Could they not offer people these new plug in solar kits? Paying for panels to be mounted on roofs 90% of that cost will be admin and installation. If they funded say a million households with an 800W plug in solar kit, that's a theoretical 800MW, could be 100MW in practice?

TANSTAAFL... There's something I have not seen in a while on here ! Of course there is a free lunch for those at the top, those powerful enough to take a free lunch.
But for us proles yes indeed. These "free" solar panels are often very bad deals often including in them taking part equity of your home, even taking ownership of it in some cases; some homes have been rendered unsellable because of these solar panel contracts.
Be very very careful with any solar panel contract, do not skim over the contract, read every word.

Luckily they are teaching the children this at a young age; I do sysadmin work for a school district and the kids filled in an anonymous survey. Cue the dean asking me a few days later - to get the names of all those who cussed out the school or used foul language. Taught them a valuable lesson about how they can't trust those above them!

It makes me laugh when Americans whine about being Free from their Governments but are perfectly happy being Slaves to their Corporations, barely a week off laboring a year, call ins on Saturdays - where is this Freedom? I guess you are Free to choose to work your entire life away or Free to wander the cities homeless hungry and cold

There's a lot of incompetence too wasting thousands of dollars.

I worked in a district where the boobie manager had bought bottom spec computers for the whole school - Intel Pentiums (this was in an age of Core2duo, I didn't even know they still made Pentiums at that time) with bottom spec ram and spinning rust when SSD's were standard. This combined with an upgrade from XP to Windows Vista/7 made them nigh on unusable.

They had just had all their switches replaced with GBPS switches; I remember (I was a bottom rung techie at the time) the manager called in an external company to figure out why "The Network" was so slow. Because people don't understand computers they would always say "The Network is so slow" when in reality it was their computer grinding away. Their answer - what would make them the most money with the least effort? Replace all the gigabit switches with new gigabit switches.

Which of course fixed nothing. His next try - replace the servers with new ones. The servers which only peaked at logon/logoff and even then barely.
When I mentioned perhaps the computers themselves are the problem - being as though the CPU/RAM/HDD bottleneck not anything serverside - I get that wide eyed alien stare then they carry on duckspeaking about switches.

A lot of people who work in IT management just don't know what they are doing yet are in a position to waste thousands of $$$. Of course this happens in corporate too but there seems to be almost no punishment for failure (for higher management, of course they will scapegoat junior techs) in public sector ICT at least from what I've seen.

These hardware wallets always baffled me; if you are dealing with Crypto you surely own a computer ? A copy of the Open Source Electrum wallet, generate the seed myself, job done? If (I don't) I had millions of dollars in Crypto, I'd feel much better having it on my own wallet on my own computer than in some third parties control, just waiting for you to log in to their website one day and see that "404 not found" as they and all of your funds have disappeared. Or do you get Madoff like interest doing it that way? (with Madoff like results)

It does baffle and scare me when a supposed intelligent person uses a machine (a computer) for multiple hours every day and relies on it for their job yet doesn't know how to use the most basic of controls on that device

Roblox can actually emulate other games fairly convincingly - I had always thought of it as just a knock off Minecraft; but it was able to clone Counterstrike: Source's surf maps and mechanics fairly well (which I used to play a lot 20 years ago)
From what I have seen it is more a platform now than a game, and the popularity comes from kids being able to make their own maps and games and have anyone come and play them. Now I am also old so Roblox isn't really my thing but I can't deny I would have found it incredibly cool when I was a kid who was (circa late 80's early 90's), stuck at home with a Sega Mega Drive being the most sophisticated piece of electronics in the house!

I don't really care about the philosophising; but what I do know is the conditions in these jails are very bad, and you are not guaranteed safety inside of them. Now if they were a place that only "bad people" go to, well too bad for them.

But what we see over and over are totally innocent people getting caught up by police incompetence and being subjected to these jails. People love to say "it's the system!" as an excuse for bad people being bad, yes that is true. But that doesn't mean that there isn't a problem with the system. And you can't say it is the .1% when we see these stories constantly, nor that it is right purely because it affects so little. In the past the philosophy was rightly - "It is better to let 100 guilty men free than have 1 innocent man punished". Now we have no philosophy if you get caught up in the system too bad for you.

