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Comment Re:"Up to date" (Score 1) 71

And they could be up to date for many, many, many years if Linux was installed on those, instead.

Well, if by "many, many, many" you mean "about five". Red Hat provides longer support terms, but not for free.

And then after those years shift from a "update" path to an "upgrade" path and have many years more.

True, sort of. Assuming the upgrade works, which it often does... but not always.

I'm no Windows fanboy, in fact the last version of Windows I used was Windows 2000. I switched to Linux completely by mid-2001 and I've never looked back. But it's really not as rosy as you paint it. The commercial OSes (Windows and OS X) actually do a much better job of delivering long-term support and (in the case of OS X) upgrades. I don't personally care about that for my machines, because I have no problem managing them, and even debugging the occasional update or upgrade failure. But I'm actually glad most of my relatives use Windows, because I would not enjoy having to help them do the same.

Comment Re: Cool Cool (Score 1) 90

You seem to have completely missed the point, which is that what Biden *should* have done -- while his party held both houses -- is changed the law, rather than issuing an order that broke the law. Trump has been far, far worse about this, but it's clear that part of Trump's goal (or the goal of someone with his ear, since I'm not sure he is capable of making and pursuing goals over longer time periods than a few days) is to establish that the president doesn't need Congress.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 241

My voltage doesn't vary much at all no matter how much power I'm pushing. And, unfortunately, I couldn't set my inverters to derate if I wanted. I'm fighting with the installer over access to configure/manager my inverters. They offer quite a good repair/service warranty and also a production guarantee, and won't give me control without voiding both of those so I'm debating which I care about most.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 241

(I somehow replied to myself instead of you. What am I, some sort of /. n00b?)

I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday. I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 241

I agree carbon capture and sequestration is important but I haven't seen anything that looks good at scale yet.

And there won't be unless we motivate research into it.

When there is a decent solution it would be ideal at times of surplus generation when power is otherwise unable to be used

Indeed! This is an ideal use for overprovisioned capacity.

At the small scale I have an issue where in summer my solar surplus is more that my rural grid connection can handle so when my hot water is heated and the house and car are charged I end up with the solar inverters derating

Wow. I generate way more than I use in the summer, but my (also rural) grid connection can absolutely take it just fine. I have 200A service with a 150A breaker (so, about 37 kW), but my generation peaks at about 20 kW. My bigger problem is that if I try to charge my house batteries (20 kW) and my car (12kW) and run my AC (4 kW) and the steam generator (9 kW) and run basic house loads (2 kW) and run my welder (10 kW) that's 57 kW or about 235A. In practice I don't ever do all of those things at the same time (and rarely charge batteries from the grid), so I've never actually tripped the main breaker, but I could do it easily if I tried. I imagine it will happen someday.

I could swap the breaker, but the wiring from the main panel isn't big enough to have the proper safety margin at 200A. Running new wiring would be... a big project, likely involving tearing up and replacing a big chunk of my driveway. So, 150A will have to do.

I have not found a good use for such surplus power yet, but carbon capture would be ideal.

Me neither. I ran the math on doing some BTC mining (I think BTC is a scourge on the planet, but I'm happy to take money) but it didn't pencil out. Free power is great for mining, but the cost of the rigs is high enough that you really need to keep them humming 24x7, and I don't have enough battery capacity for that.

Comment Re:Who's Who? (Score 4, Insightful) 118

Frankly, the quality of build, the stability of the operating system, and just the plain reliability and features even in the supporting tools exceed Windows. Take the Preview App. The work I can do on PDFs; signatures, annotations, OCR, right out of the box, and built so that the versions on my iPhone and iPad fully integrate, cannot be easily replicated on Windows. Apple just really has an eye for workflow, and making sure the base system and tools fit well into that.

It's not perfect, to be sure, I wouldn't want to use Pages as my full time word processor, and Apple, like Microsoft and Google, suffer designed interoperation friction, which does suck. But all in all, I'm just more efficient on a Mac, and in subtle ways I never knew were even problems until I picked a MacBook up the first time. Honestly going to Windows right now is just horrible for me, particular Windows 11, which just feels like constant chaos and out of control busy-ness.

Comment Re:We need them, but (Score 1) 241

Just because we can't magically address all causes of CO2 and pollution in general doesn't we should blindly ignore the issue.

Indeed. We should also, however, recognize that emissions reductions can never get us to net-negative CO2 and that is where we need to get. We should be investing heavily in research into carbon capture and sequestration, because it is the ultimate long-term solution to greenhouse gas emissions, the thing that will allow us to actually reverse global warming.

In the meantime, as you say, we should start by looking at the CO2 emissions sources that allow us to most quickly and cheaply reduce our emissions. The easiest area is electricity production... made even easier by the fact that wind and solar are the cheapest technologies we have for producing electricity, in many cases even when the cost of battery storage is included. And of course as we convert electricity production to non-emitting sources, we should electrify as much as we can the other areas where we burn fossil fuels.

But we also need to be investing in carbon recapture, because some things are going to be hard to convert and, as I pointed out, only recapture can get us to net-negative. We should also be researching geoengineering techniques, such as methods of reducing insolation. Geoengineering isn't a solution (e.g. reducing insolation does nothing to fix ocean acidification), but it may be a necessary short-term measure, and we should be prepared, having already done what we can to understand it in case we need it, and before we need it.

Carbon reduction is good, but it's insufficient and I worry that we're not putting enough into other approaches. A large part of the reason is that people are afraid that attention on anything other than carbon reduction will harm the emissions reduction efforts. That's not a ridiculous concern, but it demonstrates a lack of understanding of the scale and scope of the problem.

Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 134

The only way it could work fairly is by having an independent unbiased group making the determination on what was clearly misinformation.

That would be ideal, but I don't think it's really necessary. Just keeping the list a subject of public debate is sufficient to prevent things from getting too skewed.

Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 134

That basically all of the people in the Western governments turned out to be raping minors and eating children

There is zero evidence of this, and the fact that you seem to believe it makes me dismiss everything else you might say out of hand, because you clearly either lack or don't engage critical thinking skills.

Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 1) 134

That's the thing though. The biggest source of misinformation in ol' Blighty is Nr.10.

I don't think that would matter in practice. This law wouldn't let them specify what *news* is allowed, only what news sources, and there would be a huge stink if they tried to block the major real news outlets. They'd like to, I'm sure, but I really doubt that they'd succeed.

Comment Re:Before someone says it (Score 2, Informative) 134

It does demonstrate the problem with "misinformation" though. Some people will continue to insist it was true even years after it was proven false.

Russiagate was absolutely not "proven false". Mueller's report and both the House and Senate reports (from committees led by Republicans) thoroughly verified it.

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