"Dirty" can come in many forms. Saw a documentary on them not too long ago.
* Noise of generators and cooling systems, the DC being built too close to existing homes, more of a zoning council fail but it happens as DC money can make the council turn a blind eye to the local residents desires.
* Vibration, lots of big engines and such can create vibrations that travel thru the ground (or very low frequency) that can disturb sleep and such even if it doesn't measure on the sound meter.
* Diesel exhaust if that's used for generators.
* Water supplies can be consumed (& denied to locals) or even "contaminated" (like being warmed too much for the local wildlife), or aquifers can be drained faster than they can replenish.
* Electricity as this article is about
* Dropping local property values of existing homes
* Taxation issues because cities want to bring the DC in and give tax abatements, but there are still local services required so the extra costs get passed on to others

They don't really bring all that many jobs, but city leadership trying to "diversify" seem want to bring them in. My personal opinion is to put them at least 5 miles from anything else, they can all build together, do their own power plant just for them, and figure out how to do water as long as they don't draw from an aquifer (maybe build their own lake or draw from the ocean).

Since he can clearly identify them, just redirect the request to Facebook dot com and let Meta eat itself.

The IEA has good data for what's happened (history). They are notoriously bad when it comes to predictions, i.e. looking back at past predictions shows them to be wrong almost every time. So I'm not believing this one either. What happens, happens. The IEA can tell you really did happen after the fact.

When desalination plants are built, I hear about the worry of the left over "brine" being too salty so they have to be careful about putting it back into the ocean. In this case, you pull out water a little easier, it would actually help to put saltier water back, so it sounds like a win-win to me. Yeah, the current is huge, so do lots of desalination plants for the volume and ship the water somewhere useful. ... All in theory, YMMV, asterisks apply, etc.

I've got a 7" Lenovo and a 10" Lenovo (really the wife's), I'd have to go find the models but they were bought probably in '21 or '22. Both are decent and get the job done. I think I tried to go too cheap and the CPU is barely adequate, so be willing to spend an extra $50 or $100 to get a good CPU. Even with the only adequate CPU, I can still player tower games just fine, watch YT videos, and browse IMDB and such without any problems ... that's on the 7" one (I actually use it for reading on more than anything). The 10" one has been fine whenever I've grabbed it to use it. [FYI, if you turn off Wifi except when you're using the internet a charge can last a week or two -- really.]

So first question for you (original questioner) to answer is what size screen do you need? You might want to try to find a used one for cheap to try. They all have their pluses and minuses. The only real downside I've found on the Android tablets is that I have to buy them on Amazon and buy based on specs (as in I can't play with it before buying); with an iPad, you could at least go try one out at an Apple store (or so I'd think, but I don't really know as I don't have any Apple products).

I've got a couple of Android tablets. I've never found a case hard to find. I can't say about accessories because I've never needed any. The only thing I could imagine would be a keyboard, but there are BT versions of those that should work with any tablet.

+1 Where are my mod-points when I need them. :)

If the manufacturer wants to be the only one who can repair the equipment, then one of their representatives needs to be *immediately available* to repair. They can ship out with the fleet, regiment, or whatever ... and I'd advise them to make sure their life insurance is up to date because you just never know what might happen. Don't like it? The forkn over the manuals and the parts to the military.

Occasionally I do. However, more often than not I go to a used book store to save a few bucks. Authors nor publishers benefit from that, but it doesn't bother me as I give a book a good home. :)

I'm going to disagree. Remember, we're talking about H2, the smallest molecule, which has a lot of trouble being contained and also tends to make metals weak and brittle (or hydrogen embrittlement). An H2 tank failure is not a good thing. :)

OTOH, batteries aren't all that hard to make and they can build a new Tesla Megapack in an hour or so. (Of course, there is a wait list, but getting the right number of packs is an exercise in up-front planning.) Last I heard, a Megapack3 is about $1.4M to hold ~5MWh. I don't know what it would cost to create an H2 storage tank to contain that much energy, but again, it'd have to be a very special tank (because H2) and I doubt those come cheap (especially if the H2 comes in liquefied form as now it comes under high pressure). Personally, I'm really looking forward to Sodium-Ion batteries that are supposed to hit mass market scale in the next year or two (they're already out in small quantities), as that should cut the battery part price in half, although some say it'll be even cheaper than that.

