Agreed, this, as it stands is of limited utility.

Thinking bigger, if you put pipes on the back of the panel, then you might be onto something. During the day, those pipes can wick away the heat in the panels to heat water (or the concrete base under your back patio). During the night, those pipes can wick away the heat in your bedroom (via a radiant heat system in the ceiling) and send the heat into outer space (and give you slightly more electricity in the process). If you've got something permanently hot, like a datacentre, then you could just be sending your heat to outer space all night, while making some electricity to run your computers.

Either way, sending heat to outer space rather than into the atmosphere seems like a small step towards cooling our atmosphere down a bit. Making that a more mainstream activity seems like a worthy endeavour, even if this particular one doesn't look too commercially viable yet.

I read this as being more ironic than literal, but who knows?

I'm not saying *this* one will be a success, but in suppressed populations, they use "code" to talk to each other. Who knows... maybe protesting against the the war will be standing in front of a derelict building, looking sad. Support perhaps will be standing in front of fresh laundry - looking sad. I'm reminded of old newspaper adverts offering "french polishing services" or "lunchtime plumbing jobs", or how a pampass grass meant you were a swinger. People find a way...

My point here was really that if they follow through with this, and it becomes sort of "cool" to look sad, then this sort of social media platform could actually get pretty big. I'll agree it's unlikely to get out of Russias borders, but inside Russia, maybe it'll be *the* thing.

McFuel? ;-)

I'm not clear on the relative carbon merits of SAF versus dinosaur oil, but re-using something has to be better than finding and refining more of it just to throw it away (or burn it) later. Whatever carbon we release making SAF can presumably be mitigated and/or handled, whereas we can't do that if we just dig up more and more oil.

What I would like to see is that for every flight you take, the percentage of SAF in the fuel for that aircraft is published by the airline. That way, I, as a consumer can choose how much SAF I want to fly with - and which airline/route I want based not only on price or perceived quality, but also the "green-ness" of the fuel (for differing opinions on just how green, or less brown SAF really is). Sadly, I'm more likely to be able to hitch a ride on Porky Pig's back to fly me than the airlines thinking of this themselves. Public pressure might work, but legislation is probably the most effective.

Sure - but the data that gets leaked is at the control of Pidgin. If Pidgin doesn't (say) give contacts, or GPS, then Whatsapp/Facebook/Meta can't get their hands on it.

I agree it's hardly a panacea, and anything can be abused, but even a proprietary plugin would be better than what we have today. An open source plugin better still, and the complete destruction of Whatsapp the best of all. I'll take whatever I can get ;-)

Maybe - although Signal offers an example of what they (might) be going on about - even though they aren't affected by the law.

The Signal phone app can approximately replace your SMS app - it'll send SMS to people that don't have Signal, or else encrypt and send over the Signal network if they do. That looks like operability to me - one thing works with two networks.

If Whatsapp let (say) Pidgin have a Whatsapp plugin (possibly even a proprietary one), then that too might qualify as "interoperability" - I no longer have to install the spyfest that is Whatsapp mobile app, and instead can use Pidgin. I don't know how well supported it is, but I see Pidgin has a Telegram plugin, so at least one of the other encrypted players can do it already.

How this will actually play out... well, who knows!?

Grab a little off-cut of it from the skip and take to it with a blow torch.

We recently did a loft conversion, so had lots of solid insulation put in - I tried burning a bit with the cooking blow torch - it sort of flamed a bit, then was coated in burnt stuff, and refused to give me any more flame or indeed change shape or anything else. I reckon I'll be okay in a fire - it it does burn at all, it'll be towards the end of the house still standing, by which time it won't really matter.

As for government-funded schemes - well, it's great to get something for "free", but just check exactly what it is you're getting - the (UK) government doesn't have a good history with, well, anything along these lines for the last few decades at least.

(Oh, and "insulate older buildings" only extends to some - most of the solid walled Victorian places, anything listed (of which there are *loads*) almost certainly won't qualify)

Not sure how this works in Canada, but in the UK, if you're renting your property, then:

1) Your landlord probably doesn't give a shit. Some will happily help if you ask them (especially if you've been there a while because such expenses are tax deductable), but they're otherwise quite disconnected from day-to-day life in the house they rent you. Some of course, are proper arseholes will find ways to evict you if you ask searching questions such as "can I have some insulation?".

