Absolutely not. The charge/discharge round trip losses will be a few percent, maybe 10% if the batteries are in bad shape. The price difference between peak and off-peak is often 5-10X. Commercial users also get hit with demand surcharges based on the peak draw during the month and those can really make a huge difference. Using batteries to smooth out those peaks can be a bigger savings even than avoiding draw during peak times.

Even for residential use, the savings can be significant. I have batteries and I'm on a time-of-use plan that charges me 5X as much during peak hours (6-10PM) as the rest of the day. I make sure the system is set up so that I never draw any power during peak.

Incredibly unlikely. If the claimed violations are legitimate, and webXray reported them to the state plus the attempt to lean on them, Google would get slammed, hard, both legally and in the press. No way in hell Google would risk that.

No one can make session tracking with form variables or URL arguments as reliable as it is with cookies.

The message seems clear: If you want these features you must buy more recent models. But I ask myself: how long before these new models have features removed to get me to buy even newer stuff ?

Presumably these TVs were marketed as having these features - so, in some jurisdictions at least, this would be illegal.

The classic counter-example is Cheap Trick's Live at Budokan album which for many, myself included, had the definitive versions of many of their songs. If memory serves, they spliced a couple of different shows together for the release, but it was done pretty seamlessly.

I have a lot of success with obscure, mostly-undocumented systems. Which models are you using? There's an enormous difference in capability level between the top-tier models and the next step down. Also a pretty big cost difference.

It can be, sure, but it's less reliable and more painful to work with.

If the law is about sale or sharing, not collection, then Google doesn't have to change anything, because Google doesn't sell or share data. That would be wasteful; Google's ad business is all about monetizing the data at Google, not giving someone else a chance to monetize it.

Sure, but isn't it interesting that the number of photos -- fuzzy or otherwise -- didn't massively increase when everyone started carrying cameras all the time? In fact it declined significantly.

The only logical conclusion is that the little gray men realized there were a lot more cameras about and became much more careful.

It's possible the companies are flagrantly ignoring the opt out indication.

It's also possible that webXray is confusing ad/tracking cookies with cookies required for normal site operation, viewing any set-cookie command as a violation.

Based on my experience working at Google, I'm betting on the second possibility. But, we'll see. Either we'll hear some stories about the companies being fined, or sued, or prosecuted (depending how the law works), or this will just quietly disappear when someone educates webXray.

Apparently the rain doesn't reach the surface. But it is still only slightly less hellish on the surface for the lack of droplets of concentrated sulfuric acid pelting down.

I do not want an input only device, and if I want headphones, I'll put one in each ear I want one in. Rarely is that both ears, and usually I consciously and specifically pick which ear I want.

What I do care the most about is a screen. I'm not so hung up on screen size or quality for now, I just want something that I can use easier than my phone. If you don't have a screen, what is the point?

You are absolutely feel free to argue what you think the law *should* say. But the Bill of Rights, including the fourth amendment (which is what you meant, not the fifth), definitely does not restrict what private citizens and corporations can do. It only restricts the government. And, as TomWinTejas said, it didn't even restrict the states or local governments, only the federal government, until the 14th amendment modified the meaning.

When it comes to search and seizure there is a different concept that protects you from private individuals and corporations: property rights. But the way property rights apply to your face is... complicated at best, and under present law doesn't give you the protection you think you should have. The law gives you protection against someone producing images of your face for commercial use, but that's not what's happening here.

And as for privacy rights, the Constitution really doesn't address that except in the narrow case of government searches. SCOTUS did actual find a right to privacy in the "penumbra" of the Constitution in Roe v Wade, but only ever applied it in the context of one very particular medical procedure, and anyway that court opinion is widely considered to be one of the worst examples of motivated legal reasoning in history. It's pretty clear that the court didn't apply that privacy right in any other cases because shining more light on the incredibly shoddy reasoning could only result in Roe getting overturned. As it did.

Anyway, the point is that you can and should advocate for laws that enact the privacy protections you want, but don't fool yourself in to believing that they already exist in the law, because they don't.

Go always seemed like something of a niche language to me. Some DevOps folks, and especially people working on cloud-native infrastructure like Docker and Kubernetes, and the tools designed to run on top of them, seemed to love it. I never really heard of it catching on outside that niche, though (except within Google).

Correct. The TIOBE index is currently compiled from results from 25 search engines. You see this in the way the rankings bounce around each time they report them, seemingly with no meaningful explanation. That's why TIOBE always has been and always will be a crappy indicator of which languages are the most used ... especially now that more people are using AIs instead of standard search engines to ask their questions.

However, the index looks like statistics, which makes it attractive to journalists who cover tech. That means it's useful for getting TIOBE's name in the press. (TIOBE is a software quality measuring company),