I just went through this drama when I tried to use default Wayland in Fedora 41 with a pretty simple dual-monitor setup on a fairly recent NVidia card.. a mess getting the greeter to be on the correct screen and get correct screen placement once logged in. Then, crash after crash of random windows/apps.. don't even try to use Blender or other 3D tools or Kdenlive. ... heck don't even try to use desktop extensions.. Then I'm in the Fedora forums, posting for help and the response "oh, that's a well-known issue using Nvidia cards on Wayland". So, the most common accelerated graphics card brand on the market can't work properly with Wayland? I went back to X and it works flawlessly. So, of course, now stop supporting X and force me to use something that won't work going forward as the devs blame Nvidia and nothing gets fixed...

I have to roll my eyes when I hear something that's mitigating a greater-good problem being 'unprofitable'. It's actually quite profitable - the issue is that the profit has many layers of abstraction between the process (eg recycling) and the financial cost of not doing the thing (plastic pollution which degrades the environment and health causing difficult-to-calculate but immense impacts). If I can't get immediate profit there is no profit!! Avoiding getting cancer isn't profitable (eg quit smoking, wear sunscreen) until you have to start paying for chemotherapy.

Saying the quiet part out loud... rather than making better product they could charge more for, let's merge so we can have an oligopoly and raise prices on everyone while doing the same thing!

I can't disagree with this columnist more. I've had Roku, Amazon Fire and Apple TV and the ATV is by and far the best of the lot. Besides, de-coupling the "smart" from the "TV" allows you to pick what best works for you. "Smart" TVs are, excuse me, junk; the software becomes outdated as vendors move on to next year's model TV and don't update older sets OS or apps, the interfaces on Smart TVs are mostly awful, the UIs are slow, app choice is usually very limited and there's no consistency. If something goes wrong with the 'smarts' which prevents the failure-prone onboard entertainment software from booting the TV is junk (I had this happen on an otherwise perfectly good Vizio - not repairable w/o spending more than it was worth). Put too many eggs in one basket and you have too many failure points. With an Apple TV (or any STB) you can upgrade either component as you wish and maintain a consistent operation. If you have other Apple products the ATV is brilliant regarding screen and media sharing. I initially had MythTV on a media PC a decade ago, then XBMC, then Kodi on a small set-top box and it was always a hassle to get the latest codecs with all these, do live streaming, etc... much less interface with my mobile devices. Roku and Fire, meh. Apple TV FTW.

Using sunlight directly requires massive surface area/footprint. If you read TFA you'd know Singapore has neither. Vertical farming addresses the downsides of that requirements and add some benefits: crops can receive light/grow 24/7/365 not just during days and seasonally, is far less expensive to harvest due to compactness, is climate controlled and not subject to flooding or drought, and doesn't have to be transported from often far-flung agricultural areas.

Having worked with a lot of air compressors over the years I was suspicious of this as an efficient way to convert energy into a storage medium. After a quick Google I found a blurb on a manufacturer's website that up to 90% of electricity used to run a compressor is converted into heat.

https://www.quincycompressor.com/the-benefits-of-efficient-air-compressors/

I'd imagine that large-scale compressors are more efficient, and there would be some heat capture employed to utilize the energy lost there, but can this really compete?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

This article is a ridiculous NIMBY hit-piece. Change is hard but inevitable. Anything that gets people out of cars in hyper-traffic'ed LA is a win for me. With these, and also similar bikeshare systems, people can easily get around an urban center that does not have good public transit (ahem, Westside LA, or most of LA for that matter) quickly and without a car. These take cars off the road and have zero emissions. LA is slowly losing it's unhealthy love affair with cars, but those in the throes of their passion for large metal boxes won't give up their prized possession's street privilege without a fight.

I had many notebooks and always preferred portability over horsepower. I mostly ran Linux on them - IBM, Asus, HP, Dell - and it took me a bit to move to MacOS. The under-the-hood BSD was good enough to ease my apprehension leaving Linux to make the change, but the hardware was the closer. Now I still prefer Linux (my desktop is Fedora, don't judge) but you'd only pry my Air out of my hands with a newer, better Air. Give me 16G RAM and a better screen resolution and I am never leaving.

Fedora has been my go-to for over a decade. I've tried others, but it's modern, solid, has advanced features/libraries, and is architecturally similar to the most common Linux server OS I encounter - RHEL. Using Ubuntu would just be silly if 90% of the servers you work with are RHEL/CENTOS. My only regret is the rate of distro obsolescence... the churn is pretty high.

This is a classic case of linear human thought, which deals particularly poorly with quantum leaps and exponential curves. We've been picking away at the easily replaceable labor force with mechanization and automation for a century and a half or two while humans moved farther up the skill pyramid. Now we have absorbed much of the low-skill repetitive labor and are moving aggressively into thought/decision-based labor automation. This is the employment realm into which humans have retreated and there's really no where else to go but into higher thought-based work. The robots are hot on our trail in this area. There are no more large resevoirs of low-skilled thought industries, much less repetitive labor industries, to absorb displaced workers as there have been in the past. The human skillset hasn't improved at nearly the rate of the mechanization/automation skillset. Evolution is slower than silicon valley. Just do the math.

This is an excellent presentation delivered to the City of Austin about exactly what you outline. I highly recommend it! http://www.austintexas.gov/blog/false-prosperity-hidden-cost-suburban-sprawl

There are actually some compelling reasons to go to Venus first including cost and transit time but also more human-favorable gravity, greater protection from radiation and possibly the only other place in the solar system which currently offers temperatures and atmospheric pressures close Earth norm - albeit only at a 30-mile altitude. So, why not cloud cities on Venus?

BTW loved the Mars trilogy - have you read 2312 yet?

Two of the solar panels did unfurl and theoretically are producing power. Perhaps not enough to run all the instruments, but it's something and it's possible could be keeping the batteries charged.

Most of these probes, sensing loss of communication or other problem, go into a 'fault mode' where the bare minimum is kept going until instructions are received. The probe itself might be functional and alive, just with low power and unable to communicate with it's primary array.

I wonder if there is another way to communicate now that we know what's going on? Remember Gallileo had a problem unfurling it's primary antenna and was able to communicate, although much more slowly, through a secondary, low-power antenna.

With robotics becoming more capable all the time even more skilled labor jobs will go away. A prediction is that one in three jobs will be gone by 2025 http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html and that trend is still ramping up.

What labor-intense industry will technology create? The current arc of innovation is not like that which enabled the move from rural farming to factory farming and sent workers to urban factories and then to work at Starbucks and Wal-Mart.

We'd better get used to a whole lot more socialism, or a whole lot fewer hours worked per week, or some other way to define value for compensation. The current winner-takes-almost-all system will collapse with no employment for the vast majority of humanity.