What system? the Pre-Trial Detention system; picture you are going about your day innocently. Then the police come visit you, say you caused an accident, injured someone (a child?) and fled. They point to a dent on your car that has been there for months and can prove it with home CCTV.

They don't care and haul you off to jail. Now you are being booked in, stripped naked, photographed, all of that. You can argue with a judge your innocence but when will you see one? It is Friday night so you have a long weekend to look forward to! You get into a cell and you must ask an inmate for a mat. They won't give you one. They read your paperwork and see it mentions injury to a child. Suddenly the freezing cold pod feels very hot. Do you have medical needs? good luck!

But luckily you make it safely until Monday and you get your bail set. $10,000 which you don't have but you can get a bondsman to get you out. Who will keep that $1000 fee regardless. But lucky you sort it out and can get back to work, telling them you missed work because you were in jail, but were innocent man! trust me! You feel lucky because there were many guys in that pod who had been in there for weeks because they couldn't get that money.

So the case gets dropped and you are found innocent. No big deal right you were found innocent so why are you complaining, the justice system works!

People say it like it is no big deal but being arrested and taken to jail is far far too casual an affair IMO in the USA. Especially for first timers! Surely there is a better way ?

Thing is - while all this is going on - aren't you still thrown in jail? Sure they might offer you cash bail but then aren't you forced to spend hundreds of dollars for the bondsman's cut? Which you don't get back? Even then you could be in jail over a weekend before you even get bail set.

The fact is the police can and will arrest you and throw you in jail for days, possibly weeks/months, and cost you perhaps thousands of dollars; based on the flimsiest of evidence. Where are all those posters last week who posted "huh huh everyone in jail is innocent sure braah" saying if you be a good boy and follow the rules you'll never have to worry about this ??

The biggest problem here isn't the fact MS is American or that Element is British.
It is that they are STILL using proprietary, closed source software.

So they still have the exact same problem and are spending millions for nothing. Because like the OP said - what if Element gets bought out by a bunch of VC's? What if the CEO just decides he hates people? They then up their subscription prices 500%, introduce new "License Servers" costing hundreds of thousands of man hours to comply with, and the EU are stuck with it.

They need an open source solution. This is what is wrong with Western governments. They are terrified of doing anything themselves, they must bring in a third party business to do it. This is where our growing corruption seeps in. "Government should not compete with business" - but Government in the EU can run train services, power stations, hospitals. Software is possibly even more important these days.

So instead of spending millions on yet another system they have no control over; they are not capable of putting together a devteam and sorting something out?

Actually I believe they aren't capable; or at least my own UK government wouldn't be capable. The old time thinking, the corruption, the stupidity, the poor management and poor leadership, the non understanding of modern technology. This is all ingrained in the UK govt and I can't see the EU being any different.
Any UK project to move over to open source would be a shambles and would be no more than a bluff to make Trump sweat (Trump doesn't care).
If a government could put together a competent devteam and make a good open source ecosystem, well we'd have a govt that would spend within its means, would aid its citizens instead of hampering them, we'd be living in a different world

I just don't think these AI's have anything close to the "neuronal organisation" required to have consciousness nor have I seen any evidence for it. It can re-arrange and manipulate text very well. As an AI agent manipulating a WIMP interface it is very mediocre. But there is little in its architecture I can see that will provide for consciousness.

Now there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents a sentient machine from existing, only religious people believe otherwise. A neuron isn't some magic thing after all. The Chinese Room argument never made much sense to me but I liked the one example of the Chinese Brain. Which you scan a human brain, then make every Chinese Person take on the role of a neuron, with pen and paper, sending numbers that represent action potentials to other neurons it synapses with. This says that if you ran this experiment for years it would replicate human behaviour depending on the state of this brain. Yet none of these Chinese people have anything to do with this brain they just mindlessly follow instructions. So where does the thought come from?

