Some of the more tech knowledgeable are relying on smartphones and tablets too, if they fit their needs. The days of needing a desktop or laptop for general purpose tasks are pretty much over. Unless you're an IT guy, gamer or need some high end engineering or media production apps - you could probably get by with a tablet with far less PC janitor work.

Wow, is that in the US? I have a 15 page plan for $1.89 (Canadian) per month that I'm ok with. I'm not sure how they make money on it honestly as I get new ink carts shipped to me at least yearly.

All, now? A decade ago the law required solar hot water OR photovoltaic OR a high-efficiency gas water heater.
I'd be happy if they've tightened it up to drop that last option.

I must admit I was shocked that the problem hadn't been solved in the last three days.

I know some of these outfits were offering to install solar setups with no up-front cost, then pay for them by selling homeowners the electricity they produce over however many years, and presumably selling any excess to utilities. Okay, so if you're a homeowner with a no-up-front-cost solar system, paying the company, and the company ceases to exist, what happens? Of course, I presume they get snapped up by someone else and you pay them instead, but... what if they don't?

Even older technology, like celestial navigation, can be handy if you're above the clouds. Our aircraft go a little too fast for sextants nowadays, but plenty of military platforms, especially those that frequently operate above the clouds, like the SR-71 or B-2, have computerized celestial navigation systems that nudge their INS, and this has been the case for at least fifty years. Lots of satellites have star-trackers for position awareness too. I have no idea what the state-of-the-art is for aviation, let alone whether it's available commercially, and if so, how big it is, how much it weighs, how much power it needs, or how much it costs. But the tech is out there, and not particularly new.

Why not? "Doc" Draper INS'ed his way from Hanscom Field outside Boston to Los Angeles in a B-29 in 1953. With only one planned human course correction en route, the INS was only 10 miles off after a 2,600 mile trip. JFK-CDG is 40% longer, so you should be good to within 15 miles... you are using a 70-year-old INS, right? If you can't flat-out eyeball the airport at that distance, any kind of beacon the airport itself has should be pretty helpful.

(Of course, Draper and his folks hadn't had time to test that version of the INS before their flight. And they made the flight to attend a top-secret conference the government was hosting with University of California researchers to discuss the possibility of inertial guidance... where Draper promptly ruined everything by explaining that it wasn't just possible; they had used it to get there.)

But now that big players are downplaying it, I'm not so sure any more.

Remember Steve Ballmer's "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share."

Remember "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."

Hm.

I heard a piece on NPR's "Marketplace" last month about ChargerHelp, a startup that trains people to fix software glitches that make chargers stop working. That's a great idea, since having more chargers working more of the time means less waiting as things scale and build out. But there must still be some lag from a charger breaking to it being noticed to it being reported to a tech being dispatched to the charger being fixed.

I grew up mostly in a "full-serve" state, and even in the "self-serve" state where I now live, multiple gas stations in my town offer "full-serve" - sometimes exclusively - and do so at the same price as "self-serve" stations. So why not hire folks with associate's degrees in electrical / electronic / computing fields from local community colleges as "charging station attendants" and give them the training and tools to keep the chargers functional? They might also help maintain order at busy times (which would be less busy if all the chargers were functional) and help Granny plug in her car (while explaining that no, they can't check her oil).

The other faster-than-RAID solution I'm familiar with, MIT's Mark 6 VLBI data system, only does something like 16Gbps, I think.

> Maybe they are confused by the fact that Bing is a search engine, not a browser?

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Good catch. I meant to say... "I am not interested in having Bing as my primary search engine." Thanks for the correction.

... why does Microsoft seem to have the need to frequently try to push Bing on me, when I've told Microsoft many times (oh so many times) that I am not interested in having Bing as my primary browser? Is Microsoft tacitly admitting that Bing is really not up to par?

The sports and broadcast fees that are outside the terms of my contract have risen from $6 per month to $30 per month over the contract length. I cannot cancel the contract without a significant penalty, so I am stuck paying the fees (quite the racket the cable company has there). When my contract expires in a couple months, it's bye-bye to the cable company for me. I'm switching to a different ISP and will be streaming.

...and I see I need to update my signature here, since Perplexity did not say anything (this time) about my doing brain surgery while racing motorbikes.

I asked it "who is" questions about my wife and myself. It gave correct information about my wife, who's become much more visible online in the last several years.

I, on the other hand, have become less visible, and although my name isn't particularly common, there are a few other people around the world with the same name. So it decided that I was a freakishly multi-talented person who worked as a Wall Street trader, actor, astronomer, rugby player and writer. While amusing, at least 40% of this was wrong, but I didn't have the time to tell it that.

Hopefully the forces of evil will consult Perplexity on their way to my door, and be misdirected.