It also needs to fail gracefully. A smart switch needs to fail to a dumb switch, not “no switch”.

Home assistant is capable of it. Unfortunately it’s not yet overly user friendly about it, but it’s getting better rapidly.

For many places, your signal isn’t the bottleneck. It’s the back haul from the tower to the main internet. 5G won’t help if there’s a straw connected to the fire hose of 5G.

Just to play devil’s advocate. There was recently an unverified report that some inverters contained an undocumented cellular modem. If true, it could, in theory, allow for remote modification or control, even when fully “offline” as far as the client was concerned. Basically a mobile phone based back door.

The solution is better verification, rather than bans however. Grid scale devices should have the hardware randomly audited. The software should also be audited and check summed. This would be burdensome at domestic levels, but seems reasonable at grid levels.

According to a friend in the industry, it’s basically a non issue. Things like this are not uncommon, and wouldn’t have even made the news, without what happened in Spain.

The national grid was less designed and more accreted. There are a lot of parts that are sub-optimal, but we are stuck with them due to the cost of replacement. They are therefore very hot on containing, and learning from any failure that happens.

Resurrections is an excellent protest movie, in the punk vein.

It was protesting exactly the type of exploitation that Warner brothers did with the matrix.

The film is akin to a new lassie film. Only the film ends with lassie being staked out in the sun and flayed alive by a teenage sociopath, whimpering the entire time. It’s a massive fuck you, intended to kill the franchise. There was just enough plausible deniability to get away, and avoid being sued for it.

True, but they weren’t really used much as flying cars till later. I might be wrong on exactly when they moved from military to “rich transport to the race track”, however.

We’ve had flying cars since the 70s, they are called helicopters.

The issue with a flying car for general use, is one of maintenance and safety. If an older car breaks down, it causes a tailback. If a flying car breaks down, it could demolish a school. The higher standards required means higher costs. That means rich people only. The rich use helicopters in exactly that manner.

This is one of the biggest frustrations with nuclear power. The first power plants had issues (mostly due to them being bomb factory designs). We learnt from that, and designed better ones. They never got built. They were swamped in red tape and delays until they died.

Decades later, China comes in and just asks nicely. The designs work fine. China now leads the way, built on research we left to rot.

It’s also worth noting that there is a big difference between a fusion power plant and a fission one. China is doing active research on it, as is the west. There’s quite a friendly rivalry going on. We have also basically cracked fusion now. We just need to scale it up. The only big problem left is the tokamakite issue. The neutron radiation put off by the reaction transmutes the walls. Using radioactive materials as a buffer is an idea I’ve not heard of. I’m curious about the end products. A big selling point of fusion is the lack of long term waste. Putting a fission reaction in there too might lose that benefit.

Fyi, I’m not actually American myself. I agree with you otherwise however.

Both are brainwashed, just in different ways. Republicans are wired for fear. Democrats are wired for passivity.

The republican version is a lot more dangerous, but the democrat version is a lot more insidious.

The British managed that, though we are more than happy to share with our European cousins.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Shrapnel

He invented the idea of an explosion powered guillotine blade. Perfect for a rocket warhead.

Didn’t Putin recently make noise over America annexing Greenland? He would be happy with splitting it between them, however.

Fighting America would be as much posturing as fighting, with most fighting being an insurgency type fight. Russia is more likely to be blunt about it, but also more viable to repel. Particularly if the rest of NATO is willing to respond to it.

I’ve maintained a basic stock for a while now. I suspected people would panic buy with COVID. I stocked up well before, and so dodged most of it. I’ve kept an extra buffer since.

More likely they expect to be able to get support/reinforcement/aid in, within a couple of days.

It’s big enough to be a useful stopgap, but small enough not to accidentally cause a run on the supermarkets. It also makes people think about it more. If they update it to 2 weeks later, people are more likely to have a feel for what they need, and what will keep.

It lets your phone use the larger screen for satnav. It also reconfigures it to a better setup for driving (bigger buttons and reduced complexity). This also means your phone doesn’t need to be sat in the sun, with its screen lit up for a couple of hours, and so overheating.

My phone no longer even leaves my pocket. It wirelessly links to the entertainment system.

That’s how most EU regulations are created. They take the best parts of the legislation of various members and combine them.

As for weapons, harmonisation is a thing. However, the exact use cases will vary for different countries. A tank that’s optimal for Spain isn’t necessarily the best for Germany. Neither country wants suboptimal equipment. What is easier to harmonise is ammo, a fact that NATO have been exploiting for a long while.

There are also the implications. Before now, military has been done on a per country basis. If they want to move as a block, they need individual countries to step up. It also allows countries to act independently if desired. A unified army is seen as a threat to the sovereignty of individual countries.

It’s obviously the MAGA crowd. They’ve spent years complaining about electric vehicles. They’ve just escalated that to burning them out. The police need to go have a nice chat with the rolling coal types.

His various books explored the pros and cons of various government styles in a fairly honest way. Unfortunately, modern films don’t do well with nuances. It’s fascism on the surface, but there are echoes of the deep cracks that make it so terrifying and self destructive.

I viewed the movie as a play on the propaganda within the universe of the book (roughly the equivalent of films like “black hawk down”).

A movie playing it straight could be interesting. My only concern is how it will resonate with the current political situation. The original book was far more subtle in its view on fascism. It could easily turn into a fascist call to arms.