It depends entirely on what the consulting is.

Usually you use consultants for one-time or infrequently needed services that would make little sense to maintain staff for. Architecture and engineering services, legal consultation, and advertising are all easy examples of things a business might need but not often enough to have that manpower in-house. Some professional services also carry liability insurance requirements which, if you hire a consultant, you don't have to pay for either.

If you want to talk about something like IT services; Seems likely an IT admin might not be the busiest person in a company, so depending on the size of your business it might make sense to contract for on-call services and remote administration. One person can probably manage 3-4 small businesses worth of tech support and management, so each of those businesses pays less than hiring their own dedicated in-house employee both in salaries and benefits. (And yeah, they are very likely ALSO getting paid less...)
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> The Japanese have found a way to use small temperature differences to generate electricity

And for about $50 I can buy an engine that runs off the temperature difference between the ambient air and a cup of hot water. The idea of using thermal gradients in the ocean to generate power is at least 150 years old. Any guesses why it's not caught on?

Hint: the facility in Japan you're probably thinking of only generates 100kw (~135HP), and it's not clear if that's before or after they account for the power to pump the seawater.

There is no utility in chasing down such incredibly low quality thermal energy unless you happen to actually want heat, but even then it's not really hot enough for most things you'd want scavenged heat for.
=Smidge=

Not necessarily. The industrial revolution suddenly created exponential growth because of the discovery of large seams of coal. Wood doesn't burn hot enough - and there arn't enough trees - to run powerful steam engines so without coal , and then oil, we may have carried on developing slowly and eventually created a technical society - though not using fossil fuels - but it would have taken a LOT longer. However in the scheme of the lifetime of a species an extra thousand years here or there is nothing.

"The on-board ARM dual-core Cortex-A9 processor, while hot stuff for space computing hardware (which tends to be low-powered and radiation-hardened), was slow even by Earth-bound standards."

DOOM could run on a 40 MIPS 486. A single core A9 can manage almost 4000 MIPS! So no, whatever other issues there may have been getting Doom to run on the hardware, it sure as hell wasn't CPU speed.

> Is there no way to do it for data centers?

The water temps are typically barely warm enough for most people's preference for a shower.

> For example, use a heat pump to concentrate the heat to above boiling temperature then use that to boil water to run a steam turbine.

Getting a heat pump to operate at atmospheric boiling water temps is extremely difficult. Remember that to have a working heat pump, you need a refrigerant medium that condenses at the high temperature side under a given pressure and also boils at or below the low temperature side at a given pressure... then, you need to build a machine that can actually create those pressures.

Now consider that most steam cycle powerplants use superheated steam at temps of over 500C. What material could you use that can be made to condense into a liquid at >500C, what kinds of pressures would be required to make that happen, and what could you even build such a machine out of to survive those conditions?

> I think you could run that at a net-positive for power?

The second law of thermodynamics has left you a voicemail...
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Except most of them are not moving portraits and because of the way our world is built horizontally far more than vertically you can get more information in a landscape format. Film makers knew this 100 years ago. The ONLY reason for portrait is shitty phones with users too dumb to turn them on their sides when filming.

Why would I need to replace the built in one? It works.

Implying everyone who votes for a right wing party is a nazi is juvenile and has the opposite effect to what you might hope but then the left never seem to learn this lesson in basic human psychology because they don't really understand what makes most people tick.

Your slashdot handle is very appropriate in this instance.

I don't want to have to rely on a phone to do even basic stuff such as listening to the radio or navigation because phones can be mislaid or stolen. Plus in my car android auto via bluetooth is so slow its unusable which means I need to have it plugged in via usb all the time.

Having said that, there's no reason ANY kind of radio reception needs an "app update". The radio should be a hard wired chip with a basic interface on top. I don't need to see the fecking album cover of whatevers being played at the moment etc etc.

"Phones are a pain in the arse to turn 90 degrees"

Even for you thats a really poor troll. Had a bad day? Have another go.

Yeah,. that'll be why streaming movies on phones is in portrait mode... oh, wait...

They're all in fucking portrait mode so borderline unwatchable on a pc.

Are Gen Z ever going to figure out that yes, you can actually turn a phone through 90 degrees?

Its been engineered deliberately so it won't work without a net connection so they can charge a subscription model and possibly get user sleep data too.

The only dumb bit is on the part of the morons who parted with 4 figure sums to buy this thing from these grifters in the first place.

If it's anything like their content ID copyright enforcement mechanism, I'm sure this will go absolutely perfect and there will be no drama whatsoever.

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"An insider at the bank, a self-professed fan of the technology"

Lets see how much of a fanboy he is when HE gets replaced by it. And yes, it probably is a man as psychopathy tends to be more common in males.