Ad free is 2.99 per month. As long as there is an ad-free tier and it is not too terribly expensive, I don't really care if Amazon uses ads on their "Included with Prime" tier. When I first subscribed to Amazon Prime they didn't even have a streaming business. So I still kind of feel like the Included With Prime streaming is "free" in some sense.

What irritates me is Freevee. Last time I checked, even though Freevee is an Amazon streaming service, there is no way to use it ad free. So far I have not watched anything on Freevee for that reason.

Do you draw any distinction between bitcoin and other crypto?

In California, if you have PG&E, in the summer, from 4pm to 9pm, energy is (depending on rate plan) around 60 cents per kwh. So I recommend that you turn off your AC by 4pm unless your own home solar or batteries can cover it.

I live in California. On our rate plan (the only one available for those who have solar) the peak rate in the summer, in effect from 4pm to 9pm, is 61 cents per kWh. The lowest rate is 35 cents per kWh for winter off-peak.

Reply and let me know what the peak rate is where you live so we can compare.

My house has solar and are looking into batteries so we can avoid using utility power from 4-9pm. Until recently we had net metering which was great. But I guess that agreement expired and now net metering is not available to us.

You are right except, since the tax credit is still available through this calendar year, you can be sure there will be a flurry of activity between now and end of year. This should be a banner year for solar suppliers (which includes not just the panels, but the racks, batteries, inverters, optimizers, etc., etc).

These are not image forming. The contacts just emit visible light when they are subjected to IR.

Subjects were able to perceive the direction of an IR light source while wearing the contacts. Which I figured must be the case. They would have to get the light to form a focused image on the retina for it to be an image forming system. Considering that the nanoparticles are getting lit up and are re-radiating in random directions, there is no way it would form an image.

The problem is that google search now sucks. I guess that is probably specifically because they have become a search monopoly, so that just cram more and more commercial material into the results.

Either that or they are simply losing the battle against search engine optimizes.

SEO is the new spam. Who cares what the user types into the search box. Let's just make sure our results pop up prominently.

Duck Duck Go search also sucks for the same reasons.

I live on 20 acres. I used to wonder where the honey bees came from that I see all over my lavender. Then one day I found out that my neighbor was letting a friend keep a bunch of hives on his property. The bees are about half a mile or something (call it a km if you are metric) away from my house, but it is up a steep hill, and forested, so not obvious at all. But I also have tons of bumble bees and I am sure that my flowers would all bloom even if I didn't have honey bees doing the heavy lifting.

This article may or may not say anything about ecologoical collapse. I didn't read the article. (Who has time for that?). But I have seen COUNTLESS articles in the past which state outright or imply that colony collapse is an ecological nightmare that will lead to ecosystem failure. Also, not all crops need bees for pollination. So it will be bad for the food supply but not quite a collapse. Corn and soy don't need bees. As two examples of crops that provide a shit-ton of calories to the world, either directly or indirectly by way of animal feed.

The European honeybee is not native to north America.

The honeybees used in modern commercial agriculture are actually migrant farm workers. Companies specialize in supplying pollination services and truck the bees all around to different farms to assist with pollination as needed by the farmers.

The collapse of honey bee colonies, by itself, does not represent an ecosystem collapse. It is more of a crisis for commercial agriculture (which is still a very important thing). But the factors thought to be contributing to this collapse are also mostly commercial agriculture practices. This seems to be a problem for commercial agriculture caused by commercial agriculture.

There are plenty of other native pollinators for native plants. They just aren't as efficient at pollinating commercial crops as the European honeybee is. Also, many of the native pollinators are also in jeopardy because of lack of habitat.

Of course this is a terrible look for Musk and Starlink. The optics are abysmal.

But Starlink should get the subsidy.

The usual suspects, some of the most hated companies in America, have been harvesting "rural broadband" subsidies for years and gerrymandering things around to make it look like they were delivering when in reality they weren't.

I happen to live in a low density, hilly rural area and we will NEVER have fiber. The cost could never be justified unless every property paid 10s of thousands of dollars upfront to install it and maybe 1000 a month to keep it.

Starlink has been a lifesaver. Before that we had internet from a local WISP using a three hop Ubiquiti setup that went from the WISP tower to a redwood tree, to another redwood tree, then to our house. Before that, we had a T1 line for 500 dollars per month. Excellent SLA on the T1, but it is still only 1.5 MBits up and down. 1.5 Mbits min and 1.5 Mbits max. Come hell or high water.

Starlink is delivering actual rural broadband. The other companies were cherry-picking a few customers in each "section" to make it look like they were delivering.

You have a 5 digit user number. Doesn't any of that sound familiar?

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers?

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered BSD community when IDC confirmed that BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for BSD because BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for BSD. As many of us are already aware, BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. [etc]

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Also, we will need some confirmation from netcraft before it can be considered official.

We're going to put bigfoot on the flag. Right next to the grizzly bear. Co-apex predators.

Sometimes it is about who is loudest. Not who is first or who is right. We will be the loudest.

'Sqatch have been sighted in many places, not just California. But we are going to be the first to make them the state cryptid. Beat everyone else to the punch. California out-innovating the world as usual.