2) If you elect to do the work on your own, you do indeed get to enjoy the fruits of your labour, until the landlord puts the rent up now that the property is more desirable, or kicks you out for making "unauthorised modifications" or other reasons.

(FWIW, when I rented, I usually took option (2) for most things and kept the receipts. If the landlord turned out to be amenable, I submitted expenses ;-) )

These problems need sorting (in the UK) because rented houses are some of the worst environmental performers, and so the most expensive to live in (and the poorer folks tend to be renters). How it's going to be sorted is yet to be worked out - as a landlord you get almost zero benefit for providing insulation over the shitbag next door who doesn't. As yet, there's no real incentive to do it, other than to make yourself feel good. Sadly, that's no where near enough for many landlords, and quite probably tenants too.

I've used Signal as my messenger for years - it uses Signal if the recipient has it, or SMS if not. They do calls and video now too.

I do have one friend who signed up for Signal but doesn't have it installed on his phone. That's a pain in the backside - he SMSes me, I Signal back :-(

You asked about diallers - and no, not found one that didn't look like it was "dodgy" :-(

I'm on slashdot, so obviously I know very little, and all problems look simple to me, but...

A lake is essentially a buffer between an input and an output - water flows in at one end, it fills up a bit, and water flows out the other end. Surely, if the water level goes up by (say) 1M, then there must, somewhere, be a raging torrent of water 1M tall coming out of the lake? If not, then why not? Is there some obstruction that wasn't there before?

I may have misunderstood the proposals here, but as I understood it, they were looking to use biometrics in the same way as (say) your phone or password manager does now. That is, the biometrics are checked against a sort of "hash" (like you describe) and that would unlock some cryptographic keys which would perform the actual authentication.

That means, if I want to log onto my gmail, Google never sees my actual fingerprint, or even the hash of it. They see some crypto keys which I keep on my laptop, encrypted with the hash of my fingerprint. In that sense then, they're really just using PKI to do authentication, rather than needing a password. This (on the face of it) seems like a good thing - except that they want to be some sort of central arbiter of authentication, which in all possible ways makes it completely unsuitable to replace the very decentralised world of passwords.

As someone above said, if I can have different keys for every website, then we might be onto something. The keys are effectively a password, and they're all stored in (what is effectively) as password manager. The keys don't routinely get exchanged with servers (so I never reveal my "password"), instead we use the keys to encrypt some data which we exchange to perform the authentication. Most importantly, in such a scenario, no one person every knows all the keys, and any individual can change any of those keys any time they like. Hell, they could even do a whole lot of this in a secure chip in my laptop - so long as they have Linux support, we could be good. Sadly though, I suspect the implementation will be a compromised design that makes no one happy.

Your point about being compelled to put your finger on a sensor versus refusing to reveal your password is well taken though.

I'm no fan of MS, and frankly, they can suck up all the litigation anyone wants to bring, whether they really deserve it or not.

But OVH just isn't even comparable to Azure/AWS/GCP. These guys make using the cloud *easy* - they have the best APIs, a half-decent web console and facilities up the wazoo. OVH by comparison has very few features, has a slow, mish-mash of multiple web UIs (which you can't always protect with MFA), an impenetrable mess of multiple APIs, all wrapped up with shitty support. That said, OVH make VMs *cheap* - really, really cheap (compared to the big guys). The lack of data transfer billing makes life easier too. Pricing is indeed much simpler in OVH, but billing is an shit show.

If you want to be able to stand up and tear down infrastructure quickly, maybe have some auto-scaling, load balancers, serverless tech, DNS integration and want to use Terraform to set it all up - then Azure/AWS/GCP are the ones for you. If you just need a hand full of always-on servers, then OVH might work out for you - although you'll have to think about private networking (unless you want all your servers on the Internet - but almost no one wants *all* their servers Internet-facing). In OVH, you also need to get ready for support even worse than AWS etc - but you can probably still double-up all your servers for less than it'd cost to run them in AWS/Azure/GCP.

So in summary... MS might be doing wrong here, but I seriously doubt it's to OVH - I'd imagine AWS and GCP have more beef than they do.

