Quite. This is *exactly* what the "retching & gagging" audio emoji is for!

Oh, wait...

Just use yunohost on an old laptop with a vpn to a reputable endpoint and backups over the network to a nas which then syncs to another nas somewhere else. Thats my setup. I check everything is working an updated once a month and otherwise leave it alone.

They'll probably just use the MAC for the initial password because, as you say, the device has almost certainly already got a printed label with it on and it doesn't involve any special characters, so no change to the manufacturing process at all - just a bit of code and a documentation update. Equally, a hardware reset would simply reset the password to the MAC as well as wipe any config info, so no issues with generating extra e-waste, unless the device with shit to start with (we are talking IoT afterall).

It's a start, but MACs are 6-octets, and the first three of those are the vendor-specific OUI, so a dictionary attack is definitely possible without a mandatory password change on first boot if you can fingerprint the device, work out the vendor, then look up the possible OUI(s), and anything else they may have done - like including the brand/model name as a prefix. Three non-specific octets is ~16.7mil combinations, so well within reach of a brute force attack given even a modest amount of time & bandwidth. Of course, the chances are non-zero that unless they're also forced to use something with more entropy the user will just set it to something stupidly easy to guess like "password", but that's now the user's problem.

Many companies have departments that are loss-leaders (every company that has technical support or human resources, for example). I'm sure that Threads is a loss-leader for Facebook right now, but they wanted to have it to get their foot in the door with the people bailing on Twitter.

Don't PG&E have a cheaper rate option overnight? The math on green generator+battery combos isn't so much selling the excess for buttons, but that you used your free, locally generated, capacity as much as possible during the daytime peak rates, with any excess going into the batteries, then topped off the batteries at the cheap rate each night. Any shortfall in your demand against local generating capacity during the day is then drawn from the batteries, so (system inefficiencies aside) you're basically getting cheap rate electicity during peak rate periods.

For my UK supplier, there's around £0.20 per kWh difference in the two rates, so every 5kWh of battery capacity saves me about a £1 per day. A decent 5kWh modular battery pack can be had for around £1,500 so, allowing for some inefficiencies, RoI is around 5 years, and the battery packs are often guaranteed to last for at least 10 years, with some allowance for capacity reduction - typically to less than 80% with that kind of daily cycle pattern. The practical capacity limit on stacking the modular batteries is how much charge you can get into each stack within the cheap rate window, but you can run and charge more than one array of batteries in parallel if you know what you're doing. We currenly have a little over 20kWh of batteries installed and even with a PHEV our bill is almost entirely based on the cheaper overnight rate, rather than the daytime peak rate.

Massive incentive for EV owners to soak up that excess at very little cost

My UK elec supplier has a specific tariff for exactly this. You give them access to control your charge point, plug your car in to charge and it'll charge up in the overnight cheap rate slot as normal, but with the added benefit that if they need to dump any excess capacity they'll turn on your charger and top up your EV batteries, plus any powerwall type batteries, for free (yes, really, "free" as in beer). They are, of course, getting paid some stipend by the grid operator for doing this, but the main thing is that it's avoiding wasting already generated capacity. You can obviously still override things and do a charge when ever you need to as well.

Or they could just spin up other mechanical things to sink the power; as you suggested, anything that can run part-time would do - producing hydrogen, desalination plants, carbon capture systems, pumping water up hill/heating salt for later energy recovery, hell, even mining crypto (ISTR someone looking into doing just this a few years back).

Thank you for balancing the parentheses. Cosmic order has been restored.

The answer is that this is somewhat misleading; there are plenty of Z80 compatible chips still being manufactured. The TI-84 uses the eZ80, which is four times faster and will still be around. There are also many (many) clones that are closer to cycle-exact.

The entry-level machines are aimed at corporations buying in bulk.

That's the crux of it. Does it really matter if about half of the movies produced each year are original screenplays when the overwhelming majority of that 50% are things like arthouse, foreign language, and budget productions that have a very limited amount of screentime, even less marketing, and only get shown on a small number of screens so the chances of the average movie goer finding out about it, let alone seeing it, are near zero? Cinemas are businesses after all, and if the latest Disney prequel/sequel/spinoff/remake in a franchise they've already been mining for decades has the better prospects of putting butts on seats, then that's what they're going to show.

While I'm sure a lot of those original movies are, in fact, total crap and deserve their obscurity, there are still going to be some diamonds in the rough - plenty of what are now regarded as classics (cult or otherwise) did not do well at the box office during their original runs. If you want more quality originality, then the problems you need to solve are finding those diamonds, and making the public at large aware that this is a movie they need to see so the cinemas provide the screentime, and that's something I'm sure producers of those movies have been working on since the days of silent movies and still don't have a solution for. I'm not holding my breath.

Only if those 20% have evolved to be much more capable of surviving subsequent bleaching events as well and are not just clinging on to life while in a severely weakend state. While the reality is likely to be somewhere in between, the other extreme - 80% of what remains dying off every 14 months - would mean that we're very rapidly going to be into percentages of surviving coral on a par with the active ingredients in homeopathic remedies. Corals have had a long time to evolve defences against natural bleaching events, which has mostly worked or they'd be extinct already, but it's far from certain that evolution will be able to keep pace with the rate of increasing temperature levels and number of events we're now seeing.

There's also the habitat loss angle to consider. They're probably singling out two of the worst case species here, or maybe these are just being monitored more closely because they are already endangered, but when coral colonies collapse they take a lot of other species in the area that depend on them down too rendering the entire area largely sterile compared to before the collapse. That's not good at all as it leads to a general reduction is biodiversity which can take a lot longer to recover from, if it happens at all, and the implications of that could easily reverberate up the food chain until it starts to impact our already dwindling oceanic food supply.

I have one Win 10 Pro laptop that runs just fine, but is not illegible to run Win 11. Anyway, even if it were, I would not want to get 11 - to many annoyances. And/But I most certainly don't want ads to sell me Win 11 for/on this machine. So I've been keeping it frozen on specific Win 10 versions for several years and have been blocking all surprise updates for a long time now. In fact, the machine was upgraded only once over all those years and even now is not on the very latest Win 10, because each time Windows get updated to a new release too many things break or too much time has to be spent getting my personal preferences set correctly again.

Last week I was actually starting to look at upgrading to the final Win 10 later this year or early in 2025, prior to EoL, but if that means that I'll be facing forced Win 11 ads, it just will not happen. Blocking Win 11 was my original reason for my policy after all.

I will definitely not update until someone publishes the right registry hack to kill those !@#$%^&* ads.

The agony, of course, is that Dieter Rams was all about function, which informed his designs. If Apple had hired him (he's still alive, incredibly) instead of just imitating him, he'd probably have taken a significantly different direction that actually respected the complexity of the underlying hardware instead of trying to butcher it. And the logos would have been smaller!

Operator of the launch vehicle pays - they're the one directly requiring the ATC support - and it's up to them how they pass any costs downstream to their customers. The operator with the most competetive overll option - which, at least nine times out of ten, will be the bottom line - wins.

That's how the free market the US adores is supposed to work, yes? This seems like a pretty good way of levelling the playing field, as long as everyone is on the same charge sheet - no exceptions.

In the 1990's when I was at a company that did software development, I was in charge of hiring people for a small project. We had a policy that candidates should see Dark Star and share their impression of it with us during their job interviews. One guy had already seen it before his first interview, and was amused by the humor, and we hired him immediately.