It's established interests, as usual. Oil producers, automotive manufacturers who invested heavily in combustion engines, gas producers, fossil fuel electricity plants, nuclear plants.

Battery electric vehicles and grid scale battery storage all harm their businesses, and boost their rivals.

I'm guessing they don't just create demand by building their own grid scale batteries because the grid operators, who also happen to be the fossil/nuclear operators, have some excuse as to why they can't add storage right now. Ironically Communist China has a more free market, allowing massive amounts of battery storage to be connected, while Capitalist America seems to have a captured market.

What do you mean? People love AI slop!

On the other hand, how long can you reasonably expect companies to keep supporting old hardware?

Serious question, how long is acceptable? Does it depend on the price of the product? If it's a 3000 Euro scanner is it reasonable to expect the user to keep an old Windows XP machine around to operate it, as many companies do for old gear?

I'd say a minimum of 10 years, which tends to be what Windows offers (10 years for each OS version, and usually at least one version of forwards compatibility from hardware vendors). I'd love it to be more than that, but realistically I don't expect that webcam I bought in 2006 to still work on the latest OS.

It's not just Windows either. I have an original Raspberry Pi, and it's not very useful. 32 bit only, and a lot of software doesn't support it or is too bloated to run well now. On the other hand I have a PD drive from 1996 that works perfectly with a USB to SCSI adapter from 2003, under Windows 11.

Is nobody archiving every driver that Microsoft publishes?

They are probably on the Internet Archive somewhere, impossible to find due to their terrible search engine and resistance to Google indexing.

The main use for cameras is catching anti-social behaviour, like people hitting your car and then driving off, or kids vandalizing stuff in your garden.

It's wireless alarms that are really stupid. You have a wireless window alarm, but the alarm panel that is hard wired to the internet and which could alert you just ignores the fact that all the sensors went offline at the same time. The software seems to have been written in the 90s and never improved.

Not sure they are being entirely honest with those labels though. For example, they state that the iPhone is IP68 rated, but in reality it's full of moisture sensors that void your warranty. IP68 means it can survive submersion in 1m of water for at least 30 minutes, and water jets pointed at it. If that's true then the warranty should cover failures.

It scores quite poorly on general repairability and battery replacement, as well as on software updates for some reason. They guarantee 5 years of support, but list it as 1.0 out of 5 for software, probably because it's so locked down.

Europe is an aerospace power, with Airbus being the world's leading company of aircraft that don't kill the occupants. The ESA is decently successful, and has pulled off projects like Galileo, and some interesting space science and exploration missions.

Europe also invented the World Wide Web. CERN is one of the world's leading research institutions.

Militarily, both France and the UK are nuclear armed, and the UK, Germany, and France export a lot of weapons.

If that were true then the state would be systematically killing off pensioners, not being extremely generous to them.

We should be funding multiple moon-shots to try to deal with this. Apollo-like efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at scale, or find some other way to limit warming.

And for reference China alone installed 324GW of solar in 2024, so up to 300GW by 2030 is not nothing, but unless it's very cheap it probably isn't the first place you would look to put solar panels.

Note that the GP said "unnecessary" data. As per GDPR, there is a legal requirement to minimize data collection to only what is necessary, and the more you collect the greater the liability when it gets stolen.

I do think there needs to be a multiplier, which can be as low as zero, based on what security precautions were taken to protect the data. For example, if you just installed AV software and a firewall and called it a day, or outsourced your security to someone else who turned out to be incompetent, the pay-out should be a lot larger. If IT staff warned you that security was inadequate, expect pain.

Yes we do. Renewables and storage work well, they are proven technologies. This year the UK is going to try to run on purely renewable electricity for short periods, not to prove it can be done because we know it can, it's been demonstrated, but to check what upgrades to the local grid are needed.

We know they can scale, because we are scaling them, and because China dwarfs the rest of the world combined for installed capacity. Last year they installed more solar in the first 9 months than the US has in its entire history, and the stats for wind and battery storage are equally staggering.

That could have been us, we could have been mass producing that stuff and exporting it like crazy, but as usual we were too slow and now almost everyone just buys it from China. We complain about the cost and then fail to exploit the massive opportunities.

It's lock in. If you want a decent multi-tasking tablet, get an Android one. There are many to choose from, with equal of better hardware than an iPad.

People get locked into the Apple ecosystem, so their only choice is an iPad and further lock-in, or trying hard to break out of it.

It's something of a tradition to do real stunts in Hong Kong and Chinese movies, even though they have access to cutting edge CGI. Back in the 70s and 80s it was the only option, but it ended up giving them an edge that helped the movies do well in the face of competition from overseas, and in overseas markets.

It probably hinges more on if they keep the direction and editing style of those classics, or switch to a Hollywood style ones. The way fights are portrayed in those classic movies allows the viewer to follow the story and see every hit clearly, none of this wobbly hand-cam fast cut rubbish that is trying to mask the poor quality of the choreography. A typical Jackie Chan fight starts with him losing and then managing to turn it around with clever moves and stunts, and the camera work is essential to portraying that.

I'd never buy a home appliance that can't be fully operated with an app. That app will eventually go away, or not get updated and stop working on my device.