Right, I’m not trying to portray the UK as a beacon of goodness, but Germany has gone far beyond in suppressing any dissent towards Israel and noticeably has not said that they would respect an ICC warrant, just that they would “examine” it.

Huh? You think that the UK, which has affirmed that it will honour ICC warrants (i.e. arrest Netanyahu if he came to the UK), is somehow more pro-Israel than Germany?

Things appear white because they are reflecting a lot of light in the visible wavelengths you can see, to which the atmosphere is unsurprisingly transparent. Things that are black on the other hand absorb the light, heat up and re-emit at their thermal temperature which in the terrestrial range of 0-100 degrees peaks in the far infrared which the atmosphere is not (as) transparent to.

The linked study is talking about a boundary effect between the cooler area of high albedo (because painting things white does reduce the energy absorbed and reflects a good chunk of that back into space) and the warmer area of normal albedo. Its modelling how that change between different temperature areas affects air circulation and cloud cover, not that the reflected light is warming up other areas.

Ok I’m done here if you’re just going to start making shit up. No they did not announce that they would record peoples screenshots without their permission and start uploading them to their servers.

I think you are fundamentally misunderstanding what I am saying. I’m not saying they “wouldn’t do this, they’re not that bad” I’m saying “they wouldn’t do this as it would get them little, they’d get caught and it would have bad blowback for them”.

They’re also not stealing peoples bank accounts or blackmailing people with personal information. Again, just because they are shitbags does not mean every bad thing you can come up with no evidence is true.

No I don’t need to “pick a lane”, just because Microsoft are awful does not mean any claim about them doing a bad thing is sensible no matter how far fetched. Microsoft do care about how windows is perceived by businesses (as opposed to you and I think about them, which they do not care about), and the risk of doing what you are alleging is very high for them (easy to detect) and would have severe negative consequences for them (oops, cant use windows in healthcare as its leaking PII). To add to this the only evidence you are presenting for it is “windows is slow”.

Saying “new windows is slow as hell” is not evidence that they are capturing and sending off screenshots (which is far more intrusive than even the first fucked up proposal for recall before they walked it back significantly). ME and Vista were both slow as shit too but they weren’t doing this.

Again windows is spying on you, just not in that particular way which would be very easy for security researchers to discover and would be catastrophic for businesses trust in Microsoft if it was discovered.

Yes I am aware of recall, and that it is only available on specific AI focused PCs (copilot+). Dont get me wrong its a been a complete clusterfuck in they way they have done it, but if windows was using regular windows installs to gather screenshots and then phone them home it would be both incredibly stupid on Microsoft’s part (for a huge amount of companies that would be a deal breaker) and be very discoverable.

its not grabbing screen grabs and and key presses as you do them, its logging things that you interact with in the background and then packaging that up as a telemetry package to asynchronously send off to a server.

No it doesnt have no impact on resources but it negligable compared to what the previous poster mentioned about making everything dependent on network services and introducing latency that way.

They 100% are spying and not even hiding it. That isnt what makes a system laggy though as its just a background process snitching on you once and hour or so.

Germany has more than 3 times the population of Australia, and the article linked needed to be able to generate 30GW peak so likely required more installed capacity, and solar is only 1 element out of 5 required in that scenario.

Again it does seem to be feasible to get renewable only in Australia (or close to) but I dont think that tells you much about elsewhere

Austrailia is one of the best places in the world to do that, but it should be pointed out that the article you linked wants 120GWh of batteries (costing ~12 billion USD at current Li-ion prices) as well as building more than 38GW of wind power and 30GW of solar power in order to meet ~25GW of average demand and that still needs pumped hydro on top and more than 9GW of fossil fuel power to make up the gaps.

It’s just about feasible in Australia with excess sun and wind, plenty of empy space, low population density and terrain amenable to hydro storage. But it isnt realy generalisable to most other places.

Probably yes, but if its at the point of European NATO having to fight directly that’s likely a second order consideration.

The weapons “cant be used” in the diplomatic sense, it not like the bombs phone up the pentegon to ask permission to be used. If we’re talking about the US ripping up all its commitments I think other countries might be less inclined to pay attention to those.

Thats incredibly crass and you should be ashamed of yourself

The proposed law is only available to people with a terminal illness judged to have 6 months or less to live, needs to be signed off on by two doctors and a judge, and the patient needs to take the drugs themselves. If anything it’s potentially too restrictive, but a step in the right direction.

That is what the big AI companies do, though they are actually just packaging up American corporate norms as “neutral”.

Its possible that it was built to a lower standard than would be expected in the west, both in terms of quality and worker safety. Though unless you have specific reports of that I dont see any reason just to assume it because Arabs bad.

In addition this was largely built by Korean companies who have a successful record of building NPPs at home without incident, I imagine Korea wouldnt be particularly happy if their citizens (especially highly trained and economically productive ones) were being abused to build foreign infrastructure.

The main point is that NPPs dont have to be stuck in a quagmire, and using Hinkley Point as a stand in for all NPP construction is disingenuous, just as using the UAE as a sole example would be.

So existing examples that go against your argument dont count because you dont like the country. OK.

Counterpoint: UAE went from zero nuclear energy to producing as much as Denmark or Portugal produce renewables in ten years. From a base of zero nuclear expertise in the country.