I stand corrected - I meant not "a scientific field of endeavor", but "science". Thank you.

That's one of the ways I know that I'm not a scientist - fortunately, I don't need to be.

I'm much closer to being an engineer, and many people mistakenly believe that (and medicine) is a scientific field of endeavor, much to the impoverishment of science.

In my daily life and work I'm not overly concerned with correctness in any absolute sense - but I try to respect the work of those whose vocation is to work towards that ideal.

Evidence is more than merely important - but evidence is along way short of enough.

Without consensus and evaluation by your peers, science would be nothing more than a horde of youtube videos of people promoting their competing ideologies based on evidence that no-one has ever critically evaluated.

Actually, The Character of Physical Law is one of my all-time favourites.

But without consensus, science can't advance - continental drift was a fringe theory, for all practical purposes outside of mainstream science, until people in the field were persuaded to give it a hearing; as outsiders ourrselves, we rely on insiders to evaluate and endorse new findings and theories, because we're generally not competent to do so ourselves.

Just because something is known to be wrong, doesn't mean it isn't useful.

We build our houses and towns using tools and principles that ignore the curvature of the earth (and, indeed, of space itself), because they are practical and fit for purpose - but that doesn't make them "right" in any absolute sense.

That's not how science works - it's not some kind of winner-take-all cagefight amongst competing theories.

No matter how much evidence supports a theory, to disprove it it's only necessary to provide evidence that invalidates it; how and when that happens is - up to a point - a matter of scientific consensus, which certainly hasn't happened here yet, but that's the acid test.

Yes and no; this is capturing photons radiated by the source, and that radiation is (locally) a form of passive cooling, with or without this engine; it's just a question of what happens to the energy those photons represent - absorbed as heat by the general surrounds (local or more remote), or some being 40%-converted to electricity by the engine (the other 60% ending up likely heating the engine itself, if not directly re-radiated as lower-energy photons).

Short answer - no.

This scheme is designed to work with a source at 1900-2400C; that's practical in a purpose-built solar thermal plant, say, but if your radioactive waste gets that hot the neighbours will definitely complain.

The article says Polkit 0.113 and later are vulnerable, so my stock Debian systems (0.109) are fine.

Also, the subject line says 7 years - a bit misleading, as 0.113 from github) appears to be only 5 years old, and RHEL 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 (the only affected distributions the precis actually names) are much newer than that (2019 and 2020, respectively).

Perhaps you missed the text of the story, but WA is Western Australia - not Washington State. In Australia, local government plays little part in elections - each state has its own electoral commission, and there's a national commission (AEC) for federal matters. They are separately funded independent public service organisations that do all government elections, including maintaining voter rolls, manning polling stations and drawing electoral boundaries, and elections is all they do.

Another difference is that registration and voting is compulsory at Australian state & federal elections - so electoral fraud is both rare and difficult, because electoral rolls are well-audited and voting in someone else's name is hard to cover up when they will almost certainly cast a vote in their own name also.

Of course, Voltaire was an essayist and satirist whose focus was the Catholic church and other public institutions of the day, and not primarily a publisher - so however eloquent and defensible his position may sound to us today, remember that he spent a fair bit of his time trying to keep his work in print, while staying out of jail; so his tone shouldn't come as any great surprise.

No; you called it "virtue signalling", which you described as "One of the most stupid acts human beings are capable of".

When I type "bigot" into the Google search bar, I get "a person who is intolerant towards those holding different opinions"; and you don't have to look very far - certainly, not beyond the responses on this page - to see plenty of those.

Sigmund Freud (probably never) said "sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar", but even plain old cigars aren't what they used to be - and you're unlikely to see many in a family-friendly timeslot nowadays.

Thanks for caring,

Hey - if it annoys just one bigot, it's worth it.

Mostly correct, but it's not clear that receivers are "pre-paired" with the devices they are sold with. My assumption was always that the devices are sold "blank", and firmware tells them to automatically pair with the first device that asks; "combo" devices may get slightly different firmware (s/first/first and second/), but it seems simpler, cheaper and more reliable than programming IDs into each one, then making sure they get packed together.

I live in South Australia and buy power from the grid, and I think I would have noticed if this were true as presented here.

The referenced article appears to refer to wholesale spot prices - the electricity market in Australia is, through an artificial market created in the wake of privatization, structured as wholesale provider (usually, generators) selling to retail entities, that then sell power to end users. Consumers sign up for an "agreed tariff" contract arrangement with a pricing structure at least as opaque as any mobile phone regime, and retailers buy off the wholesalers at spot prices that vary more or less minute by minute, depending on demand. Those wholesale prices do routinely spike and crash over the course of a day - especially during summer - as factories start up and shut down, people turn their air conditioners on and off, and so on. It doesn't help that power is distributed across different timezones - SA users routinely use power generated in Victoria, and vice versa, which itself creates artificially high peaks and troughs.

It also doesn't help that politics gets involved - most providers see the writing on the wall and are trying to transition away from coal-based generation, but with a major coal industry to support they've seen significant push-back from government, which last year proposed putting out to tender the construction of new coal-based generation, because private industry wasn't willing to undertake it in a free market.