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Comment Re: Has Climate Doom Modeling Turned Into Clickbai (Score 1) 130

Sorry - as a full-blown human-caused climate change believer, I am also old enough to remember being told that we were in an inter-ice age era and that it would end in my lifetime. I'm in the UK, and I clearly remember a school textbook with drawn pictures of Trafalgar Square fully iced up. This would be early 80s.

Let's not deny that bad information has been given in the past. Bad information is also likely being given today, and will be tomorrow as well. Mistakes happen. I like that this paper has been caught and do not in any way see it as a problem.

Comment I'm already playing x86 games on ARM (Score 4, Informative) 42

I'm seeing a lot of scepticism in the posts, whereas in fact this approach works really well. I'm going to use the example of the Mac - Rosetta 2. I play games running x86 code all the time on my M2 ARM chip, and it's not really noticeable at all. Taking exactly the same approach and applying it to Linux - yep, why on earth not? Already proven to work well.

Comment Um. No. (Score 1) 1

First off, that's not even an article about Internet infrastructure, it's an article about open source software.

Second off, when you use open source software, you own the copies you're using. That's the whole point. If it breaks and the original author isn't around, you hire someone to fix it or replace it with different software. That's how it works. And all of the software licenses deemed open source are structured to make it continue to work that way, with or without the original authors.

Comment For anyone from the UK who likes this stuff... (Score 3, Insightful) 17

...consider listening to One Person Found This Helpful", a BBC radio comedy show about absurd reviews for often even more absurd products. Surprisingly good show.

For anyone not from the UK...not sure if you can access it, but even if you can you're going to need to make your way through a full-on Birmingham accent. Godspeed, you brave intrepid souls.

Comment Re: Raise the costs even more! (Score 2) 54

You're thinking DRAX which yes, as it stands is definitely not a net-positive. But DRAX is normally excluded as they usually report on 'wind and solar'. If someone in government wants to look good with a pie chart with bigger numbers then yes - DRAX gets put in. But for the energy industry itself, it's reported differently.

Comment Re: Raise the costs even more! (Score 2) 54

It's the reverse. Green electricity is held back from adoption because the price is linked to the price of gas. While ever that link exists, electricity will be unnaturally expensive in comparison to its raw market price.

It's not completely irrational, although arguable (I would be on this point of view for instance) it's now out of date. The idea is to pick the most expensive bid price for the spot market price, not the cheapest, in order to incentivise continued operation of difficult energy sources. Why would you want to? Because in ye olden days 'difficult' were things like the hydro power or nuclear which were great for maintaining base line load and which you wanted to subsidise to keep going.

In today's market, that's completely on its head and renewables are the cheapest. Established nuclear second, granted construction costs of new nuclear make that overall cost higher of course. This is why the government is incentivising pushes towards heat pumps etc. - the more we get off gas, the less reason to maintain this market oddity exists and it can be removed making electricity cheaper again.

This is easier said than done. Much of the UK's housing stock would need improvement before heat pumps are viable. I recently had a survey on my own house for instance, and it came back as non-viable without a lot of improvements around heat loss first. These improvements would be a good thing and are semi-subsidised, but it's still effort. I believe the new build rules have finally, years late but finally, been changed to require standards around heat pumps and solar.

So yep - electricity being expensive in the UK is not due to the renewables or nuclear, it's due to gas. And the reason we still rely on gas so much is inertia plus building standards and upgrades. Hard one to unpick, but got to start somewhere.

Comment Useless without knowing what the passwords protect (Score 1) 97

This information is useless without knowing what the passwords were chosen to protect.

Let's face it: the password to my netflix account is not very important to me. If it's hacked I suffer a minor inconvenience at worst. What would be inconvenient for me would be if netflix forced me to do 2FA or some other complicated thing in order to use their service. That inconvenience would drive me toward cancellation.

The password to my bank account IS very important to me. I picked a much better one there. And of course the password to my primary email box is critical, so I chose a careful password there.

Comment Re:Customized music is the future (Score 2) 68

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

Comment Re:*some* games (Score 1) 100

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

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