Your certification idea actually has merit, so you'd have some sort of certifying authority or CA that issues certificates to each cell tower and you can rely on them to dutifully and carefully only issue certificates to legitimate entities. In fact if we could migrate this idea to the web, all online crime would go away overnight. Dunno why no-one has thought of this before.

I see it as another example of the great thinking that brought us Brexit: There's a country that gets a bazillion hours of strong sunlight a year and we get about six hours total (Tuesday 16th April, 10am to 5pm), but let's not use their solar power but instead think about doing it here, or at least talk about it for years, and at least we won't have to deal with any damn foreigners.

Well you've got to admit, changing the screen colour is the most innovation Microsoft have done in at lest ten, if not twenty, years.

I foresee... I foresee... a large donation to King Donald I, and the whole thing will go away again.

I've generally preferred to pay people a salary, when reasonable to do so.

I hire(d) people (I still employ some people directly) to do a job. So long as the job was done properly, I'm not a big stickler when it comes to spending time at work. If the job can be done in 4 days, so be it. My concern is that the work is done on time and properly. It's also not important to me how they did the work, so long as it was done right.

I'm all for a 4 hour work week, so long as their wages match what they'd make for a 40 hour work week. Yes, minimum wage is too low. Then again, I'd never consider paying someone the least amount I could pay them by law. That's just a kick in the proverbial nuts and pretty damned degrading. "I'd pay you less, but the law won't allow it."

My house was built before CAT6 came out. It should be easy to upgrade as everything runs through in-wall conduit. I figured I'd do that for future-proofing.

I've not really seen a need to upgrade. It works well enough and there are jacks in most rooms. I also don't have the bandwidth to make it matter much, though fiber will be here before too long. Upgrading then may matter. (Fiber wasn't going to come up my road, but I contacted the company and a couple of neighbors and I will pay for the fiber to be run.)

Cat5e should still be fine. I'm not going to bother paying for full GB service, as I don't need that much bandwidth. I'll be fine with half of that and CAT5e should be viable.

This is about the 'inadequate' comment you made.

I could see it being inadequate for some people. As for me, it's still holding up and still fit for purpose. I've lived in a bandwidth-impoverished area for going on two decades. So, my needs, perhaps better said expectations, are different. I don't even see a reason to go full boar on the GB speeds. As I am technically a business, they say I can request even higher speeds. I'm simply not interested in that.

Then again... We'll see how I feel after a few months. I may end up wanting to splurge and increase my speeds. It could happen.

You'd think so, but you won't feel a thing. You won't have to adjust your diet because you'll naturally lose weight. Then, well, you won't even suffer a headache, a toothache, a stubbed toe, or any of those other painful things.

Hmm... This needs a pithy statement that can be summed up enough to fit on a bumper sticker.

I dunno... I'm a doctor and if you're dead then you're in perfect health. You no longer have any ailments of any kind. You're not going to catch any diseases.

Just to be clear, I'm not a medical doctor. I don't even play a medical doctor on TV. But, I am a doctor - though I don't tend to use the honorary, for a variety of reasons.

Typically clickbait headline, what the real story is "Ship carrying large numbers of ICE vehicles, huge quantities of other toxic and dangerous substances, and a few hundred EVs, catches fire". Fires on ships carrying vehicles were relatively common well before EVs came along (example, the MS al-Salam Boccaccio 98, 200 ICE vehicles, around a thousand dead), but they never make the news because there are no EVs involved.

And that seems to be about the only thing it's good for. I have the whole house cabled up for GbE, of which about 95% of the cable runs carry maybe 9600bps of traffic, a few carry maybe 10Mbps, and may one or two 100Mbps, with occasional bursts of a few hundred Mbps. And I'm a technical user, most of my nontechnical neighbours are using well under 100Mbps for the whole house despite being on gigabit fibre.

So yea, FTTR is great for press releases or shareholder reports or something, but not much else for most of the population.

As mentioned elsewhere, per 100,000 cars, ICE powered vehicles catch fire more often than EVs.

This may be of interest, so I'll share it...

https://core.verisk.com/Insigh...

This doesn't mean that EV fires aren't important, it's just that they seem to happen less often (per 100,000 cars) than ICE-powered vehicles. There are other citations, some newer, but I just grabbed the first one from Google.

EV fires still suck to get under control, especially for small volunteer fire departments without a lot of money to upgrade what they have. EV fires still release some pretty awful stuff - but so don't ICE-powered vehicles.

Because throughout the entire history of these things there's never been a single recorded case of any of them ever being used (outside of conference papers and press releases). Which in turn is because there are about 10,000,000 easier and more straightforward attacks that get you what you want.

They've already essentially dumped it somewhere else, Wittelsheim is more German than French: Les Allemands can have ze toxic waste, non?

In comparison, China takes between five and seven years to build a new reactor, including US designs like the AP-1000 so it's not a case of them putting up some HTR-PM's and claiming the speed record.