You know that it's not true! They're extremely understaffed in their legal department, they don't have enough lawyers to sue their customers for license violations.

That's probably a dramatic underestimate.I would have guessed more like 92%

The restrictions are a mix of reasonable nuisance management and paranoia about who is flying drones, what they can do, and chain of custody.

Beijing proper is a city with a population density of over 21,000 / km^2 -- so you can imagine the chaos if any tech enthusiast resident could fly a drone without a permit. Except for a couple of free zones in the outer boroughs, New York City restricts drone launcing and landings within the city to flights with a permit and flight plan, because otherwise the sky would be black with drones. Many cities -- both red and blue -- have zone restrictions for drone flights, and those currently hosting World Cup matches have tightened them for the duration of the tournament.

??? This is pretty common terminology. Enhancers ("performance enhancing drugs") are designed to _enhance_ something above the baseline, not just to merely correct a pathology.

If you don't know this, perhaps you should go back and do some more study?

Sigh. Can you cut out the "prescribed drugs are bad because they must be bad" bullshit?

ADHD stimulants absolutely do not work as _enhancers_, as your article explains. But they are not used as enhancers, they are used as medicine to fix problems. As another example: vitamin C does pretty much nothing normally, but if you have scurvy, it's life-saving. Here's an important quote from your article:

Which basically says: "ADHD drugs are not needed if you can fix all the symptoms of ADHD without drugs". Well, duh.

That's why everything running in the cloud runs in containers on a cluster (Kubernetes or similar). If a physical server dies, the cluster control software just drops that server from the cluster. Load management then automatically moves the containers to the remaining servers in the pool. When enough servers are dead they send a tech and a truckload of replacements out. Same for storage: everything's on RAID arrays and as physical SSDs die the array drops that drive and keeps on going with no data loss. Once enough drives in the bay are dead they send someone to swap them out and the RAID controller takes care of initializing them and restoring data from the existing drives as required. It's not uncommon for 30% of the capacity to be out-of-service before replacements are ordered.

They still have to catch up to IBM's old mainframes though. Those you could go in during peak business hours and start pulling and replacing CPUs and memory modules and I/O controllers while everything was live and not disrupt anything.

The language part, true. The problem is dependencies. Any time you upgrade, especially if you're jumping a large number of versions, you're going to have packages your code uses needing upgrades too. Those package upgrades will usually require code changes to accommodate. Some of those changes will require refactoring to handle structural changes needed for things to work right. That is usually where you end up down a rabbit-hole.

I'd prioritize updating Java 8 applications to Java 11 first. Those are going to be the hardest to bring up-to-date with Java 25 (latest LTS), bringing them up to Java 11 buys the most time. Then upgrade to Java 25 starting with Java 17 applications, then Java 21, then Java 11.

Remember that Java 25 will end support in 2033, so plan on starting your upgrade from Java 25 to the next LTS version basically as soon as your last upgrades to Java 25 are done.

Yes. The construction jobs are very short-term, and once built the data centers bring huge costs (financial and otherwise) while contributing only a handful of permanent jobs. Remember, these are lights-out hands-off facilities. They'll employ a handful of security guards and maintenance workers, the rest will all be handled remotely from Malaysia or the like.

True up to a point, and governments are past that point. They can in fact tell companies what formats the government will accept and generate and companies can't afford to just ignore that. And that's actually the first step towards sovereignty: dictate formats that aren't controlled by hostile entities. So, start by declaring the ODF formats the official government standard formats. You'll accept documents in other formats, but you can't guarantee they'll be correctly rendered on your end and you won't put any effort into trying to clean up Word and other non-standard format documents. If they're bad or unreadable or whatever, they'll be rejected and it's on the sender to fix the problem. When you send documents you'll only send them in ODF format, no others, and it's on the receiver to be able to read them.

Internally you standardize on something like LibreOffice that natively handles ODF formats. Anyone else can use anything they want as long as it can handle ODF. Word, BTW, actually does a decent job of handling ODF. Inertia may be a thing, but remember that governments have a lot more mass behind them than private companies. If the government insists and won't budge, any company that needs to do business with the government will slowly come around.

At 1500kW it won't be spending _extended_ periods of time charging. If you want to charge a battery for 75kWh, then 5% of that is just around 4kWh.

Assuming the thermal mass of the battery 300kg, and specific heat capacity of 2000J per 1 kg per 1 C, that's a delta of 24C. So just simply using the battery's thermal mass completely passively without any cooling is probably going to work.

Modern batteries are about 95% efficient at charging. So at 1500kW you're looking at dissipating about 75kW (100hp).

A 100hp gasoline engine needs to dissipate around 250hp of heat energy. In other words, cooling an EV is completely trivial compared to cooling an ICE car.

So now NHS has nearly half a million headaches. I'm not sure this is an improvement.

I know it's really trivial, bordering on petty, but please oh please give her a different accent. She says "okay" so much, and the Valleygirl accent is never heard so pronounced as obviously as in that word that I really want any other accent. Mid Atlantic, Southern, Cascadian, Midwest, Irish, please anything other than Valleygirl.

Pretty much all stations now accept credit cards. I think you can pay physical cash on some chargers that are attached to actual gas stations.