same distance. They are a collection of stars roughly close together, in a pattern _as viewed from Earth_. Apparently adjacent stars in the same constellation can vary in distance from earth by thousands of light years.

So any newly discovered star closer to Earth is most likely to be in the scope of some other constellation.

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

I joke that if PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy", PHP stands for "Pretty Hopeless Privacy". The language practically encourages people to write code that suffers from SQL injection exploits.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.