We have a sunny, south facing portion of our yard. Looking forward to hanging 4 solar panels on the fence and getting 800-1000w (1200w "nameplate" max but reality is closer to 1000w) to offset our daytime use. We both WFH and then the kids are home by 3pm so being able to offset computers, fridge, and part of our AC/Heat bill is huge.
 
A couple of mfg, Anker and Ecoflow both sell a system that you do the standard 4 x 400w panel = 1200w plug in, and then a second 2000w (+5 more panels) into a battery system that discharges a max of 1200w overnight as the sun sets. I think they want like $1600 for the system. That's an instant buy for me when california electricity is $0.50/kwh

Okay, I'll feed the troll: I choose to comment on Slashdot. I also choose not to use less privacy-respecting platforms like Facebook. And make no mistake, I'm under no delusion Slashdot-the-company has been anything more than yet another data harvesting endeavor since CmdrTaco sold it.

I do not have a choice in whether or not Flock misreads my license plate and I'm arrested at gunpoint as a direct result - Or worse, which will eventually happen; and Flock somehow magically bears zero liability because hey, their contract admits they're unreliable and requires users to do their own due diligence. Which absolutely none of them do.

Sorry - To be clear, I wasn't disagreeing with you. Quite the opposite, I was basically expanding on "There is something dodgy going on".

Peace, friend!

And your problem is apparently an inability to figure out that two plus two equals four.

First, those age brackets are necessarily dynamic or the OS would be out of compliance the day after installing - Because y'know, people tend to age one day per day, at least until we have space stations orbiting Sgr-A*.

And second, if you visit Facebook the day before you turn 18 and the day after, whaddya know, they magically now know your actual birthdate without ever needing to be explicitly told. This ain't rocket science, dude (space stations orbiting the nearest supermassive black hole aside).

That's really the biggest question in all of this - What means of enforcement on the end-user will end up attached to this?

I suspect the vast majority of us are just as fine with lying to Microsoft as we are with lying to Facebook. And as a privacy freak myself, the law itself honestly sounds about as tame as we could have hoped for (short of no law at all); but almost guaranteed Microsoft / Apple / OEMs are already rubbing their hands together and cackling with evil glee over having not just an excuse, but a near-mandate, to demand a license or passport merely to activate a new install.

And what about preexisting installs? At what point is MS itself effectively going to ransomware the very PCs we own for a pic of our license, and what recourse do we have when they invariably brick some fraction of those? Because it will happen.

Nobody's paying a few grand just to steal a similar few grand in hardware; and the booth bunnies / bois couldn't care less about having a few work laptops stolen, insurance would cover it and it's not a personal loss anyway.

Rather, this is 100% about stealing what was on those devices, and the potential value could be hundreds / thousands of times higher than the cost of the lost hardware itself. Imagine a pre-release build of GTA VI, almost certainly without the DRM baked in yet so it doesn't embarass the vendor at exactly the wrong moment, and you have the right idea.

PII comes in two types: direct identifiers and indirect identifiers. Direct identifiers are unique to a person and include things like a passport number or driver's license number. A single direct identifier is typically enough to determine someone's identity. Indirect identifiers are not unique. They include more general personal details like race and place of birth. While a single indirect identifier can't identify a person, a combination can. For example, 87% of US citizens could be identified based on nothing more than their gender, ZIP code and date of birth. (emphasis mine).

"Do you know how empowering it is to realize that after 25 years away from coding, you can"...
...Force a subordinate to do coding tasks for you and take credit for it?

Sweet $Deity the lack of introspection in this waste of flesh is strong!

All I'll say is, they're not calibrated anywhere near as accurately as you seem to believe; and that I'm not talking about after-market add-ons, I'm talking about the OEM markup on sub-$100 hardware.

If you're trusting the edge of that cliff to actually be right at the red line on your camera, you're going over anyway.

More to the point, it doesn't take a $6k computer with access to lock everything in your car behind a paywall just to get a video feed from the back of the car to somewhere on the dash. It takes a $20 camera and a $50 dumb display (and that would in most cases give a significantly higher quality image than the garbage auto manufacturers are using).

There is a reason not to have both - Because there's absolutely no reason volume needs to go anywhere beyond a pot inside the radio. The entire rest of the car doesn't need to know or be able to override the physical position of that pot.

The same is true for virtually all features that don't directly affect the operation of the engine itself (and even most of those!). Even when we're talking about something like power windows or HVAC, the buttons don't need to do anything more than physically bridge the dumb-as-shit DC power bus going to the corresponding motor.

We're building modern cars as a giant ball of points-of-failure glued together with software. Software that can fail, can lag, can ignore us when the manufacturer would prefer we listen to their ads. And that the real "cost" here - Nothing to do with $0.25 knobs and everything to do with locking core features behind a paywall.

Ad-sponsored is fine for "free" services like broadcast TV and mobile games. When I'm paying mid-five-digits to own something, BMW can fuck right off with this rent-seeking!

A million years ago I thought there was probably some synergy between my gmail account and getting better, personalized search results. That never was realized, but oh well. I can't even recall the last time I used google for anything. I use Kagi for search now but even then it's use is pretty minimal. Now that the need for search engines is being replaced.... why would I ever use a google product? What value does the brand "google" even bring to the table in 2026? Other than Kagi I haven't been actively trying to "degoogle" but the lack of interesting or useful products is really striking for such a large company. The last thing I want is yet another google app yeeting marketing telemetry back to the google mothership.

Sorry, 38% of people support them, or merely don't hate them passionately enough to commit several felonies destroying them on sight? I find it hard to believe anyone on the correct side of the thin blue line actually wants this garbage.

And that's not even touching on the blatant fourth amendment violation going on, which I don't expect Joe Average to even recognize much less care about. Who wants Uncle Sam or his proxies watching their every move?

Gallant forms a partnership with a preexisting top STEM university, buys them a few new tech toys, and sets up a scholarship to promote people going into field-X.

Goofus forms a partnership with the University of Phoenix, burns two billion on a giant faux-gold plaque of his name, then rants about wokeness when nobody sane enrolls.

Five points if you can spot the difference.

It's not often I say this, but China definitely has the right idea when it comes to executive liability for corporate misdeeds".