Actually the former head of the National Grid said that. The guy running the UK's grid said that the concept of base load was obsolete, and he was right.

The UK has at least 20x as much wind power available than its current electricity consumption. Energy independence is entirely possible, if not particularly desirable.

The UK could be a massive exporter of clean energy. Scotland in particular could be getting rich off it, but like with the oil they aren't seeing as much of the benefit as they should be seeing.

I'm not really clear what it even does. You get an @thundermail.com address I think, probably blocked or assumed to be spam by many systems. Anything else?

The containment buildings didn't contain the meltdown, and the emergency cooling system that was supposed to let them use external pumps diverted the water into holding tanks instead of the cores. There were many screw-ups, and even now they are behind schedule with the decommissioning and clean up.

Chernobyl and Fukushima had the same root cause - too expensive. Chernobyl skimped on not bothering to build containment buildings or train people properly. Fukushima didn't build the necessary tsunami defences, despite being warned.

It's nuclear's Achilles' heel. Costs too much to be commercially viable, can't afford to be properly insured, and doesn't get the necessary level of investment once it's running.

I think there is some confusion here. They don't seem to have disabled it on older chips, only on new laptops, before sale, where AV1 is supported.

You're right about YouTube. I was thinking HEVC was one of their delivery formats, but apparently not.

Netflix definitely did use HEVC for delivery of some of its high-end content at one time. Whether they still do or not, I have no idea.

Either way, the fact that people are running into error messages suggests that there is some actual customer impact.

Netflix and YouTube both use AV1, which is royalty free.

Except that nobody who buys one of their machines is going to think, "I could pay an extra $100 and my machine would work better." They're going to think, "This piece of s**t can't even do things that my cell phone from eight years ago can do. Why did I buy this, and why should I ever buy anything from this manufacturer in the future?"

This level of penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior is a sure way to permanently lose customers.

...or decoding...

You mean like... anyone who wants to watch Netflix or YouTube or any other streaming service's high-res content?

Apparently it's around $4 per device. The margins are thin on their low end models, and they are greedy, so I guess $4 is too much for a feature that few people care about or will notice not being available. Anyone who wants to do H.265 encoding will probably be looking at the higher end models anyway.

The real blame here is on the patent holders. AV1 is the solution for everyone else.

It's worse, they recommend software for encoding as well.

It's because they have to pay licence fees for HEVC. Most streaming services use AV1 now, which is free and supported.

He clearly wasn't that good, or he wouldn't have been caught. These amateurs don't seem to understand that they way to do this is to make the system so complex and reliant on you doing certain undocumented actions, that if they fire you it will all collapse on its own. Then you can't be accused of causing damage, because you didn't, you just walked away as asked. It's not your fault that they didn't recognize how essential your services were, or pay you to do a proper rebuild and handover.

The rational response is to either not stalk users, or to have a small checkbox somewhere that lets them opt in to the privacy invasion.

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.