"We are gentlemen at the World Conker Championships and we don’t cheat. I’ve been playing and practising for decades. That’s how I won.

Mr Jakins won the men’s competition but lost in the overall final to women’s champion Kelci Banschbach, originally from the United States, who only took up the game last year when she moved to Suffolk.

Hmm.

Any hard drive can fail at any time with or without warning. Worrying too much about individual drive families’ reliability isn’t worth it if you’re dealing with few drives. Worry instead about backups and recovery plans in case it does happen.

Bigger drives have significantly lower power usage per TB, and cost per TB is lowest around 12-16TB. Bigger drives also lets you fit more storage in a given box. Drives 12TB and up are all currently helium filled which run significantly cooler.

Two preferred options in the data hoarder communities are shucking (external drives are cheaper than internal, so remove the case) and buying refurb or grey market drives from vendors like Server Supply or Water Panther. In both cases, the savings are usually big enough that you can simply buy an extra drive to make up for any loss of warranty.

Under US$15/TB is typically a ‘good’ price.

For media serving and deep storage, HDDs are still fine and cheap. For general file storage, consider SSDs to improve IOPS.

Ah, it’s been a while since I used ChromeOS. Looks like Flatpak was founded about the time I stopped.

Ah, it’s been a while since I stopped using ChromeOS. That’s an improvement.

That’s not really practical. For a lot of on-call roles, you need the experience of working on the equipment daily to know how to fix it.

Even if you alternated e.g. a week of on-call then a week of normal shifts, you end up reducing the amount of time you have that is completely non-work.

Firemen are absolutely not doing nothing until called out. There’s training, maintenance, cleaning, post-incident paperwork, and probably other duties.

Most Fediverse stuff has web front ends so that any modern browser will work.

My concern would be that Chrome is about to neuter ad blockers, and you can’t use a different browser without replacing the OS.

Both are also heavily privacy destroying.

I didn’t realise it was possible to hate every side of an argument this strongly.

Kinda yes, kinda no. There have certainly been times, particularly after 9/11 and various crises, when demand dropped significantly.

There’s also airliners that just haven’t sold well. A340NG, A380, 747-8, 767-400, the MD-11, until recently the Cseries/A220. The A330neo has also not sold particularly well and you could probably get a slot within a year easily.

And the Blackadder equivalent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6mJw50OdZ4

Turning that instinct off when going through security screening, customs, or biosecurity is usually a good idea.

Indeed, the US has a major lack of fixed-line competition and lack of regulation. Starlink doesn’t really help with that, at least in urban areas.

I’m not familiar with the wireless situation. You’re saying that there are significant coverage discrepancies to the point where many if not most consumers are choosing a carrier based on coverage, not pricing/plans? There’s always areas with unequal coverage but I didn’t think they were that common.

Here in NZ, the state funding for very rural 4G broadband (Rural Broadband Initiative 2 / RBI-2) went to the Rural Connectivity Group, setting up sites used and owned equally by all three providers, to reduce costs where capacity isn’t the constraint.

Starlink plugs the rural coverage gaps, but in urban areas it’s still more expensive than either conventional fixed-line connections or wireless (4G/5G) broadband. Even in rural areas, while it’s the best option, it’s rarely the cheapest, at least in the NZ market I’m familiar with.

It also doesn’t have the bandwidth per square kilometre/mile to serve urban areas well, and it’s probably never going to work in apartment buildings.

This is a funding/subsidisation issue, not so much a technical one. I imagine Starlink connections are eligible for the current subsidy, but in most cases it’s probably going to conventional DSL/cable/fibre/4G connections.

As ‘colony breadbaskets’, with lots of land and small populations, both NZ and Aus used to export lots of meat and other primary industry products to the UK.

I believe the UK’s entry into the EEC and deprioritisation of the commonwealth led to those exports reducing and instead heading to Asia and the US.

Regardless, expecting to export beef to the other side of the world, a country with four times the cattle and a better reputation for food production, is just daft.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen any UK-sourced food in NZ other than high-value small stuff like Worcester sauce, and expat reminder-of-home products.

Aggregate bandwidth now rivals or slightly exceeds gigabit wired connections.

Where that aggregate bandwidth is shared amongst large numbers of users, bandwidth per user can suffer dramatically.

Low density areas may be fine, but cube farms are an issue especially when staff are doing data intensive or latency sensitive tasks.

If you’re giving employees docking stations for their laptops, running ethernet to those docking stations is a no-brainer.

Moving most of the traffic to wired connections frees up spectrum/bandwidth for situations that do need to be wireless.

The actual eruption happened in 2019. It was big news locally when it happened, and there has been a slow trickle of further reports like this one.

It wasn’t a particularly big eruption; the fact that people were on the rather small volcanic island when it erupted is what led to the deaths.

The efforts towards a prosecution have been long and slow because it’s probably going to be a real mess:

• Adventure tourism including visiting active volcanoes is inherently dangerous.

• Did the scientists get the volcano risk levels wrong?

• Which entities should get criminal blame? Island owner, tour providers, tour transport providers (boats), and/or the various regulators?

It sounds like that’s all sorted and they’re into sentencing on those that were found guilty.

Secondhand stuff can be really cheap if you know where to look, but the drawbacks are usually power and noise.

Yeah, you can’t really say “we started the engines but #2 wouldn’t start, so we’re continuing to the destination on one engine”. Delaying/cancelling the flight due to a safety/maintenance issue is perfectly legitimate.

The issue is that after that, a) passengers are entitled to compensation depending on the delay, and b) you need to provide food/water/aircon or take the passengers back to the terminal.

I think you mean Alaska.

The passenger volume, cost, and build-it-today claims are I think in line with theirs. The only outlier is the energy claim, which is so absurdly false that it falls into puffery (think ‘red bull gives you wings’) and is again believable.

It’s clear HSR costs, and infrastructure in general, are getting out of control in the English-speaking world. It’s not clear how to fix this, but moving from proven and understood technology to Muppet technology doesn’t seem to be a good option.

:(

Not sure if sarcastic…