In my case that was definitely the case, install cost more than the hardware. And it wasn't junk stuff, Jinko triple-cut bi-facials that would have been beyond-top-of-the-line just a few years ago.

Two completely different things. With radios you need to be within physical range of the radio with advanced signal-interception gear to capture and decrypt the conversation, which will then give you some tactical comms that could well be out of date by the time you've recovered it.

With Internet-based stuff any attacker anywhere in the world with access to on-path capabilities can capture and decrypt at their leisure, and it's typically data that isn't short-term tactical comms that's stale after five minutes.

So... you want them to become men? "How was your day honey?" / "(grunt)".

The problem with landing a reactor before demonstrating a capability to land humans is that the reactor could, depending on the design, well have reached the end of its service life by the time the humans are finally landed.

Alternatively, they should fit it with type I power outlets so at least the taikonauts can use it when they get there.

In other news, a billion flies ate shit in the last 3 months.

That was my reaction too. If they'd said "here is a problem, solve it" then it would have been relatively easy. Instead they threw in a huge pile of constraints dictated by how the person who wrote the question would have solved it, which makes it a lot tougher to figure out. The first paragraph should have been the entire question, not the following four pages.

That's not surprising at the moment, once they've had a chance to drive anything recent with all of the automation available. When you can just let the car do most of the work for things like bumper-to-bumper traffic, motorway driving, etc, it's hard to go back to the endless manual slog of older cars. Presumably at some point things will plateau, if they haven't already, and people will be happy hanging onto ten-year-old vehicles again because there's no big incentive to upgrade, but ATM there is a big incentive to get all the automation and get it working for you.

I'm holding off any purchasing decision until the conversation is "oh yeah Alexa... keep doing that... yeah, swallow it all...". And I'd never call her "bitch", I respect her too much for that.

It really depends on the car. Friend of mine drives a BYD and has never had problems like the ones in TFA, presumably because the manufacturers see their current customers as future repeat customers, not cash cows.

Friend of mine used to drive Alfa's, right until the time he heard the announcement "would the owner of XXXX please identify yourself to staff, your car is on fire". It was parked outside at the time and had been for several hours, switched off, everything cooled down.

We see you are driving with Firmware 4.02c, Friend Citizen, but this is a Firmware 4.03 Highway. Please report to your nearest termination center immediately. Thank you for your co-operation.

Was going to say the same thing about JL, as long as you stick to the defaults for everything they really can't be beat. It's when some plonker insists on you going via some special-snowflake path where you now need to spend a week of round-trips making sure it's snowflaked right that things get slow, and cost a lot more. "Well if it's like that we could just get it made locally" - no, "we" shouldn't insist on a special-snowflake variant when a bit of rework will make it fit nicely into JL's standard production flow.

OK, rant over.

The same sort of nutjob people who'd then go on to name it Thaddeus.

Could well be a bit of both. Or, given that Trump's understanding of economics is, from the words of numerous people who have worked with him, only slightly better than that of my cat, it could be whatever random brain fart he had this morning, a throwaway comment on Fox that he's turned into US national policy by lunchtime.

Interesting to see that Europe is adopting "Irren soll man ihren Willen lassen", something like "play along with/don't try and contradict, the obviously crazy person", as its mechanism for dealing with Trump. Pretend fo give him what he wants, let him brag to his fans about what a great deal-maker he is, and move on.

During the first Trump presidency someone wrote an article that had a checklist on how to negotiate with Trump, unfortunately I can't find it any more but it involved steps like convincing him that it was his idea in the first place, pretending to back off in the face of his brilliant negotiation skills to exactly the position you want, and then allowing him to claim victory. Leaders like Kim Jong Un understood that this was how you get him to do whatever you want from the get-go, looks like Europe is finally going that way as well.