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Comment Re:Worthless fucking statistic. (Score 3, Informative) 38

I doubt that seriously. The big Iberian Peninsula outage already mentioned happened because a "reliable" power source was not decoupling correctly from the grid. France right now runs into electricity problems because its "reliable" nuclear reactors have to be shut down because of excessive heat making the cooling of the reactors problematic.

Your "reliable" power sources are not reliable, they are inert. This is not the same, and if conditions change quickly, or aren't within specifications, they fail in a big way.

Comment Re:F-Droid (Score 1) 23

Google is requiring *all* apps, regardless of how you install them, or from what app store you install them, to be signed *by them*. This means that every app available on F-Droid must be signed (and developer dues paid) also or it won't be installable

Yep. And this just means that F-Droid has to have one person sign up and submit all of the apps for signature, as I said.

Comment Re:People want biased news. (Score 2) 59

I'm not interested in Trump's gaffes, There's more important things this administration is doing the media - all of it - needs to cover. And do so objectively - but not in a bipartisan way, which isn't the same thing at all.

Most people under 50 don't pay much attention to the news. People such as yourself are the minority. The majority are primarily entertainment consumers. Fact consumers such as you are a small sample of voters, like it or not. The challenge is motivating and messaging the indifferent majority without alienating the fact-driven and motivated minority...because democracy is a game of getting the most total votes.

Comment Re:Broadcast TV is dying (Score 1) 59

What I'd really fear is the FCC controlling news organizations and video on the Internet, but without an act of congress this seems unlikely. Of course, I wouldn't put it past them to try.

If they can get this done you can be sure they'll try to invent ways to prevent "unfriendly" news providers from being on the Internet. Most Internet providers are small and lack sufficient money, legal representation and political influence. It would actually be pretty easy for the government to convince their Internet service providers to deny their access and get their domains removed from DNS. If Russia and China can do it, so can the U.S.

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 149

Yeah, there's two main problems:

1) People entering the wrong fields. For example, medicine really needs workers, at all levels, but not enough people are going into it.

2) Certain manual labour fields, like field work and home construction, because... well, I think we all know why there's a shortage of workers in those fields.

Comment Re:F-Droid (Score 3, Informative) 23

Nope. Google is still set to kill F-Droid later this year when they turn on mandatory developer certificates which will require developers to pay Google and hand over their personal information, regardless of what app store they want to distribute through.

Nonsense. There's no reason to expect that mandatory developer certificates will kill F-Droid, at all. F-Droid will need one guy to pay the $25 fee and identify himself. Unless they can use the open source developer exception that Google has talked about (but hasn't announced any details, AFAIK).

This will essentially kill F-Droid for casual users (their main target is almost certainly NewPipe). Yes you can still use F-Droid but you'll have to do a 24 hour delay before you can install F-Droid.

That's a bigger issue, because Google's announced policy is to require that apps respect intellectual property, which would include not distributing apps that blatantly violate terms of service. Most likely F-Droid will have to stop distributing NewPipe if they want to be in Google Play. If dropping NewPipe is enough to kill F-Droid, then I guess that'll do it.

Comment Re:Well, we've been through this before (Score 1) 235

And, as usual, everyone in the North will roll their eyes at all the whiny babies in the rest of the country.

Those in the north will complain because the portion of the winter they go to work in darkness will increase, and it will be darker. Those in the center will also complain louder because they'll start going to work/school in the dark.

Those in the south will be confused about why everyone else is complaining, but they'll lose.

Comment Re:An AMAZING number of flaws (Score 1) 62

Actually, producing shoddy code is precisely what Microsoft is know for.

It's really not. 20 years ago, yes, but they've grown up and wised up. I know lots of excellent engineers at Microsoft, and I know they do good work, and they report that their colleagues do, too.

And note that I'm no MS fanboy. I hated them with a purple passion in the late 80s and early 90s, and swore off Windows entirely in 2001. I did finally break down and buy a Windows laptop a couple of years ago because I bought a CNC milling machine and the good software is Windows only, but that's the only thing I use it for.

Comment Re:DST is Dumb (Score 2) 235

Which might be true for the Southern U.S. states, true.

On the other hand, we tried this in the 1970ies already, and it was abolished immediately after the first winter, after traffic accidents during morning rush hour had risen sharply, and school children had to wait for the school bus in the coldest time of the day (and the school bus took longer because of all the icy roads anyway).

Comment Re: They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 4, Interesting) 235

Permanent standard time is ideal for human health and balance of daylight throughout the day.

That is not true. Left without clocks, humans in median latitudes tend to sleep longer in winter than in the summer. A standard schedule throughout the year is not healthy, except you live close to the equator, where the day length does not vary much during the year.

Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 1) 235

It's not only that. It's more that then, the very short daylight is concentrated in the evening, because you get up an hour early, during the coldest period of the whole day, and then you are wasting the daylight in the afternoon, when it is too cold anyway to have any outdoor activities which could profiteer from the light.

Comment Re:DST is Dumb (Score 2, Interesting) 235

Not having DST, especially in regions away from the equator, is also dumb. You have to deal with the fact, that the Sun rises in the summer much early than in the winter, and getting up in total darkness and not having any daylight until late in the workday like DST in the winter is as annoying as trying to go to bed when it's still bright outside.

So either you abolish a strict day schedule and adopt during the year, which is not only two switch days a year, but multiple times, or you have some kind of switch between Summer time and Winter time.

Comment Re:They should do the same in The Netherlands (Score 5, Insightful) 235

If the Netherlands did this, they would reverse it immediately after the first winter. Not getting any sunlight until past 10.00 AM is so annoying, and the cost of road maintenance because rush hours is when everywhere, there is still ice on the roads, will be prohibitive.

People complaining have simply no clue how it is to have DST in the winter, and can't imagine.

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