Bad and unstable user interfaces are par for the course nowadays. Consumer-facing software in entertainment devices has become totally enshittified, as the complexity of the software has grown from what the microcontroller of a VHS player or analog TV did back then, and the devs writing it cannot handle it, or are under too much schedule pressure to do a good job.

I'm pretty sure that kind of surveillance would be illegal in my country, and probably many others as well. U.S.A. seems to be OK with arbitrarily invasive surveillance, as long as it is not done by the state.

So true. The ODF support in MS Office continues to be dismal! Even simple documents written in LibreOffice have various problems when opened in Office (I occasionally try it to see if there is any progress). I am totally convinced this is intentional. LibreOffice opens MS Office documents with far better fidelity, than MS Office opens LibreOffice documents. Microsoft could easily fix this, but it will never do so, because it wold not be in their interests. ODF support for them is just a tick box item to get past some governement procurement rules. Actual users, if they try it will soon give up with it, falsely convinced that ODF is a crap format.

As a German company, it should be very easy for them to handle payments by all European customers as standard SEPA bank transfers. The commission should be lower, and the money arrives the next day at the latest.

1. The Lord of the Rings

2. The Lord of the Flies

Two books that can hardly be more different. One heroic, the other demonstrating why human societies eventually screw themselves up...

>First, we don't know how to protect humans from Cosmic radiation on even a short voyage, let alone a super long 300 year voyage.

Actually we do. A few meters of water or other hydrogen-rich substance. Very low-tech, but heavy. But a generational spaceship would inevitably be heavy, and would need a very large reservoir of water anyway. The water would not have to be hauled up from Earth, there is plenty of it in the outer solar system, in icy moons. Possibly even in our own Moon. By the time building generational starships becomes feasible, accessing extraterrestrial water resources is probably routine.

Is there some fundamental reason why ion engines cannot have a higher thrust, assuming you have the energy available (like from a nuclear reactor)?

>The _only_ time an energy inefficient light source is wasting energy is when you are not heating the house. For most of the UK population, that's about 1/4 of the time.

But it is quite a bit more than that in countries south of UK! Especially if you have air conditioning, the traditional light bulbs put you in the absurd situation of using energy both to heat and cool the room at the same time... Another thing is that the light bulbs in typical lighting fixtures are inefficient as heaters. Most of the heat goes and stays near the ceiling, which is not where most people spend their time. Even ignoring that, direct electric heating is usually more expensive than other heat sources. (This of course depends on where you live).

By the way, I'm from Finland, so from my point of view the UK is one of those balmy southern European countries. And I have gradually replaced most of the bulbs in my house with compact fluorescents and LEDs. The latter have come down in price in recent years, and solve the worst annoyance of compact fluorescents: they turn instantly on with full power.

>Neither IE9 nor IE10 are available on XP.

The Google stuff works better on Firefox anyway. Or on Chrome.