It's Trump, so it's almost certainly just corruption.

They do fabric things you stick on, but they aren't great.

I think my Lidl one would work. The inlet is on the side, I suppose it would be better at the back.

Air to water is okay for cooling if your system can take it, but in the UK condensation is often an issue.

So far as CPU and GPU compute is concerned, the US's best are already good enough. They reached that point with their latest machines. Further progress will be made in different forms of compute. China has basically won the first p***ing contest to take place after the last important 'supercomputer arms race' battle was won by the US. Just my humble opinion as Mr 987. I've been watching this race since the Stone Soupercomputer and before the term Beowulf Cluster was born. (Before time... before slashdot user accounts... I was there.)

Oh my god, I did not know that British conspiracies nut jobs are crazier than American ones.

Thank you for showing me that Americans are NOT the most extreme idiots that will believe the most extreme of propaganda lies just because some lunatic spouts it.

I thought it was only Americans that could not spot the difference between obviously false extremist "interpretations" of real facts and reality. I thought we were the king of being a shit head that makes up lies when other people catch us being shit heads.

(Legalized gang rapes = government attempts and fails to stop gang rapes and covers up their failures.
Legalized beheadings = government upset about racist comments after a stabbing.
Rape of 11 year is the girls fault = government stopping the release of the rapists name after sending him to jail for 12 years. etc. etc.)

You have to make one yourself. I've seen cardboard used.

Yes, mostly swing outwards. Sliding ones do exist but aren't popular with homes. They have a bit of an "industrial" reputation.

That will probably change due to climate change, but slowly. I had mine done a few years ago and wish I'd got sliding ones now, not that suitable air conditioners are widely available here.

Probably not. Coal use for electricity is declining in China, and last year new renewable generation equalled the entire output of all generation (including coal) in Germany. The have a massive amount of cheap, clean energy.

Air conditioners are not ideal though, if your house was designed for central heating. You might not be familiar with it, but UK houses usually have pipes that carry hot water around each room. In each room is a radiator or underfloor heating. The hot water is provided by a gas boiler.

For heating the best option is usually to replace the gas boiler with a heat pump. Heat pumps do produce less heat though, so your house needs to be reasonably well insulated, or you need a very large heat pump that will be expensive to run. There can also be issues if the pipes are very small and the water flow is low.

As a result of this design, air conditioning isn't ideal for heating because it doesn't heat the whole house very well. The units heat individual rooms. It's less of an issue for cooling, and there isn't much alternative. Pumping cold water around the central heating system can cause condensation issues.

In the UK most of our windows aren't suitable for window units. You can sort of bodge it with something that has a pipe going out of the window, but it's not ideal.

Air con is becoming more and more common here. Even so, it's madness not to do other simple things that massively reduce the amount of heat entering your home.

Once you have your house decently insulated, a pre-requisite for a heat pump, A2A isn't too hard to do. Remember that most people have a boiler for hot water, so will probably want either a combined A2A/A2W model, or two separate ones.

In fact it can be an alternative to upgrading your central heating, if you have micro bore or small rads and A2W alone won't be enough. Most of the time A2W will be fine, but for the rare times when it isn't enough for heating, you have a secondary A2A system to add additional heat. And of course cooling in the summer.

It doesn't use SQL, or require any kind of central server. Transfers can be made P2P locally, completely offline. Details have not been finalized yet, but it will likely be similar to how stored value transport cards work. The card has a serial number, but is fully capable of making offline transactions in which only the transacting terminal/card details are recorded, and only on the devices involved in the transaction. It's likely that phones will have the wallet functionality built in, as they do for some transport cards like Suica.

So if you were arrested with the card on you, they could check if you used your card to travel, or if you transacted with a specific other card, as long as it was within the card's memory (typically 20 transactions). If the card wasn't on you when they got to it, they would need to prove it was yours.

In privacy terms it is a little less private than handling money, but only a very little. Buying transport tickets will have you on CCTV anyway, and most people already use cards. You could give the card to someone, effectively transferring the balance to them.

Or just not use it if you are that concerned. For most people it will be a huge upgrade compared to having VISA/Mastercard track them all the time. While they won't get the same protections that VISA/MC offer, I think it's likely that retailers will probably sign up to similar terms to encourage use, since it ultimately saves them money. If not, terms could be added to local laws.

People are already dying, and we are going to have to do some drastic stuff if we don't want it to get dramatically worse. Accelerate the race to net zero, and radically alter our cities and buildings to cope.

The UK wasn't built to survive hot, humid weather. We need urgent reform of planning laws so that people can fix their homes with things like exterior shutters on windows. The push to install heat pumps should focus on air-to-air with cooling capability.

In Japan, where they have hot and humid months, the advice is to design your house for the summer. You will be a bit cold in winter, but that's far better than being extremely hot and humid in the summer.