I understand that Phoronix is clickbait for nerds, but people falling for it is totally unjustified.

Since when "Linus Torvalds wrote some code" is news? This is just a cleanup, and it's totally uninteresting. Even the fact that Linus Torvalds did it is uninteresting. Even though he is mostly a maintainer these days he still writing some code all the time, check the git logs.

Based on this recent case I'd say the answer is yes.

It's very odd that LSM LOCKDOWN is controversial. This is roughly the same feature as BSD Securelevels, though with some more fine-grained control. In theory, it's very useful if you want to protect your system against attackers who compromise a process that runs with root privilege. In practice, the kernel attack surface is so large that a motivated attacker can probably bypass it.

I'm quite surprised that they didn't. Prior to the launch, they said that they were going to market it as 'plant-based' and not 'vegetarian' or 'meat-free' because it didn't meet the requirements to be classified as vegetarian. They were aiming it at flexitarians that wanted to reduce the amount of meat that they were eating, not at vegetarians or vegans. I guess someone in marketing realised how big a market they were losing and decided it was a big money maker to advertise it as meat-free but didn't bother to see if this was actually a true description.

It's true for about 20% of people. You're probably not one of them.

Encrypted data cannot be effectively compressed. Storage device-level compression's big shortcoming is that it's fundamentally incompatible with encryption (except for storage device-level encryption). In other words, to get any benefit from compression you have to make sure that whatever you're sending to the storage device is UNencrypted. Do you really want to shut off all or most higher level encryption? To disable dm-crypt/LUKS2, FileVault, BitLocker, and PGP, as examples?

If you want to see where computing's future lies (sometimes far future), then it's often helpful to look at today's mainframes. Mainframes are now compressing and encrypting (and decrypting and uncompressing) everything, often more than once ("multi-layered" encryption), "at rest" and "in flight," using specialized compression and encryption accelerators directly on their main CPU cores backed with uniquely strong Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) to protect keys, and with full software support up and down the stack that avoids burdening application programmers with all the responsibility. Mainframe storage devices then only ever deal with storing and retrieving encrypted data -- or at least that's what they're designed to do if implemented per "best practices." (IBM calls this "Pervasive Encryption.")

This sort of arrangement is really the only way to compress/encrypt (and decrypt/uncompress) if you care about security at all. If encryption is solely or predominantly the province of a storage device, then there are all sorts of inherent security risks.

It's also something that people need to stop viewing as a bad thing. The most FOSS in a proprietary product, the easier it is to build a fully FOSS alternative.

It got boring when Slashdot disabled (broke?) the message center so it is now impossible to see when someone has replied to your posts. That was the thing that, early on, allowed Slashdot discussions to be discussions and not just disjointed monologues. Since it went away, the quality of discussions has gone way down. The AC spam was just a symptom of this.

Nope. Note in TFS the key phrase: 'In its default configuration'. The university that I used to work for bought Office 365. This was even before the GDPR, but the university deals with a lot of confidential commercial data from industrial partners and with health records in life sciences departments. Google's stock T&Cs were completely incompatible with this and they refused to negotiate. Microsoft's stock T&Cs were also incompatible (which is why this ruling is completely unsurprising), but Microsoft was happy to negotiate a contract that gave much stricter controls over data.

For Germany in particular, the German Azure data centres are actually owned by a joint venture between Deutsche Telekom and Microsoft and so out of US jurisdiction. Companies in Germany (and the rest of the EU) can buy an Office 365 subscription that guarantees that their data doesn't ever leave Germany.

What do you mean by 'a cycle life of 1000 cycles'? Most batteries that I've seen are rated as a number of cycles after which they are guaranteed to retain 80% of their initial charge. That number is typically 1,000-3,000 cycles. After that, most of them don't die, they just have a lower maximum charge, which continues to degrade.

It gets more complicated when you factor in partial charges. LiIon batteries are most efficient if you never fully charge or discharge them. If you use around 40% of their total charge cycle each time then they last a lot longer, but then you have to increase your up-front costs in exchange for the lower TCO.

Solar cells are now very cheap. They are a negligible part of the cost for a small-scale installation. The cost of deploying rooftop solar is dominated by the installation cost (putting up scaffolding and having competent people climbing safely around on the roof is not cheap). The second largest cost is the storage and the alternator system to drive AC mains. Both of these costs are amortised significantly in larger installations. Most large installations are at ground level, so require a fraction of the manpower to install each panel. They use much larger alternator installations, which also come with higher efficiency.

TL;DR: Solar power is not immune to economies of scale.