I've done this for most (long-term Lightwave user) but there's still a disadvantage - colour. I would be really interested in a smart switch that also allowed me to select the colour of the bulb.

And when you can't? Leaving aside the obvious convenience for the disabled, you also have people like me who work some distance from home but have pets. Short of training Fido to turn the lights on at 6pm...what "simply walk across the room" solution do you have in mind for them?

No-one's forcing someone to buy Apple either. That's the point - the choice to have what this politician is asking for already exists. Simply buy something that isn't Apple and which already operates that way.

I buy into the Apple iOS ecosystem because I want walled garden. That's a valid choice for me to make, and it looks like a politician thinks I should have that choice removed from me.

There are already alternatives I could choose that are more 'open', and if other people prefer those then they are perfectly valid choices for them to make. I'm not trying to persuade or force them to change, why should I be forced to change? Different choices, different people.

I also think these things are normally driven to Apple because politicians can physically see a phone. The bigger data traps are the walled online universes. Even there I'm not asking for people to be forced out of them, but they tend to escape as much attention in discussions like this and my opinion is that this is because they're not physical things that can be held by the politician in question.

I was at school in the UK in the 1970s and 80s. I am a supporter of the concerns over global warming today, including the man-made element. And I can absolutely confirm that we were being taught about coming ice ages, within our lifetime, in my school geography lessons.

It concerns me that people are saying this is a fallacy just because one image is faked. It isn't, this happened and there is evidence for that teaching. Whether it's right or not is entirely different to whether it actually happened. 'Our' side, the side wanting more action on energy transition and the side on which I cheerfully identify myself as being on, just looks foolish if we start pretending contradictory teaching never occurred. It is not, and should be not, a surprise that views change as more evidence is gathers.

Mine was still early 80s but agreed and that was kind of the point. Until the cartoon, we had some of the cool kids in the group. After the cartoon...nuclear wasteground.

I'd be 11 at the time. It felt like it was intended for 7 year-olds at best.

I was at school in the UK at the time (not sure if airing dates were the same), and we played D&D. People played, people were interested or just kind of meh about it - nothing special.

Then that bloody cartoon. With flaming Uni in it. My god. Overnight, the name of D&D was utter social poison in the school. It was truly, truly terrible as a show and just killed any outside interest overnight.

It wasn't - this has gone into legend a bit. Google was superior to Altavista in that it was a nice, clean, white page that loaded instantly in the days of low bandwidth/dial up. It wasn't as good as Altavista at the beginning, but Altavista had gone then then-fashionable "portal" route and was so overladen with garbage it took an age to load.

It certainly became better, and relatively quickly, but its first route to dominance was the blankness and speed of interface.

Eventually the sun will expand and destroy this planet. No amount of faffing with the Earth is going to help that. For the actual long term, we need to be able to leave this planet if we wish to survive as a species.

That's not the same as saying it's necessarily the best answer to this climate problem and obviously keeping space research going does not and should not preclude action in other areas. It is, however, a required answer that's required for long term survival.

Regarding Paint and Notepad? Proud luddite. I'll forgo my "except perhaps line endings" if it means they'll leave it alone completely.

They're like the vi of the Windows world. It's all gone to hell? Open it in Notepad. It's crashed and everyone's doomed? alt-prt screen, paste into Paint and draw sodding big arrow saying "I mean over here!". Quick, reliable, works.

Do not destroy one of the most useful bits. And whilst I'm here, leave Notepad alone as well (with the only possible exception being allowing different line endings).

I'm surprised they're not going after WhatsApp since, as you say, that's the one to go for. It fits all of the gatekeeping criteria being asked for.

It's effectively a monopoly. I tried to avoid it for years (I'm in the UK) since I didn't want to use any then-Facebook-now-Meta stuff. Nope, eventually had to cave to reality and start using it - pure networking effect. It's that service that should be making the headlines here, as opposed to Bing or Apple.

This is EU legislation. In the EU and UK, WhatsApp utterly dwarfs iMessage, and Android outsells iOS. Apple might well be right.

You missed the part where he suggested salt, not sulfur.

I don't feel the coverage is saying that. It seems to me that no-one is advocating for a return to sulfurous clouds, but that they are noting and observing the effect of removing them. Following that, they are postulating that replacing cloud cover using far less toxic chemicals is a potential viable way to reintroduce cloud cover without polluting.

Honestly, it seems to me like a very nice piece of science. It's doing exactly what it should do - study the effects based on data, not on ideology in either direction.