I mean you can always tell yourself that, despite all the evil the "GAYMAN" (Google, Apple...) companies do, they still provide a sliver of a benefit to humanity. Sure they might destroy democracy, exploit our attention spans... but at least we get touchscreen phones, and next day delivery on soap.

However this is not the case with Palantir. Palantir only exists to prop up dictators. There is no benefit in that company, only damage.

I mean just like the numbers based on running Javascript from advertisement servers, the numbers on Steam probably are severely skewed away from Linux and *BSD. There is a correlation between not loading advertis or not playing computer games and running Linux and *BSD. Just like there is a correlation between a work computer and it running Windows.

I mean even heavily Windows-oriented websites, mostly browsed from work computers, like heise.de report much higher numbers than that.

In railway safety is usually very important, and a stopped train usually is in its safest state. So everything typically fails towards stopping a train.

You can stop many stations by placing a copper wire on the tracks at a strategic position, making all of the systems believe that there is a train. You can puncture a brake line and the train will stop. You can cut wires used for signaling and the signals will fall back to stop... on AFAIK any signaling system.

Well yes it does, it's a smart card, it has not only storage and cryptographic primitives, but also the ability to run software.
Even for E-SIMs:
https://laforge.gnumonks.org/b...

Here's just one random vendor:
http://www.logossmartcard.com/...

The use is, for example, to re-format phone numbers, so if someone roaming abroad enters a national number from his home country, the SIM card will intercept the call and change the formating into something the foreign network will understand. (there are also other ways to do that, but this is the cheapest)
In some developing countries this was used for app-like services on phones where you cannot install software, since SIM-cards have some control over the user interface of the phone.

Well the phone book is a "filesystem" feature of the SIM card, it actually predates Java by (more than) half a decade. I'm refering to the ability of most modern SIM-cards to execute Java software. That software cannot use standard string functions because of limitations in the VM.

By now most Java instances are SIM-cards. Almost every SIM card in the world has a Java VM running on it, while only part of mobile phones and very few desktop computers or servers have Java VMs running on them.

If you talk about Java and it's frameworks, keep in mind that those probably won't run on the majority of Java VMs out there. SIM cards, from what I've heard, don't even seem to support strings.

So it's not "write once - run anywhere", but more like "write once - run on Linux". Most of those x-Billion devices running Java are SIM cards now.

In Germany most battery storage is actually at a household level. The last numbers I've seen claimed that there was 5 times more capacity in private storage than public one. This is because selling electricity to the grid only gets you about 6-8 cents per kWh, while buying electricity costs you more than 25 cents per kWh.

Since battery prices are low, particularly if you use less energy dense batteries, it just makes sense to store as much energy as feasible. However commercial operators are slowly ramping up. Their future is, however, unclear as we now have a very right-wing government which tries to be as "anti-green" as possible. It seems possible that they do something incredibly stupid like having import taxes on solar and batteries or declaring photovoltaic cells illegal or something.

Well but those weren't "office skills", but "Microsoft Office skills". Nothing in there prepared you for working in an office. It was essentially learning how to work around the bugs of that software package in the current version.

when schools got rid of their programming courses and replaced them with Office 95 courses in Germany. The result was a lost generation... and a world in which "telling a computer what to do" is a very lucrative job, particularly if you know what the computer should do.

For example Vienna has a "remote heat" as well as a "remote cooling" network. You can simply connect your datacenter (or bakery) to the "remote cooling" network and a municipal company will take that heat with a big heat-pump and provide heat for people who want it.

Even in places where you don't have such networks, it's not uncommon to use waste-heat to heat flats or public pools.

Postscript should be a must, not only because that solves the driver issue, but also because of printer manufacturers not putting postscript on their "do not buy" models. If the printer supports postscript, or at least some other well defined and published language, it's not going to be the worst.

In general, if you are short on cash get a used 1990s HP LaserJet. Brother is nice for modern stuff, but avoid their "GDI"-printers without postscript or PCL support.

"If they figure out storage, their fossil fuel plants can all be shut down in a few years."

Guess what, they are figuring it out. Storing a kWh now just adds a few cents to its cost.

I mean sure, electric vehicles are going to plummet in price, once the Chinese want to add the rest of the world to their market. It's just so much cheaper to build an electric car than one with an internal combustion engine.
As for synth fuels... well the conditions under which that would make sense are very... special.

That said, we are living in extremely odd times, particularly in the US.... so maybe your president declares a war on the sun, outlawing any use of its energy, or a ban on technology past 1935, who knows?

Users are, after all, the product, even if they pay, they don't matter. The people who matters are the investors, and investors demand AI.
Users on the other hand will pay for anything roughly meeting their needs. Since we live in a world of oligopolies, you can virtually abuse them to the point of them being barely able to work with it.

I mean a good example is Miro. It's a virtual sticky platform. You use it to place virtual stickies onto a virtual canvas with multiple users at the same time. It's slow, but it kinda works. Everbody is yearning for it to become faster and more reliable... The company behind it is adding "productivity features" nobody asked for.

First of all, where will they get the money from to do so? Nuclear energy is extremely expensive, both in upfront investment costs and in running the plants.
Second, where will they get the nuclear fuel from? Yes, Belarus and Russia are big exporters, but what if the political situation worsens and it's no longer a good idea to import fuel from there?
Third there's the reliability. Nuclear power plants are complex machines which rely on things like a steady source of cooling as well as regular maintenance. However Nuclear power plants are also rather large and a country typically just has a few of them. How does one deal with things like heat-waves where, for example in France, regularly large portions of the power plants need to be turned off.