It must be nice to have the luxury of doing that. For most of us that kind of money would be a helpful windfall in these rough times.

Suck/not-suck aside, would you at least agree that it's as good as The Mandalorian?

Eyeball monster == Baby Yoda. So. Fucking. Cute.

The second movie, Aliens, also didn't have the mood of the first movie, yet was still one of the best movies ever made (IMHO! of course). I don't think the feel of the original is necessary in sequels, and might even be so hard to recreate that it's borderline hubris to try.

I'll probably watch it .. when I feel like doing nothing and thinking the presence of the xenomorph is a coincidence.

I think that is the best attitude one can take. The "domestication" of the xeno is the weakest part of this TV series, but OTOH, the inclusion of all the new monsters is part of what makes A:E so fun. The classic xeno is just one monster among many, now.

There are so many horrible ways to die. Show us more of them, Noah! ;-)

Nobody wants your shitty iOS. People tolerate it on phones, because you taught them that it's ok for PCs to suck if they fit in one hand. But once the one hand constraint is lifted, people come back to their senses for some weird reason. You did too good a job of persuading people to treat phones as weird exceptions to common sense, when you should have undermined common sense itself (but that would have harmed Mac sales).

...never work for a company big enough to have an HR department. Who wants to be views as a 'human resource' by your own employer? I've been self employed for 10 years, and blessed to have some great customers. Nowadays when I watch Office Space, instead of painful recognition, I can actually laugh at it as something that's a part of the distant past.

The turbines are a sunk cost and so there's value in conversion than turning them to scrap and building fuel cells.

There are no sunk costs around the turbines. The existing turbines will be replaced. From TFS:

In their place, the DWP will install new combined-cycle turbines that are expected to operate on a mixture of natural gas and at least 30% hydrogen with the ultimate goal of running entirely on hydrogen as more supply becomes available.

They're reusing the land and part of the existing structure on it. Almost everything else is getting replaced.

Modern combined-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than that. Most new installations now get around 60% efficiency if not better, and the current record is 64.18%, set by a Siemens turbine at Keadby Unit 2 Power Station in the UK. The end result won't be 68%, but it also won't be 34%. Given the losses associated with electrolysis, the net is likely to be around 50%, which still makes it a bad idea.

Spam, spam, spam, eggs and spam didn't provide enough incentive to try to distinguish between humans and skin jobs, but now "AI slop" does? Ok, great!

Check the OpenPGP signature.

Unsigned? /dev/null.

Signed but no trust path? /dev/null

Signed and with a trust path? Can still be trash, but its claims to be of human origin, are worth taking seriously. If you find a problem (e.g. someone trusted the wrong person) then deal with that then.

It's local and does not rely on the internet for anything but remote access as far as I know, but still buggy now and then.

It has a number of Tesla PowerWall batteries. Compared to a Generator they don't last very long. For the price they paid for everything, I would have added a generator as the secondary backup method when the PowerWall batteries become exhausted. There have been several times when there were prolonged blackouts in the area, and most of the other homes you hear the gennies kicking in.

I don't allow smart appliances or home automation in my house. And really, it's an easy choice. The cheapest stuff does not include that technology. You have to spend more to get a fridge with a screen.

Aside from the obvious privacy issues and information sharing, which all of us here are familiar with, there's another overriding reason not to have smart appliances or home automation - reliability. When you add complexity, things break more often, and costs go up. Obsolescence of your investment happens fairly quickly.

My line of work involves sometimes working inside of very high end homes and the newer ones contain every automation bell and whistle you can think of. And they break, and fail, a lot. One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works. The more complexity you add to a system, the greater chance of a failure. These are people that paid a premium for these features, and I think they were sold a bill of goods.

Home automation companies market whiz-bang features to high end home builders and their customers, not letting on that A. The ecosystem of hundreds of different products they are assembling is not perfect nor trouble free, and B. Whatever they are putting in the house now will be obsolete in 5 or 10 years, and it will become more difficult to maintain over the next 10, 20, 30 years without substantial upgrades and replacements. What is state of the art now will probably be seen as fairly archaic when the house is sold again. For large homes and mansions, there is probably a middle ground somewhere that allows for some automation, but has enough manual control so that if something fails the device in question is still operable. This is not what I'm seeing in the newest systems. They are entirely reliant on a server for things as basic as turning lights on and off. Where a light switch would be, there is a keypad with five or six buttons, none of which anyone ever uses except the top button that turns the light on and off, and it's harder to find and press vs. a traditional light switch. The idea of being able to have dimming presets, etc. sounds flashy, but in reality they go largely unused. The biggest visual effect of course is when you push the button, it slowly fades the lights on. I find that annoying. I just want it on. Maybe that's just me and my old school ass that grew up with regular light switches. Being around this stuff has completely absolved me of ever wanting it in my own home, and I used to be a pretty big home automation enthusiast in the early days of Homeseer, X-10, Insteon, etc.

For a regular sized home on a regular suburban lot, there is no need for home automation. It is a solution in search of a problem that doesn't exist. If you want to change the temperature, go adjust the thermostat on the wall. If you want to turn on a light, go hit the switch. There have been plenty of examples of home automation companies going under and the network enabled features of their appliances are suddenly rendered useless. With my dumb home, the problems don't exist. I don't have to do anything, maintain anything or subscribe to anything. It's bliss.

Even if the people who know how didn't move on over the last few decades, surely they would have been fired some time in the last few months as part of the overall effort to weaken the US economy, health, and defenses.

Is there anyone left who knows how to do the job? Can they be hired back, after the Epstein shutdown is over?

Apple could just stop being evil.

Problem: adversary has you in a headlock.

Solution: wait for the adversary to change allegiance.

This sure sounds like something that can be completely solved by getting a new account. But then there's this hilarious excuse for insisting that the problem remain:

Although users can "abandon the accounts and start again with new Apple IDs," the report notes that doing so means losing all purchased apps, along with potentially years' worth of photos and videos.

If there's any risk of losing photos and videos, then they should already be working on fixing their backup system immediately, before something bad happens. This isn't so much a problem as a wake up call that they haven't yet done one of the most basic first-things in using computers: get data backups going.

Loss of access to an external data storage account is just one of the risks they aren't protecting themselves against, with regard to that data. (And geez, since they're already cloud-storage enthusiasts, what was their plan for what they were going to do if they ever found a better cloud provider?)

As for proprietary apps: same problem, they already faced the risk even without this parental splitup. Either stop doing that, or accept that you occasionally have to repurchase your proprietary software. Given how much crap is monthly subscriptions now, I suspect there's very little loss here anyway, since having to continuously repay is already the status quo for an increasing number of .. [sighing and trying to remember to be nice] .. inexperienced computer users.

But if it's not (yay! it shouldn't be), then either suck it up that you have to re-do a "one-time" purchase, or [gasp] contact the manufacturer of that software and tell them the problem.

Oh, it's some company who is unresponsive or says "fuck you, pay me?" Well, then you're the one who decided to do business with an unresponsive company. You were already fucked and just hadn't run into the already-looming disaster anyway. Glad you're learning about how stupid that was while you're a teenager instead of later, when the stakes are going to be even higher.

All objections to "get a new account" are bullshit. And worse, they just point out problems that these people can/get-to/should face now, before anything bad happens.

The best way to innovate in gaming is to have..

.. more game-makers.

Kids, become a programmer. You can write games yourself, or you can join an existing project. There are many to choose from, but also, there's always room for one more.