well yes, but it has been too expensive in the past, over the decades one constant when visiting various countries around the Mediterranean, especially Greece, is that every single building would have a solar panel on the roof, they would be solar-thermal water heaters, because they were cheap and it is an obvious cost saving. These days, as the pricing has improved, I imagine there are a lot of solar-PV panels as well.

That's a VERY good desktop - whoever specced it out was very thoughtful :-) Re Surface Book 2: ah, I've only seen one of those so far but it did look well designed. I always thought Windows 7 was OK and I'd say Windows 10 tipped things over to good (I know people hate the telemetry but that's not a personal worry for me). I'm impressed by WSL (I know it's slow for filesystem I/O and there's no official graphical support but again those aren't worries for me) and I know someone who was happy running it. In fact the whole better terminal/OpenSSH available from MS add/investigation into using clang/move to Chromium etc. just proves MS can execute. Busted sleep doesn't sound very Microsofty (I could understand that more with broken third party drivers but yours is essentially a first party laptop) but in these days of "rolling" OSes I guess speed bumps are to be expected. Oh and I also found Hyper-V was good so long as your guest OS had enlightened drivers (Windows/Linux/FreeBSD?)...

I also I admit that Apple will get "tablet money" out of me - I found the iPad to be top notch (again mine is old and dates from 2013 so could do with replacement) but I'm waiting for the "regular" ones to get USB-C. Their phones are less interesting to me 'cos normally I'm a cheapskate and the household seems to be keen on Android (stock only). I'm not so keen that phone physical dimensions keep getting bigger (curious given what happened to laptops) but that's the trend...

I think your "except two things" are nearly impossible for MS to fix though... Are you saying you would be happy with another key combo sending SIGINT in a terminal (for example) or you would only be happy with an Apple-key style situation across the OS? Or are you saying that when the time comes it's going to be a lump situation? :-)

I'm genuinely curious, what are you going switch to TR? Did "work" give you a desktop?

I know people who were MBP owners who went to a Windows Lenovo X1 (which had 16GB RAM, had a 512GB NVMe SSD, i7 of some description and cost less than £2K) in defiance of the new MBP keyboards. They're very happy with their choice and talk plenty about how Mac laptops now aren't what they were in the late 2000s/early 2010s - in the "old days" Apple used to ship things like remote controls in the box, AppleCare was affordable/convenient to use and what you got in your laptop was high-end even in comparison to "regular" laptops (although I've always been an Intel GPU chipset lover when it come to laptops myself).

I'm typing this on a 2012 MBP (with far lower specs than your 2013, still has a heavy DVD drive, came with a small SATA SSD etc) which has had broken keys for the past year and I badly need a new one. I live in hope that somehow Apple produce a physical machine I can't resist (I would like at least 3 USB-C ports AND a decent keyboard with a physical escape key!) but I guess an endgame is coming where they keep their current keyboard (touchbar and shallowness), remove the headphone jack, switch away from Intel CPUs and up the price (I can't afford to spend even £3K on a laptop). If it comes to that I'm unsure what I'll do... call it a day and buy a Chromebook?

They very likely are CT scanners as the bbc news article about Heathrow installing some says that Schiphol already tested them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-44925635

I would have thought this was basic IR35 stuff. if you do work only for one employer, wether via a shell "service" company or not, then you are not an independent contractor you are an employee, and all the standard payroll taxes and procedures apply.

If i get a call from what is obviously a call center i just want to hang up, they always start with phony platitudes, asking how am I today etc. I don't know you, anything I could possibly say is meaningless to you, why are you wasting my time even bothering, just tell me what the f. you want and go away. I would so much prefer an automated system if that didnt try to be my friend and just got the hell on with it. Also wouldnt have the background roar of hundreds of other conversations happening in the same room as the caller.

They could cut out the people by just having an online booking service in the first place, either their own, or joining one of the many 3rd party services. It is purely because they haven't done this that duplex needs to exist in the first place. So if the receiving side ever got automated enough so as to have their own duplex call answering then google wouldn't need to call them in the first place.

You can actually see the lists of changes in the Ubuntu kernel git repos:

• Ubuntu AWS kernel git log
• Ubuntu Azure kernel git log

The changes range from configuring things off for hardware that will never exist on that platform, forcing certain options to speed up things like boot times, additional new drivers that aren't (yet) upstream (in one case the driver added was actually rejected by the mainline kernel maintainers and was pulled out of the Ubuntu tree later), backports of tweaks that were made in later kernels that help that platform etc.

One downside is that this makes a bit more likely that people running on cloud platforms could see different problems to "bare metal" setups (and vice versa) thus splintering the test effort a bit and increasing Canonical's maintenance burden. Also porting a VM with optimized kernel means you have to remember to switch kernel package (but if you know what you're doing then injecting packages into an offline VM is easy). I guess the benefits outweigh the costs...

This isn't the first time that Canonical have produced a custom kernel for a cloud provider platform. Earlier in the year they came out with a custom Ubuntu kernel for the same for AWS so it sounds like strategy they're pursuing in general. Other than the reduced size I'd hope these improvements end up in the mainline kernel in the end (perhaps these changes already have and these are just backports?)...

Pieces of JavaScript infrastructure (such as npm) push their ecosystem towards Github so there's an inherent bias there (plus do believe that Vim script/VimL really is more popular than Perl for projects as your GitHut link suggests via Active Repos). Also just because a language is troublesome doesn't mean it can't be popular too. In all honesty I'd guess both what you've presented and what stackoverflow have presented are about as inaccurate as each other. Python's popular, JavaScript is popular, some people like them, some people hate them, some are indifferent.

Looking through the list on Mozilla's list of WoSign Issues it looks like WoSign not just issued

• long lived SHA1 certs
• identical certs other than the notbefore date
• certs with identical serials
• certs that violate the "Baseline Requirements"
• certs using unapproved cryptographic settings

but their setup also violated a number of other best practices and security measures too (such as unpatched servers). However I'll note that on the political front folks were unhappy that the Startcom acquisition wasn't made public earlier. Outside that though there are a lot of different technical complaints.

CA's have been dropped in the past for non-political problems (see DigiNotar) so I don't think it's fair to attribute WoSign's woes to purely political motivations as you alleged.

It's a bit more elaborate because if you need a visa (citizens of some countries can get visa waivers) at application time you MIGHT be asked to give up all this extra information if they deem it necessary. It's not clear that every visa application will force the applicant to cough up all this information right away or only if you trigger some extra checks required tripwire (e.g. "name contains non-even number of letters, full information required"). Also note this presumably happens once per visa so if your visa lasts a year and you were pressured into having to do this you'll have done it once for that year even though you may fly many times...

It's hard to know for sure because the account that posted the parent comment seems to be new and it's unclear who the commenter is in real life but this seems to be a well written complaint about the outcome of WebAssembly. I did a quick search and it doesn't immediately look like a copy/paste of critique from elsewhere so it seems a shame to see this slip below the waves. Sadly, I suspect few will see it because this story has passed the "breaking news" point...

Here's a blog post from Dan Luu on the topic of "Why's that company so big? I could do that in a weekend". Turns out there's a lot to do in a lot of places...

It sounds like Lars (owner/creator) is burned out by the ordeal but a handoff of GMANE might be possible. No matter what, I hope Lars is rewarded for all the effort he put into GMANE - it's a fantastic tool.