This is a huge (and for the vast majority of the world: incorrect) assumption. Down here at 40N the peak winter solar incidence is 1 third of the summer peak (10 MJ/m/day cf. about 30 in June / July) but with decently built houses that are designed for the climate there is no need for cooling during the summer months.

However, take me into one of the hundreds of OTHER fields of programming skill: database, gaming, AI, graphics or most of the others and I wouldn't even register a flicker. In short there's no such thing as "programming skill" once you get past beginner.

There is a 16,000 mile train link from China to Spain. It takes 4 months for goods to arrive and they are subject to extremes of weather that make a lot of shipments impractical. It's also slower and more expensive than sending goods by sea. Any fixed link is going to be subject to delays, breakdowns, politics and difficulty in "overtaking" slower vehicles ahead of you.

It sounds like a neat idea, but we've already got better solutions: depending on whether you want speed or low cost.

The "traditional" view was that proper English is the grammar, pronunciation and maybe even the dialect used by BBC newsreaders. This doesn't really stand anymore, as there are many more regional (british english) dialects on national TV than were encouraged in the past.

However I can see the confusion as the word for "American" in the american language is "English". That is the language that most of the world learns as english, not "british" english.

No. Everybody can access some pseudo-anonymous content that may be from one or more actual humans who have access to an account called "meta-monkey". Similarly, one, some or all of those humans could contribute to other pseudonyms and might post completely different views, opinions and personal information. We'd never know if there was a 1-to-1 relationship from a person to a "handle", a 1-to-many to other handles or a many-to-1 for a group contribution.

Even using a "real name" is meaningless. Last time I googled, there were over 35,000 people with my name just in my country. You need a helluva lot more information (and it must be true information) before you can create a high-quality link between a single individual and an online presence.

Sounds like the best way to prolong your life is to avoid treadmills

Windows, on the other hand has, as the author says, For Windows many solutions claim to exist, usually in form of massive antivirus suites that provide the locked-down, restricted environment that parents often think will stop their children accessing material the parents don't want them to (ha!).

So if you want to feel as if your child is "protected" then that is the way forward. At least while they are in your house, using your systems. Obviously once they go to school, to friends' or get a device of their own then none of these controls is worth a dam' any more. But that's life!

If these aliens were intent on destroying us, they'd simply drop something large, fast and nasty into the sun and cause some sort of X-Ray eruption. Since there is a massive nuclear reactor so close, it would be silly not to leverage that to your goals. No need for ships or an invading force.

So we can assume that if aliens did arrive here, our destruction would not be their goal. They might, for example, just be neighbours popping over to ask politely if we'd mind turning down our electromagnetic emissions: TV, radar, etc.

If domination / subjugation / removal of humans to make way for their own settlers was their intent, then there's no reason to expect it would have to be done quickly. It could be a centuries long process. And, again, climate control or sunlight restriction would be a straightforward approach that would cause little permanent damage and wouldn't involve their actual presence in our system.

The difficulty there is that it also reduces the engagement with the readers and thus the number of times they will return to the page and therefore see the advertisements. There do appear to be many (previously respectable) newspaper websites that publish articles that are only there as click-bait.

The the UK The Guardian (a once respectable, semi-liberal, print publication) has taken that route to publishing inflammatory, poorly written and factually incorrect op-ed / opinion pieces on its website who's only value seems to be to draw comments and provoke arguments.

I believe that people are more inclined to give credibility to comments that they already have some sympathy with - rather than ones which take an opposing view.

I've never seen any follow-up comments, anywhere, that say "yes, you're right. I used to think differently, but your arguments have persuaded me I was wrong". At best you get other like-minded people agreeing with you and at worst you get those who disagree making an extreme, offensive, insulting or threatening retorts.

It also seems likely that the "less internet-savvy" are soon cured of that particular shortcoming and soon join in the fray. While most will be well-balanced individuals, a few will go completely over the top - some permanently as they then get the attention (and pity) they crave, but most will quickly have an "OMG, what am I doing" moment and become ashamed of their excessive behaviour.

If all the gadgets you install in a house need explicit controls, they're still dumb: not smart.

A truly smart device would "know" what to do and when. How it attained that knowledge - though being taught, observation, or some sort of self-learning / evolution process doesn't matter. The point is that merely swapping one sort of switch or control for another (less convenient, more complicated and dependent on a whole slew of subsidiary technology) isn't a sign of "smart".
A really smart device would, like a good butler (so I'm told), just fade into the background. It would produce just the required item or action at just the right time without the need to ask and it would just work - including handling exceptions in a "smart" way.

That would also allow individuals who wish to start over (say: when they grow up a little) to do so by simply starting a new account and leaving the old one to die off.

However, the final step: where the sound is converted from electricity to air movement has always been the point that was most open to improvement - it still is. Hence a decent set of speakers will make an otherwise mediocre audio system sound so much better. This is never more true than when you wish to improve the tinny sound from modern, thin, TVs.

Why make things harder than they have to be?