It's because in both of those worlds, the US was effectively destroyed. In Nineteen Eighty-Four it was part of the same nation as the UK (Oceana) and in V for Vendetta, it was destroyed by infighting. The UK is presumed stable enough to survive cataclysmic events. The US is presently demonstrating it really isn't and is far more Orwellian than the UK's worst nightmare. I can still criticise the UK leader, Kier Starmer (yes I can, Joe Rogan was talking complete bollocks as per usual), hows that working with you being able to critisise Trump or Charlie Kirk (even daring to repeat what Kirk actually said).

In fact the only UK politico who is likely to come after you for criticising him is the Far-right fascist frog-faced fucktard Nigel Farage... Odd that but as he's never going to get anywhere near power I can still tell Frog Face to Fuck Right Off.

What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.

Artemis, about a woman living on the moon. I read it too, it was pretty good.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Solar panels on deserts are regreening them so they are cooling not heating. The data is out there if you could be bothered to look for it instead of guessing

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

"there is no evidence whatsoever of doxxing, death-threats or swatting," why would he put it out there if there wasn't any? Can't see the point of making the claim if it didn't happen.

Just wait until you see Steam Machine pricing.

Anyway, Sony can jog on. They raised prices in Europe when Trump brought tariffs in on Americans.

Windows has been pretty damned stable since Windows 7 was released, that's 2009 for anyone not paying attention. Microsoft changed it so that one bad driver can't crash the entire OS.

Seems Apple is going all out with the paid propaganda of late... Because there's no way they're cheaper. If anything keeping hardware for longer makes it more expensive as you have to deal with more hardware failures, extended warranties, outages, et al. I suspect Apple is using very, very funny maths.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

I suppose to be fair the UK isn't so much better. The police can make these requests themselves. They have an oversight group, but they rubber stamp everything it seems. Hundreds of thousands of requests per year.