There was a brief cyber-cafe game place here but it crashed and burned very quickly. It that still a thing in Asia or Europe ? There is an old time arcade with pinball and stuff that seems to keep chugging along though.

I recently started tt-rpg again with the new D&D. Getting back to pen and paper is really refreshing and fun. Check your local game shop, or college for active gaming groups. Oddly all the players are older folks with a even breakdown in men/women. All the younger folks play MtG or some other card based game. I think Pathfinder might be the rpg for that genre.

I agree but user awareness is critical and they have the memory span of Dory the goldfish. If you don't keep the problem in the spotlight they will forget before first coffee break.

Email clients could make this problem MUCH easier to deal with if they would just show the DOMAIN instead of overlaying the address with a title that is wholly made up. If you could see that your MS support email came from iamfuckinghack.com and not microsucks.com it would help. The mobile email clients are TERRIBLE in this manner and almost part of the problem hiding the true email address. Hell your client should point out those discrepancies when the mail is received.

It may just be me but I don't want ANYTHING to do with Elon Musk. Fuck him and his cars and his spaceships all in one fast steroid filled gross mess that looks vaguely human.

It's not either/or though - if you're generating more than you're using, then you can redirect that back into the battery (or sell it back to the grid). I have limited winter experience at the moment, but the battery is fully topped up during the day while still powering the house from solar. That said, the darker nights/evenings right now means you kick into battery power earlier, so for me for example at roughly the same lattitude as London, the battery is drained by about 9pm.

It's interesting to watch and fun too if you're in to that kind of thing. Which, quite clearly, I am.

The cloud is a trap
Run away!

That's increasingly true here too (UK). I'm on an EV-focused tariff which guarantees me up to 6 hours cheap EV charging per day, and in addition there are lower, cheaper overnight rates for the electricity.

What's been noticeable recently is that these periods are now tending to be different. I've been driving EVs for eight years and on roughly the same tariff (the 6 hour cap is new), and usually the "cheap EV charging" and "overnight low rates" coincided. Now however, I've noticed that if I plug in the EV during the day it pretty much starts charging instantly and you're right - I could say that's 100% around lunchtime. My usage means I can't really take advantage of that much since I commute in the day and plug in in the evenings, but it's still a noticeable pattern for the days that I am either working from home or its a weekend.

The problem is not overall capacity. It's that they're all crowding into the same areas. Most places in the US (let alone the world) have nobody building datacentres anywhere near them. They all want to go into the places with not merely cheap power, but cheap property taxes and other incentives. Some places will tax everything, down to the servers themselves, whereas some will only tax the land and the building shell, not even the power interconnects or cooling systems.

When everyone wants to rush into the same place, it overtaxes the local grid; they have to build not just more generation, but power lines, substations, etc. And all of this has to go through permitting. There's no real limit to how much generation can be built, but none of the datacentre operations want to wait, because they're all worried about missing out on the opportunity. Hence the reason that they try to come up with stopgaps, like installing their own generators, or... this approach.

ECL MV1 / Lambda is 3,5 miles from the Googleplex. And 10-12 miles further to the southeast, Santa Clara is one of the densest datacentre hubs on Earth.

If you care about where they actually live, and distances to datacentres:

Sundar Pichai: Los Altos Hills, CA: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-6mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub (CoreSite SV9, Vantage, Colovore), 9-11 miles

Larry Page: Palo Alto, Ca: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 4-5mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 10-12mi.

Sergey Brin: Los Altos Hills / Bay Area: ECL MV1 / Lambda (Mountain View), 5-7mi; Santa Clara Data Center Hub, 9-12mi

Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind CEO): North London, UK: London Docklands Hub (Telehouse / Equinix), 7-9mi; Slough Data Center Hub (Equinix, Yondr), 18-20mi

I don't know about you, but they're all way closer to datacentres than I am.

Completely agree, however this should just be rolled into the "how much does a data centre cost?" bill. Add the solar, add the necessary battery storage...that's your cost. Not "we'll build it without anything and hope everyone else will give the power instead".

It's not, but that's where home batteries come in. I'm a new'ish convert to solar, having had it installed in March and so this will be my first winter with it. I also installed a 12kWh battery to go along side it. The combination pretty much takes care of all my daytime home usage, although it does not take care of my full usage since I also have an EV.

I charge the EV overnight, plus top of the battery on cheap overnight rates. Result is barely any daytime usage for me. How that translates to a 24 hour data centre of course is a question in its own right, would they start affecting the overnight rates? Hmm.

you are probably correct, but luckily I don't play sports games and I gave up on battlefield after 1942...

Erm, yes it is and yes it does. At least if you use systemd. And you say "perfectly possible" and yet sysvinit and other systems don't do it.

Every invention ever made has been used in war.
This is sad and depressing, and clearly points out the biggest problem with human society.
I wish we could kick the habit and get over our addiction to war, but this appears to be a fantasy.
And yes, in the past I have worked on jobs for the military.
It's complex.