Damn... another botched Windows 11 update from Microsoft? :-)

I guess, given the recent social media ban for under-16-year-olds in Australia, these kids can't apply to enter the USA now... hahaha!

I have a combination of prescriptions that mean that I can't use contact lenses. I see quite a lot of people wearing glasses, and Zenni, Warby Parker, and the other online companies have said they sell a decent number of frames with plano lenses (meaning no prescription), presumably for people who want the look.

Eventually, you won't be able to tell. Someone will come in wearing glasses, and the tech is going to be too small and streamlined. There are also companies working on embedding augmented reality capabilities in contact lenses fed by tiny cameras placed just out of the field of vision. You'd be able to see them only in very specific circumstances. Power feed is a primary challenge right now, but it's probably not an unsolvable problem.

Just looking at the technical side, the cost to the end-user of streaming that much data would be exorbitant. Compressed video or even once-per-second snapshots would eat up all the mobile data, and the battery life would be measured in single digit hours.

No one else is going to risk making a part that one of the big defense contractors has under copyright with an exclusivity lock even if the US government says they can. The smaller ones just can't afford the effects of a lawsuit or the risk of treble damages if they do. That's why forcing a right to repair into the contracts is so important.

Google's motto was once: Don't be evil

YouTube's motto is now: Don't be honest

That's what LibreOffice is for.

Nobody asked for this but legions of YT creators have been screaming for fairer moderation and an appeals process that works. Even more YT viewers have been asking for an end to the relentless onslaught of crappy AI-generated scam ads for obviously bogus "7 second health hacks", fake AC units, ridiculously ineffective heaters, pressure-washers, robot dogs that are just stuffed animals, etc, etc. Don't even get me started on AI-slop.

Last time I complained about a scam ad, @teamyoutube told me just to block it. Yeah, that's right, if I don't want to watch these obviously fake scam ads it's up to *me* to block them. But if I use an ad-blocker -- oh no, that's not allowed!

It seems that YT spends far too much time working on the "nice to haves" and nowhere near enough working on the "need to haves".

The future of user-generated VOD is not YouTube. Big changes are coming to that part of the market quite soon, lead by open-source software that supports self-hosting along with multiple access and monetization portals. Stay tuned, this will be big and YouTube will regret its infatuation with AI, short-form content and repurposed video from other media.

I wonder if they'll discover bulletin board systems (BBS) like we used to use before the internet was even a thing.

Seems to me there might be a proliferation of such systems appearing in Oz. I wonder if they could even "import" content from other mainstream social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube etc like FidoNet used to do with usenet postings. Now *that* would be interesting.

Hey... come to think of it, let's just revive usenet and be done with it!

It's mostly a contracting issue. Sometimes, if a customer wants full rights to all documentation and design details (or source code or whatever), they have to pay more. If they want exclusive full rights, they have to pay even more. This can be beneficial for some things, not so good for others. If you want to customize your ERP system (SAP or something like that), you'll generally bring in an outside company to do it. You could demand all the source code for everything they did and pay more for it, but if you don't have the necessary expertise on tap to make use of it, it's just throwing money out the window.

The taxpayers paid for the goods along with their research and development.

Not always. Companies do undertake their own research on their own dime, hoping to later sell it to government or other contractors. To take a simple example, a government that purchases a Cessna Citation jet for travel purposes is mostly buying off the shelf. They may customize it with their own communications gear, but they didn't pay for the R&D that went into it. Textron (owner of Cessna and part of RTX) paid for that and is making it up over time with sales of the jet.

A more complicated example is Anduril, which started developing families of weapons on its own and then started getting contracts to further the development process. How much of that should the government own, or at least get access to, if they didn't pay for it?

I agree that the government should be able to fix its own things through contractors of its choosing, and it should get access to all necessary design data. But it's still a contracting issue.

I have a bunch of old data stored on Kodak Gold CDRs from the 1990s. Kodak claimed 100 year archive life -- although I guess this was just a "best guess" based on accelerated aging tests.

Perhaps I should check them and make sure that bit-rot hasn't set in.

Otherwise I don't bother with backups, they're far too stressful. I mean... if you're backing stuff up you've got to choose the right media, keep a copy off-site and have a restore strategy in place. If you don't backup then none of this is a worry any more. I'm sure AI will fix everything if I get a hardware failure, corruption or malware on my active storage media.

Carpe diem solves everything!

Batteries are catching up faster than it will be cost-effective to build nuclear in the US. A month ago, Bremen Airport announced they had integrated a new sodium-ion battery with a 400 kW output and 1 MWh capacity into its infrastructure. The entire thing apparently fits in roughly one twenty-foot shipping container, and there is almost certainly room to expand that to additional batteries to provide power through the night and beyond.

Beyond that, Peak Energy just signed a deal to build up to 4.7 GWh of sodium-ion batteries by the end of the decade. This follows a successful 3.5 MWh demo project in Colorado. Time will tell if they can successfully scale up and avoid the fate of Natron energy, which just ceased operations.

But the market does appear to be moving rapidly in the direction of battery storage regardless of individual solutions, with BNEF forecasting another 92 GW of output and 247 GWh of capacity just for batteries in 2026, almost a quarter more than 2025. They expect growth of 2 TW/7.3 TWh by 2035. Some people think that's conservative, similar to how solar has blown past everyone's expectations from even 2015. I think if the iron- and vanadium-based flow battery demos work as hoped, that could let cheap grid-level battery installations soar beyond anyone's expectations. Whether lithium-ion, sodium-ion, or flow, they will land far sooner than we could build equivalent nuclear plants. It will be better to greatly expand solar, like over parking lots, irrigation canals, and other places where they can lower heat and supply energy to the batteries. It's politically easier and can provide more jobs in more areas that don't require college degrees. Many more winners than sticking with nuclear or fossil fuels.

eVTOL man-carrying craft (flying taxis and flying cars) are not yet economically viable -- and won't be until we have a whole new generation of batteries with higher energy densities and cycle-lives. At the current cost of operation, these are a solution looking for a problem.

Hell, China can't sell all the EVs it makes so the chances of them selling any of these is....

Hedge funds and private equity firms demurred on investing in NTP, reportedly claiming that the foundation didn't have a credible plan for improving engagement.