What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.

Artemis, about a woman living on the moon. I read it too, it was pretty good.

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

Just wait until you see Steam Machine pricing.

Anyway, Sony can jog on. They raised prices in Europe when Trump brought tariffs in on Americans.

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.

Most Chinese phones use Android. Google could be huge there, but choose not to be.

They gave the Chinese government access to Chinese user's data years ago. They don't seem to have an issue with governments gaining warrantless access to their systems.

If you care about privacy, go Android. Google does require warrants, and doesn't operate in China due to the warrantless access requirement.

It will, you can side load them.

Mine is a Pro as well. They just keep failing on me. One stopped seeing the remote after boot for a few minutes, and the other stopped getting any network connectivity (wired or wireless) for several minutes after boot.

The Mi Box is just an Android TV box, so you can run Kodi and use whatever network sharing method you like.

Aren't they Wallmart's own brand, as in innately shit?

I've liked Panasonic TVs before, but now they have sold the business to a Chinese company I will have to properly evaluate one when the time comes. My main Panasonic is from 2012 and still going strong. It's used as a dumb display with an Nvidia Shield, which Nvidia has replaced twice outside of warranty. Their hardware may be unreliable crap, but at least they give you a replacement for free.

Honestly, if you don't care about games, get a Mi Box, not a Shield.

If you don't have a Wallmart account, it becomes a dumb TV, which is a significant improvement for many people.