On the other hand, how long can you reasonably expect companies to keep supporting old hardware?

Serious question, how long is acceptable? Does it depend on the price of the product? If it's a 3000 Euro scanner is it reasonable to expect the user to keep an old Windows XP machine around to operate it, as many companies do for old gear?

I'd say a minimum of 10 years, which tends to be what Windows offers (10 years for each OS version, and usually at least one version of forwards compatibility from hardware vendors). I'd love it to be more than that, but realistically I don't expect that webcam I bought in 2006 to still work on the latest OS.

It's not just Windows either. I have an original Raspberry Pi, and it's not very useful. 32 bit only, and a lot of software doesn't support it or is too bloated to run well now. On the other hand I have a PD drive from 1996 that works perfectly with a USB to SCSI adapter from 2003, under Windows 11.

Is nobody archiving every driver that Microsoft publishes?

They are probably on the Internet Archive somewhere, impossible to find due to their terrible search engine and resistance to Google indexing.

The main use for cameras is catching anti-social behaviour, like people hitting your car and then driving off, or kids vandalizing stuff in your garden.

It's wireless alarms that are really stupid. You have a wireless window alarm, but the alarm panel that is hard wired to the internet and which could alert you just ignores the fact that all the sensors went offline at the same time. The software seems to have been written in the 90s and never improved.

Not sure they are being entirely honest with those labels though. For example, they state that the iPhone is IP68 rated, but in reality it's full of moisture sensors that void your warranty. IP68 means it can survive submersion in 1m of water for at least 30 minutes, and water jets pointed at it. If that's true then the warranty should cover failures.

It scores quite poorly on general repairability and battery replacement, as well as on software updates for some reason. They guarantee 5 years of support, but list it as 1.0 out of 5 for software, probably because it's so locked down.

Europe is an aerospace power, with Airbus being the world's leading company of aircraft that don't kill the occupants. The ESA is decently successful, and has pulled off projects like Galileo, and some interesting space science and exploration missions.

Europe also invented the World Wide Web. CERN is one of the world's leading research institutions.

Militarily, both France and the UK are nuclear armed, and the UK, Germany, and France export a lot of weapons.

Orcas rarely venture into the Mediterranean much beyond Gibraltar.

1. A favorable business climate.
2. Skilled workforce, specifically in semiconductors
3. Low humidity
4. Stable geology. No earthquakes. No hurricanes. No blizzards.
5. Stable utilities. No power blackouts.
6. Located close to labor in Mexico for packaging. Direct flights to Asia.
7. Decent universities
8. An attractive location for new employees to relocate to. Arizona is a nice place to live with affordable housing.

Using water for cooling doesn't "use it up". The warm water is still available for other uses, such as irrigation. Evaporative losses are not significant.

Compared to agricultural irrigation, these other water uses are minimal and create far more jobs.

A bigger environmental impact will be the residential water used by the employees drawn to the area, mostly for watering their lawns. Xeriscaping can help here.

TSMC is already having trouble recruiting skilled tech workers in Arizona. Softbank will have the same problem.

Why Arizona? Why pick a state that is so overheated and water deprived? Seriously, they are already fighting over water there and you want want a ton of water to do semiconductor manufacturing?

I rarely use semicolons.

When I do, my grammar checker always complains.

Grammar checkers may be the reason for the decline in semicolons.

Emissions reduction is the first step in working toward eliminating our emissions.

Not at all. That said, it can by synthesized which would eliminate the need for crude oil.

Emissions by wildlife was never a target because the problem is purely a human creation. However, we will need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to undo the damage we have already done.

If that were true then the state would be systematically killing off pensioners, not being extremely generous to them.

We should be funding multiple moon-shots to try to deal with this. Apollo-like efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, or find some other way to limit warming.

And for reference China alone installed 324GW of solar in 2024, so up to 300GW by 2030 is not nothing, but unless it's very cheap it probably isn't the first place you would look to put solar panels.