Reasonably priced LED light bulbs that put out enough light to be useful for room lighting are a pretty new thing. I haven't seen =$10 bulbs with lumens equivalent to 60-watt incandescents until last year, though it's possible they've been around slightly longer, and I'm still waiting to see cheap LED bulbs that are equivalent to 100 or 150-watt incandescents. And yes, CFLs have been around for a while, and have probably been cheap for 4-5 years, and most of the hard-to-reach light fixtures in my ceilings have them, and sometimes they burn out. These days, if they do, I replace them with LEDs.

That's efficiency. Energy saving really is the watts; whether the amount of light the choices put out is enough, not enough, or more than enough is a separate question. For night-lights, not much is still usually enough.

Except that 'in orbit' is a state, not a place.
It's like doing the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs.

Technically, a non-lifting body could be "in orbit" 1" off the ground (assuming the earth were a sphere).

Rather than pushing others down, they pull others up by creating jobs and demand.

It takes two people to create a job: one to offer the position, and one to accept it. Otherwise, the job hasn't really been "created." Proponents of trickle-down theory usually seem to ignore this fact.

Meanwhile, those who offer the positions are greedy and are always trying to pay as little as they can get away with, so I wouldn't consider them to be any more virtuous than those who accept the positions.

"But, guess what, the people can decide."

Guess what, the people have already decided: it's called capitalism. It's the French government that's standing in the way, by decreeing (essentially) that books are only for the wealthy.

I haven't owned any of the current generation of cellphone-accessory smartwatches. The ones I have owned:

-- Casio GPS watch - It was a gift from my wife, back before GPSs had taken over the world. It was big and clunky, got me all kinds of geek cred at work, didn't work very well as a GPS but the fact that it worked at all was amazing.

-- TI EZ430-Chronos watch - programmable, using their MSP430 microprocessor set, had a reasonably flexible display. It didn't have a lot of sensors, and I didn't end up hacking it very much, but it was a lot of fun. It had a low-power radio link that let it connect to a heartbeat monitor band, so you could use it for things like watching your heart rate while jogging.

-- Watches with various other functions built in, like moon phase, tides tables for surfing, that kind of thing. One of them had a screen saver for entirely no good reason, just because it could.

In practice, I find that almost all of the time I'm either in front of a computer screen with a clock display in the corner, or in an environment with clocks around, or carrying a cellphone with a clock display on the main screen, or in an environment that's not very friendly to watches, or in a social environment where I don't really care what time the clock says it is, so I've stopped wearing watches most of the time.

When smart-watches get smart enough to be the phone instead of being a peripheral display for the phone, maybe. But is a smart-watch phone that needs a Bluetooth headset and needs reading glasses to use more convenient than a cellphone with big text that can use a wired headset? For me, it's really not.

And Iron Dome hasn't been doing anything to protect the Palestinians from missile attacks.

Mira Grant sleeps with a machete under her bed, and highly suggests you do the same.

It's not the cold that kills you - it's the cure for the common cold. And not everybody dies. Or stays dead.

In Tucson 10%ish of the drinking water comes from reclaimed water (aka filtered sewage). Makes sense in an area with not a lot of fresh water resources. Also in those areas you can have different kinds. You can purchase a non-potable (not for consumption) water source for irrigation. Again, reclaimed water, but it undergoes less filtering and thus is cheaper. Plenty of larger places get a hookup to keep their watering costs down.

It is a very sensible way of doing things and you actually have more control of purity than water that comes out of the ground.

I didn't express any hate for the people using the illegal explosives. As a friend of mine says, on a holiday celebrating the overthrow of a government, the question of whether your fireworks are legal or not really just shouldn't come up.

Yes. AWS, Azure, etc. are focused on (and are actually pretty good at) providing compute services (whether that be PaaS or straight-up VMs). However, what they are not is contractually responsible for the safekeeping or integrity of your data.

There are definitely use cases for using "someone else's servers." Use them for external-facing resources like a web presence, customer portal, extranet services or even email. But when it comes to business critical systems and data, no one has a more compelling motive to secure and maintain them than an internal IT staff.

I imagine you'll disagree with me, which is fine. I would point out that despite the costs of implementing and maintaining a highly availabile internal virtualization environment, many of those costs are significantly offset by the usage and maintenance contracts as well as network connectivity required to support internal access to "someone else's servers."

In the end, it's a matter of balancing the costs against the criticality and confidentiality of the data, IMHO.

Assuming it would require me to provide personal information, remind me not to do business with whatever company you work for. Then again, if you're a shill for a "cloud" (marketing-speak for "someone else's servers), I understand. Either way, carry on.