Auto gearboxes dont like being towed because they require fluid to be pumped around else gears start grinding pretty soon.

I think that's only true of automatic transmissions. (Manuals have the gears and shafts immersed in oil. Automatics require the oil to be pumped, to provide power for the logic and actuators to lubricate some shafts/beraings that require oil injection because they aren't immersed, and to circulate it through an external radiator and/or heat exchanger in the engine coolant radiator (which then also would like the engine to be running to run the water pump) to cool the fluid which gets heated by the moving parts.)

Older transmissions only have a pump on the front (engine side) shaft. So the transmission isn't cooled and lubed if the engine isn't running. This limits towing speed and duration (unless you disconnect the drive shaft or put the driven wheels on a dolly or raise them off the pavement.) That's why to companies usually haul auto-tranny cars on a platform. It also means you can't push-start the car, because it won't shift into gear without the fluid pressure from the pump.

Some modern automatic transmissions also have a rear pump (on the wheel-side shaft). This provides fluid pumping even with the engine stopped, which lets it be towed longer and faster (especially if the vehicle has a transmission oil cooling radiator), may allow it to be push-started, and lets it use engine braking without rising loss of braking (both engine drag and power brakes) and power steering if the engine stalls and stops turning. ("Tow-haul mode" in vehicles with the towing package.)

So this conversion looks like it would work on a manual or a rear-pump auto transmission, but would also need an extra electric tranny fluid pump on a front-pump-only automatic transmission.

Burton believes he'll be able to offer the product for around AU$5,000 (£2,640)

Google says that's $3,200 USD at today's exchange rate.

intended as sarcasm I think, but I moderated this flamebait because ...

And then commented in the same discussion, which undoes all your current moderations in that discussion (as well as prevent more).

Linux was useful from day one. RISCV is nowhere near that. It is being used in deeply embedded cores to avoid paying arm license fees.

And to avoid being crippled by export restrictions on the other instruction set technology.

Also to avoid the embedded hard-spyware included with cutting-edge processors by rolling your own perfectly adequate (if not bleeding-edge) machine cores for which you have the source and it's being looked at by thousands of others with similar biases against hard-spyware.

I never got the appeal of this bland bitter tasting drink. Is it just machismo to pretend to like it?

I used to think the same. Until one summer day I hiked along a railroad track for a few miles until I got really thirsty - and upon reaching a commercial area side-tripped a couple blocks to a bar and asked for a water or soda. But this bar had none, and recommended their on-tap beer.

It tasted REALLY good, like it had just the right mix of electrolytes, vitamins, and other nutrients to restore my body after hours of hot, dry, non-trivial exercise.

I did not become a beer drinkier. But now I have a gut feeling for what it's about, and why it's popular after work, especially among those whose hysical labor is substantial and in exposed or hot-and-dry environments.

British Isles I'm not familiar enough with: Maybe they'll have to import hops from somewhere in Europe.

Heck. If global warming really takes off there's a LOT of land in Iceland that will be freed of ice and should be GREAT for hops cultivation.

The Yakima tribe and some of the non-tribal people around them used to be major growers of hops. (It was one of the few crops the land there was suitable for.) Then a few decades back several major commercial brewers switched to something else instead of actual hops. Their market dried up and the area has only a little hops production now.

Beer made in the US using actual hops is mainly products of microbreweries these days.

Though hops grew especially well in the northern tiers of states there are beer-worthy cultivars of hops that grow just fine as far south as southern California and the levels of heating predicted for even most of the eco-disaster scenarios correspond to moving crops a couple hundred miles north or to fields at a couple hundred feet greater altitude.

So I'm not all that worried that U.S. beer-drinkers will not be able to find something tasty if the brewers will deign to produce it. British Isles I'm not familiar enough with: Maybe they'll have to import hops from somewhere in Europe.

The Ring cameras share their video with law enforcement without the owner's knowledge and permission.

Which raises the question: Is there a self-hosted open source equivalent?

He should have just given the kids a pooper scooper with a long handle and had them clean up the yard before they played rather than blast the local wildlife with whatever this is.