I actually skipped the whole story and used Google. It turns out it's actually pretty mainstream - for example: https://www.game.co.uk/en/the-...

I've got to say, this might actually be a console I'm interested in. It's pretty "open" in so much as the Amiga's been picked to pieces years ago. It's also cheap and the whole thing works via SD memory, so no fiddling about with CDs or downloads to a locked down hard drive or "virtual ownership" online or whatever.

I will admit, that if the kids have to watch me playing speedball 2, it won't be as compelling to them as if all of us can play at once (like we do on the Wii). If I can dig out some of the old games I used to play as a kid though, they might find some of them fun.

I guess one day we might see something like this that can be a BBC micro, an Amiga 500 and perhaps something like an N64 or even a Wii - all determined by which game you pick on off a menu. That would be pretty cool - especially if a few small-scale devs get involved and make new games for it.

The stereotypical slashdotter is a bit overweight, lives in a basement and eats junk food all day. Probably not the Peloton target market ;-)

My wife has a Peloton - the hardware is definitely over-priced for what it is. I was disappointed that (for example) the resistance adjuster wasn't controlled by the content - so if you do one of the "trail" rides, it doesn't get harder to go up hills. Other than that though, it seems pretty solid - it's been getting a lot of use over the last couple of years, but you wouldn't know it to look at it.

I'm not much into classes generally (never went near one at the gym when I was a member), and I generally prefer to go outdoors to do my exercise, but I think the classes is where Peloton does really well. The trainers have to be "the best of the best" to get on there in the first place, and from what I've heard from owners, they do a good job of putting together classes of the sort of level people want. A friend of mine likes someone or other because they're easy to work with, but play good music, for example. My wife tells me there are a few young, hot women with big boobs, so I guess they have a following too. The do have the "drill sergeant" style classes if you're into that too.

The other area they do well in is the off-the-bike stuff. Wifey does weights, yoga and even uses the sleep aids occasionally. That all comes as part of the subscription, and has meant we've stopped a handful of other "£10/month" subscriptions we used to have.

Could we do all that she does with it more cheaply? Yes, absolutely. Just like she could use a phone much cheaper than an iPhone. Like Apple, Peloton have done a good job of bringing a load of things together and making it usable by ordinary people. Like Apple they charge a premium, and like Apple, a lot of people are quite committed to them.

I'd also say, like any successful company, there are a queue of people looking to knock them down. I don't know if it's justified in this case or not, but they seem to be doing well enough in spite of it.

In the last round of Macbook Pros (the first M1s) it was barely "pro" at all though - I mean, what "pro" can use 16GB of RAM in 2021/2? So for that round of laptops, yeah, "pro" didn't mean much.

Going back a bit further, the 2015 line up was definitely segregated - the "pro" systems (especially the 15" ones) were most definitely not for your average sales person (whereas the "air" really was). Back then, the difference between the two was pretty obvious - just the cooling alone in the "pro" laptops were what made it worth getting for the heavier users.

In the current line up, I'd say there's still a definite difference between "pro" and "normal". The thing is "normal" has got so good that few of us really need "pro" any longer. Even as an IT-professional, I could probably have managed just fine with an "air", rather than the "pro" I actually bought. I'm pretty sure my GPU isn't getting stressed with my workload in the slightest (as one of the main spec differentiators between the two). "pro" now is probably reserved for higher power-users, graphics and video workers, etc. Most "power users" can probably get away with an "air" (just as well, because they all got very expensive all of a sudden).

You're probably right - but in fairness, you don't pay an annual subscription - and yes, apples are more expensive than lemons, so you're paying for it then, but supporting some 7+ year old hardware? They're a commercial entity, not someone doing it for the good of the people. By any stretch of asset depreciation, 5 years is about the longest you'd expect before writing off such an asset.

You can't even get 3 decent years out of a Windows laptop. And as much as I like Linux, you don't get it there either. Having said all of this, I did just upgrade my 2015 macbook pro - not because I wanted to wait 7 years, I'd have done it at least a couple of years sooner, except Apple kept making shit laptops, so I kept skipping them in the hope they'd make a decent one (which I think they have now - YMMV).