Here's some efficiency numbers...

If you start with & stay with electricity, after transportation/distribution, you end up with ~94% of your original energy starting amount at the site for usage.
If you start with electricity then change to H2, after electrolysis + transportation/distribution, you end up with ~68% of your original starting energy at the site for usage.

Hmm, which is more, 94% or 68%? :) It is never better to go from electricity to H2 for energy unless you have an absurdly special use case (aviation is the only niche I can think of where it *might* make sense if you squint just right). The research has been done (from article "Why Battery Electric Vehicles Beat Hydrogen Electric Vehicles Without Breaking A Sweat" where they used to have an amazingly useful chart to show the numbers which is now gone and only findable on the Wayback Machine). As long as they're going to burn the H2, I can stop there.

However for those who say "use a fuel cell" for the H2 to make electricity, the chart goes on to show the overall efficiency for electric only (or solar->electricity->battery->electricty) to end up at 77%. Meanwhile, the fuel cell route causes the overall efficiency to end up at a frightening 33% of original energy left. That further reinforces the idea that if you start with electricity, just stay there.

+10

I don't care for sports all that much either and if ESPN died tomorrow I wouldn't shed a tear (in fact I'd probably rejoice). My 1 weakness is the olympics though. :) I loved Netflix DVD rental too and am sad that's gone. So I'm left with Tivo to record the few shows I care about for as long as it works. When that goes, I don't know, maybe I'll just stop watching TV. I've got a huge pile of DVD movies sitting on a Jellyfin server to keep me busy and I regularly visit a used DVD store to pick up new content for cheap. If all else fails, I have a huge stack of books I haven't read since I was much younger ... maybe I'll go back to them for entertainment.

Definitely FF. I believe I've seen it more often on sites that want to auto-update the page every so often. Usually it's the active tab, but not always. Last time it happened to me, IIRC I had a few Youtube tabs open, listening to each one before closing. Suddenly, the video stops about 5min in, controls within the tab were non-responsive, "xosview" showed a core pegged at 100% with others flickering too, "top" showed an an "Isolated Web Co" process taking like 200%. I killed FF, eventually my system returned to normal. Started it back up and restarted the video and FF ran for another week just fine. So YT does it, I've had news sites do it too. I really should file a bug but one probably already exists. :)

The vast majority of the time, you're correct. However, from time to time I have [a Linux] desktop FF just go crazy where a tab suddenly starts to eat RAM, taking multiple GB and just holding a core hostage at 100% usage. If I'm lucky, I can figure out which tab it is and close it ... FF usually lets me do that but not always. Sometimes the only recovery is to tell the window manager to shutdown FF, where the GUI will go down quickly but "top" will show the sandbox engines running for another 30s or so before they finally die and memory & cores are released. FF [still] definitely has a bug or two in memory management. The really annoying part is that I can restart FF and reload the tabs and it's all good, so my guess is a memory leak is triggered after FF runs for a few days.

I agree, if it doesn't have a community, just stop working on it; assign the few workers left to other projects. There are other DE for Ubuntu that work well, like KDE, or XFCE.

Yeah, I feel that pain. I just upgraded to Ubuntu 24.04 and sound was changed to Pipewire and broke ... I moved it back to Pulseaudio and it worked again. I've had trouble making the Nvidia proprietary drivers work with 24, unlike how they worked with 22.04 just fine. (When I get time soon I'll try again.) There are other things that work and then break on an upgrade; it's really annoying.

However, I do get more control over Linux if I want it, so the upside is very large (for me). When the wife's Win7 machine died, I told her (as the family IT guy) it was time to move to Linux. She mostly uses Firefox & Thunderbird (and did on Windows too), Libreoffice, and Okular (not that she knows the name but that's what shows her PDF's). I threw a Jellyfin client on there too. It works as well as Win7 did for her and I can admin and back it up far easier now. Then again, most of her online life is spent on her Android phone or tablet and she doesn't use a computer too much any more.

Whether I recommend a Linux desktop to someone only comes after a conversation about how they use their computer and what they expect out of it. For example, I did NOT recommend my mom change [even if I'm willing to support her install] because she has need for her HP combo scanner/printer and there is a lack of a driver to make that thing work like she expects.