Dams are a normally a power supply rather than a battery. I was more thinking pumped storage hydro. Which is usually done where theres 2 lakes next to each other at very different heights, so you can “store” power by pumping water up and release by pumping back down.

Everyone can always call themselves whatever they want. But fear that people might use a kernel of truth to sell a lie isn’t a good reason to throw away even a tiny part of the truth.

I know, I just threw out one of the many contenders for grid power.

Iron water does look promising too.

Weirdly it’s not, except maybe gravity batteries where nice reservoirs happen to exist already. It should be but it’s not right now.

Li-ion has economy of scale right now. I do think molten metal etc will overtake eventually, but they’re currently playing catchup and li-ion has dropped in price so much over time that it’s surprisingly cheap even where it should make no sense.

Because democracy is not the best way to solve every problem.

The messy job of squeezing entire countries into a handful of words is fraught enough without throwing away up to half of the information.

As a more amusing answer: Dictatorships throw away 99.9% of the opinions, so should we let one arsehole decide which countries are called a dictatorship?

We can all agree on that, Clearly li-ion is a bad choice for static use cases.

But right now it’s the cheapest option, and it looks likely that will stay true for quite a while unfortunately.

Yes, great example. That would indeed be stretching the definition to breaking point. The fuzzy logic approach would be that you’ve described a 99% monarchy with 1% democracy.

Personally I’d put the US as a 60% democracy with a 40% oligopoly. The UK is similar since on the one hand we have more than 2 parties and are slightly better at avoiding gerrymandering and voter suppression, but on the other hand we have the silly rules for the House of Lords, and weaker freedom of speech (I don’t mind the theory of banning violent extremist speech, but I don’t like the application we’ve got at the moment, it prevents too much speech that isn’t unreasonable, free speech would be better).

Based on what you’ve said, I’m Sure you’d put it lower, but I don’t think you can justify putting 1% when it’s so easy to find worse countries even in the real world, that are still on the democracy spectrum.

Strongly disagree. Yes, all the problems you listed weaken a democracy. Some by a lot. But that’s “no true Scotsman” logic, and dangerous. Better to apply fuzzy logic than Boolean logic, countries are not perfect democracies or non democracies. They are on a sliding scale, and there’s not much point making a scale that is so idealistic that no existing country can get on the scale (or where only the best few can).

You can claim the US and UK are weak democracies, that’s justifiable if you define why (and you have, I see your point there). But calling them non democracies is just willfully twisting the meaning of words, in fact they’re unusually good democracies by some measures (both have unusually free and trustworthy elections compared to most in the world, and that has to be taken into account).

Or to put it another way, any scale needs space at the bottom.

Imagine an alternative USA where every single state was gerrymandered to hell by whoever won, where electors were routinely bribed by opposition parties to vote against their states results, where people were bullied at the polls or where minorities were entirely disenfranchised. That would be a worse place than our USA, but by your definition both would be the same. Clearly they are not the same, that one is a worse democracy. By my definition that hypothetical and awful democracy is still a democracy, just a very very bad one.

As a Brit, this all seems unhelpful. The only reason anyone cares how the US was “founded” hundreds of years ago is that they were a bit closer to having the right idea at the start than most countries. Doesn’t mean they did of course, but compare to how the UK was “founded”, or Greece, “the birthplace of democracy”, and suddenly it really doesn’t matter.

As for whether it is currently a democracy, a flawed democracy is still a democracy. Trumps a terrible choice but he did get a lot of votes by ordinary people, and whilst their system is skewed by being a shitty fptp setup (just like the UK sadly) and their crazy elector system, it is nonetheless fairly democratic, in the sense that most people can vote, they didn’t pressure or threaten voters much, they didn’t fake lots of votes, and the flaws can only influence and skew the result to some extent, rather than being the deciding factor. But it isn’t the best democracy in the world, we can all agree on that. I hope they manage to replace it in our lifetimes with something that would allow for more than 2 parties (UK too).

Disagree, XUL was a dead end that either needed shooting behind the bike shed or it’d have taken Mozilla down with it inevitably. It froze their internal architecture to a design that didn’t care about multicore or modern security. Switching to a proper extension api (it didn’t matter if it was chromes or their own, only that they are willing to make their own decisions, like in manifest v3).

That said, I suspect the real death blow was when they killed servo, that project was their distant salvation, a chance to genuinely outcompete technologically and direct where browsers need to go next. I too hope I’m wrong and they can figure out a path forward, but they’ve shown little ambition from the top, so I’m not holding my breath.

Edit: you could argue that the solution to XUL should have been an upgrade to modern design rather than death, but that would have just been an expensive temporary reprieve, the world doesn’t stop changing, it was always going to be slow to correct to whatever direction they needed to go next (and meanwhile every extension dev would be screaming murder every time they killed some braindead api designed 20 years ago).

Bits are also a unit of information from information theory. In that context they are relevant for anything that processes information, regardless of methodology, you can convert analogue signals into bits just fine.

They didn’t “build” their business model on it so much as “clung desperately onto the only lifeline in existence to avoid drowning in debt”.

There really isn’t a plan b, it’s not like they’re refusing to switch to the obviously better business models out there that could replace their search money. There just aren’t many business models that can maintain the development costs of a web browser and engine.

At least they were banned from using AI screening for 5 years.

I’d hope breaking a court order would result in the kind of punishments they would actually fear.

Yeah, it sounds like a normal lesson plan with ai fairy dust sprinkled on top as a marketing gimmick.

I’m no audiophile either, I don’t care what profile it’s in in normal mode, but everything is instantly a disaster in headset mode.

I know AirPods have some non standard support to escape the Bluetooth mess on apple hardware.

I want a headset that works on windows, my phone, and mac, which means I’m stuck with standard support, which basically means I’m stuffed.

Sorry for linking to the alien, but see this discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/44sxms/bluetooth_headset_goes_to_low_audio_quality_when/?rdt=57825

As I understand it, standard Bluetooth cannot support quality audio and microphone.

That said, lots of phones and headsets secretly support non standard profiles if you use the right hardware together, but at that point you can’t know if you’re going to get quality with your setup unless someone’s tested it thoroughly and half the time reviewers are either deaf or lying

I just want a headset that doesn’t descend into hissing at me in mono over a crackly 1940s phoneline whenever I dare to use the microphone.

I don’t disagree with your views on Boeing, but this incident is quite likely not related to Boeings problems, (other than their hard-earned public perception problem). Plane engines shouldn’t catch fire, but they do, whether that is rare bad luck or somebody screwed up is yet to be decided, but it sounds like this is not a newly minted plane, Boeing probably hasn’t touched it in years.

Not that Boeing hasn’t earned their public perception problem, but accidents happened before Boeing lost their mojo, and will continue to happen even if Boeing regain it. This incident may well turn out to have lessons once the investigation is done, and some might be directed at Boeing, but that’s not where I’d put my money this time around, it sounds unlikely that they caused this particular incident.

Well that sucks. My favourite moment in a hidden role game was when a player won by misreading their card and convincing both of us that we were allies at the start. They ended up the only evil player for most of the game and then in the last round after we’d worked together to systematically kill everyone else (all weirdly innocents, we were both feeling guilty by this point), when they finally realised they knew there was no evil player they checked and… killed me. Total madness and a glorious victory for them. How can you be mad at that?!

Yeah, the switch has an entire core locked off and everything is downclocked to improve battery life and control temperatures. No doubt this emulation gives everything more clock cycles (and perhaps an extra core?). Probably very short on battery and possibly very hot too.