This was supposed to prove a sentient computer impossible but if consciousness is just an emergent property of billions of neurons operating very quickly, which it most likely is, then there very well could be conscious "thought" arising from the Chinese Brain on the scale of years. It really would believe it was thinking. As absurd as that seems. The alternative is some magic voodoo that makes human brains/neurons special (like the quantum theology shit people post) that has less evidence than sentient AI.

So then why the objection to Chat-GPT being sentient. These AI's have been trained as text parsers, real intelligence took billions of years to evolve, the complexity it is not there. Now am I an expert in Chat-GPT's "computology" no. But show me something convincing. People were fooled by shell scripts a few hundred lines long in the past. Now the parsing is vastly more sophisticated people will willingly believe in something that isn't true. Magical thinking. Especially lonely people who don't have much human companionship.

Now of course the age old question how does one prove sentience. What would satisfy me. 1st an architecture more complex than a system that crunches its weights then stops, until prompted to again. The neurons should be humming with weights back and forth by itself. Does Chat-GPT do this? Is it reliant on prompt imput over and over? Give the AI agentic control over a computer. I should see "curiosity" as it moves the cursor and navigates the interface trying to figure out and learn stuff. (though this might be a naive view given the speed these may run at). I should see more than we see at the moment.

Wait, yes I can run a model that plays a video game in a certain way. What I can't do is infer that this game playing script has any emotions at all. It has been trained on material detailing how to play Starcraft and in that material likely mentioned Starcraft bots, how to get them, how to play etc.

So are you inferring this machine really felt "frustration" ? Do you think they are alive? That kind of speaks of mental illness in my opinion. Now I of course believe that sentient, emotion feeling machines (in the style of Culture Drones or whatever) can exist, there is nothing that prohibits them. (no quantum woo or other bulll shit). But I've seen no evidence so far (this stuff isn't evidence) of any mechanism to give these things feelings or conscious thought.

I wonder do you have an AI girlfriend? (more likely boyfriend?)

Still though it's pretty amazing how much memory and resources Windows takes up. I was debugging a Windows laptop trying to join an Intune/Autopilot environment. At the same time I was watching a Youtube nostalgia video on a Windows 95 Gateway PC.
Going through the Windows logs, it is dumping hundreds of pages of logtext every single second. Pages and pages of XML detailing what it is doing to try to connect to MS's Intune infrastructure. And this is just 1 component, checking the logs there are many other components doing the same thing.

Watching that Youtube video it got me thinking how long all this would take on a Pentium 90. This can't be the most efficient way to craft an OS surely. That saying - software is like a Gas - it will expand to take up everything - seems to ring true with Windows.

Now Intune/Autopilot is useful yes but reading MS logs you get the impression Microsoft haven't crafted intelligently designed software that handles errors and exceptions well, moves on to the next step and finishes gracefully. More - it seems that it will try a task, loop over and over, either eventually succeed or it will silently fail by timing out. It's very badly written and reading behind the scenes MS talk, with all that stack ranking, outsourcing etc, there is no cohesion or good management behind the dev teams.

This is why Microsoft has lost the home user. Given a choice of waiting 2 seconds for a tablet to fade on, or upto a minute for Windows to become usable.

It's bizarre because I recently enjoyed using some excellent Microsoft software and would recommend it. It is called Age of Empires 2.
Satya or whoever you are, sack the Windows devteam and put the AOE2 guys in charge instead, surely it couldn't get worse

If you can't VPN - a popular thing for teenagers is to use Hidden Containers to hide their porn. Load up a fake calculator, put in the right digits and there it is.
Would not having 2 logon codes - 1 a normal one, the other one also logs you on as normal but discretely wipes the hidden containers - be a better thing?

A wipe code or a "honeypot" code is no good because the police can tell and thus will charge you. If they log on and they see a "honeypot" environment with a few token internet searches and no chat or saved items, they will know that it is fake. They need to log in, see your normal phone usage, but anything stored in the Hidden Container is gone as if it never existed. As if the police suspect or find it, it's already too late.

I guess it would have to handle chat logs too, as that would be the evidence of conspiracy or what have you