2000UltraDeluxe

This. It, along with diesel, is also the power source for most wheeled veichles in current operation on the planet.

I'm sure EV's is going to take over in most areas given enough time. Until then, it's only logical to run ICE's on green fuels if available. Synthetic fuels made with excess solar/wind certainly sounds like it would fit that description.

Also, we already have infrastructure in place for handling large amounts of petrol and diesel, so storage and handling is a solved problem.

Absolutely! Alas, the Finnish administration seems more interested in using areas with cheap electricity to attract electricity-intensive industry rather than, say, exporting it to other countries. Heck, in neighbouring Sweden they have issues transferring power from the large hydro dams in the north, to the densely populated south where the power is needed.

While building better grids is practically doable, I don't see it happening anytime soon; the idea, of using cheap electricity to entice a FAANG to build a data center in one's backyard is preferable to most elected officials here.

In that situation it's probably better business to just buy cheap electricity off the market and use it to do something useful.

Too bad there's no infrastructure in place for producing synthetic fuel with the surplus electricity. It might not be efficient, but if we're producing surplus electricity anyway, then even inefficient storage/usage won't be a waste.

Can confirm. It's the norm up here. Wikipedia says the practice was imported from the US after WW2.

Yes, animal husbandry is an integrated part of food production, but there is merit to the suggestion of _reducing_ meat consumption; most of the world has increased meat consumption per capita quite a lot the last 20 years and going back to 2000 levels might not be a bad idea in the case of a lot of richer countries.

Windows 2000 was fairly solid as long as the device drivers weren't too exotic.

Yeah, Bing has gone completely nuts the last six months or so. They'll happily send the equivalent of a small DDoS at sites hosted on shared hosting, knocking them completely offline for a while. Nuts.

But how can you trust it to provide accurate information?

When I've played around with Bing, I've been seeing hallucinations and outright false data pop up quite regularly.

My initial assessment of LLVMs is that they can be great writing aids, but I fail to see how I can trust them for search, when I can't use it for simpler tasks without getting served outright falsehoods.

More pressure to keep profits high due ongoing financial shenanigans. Add consumers with little to no options, and the expectation that the common good is more important than profits.

It turned out profits were more important, and now people are angry about the new 230g mayonaise tube costing the same as the 275g one did last year. But at least the new tube required 17% less plastic.

Something's got to give if we expect inflation to drop. _Many_ people expect businesses to take the hit. After all, many raised prices due to things like energy costs last winter, but very few lower them again now that production costs go down again.

It's not about disruptions in the supply chain, but rather about controlling it and using it to extract maximum value for the shareholders. Everyone wants their share and nobody will accept a smaller percentage than they did last week. Consumers are caught in the middle, with rapidly increasing costs of living as a result.

We as in "society"), have assumed this would be solved by some healthy competition. It's just that we optimized society for maximum short-term gain rather than a market where newcomers are welcome. As a result, the players that are already in the game are free to ignore the forces society assumed would keep things running smoothly.

Handful of products? In Finland, at least, much of the grocery market is controlled by two dominant players that more or less control the entire supply chain for many products. Both have been profiteering like crazy lately, and for most people there's no option than their local supermarket.

Good ones are decent, as they save desktop space. Alas, left-handed ones are usually either low-quality ones, or twice as expensive as right-handed ones.

I'd add .xyz to that list.

Frankly, I can't understand such movies aren't monetized more. I can imagine there' some money to be made from ads, especially from movies most people will never watch anyway.

My teenage daughter will most likely never watch The Seventh Seal. Unless she stumbled upon it on Youtube or something.

It applies to systematic collection and processing of personal data.

In Finland, at least, the most common way is to get people to download an app, or join a bonus club. I'm sure they use visual analytics too, but identifying store visitors means storing personal data, which you can't do without explicit consent.

Yeah, I expected Gorillaz to be some one-off art project when the first album was released.

1998 me would never have believed you if you'd told me Gorillaz will be a household name while Blur will be some old 90's band the kids don't know about.

ET is still alive?! How active is it nowadays?

There are many cars from 00-05 and with emission levels that are relatively low; if one is to make a somewhat absurd suggestion to prove a point, I'd suggest many smaller petrol and dieselbcars would be cleaner than an EV _if_ the EV was charged with 100% coal power.

Luckily, most people don't charge their teslas with coal power.

Using a VPN is one of the easiest way to get rejected. Most automated systems flag stuff coming from them as highly suspicious due to the sheer amount of crap coming through them.

You have an address on your passport? I can see how that could cause issues if the address isn't valid. If I'd have to determine if your order was fraudulent or not, I'd err on the side of caution rather than risk having you abuse my server infrastructure (in the case of Hetzner).

And more renewables are not solving any issues until there are more investments in grid and storage.

Alas, at least in Northern Europe, the grids are largely in private hands, and investments are kept down to the legal minimum. There's no way we go all-renewable until someone kicks that hornet's nest.

I don't believe that's relevant? Unless someone starts selling and building cost-effective and large-scale storage here and now, nuclear and fossil fuels are the only reliable options that will fix the current situation.

Fixing this with trans-European energy transfers is a neat idea, but if you want to send power from i.e. a solar panel on a roof in Spain to my house in Finland, or wind energy from Denmark to Poland, then we'll require infrastructure upgrades at scales that haven't been seen in much of Europe since the early 50's.

Charging ports intended for public use. They're appearing in a lot of places nowadays.

Most of Poland's neighbors are situated around the same pond (the Baltic sea) with similar conditions. Winters are dark, and occasionally with little to no wind over the entire region.

Unless you somehow solved storage at a low enough price for it to be viable, we need nuclear or fossil fuels up here - biofuels won't be enough.

Now check GDP per capita. :)

Sweden has twice the population and what? Three times the landmass?

Sweden also does not have an oil fund where it invested much of the dino profits from the last 60 years. The Norwegian one won't last forever, but I'd bet it'll last longer than any of us.

Don't get me wrong; Sweden has a decent economy and the standard of living is still amongst top-20 on the planet. Norway just struck black gold and scored higher.

As much as the rest of the Nordics hate to admit it, Norway's economy is far more stable than those of their neighbours, including the Swedish one.

For anything that requires temporary but really fast storage, RAM disks is still a thing. The number of valid use cases have gone down since SSD's became the norm, but there's still situations where disk i/o or the fear of wearing out an SSD are valid concerns.

Athlon Thunderbirds were notorious for reaching insane temperatures without any form of thermal throttling -- an uncooled Thunderbird will destroy itself without cooling. The Pentium 4, on the other hand, will throttle down and often keep running if you take the heat sink off.

I guess it's a matter of how efficiently you can cool the CPU with pool water. If you're able to keep the P4 below whatever limit it has for thermal throttling then I suspect it will, indeed, be a winner. If not, a Thunderbird will happily boil away the enire pool if given a chance.

Most "audiophiles" won't argue in forums; they'll just buy the equipment they think sounds right for them and then just leave it at that.

The listening experience differs from person to person, depending on everything from hearing, to noise to the individual listener's preferences and tastes. The audiophiles you mention try to justify that individual experience using whatever argument available, including false ones.