Good point. An army that sees all others as subhuman and sees only the next death is one that has to keep fighting. It has no choice. It's the only thing it knows. It can keep conquering more territory outwards, or it can slaughter its own government inwards. History shows those are your two options.

Whether or not Russia conquers Ukraine, it will attack other countries - vast numbers of bored, underpaid soldiers would seek entertainment elsewhere if they didn't.

This is what I'm going by:

The report said that in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin based on reports from operators of model 737 planes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.

The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant an airworthiness directive – a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions.

The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB, which crashed. The report added: “As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out as the SAIB was advisory and not mandatory.”

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

Not sure about these particular devices, but in general devices will still be fine. You add via a QR code, HomeKit stuff is local only. But even with this - it's Matter/Thread that's the current hotness, not HomeKit/Google/Alexa-specific. If a thing supports Matter and Thread, *properly* (i.e. hubless), then you're fine. If it doesn't, or it does but needs a hub in the middle before it spits out Matter out of the other side...be wary.

This is a good example of why you pick things that work natively with what you want. In this case, if you've connected them via HomeKit then they'll carry on working without issue. In future cases - buy the standards, look for Matter (and preferably Threads) integration to make sure you don't need this kind of reaching out to servers.

Although the literal answer to that is "yes" since people have definitely rewired houses before, the more relevant one is - this isn't a completely different system. Your light bulb remains a light bulb. It screws into the same sockets as the last ones did, and is operated by the same switches.

In terms of protocols, I've already got several protocols running in my house and they mix and match without issue. Gradually switching over to emphasises one of them (Matter/Thread) more than the others won't affect the overall setup at all.

Many aren't doing Matter properly unfortunately. Take Switchbot for instance - it uses a hub to expose its devices over Matter. Aqara did too, though not sure if their latest stuff needs it.

Many people did Matter as "take our Zigbee kit, run it through yet another hub, and we'll push it out the other side as Matter". Not ideal.

Interestingly I've found that there are good deals...just not at Amazon. It's from stores making sure they can compete/are still relevant during Prime day. For example I'm a musician who's into synths: this is a good deal on a well-regarded (if a bit controversial) synth. There are other examples for other niches - I get emails from smart home tech manufacturers for instance and they seem to do ok.

And no-one has ever replaced a light bulb in their house before. No, not ever in the history of the universe.

Was torn between moderating and replying - am replying. Yes, it is and by 'backwards' I'm guessing you mean that as a good thing. Ives did fine with most hardware, but when he got his hands on software and produces macOS Funereal Edition (aka 10.0 Lion) stripping all colour and joy from the interface...yuck.

Bring it back, that's what I say. People still talk about BlingOS, Snow Leopard, as their favourite incarnation. There's a lot of functionality added since that I'd miss and I'm not totally sure on the 3D dock base, but I certainly get where they're coming from.

So what, we plunge to oblivion because we didn't hit good? If we're in a minimisation game, so be it. But we should still try to minimise.

There's still some good news on the UK, although it's less visible. There is a change to building regulations this year requiring new builds to have solar panels. It's long overdue.

There are pushes on heat pumps as well. In fact I had a worry with the original Green New Deal that it had basically been hijacked by lobbyists to concentrate too much on carbon capture, allowing them to carry on burning stuff but still claim the money from the deal. The EV mandate is on track regardless of the lobbying to soften it, which is a good thing, and also lower cost attractive EVs are starting to arrive. Our energy mix is improving too, with a smidge over half being generated by renewal last year.

There's the standard tabloid backlash rubbish, but in general green ideas are popular in the UK so they're likely to continue. Is it as big as the push from China? It is not and the deadcat bounce of loud and boorish objectors is annoying. It's still a pretty good picture though.

This makes no sense at all to me. While we're (I'm in the UK, this applies to the rest of Europe too) fretting about how to keep Russian gas supplies and other nonsense, China has built phenomenal amounts of renewal power and their emissions peaked this year, with a modest (1%) decline.

Here's a good source from the World Economic Forum. It notes the complexities and fragility of the decrease, but also shows the underlying path which lead to it. Their renewal energy capacity grew faster than their demand and interestingly, their demand was rising at a higher than average level just across for fifteen years.

The EU? Not so much. Energy sector is moving forward with a 2.9% drop, but outside that sector emissions are rising. The UK has a 3.6% drop, with coal in particular back to Medieval times and peak demand having passed over a decade ago.

The EU is playing politics here, nothing real. It is the EU that would struggle to live up to the example of China in the energy sector.

I have thought that long before electromagnetic-confinement fusion reaches power production, it will be useful and usable for isotope production. Tritium for "boosted" fission weapons and possibly breeding plutonium?

orcas may even learn how to format a Slashdot post into paragraphs?