Well I can tell you're not in the GTA where it's been in the 20s for a while, and last year most of the summer felt like one big heat wave, where it was technically 6 back-to-back.

It's not even a good joke, it's a Gutfeld-grade groaner.

I have seen satellite dishes at the base of isolated cell towers, though I have no idea what they were being used for.

One big drawback for satellite networking is the delay it adds to the transmissions, to travel up to the satellite and get sent back down to a ground station. This delay probably wouldn't be tolerated by a cell phone user, especially if they were talking to another cell phone which would double the delay a second time.

There's also a bandwidth issue at the satellite, if you want to do that with hundreds of thousands of towers there's just no way to have that amount of bandwidth even from a cluster of satellites. The bandwidth problem isn't one of data rate, its one of needing to be able to communicate with the ground on so many different channels because of all the towers, and having satellites at many different geostationary locations. (that's what Musk is trying to do with launching this absurd number of starlink satellites)

High data rate meshing requires directional antennas pointed at other nodes, unlike the more broad-beamed bay antennas the towers use for cellular access. Adding several dishes and a bunch of expensive hardware to each tower would dramatically increase tower cost and maintenance.

It's much cheaper to just run a network drop off a nearby pole or trench a line to the nearest fiber vault. Even the towers out along the open highways tend to get fiber trenched to them rather than dishes networking them together over the air.

Here in the USA anyway, cellular service has been considered "critical infrastructure" for quite some time now, mostly due to the decline of landlines. 9-1-1 having high availability has been legally required for a long time, and those requirements shifted to the cellular network as people ditched their land-lines for cell phones at home. So all the towers have short-term (15+ minute) UPS's and a gas generator that auto starts, with requirements to run periodic tests.

The other part of it though is the towers nowadays require internet access to function. We had a massive storm system move through the area a few years ago with close to tornado-speed "straight-line winds" that took out a huge amount of above-ground internet infrastructure, rendering cell towers functionally disabled despite giving out full bars. There were a few lines still up but everyone's home internet was either down or spotty, and it was hard to get a cell call to connect. Was llke that for 2-3 weeks, really annoying.

So, power's not the only thing that needs to be protected to keep cellular service working.

One downside of a laterally centered driving position is much worse visibility when overtaking. A centered driving position is good for a track car where the chances of overtaking on the left or right are roughly 50/50, but on the street where the odds are heavily biased one way or the other depending on whether it's a LHD/RHD country, having your driver's seat on the correct side makes it much easier.

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

Also I would point out that there's nothing socialist about modern American fascism, considering that there's very little flirtation with collective ownership of the means of production going on (other than Sam Altman getting Trump to consider having the US government buy the gigantic economic black-hole-bomb he's built), but they do enact deals that look a good bit like socialism for corporations the regime favors...

This is only possible because the US has first-past-the-post elections, a clunky and primitive voting method that can enable this situation. Moving to more advanced voting methods like ranked choice or STAR voting prevents a two-party stranglehold from forming.

Agreed, in fact I think that's a major reason to avoid use of non-hybrid PQC.

See also: Android and the ever-increasing difficulty, impracticality, and necessity of getting root access.

oh I guess I really hadn't thought about heating needs. The batteries generate heat when being charged or discharged so I was just assuming they never really would need external heating.

I live in Iowa, and I've heard some pretty brutal accounts of bad EV performance when it gets really cold here. All rechargeable batteries perform poorly in the cold though, I remember NiCD batteries being absolutely terrible in the cold.

Not only do we have the concept of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement; the current level of disagreement between the agreeing parties suggests that we actually have at least three distinct concepts of a plan for negotiations for a peace agreement! Where a lesser leader might myopically interpret having a single agreed-upon set of terms as essential to a treaty; Great Leader understands that American Greatness requires more.

Is that really a bad thing? There are certainly plenty of examples of old things that suck; either because genuine improvements became available after they had already solidified or because they were always broken and are now running purely on denial-fueled risk tolerance; but, in principle, it seems like it should be a bad thing that age is seen as a bad thing. Especially when software is more like math than like civil engineering in terms of the tendency of its materials toward corrosion, embrittlement, and fatigue. (and when so many 'modernization' projects turn into expensive failures or go way behind schedule and over budget to eventually death march toward feature parity, sometimes even achieving it in time to be declared legacy themselves.)

I'm not calling for a crusade against 'fast fashion' software; if people want to bang out an app on the fast and cheap to catch the moment when people care they can do that; fine, whatever; but it seems like software built on real long term service timescales should get a lot more credit than it does. Absent specific criticisms; it's not "eww, there are people who weren't even born then", it's "the software has been in service for a generation".

All the more if there are a lot of outfits doing the same thing: having some unique oddball legacy thing means having potentially crushing maintenance requirements unless everything was gloriously secure from day 1, which it probably wasn't; but if there is some big mass of enterprise Java 8 why should we call it all eol and scramble rather than just maintaining java 8? Especially when we can do so in software, without some of the vendor and hardware inflexibility you see with things like old school mainframe applications where there's an implied commitment to a single old school mainframe vendor in perpetuity.

It's not elegant; but realistically we are far enough both into the history of computer science and the history of computers-as-hardware-you-can-buy that there's a lot less obvious, low-hanging, progress to be had by going 'modern' relative to the amount of fashion and fad chasing. Especially if (as is the case for a great many people and organizations) the scale of your problem has grown at or below the rate at which hardware advances have made systems not particularly well designed for scalability faster.

Obviously this would require coordinated action, and some people likely have other reasons to want to either poke at or kill legacy applications; but(since all those java versions are solidly post openjdk) I'd be very curious to know how the cost and risk associated with "modernize because java 18 is going eol!" would compare to just...not...having java 18 go eol. Unsexy maintenance project that you'd need to pay to have done, sure; but very plausibly better characterized and lower risk than trying to deal with a lot of the oddball internal accretions that would otherwise need updating; and, depending on how much people have running on java 18, certainly possible that they'll individually spend a fair bit more running the treadmill than it would cost to just keep kicking java 18 down the road until (almost) nobody cares.