Not if he has raccoons. Large numbers of them (in some urban areas over half) have a parasitic worm and leave its adhesive-coated eggs in the droppings. If it gets into a human, it migrates to the brain and soon kills. Once symptoms show it's too late to treat it. Cleaning raccoon droppings is a job for someone in a hazmat suit or at least elbow-length gloves, mask, and goggles, with equipment to sterilize the ground afterward and access to a hazmat disposal system.

I strongly suggest that he add raccoons to the recognition system.

He could have just put it on a timer switch and run it at night.

I think part of the point was to chase off badgers when the kids are playing in the yard.

What is a "badger"?

A muscular weasel that had its head run over by a steamroller and is still mad about it.

It's the "Silent Majority" problem.

No it's an imaginary majority problem;

Precisely. "Silent Majority" refers to a particular political episode in the Vietnam Conflict era, where large numbers of the population were protesting the war - to the point of marches that filled multi-lane main streets for miles - and the administration claimed that the population was really mainly FOR the war but weren't protesting because the government was doing what they wanted (and HAD elected them earlier).

My point was not to claim that there actually were a lot of people silently using LTS kernels. My point was that you can't judge the number using them by feedback, because if they're running smoothly you're unlikely to get feedback, so the number is unknown (but a happy user base would be underreported by being UNreported. (And if anything in the kernel or the rest of the package is reportng usage, that's malware...)

"LTS kernels are no longer supported for 6 years because it turns out no one used them."

*I* do! I'd use 'em a lot longer than six years, too, if they were supported.

Why the HELL should I, and how many thousands or millions of others, have to spend a bunch of time every couple years porting a bunch of machines to a new version of the kernel - and then fixing all the stuff that breaks, and upgrading the machine because the new stuff was designed for faster chips and - when the old kernel and apps would continue to do the job they were set up to do if they just had a few fixes for bugs and exploits patched?

IMHO the idea that "nobody uses them" is an illusion. Plenty of people use them. But if they're running fine and the patches work, why should they waste their and the maintainers' time spamming the maintainers with "nope, I've got no bugs" reports?

It's the "Silent Majority" problem. How do you judge the size of the population that's NOT complaininig?

Coal is on the way out. Natural gas is cheaper than coal, and it is replacing it.

Which is good on the carbon-emission front because Coal is the most, natural gas the least, carbon/per/watt emitting fossil fuel. (Even if you include inadvertent methane leaks you're still 'way ahead on greenhouse emissions, and those can be expected to drop now that NASA has, and is deploying, satellite tech that can locate significant methane leaks)

On shore wind is cheaper than natural gas, solar is getting there.

Solar has gotten there, largely thanks to deployment (commercial, feature and price competitive, at scale, price dropping) over the last three years or so of developments] in photovoltaics, battery storage, and electronics. A decent solar home site now pays itself off in two (pricey power markets, e.g. California) to four years (most US places) and is expected to still be working (at 80% or better) in 20 years with minimal maintenance.

Gadgets are manufactured by several competing companies, have regulatory approval, and are becoming drop-in simple. All-in-one boxes can do solar charging, battery management, AC inversion, standalone or grid interactive (UPS, grid charging, solar charging, mixed solar/battery/grid supply, sell power to grid if allowed, optimize time of loading and feeding grid re: time-of-use variable rates), manage backup generators for long grid outages during periods of low sun AND wind, all for a moderate price and with easy config.

Good thing it's cooler over there on that land ice right beside the sea ice. If that land ice were melting, that could be a problem.

I recall a few years ago there was a big panic over how there was a big increase in Antarctic sea ice and concern that the underside of the Antarctic continental ice sheet was melting. This, it was said, looked like the start of a massive melt-and-slide of a big chunk of the southern ice cap from land into the oceans, which (if it occurred) WOULD rapidly raise ocean levels and cause problems for continental shore areas worldwide.

So shouldn't the current reduction of sea ice be a sign that the feared massive underside-melting and advance of Antarctic glaciers has slowed or stopped? Shouldn't this be applauded as a sign of the possible aversion of a predicted sea-rise disaster, rather than a cause for hand-wringing? Or at least a signal to take another look at underside-melting?

Sea ice expands, predict sea level rise. Sea ice contracts, predict sea level rise. Seems to be a disconnect there.