> Right next door, Ireland had a little problem with potatoes
Common misconception: Ireland actually had a little problem with the British. Even during the most intense parts of the famine Ireland was still exporting food. The British absentee landowners simply did not care that their peasants were starving. The ruling party wanted to let the "free market" solve it, with some politicians considering it "divine providence" or a "lack of moral character". This was made even worse by refusing aid to small landowners, which killed sustenance farming.
People often forget that it was a European famine, rather than an Irish one. The Irish potato yield was reduced by 30%, while the potato yield in Denmark was reduced by 50%, The Netherlands by 71%, and Belgium by 87%! Tens of thousands died in those countries, but it is only Ireland where the population was reduced from 8 million to 4 million.
Monoculture (as decided upon by the absentee British landlords) was indeed the direct cause, but it only got as bad as it did because the British elite chose to let them die. Had they imported alternative crops to feed their peasants, or even just stopped potato export, it would've been far less severe.
Yes, the fact Britain was brutal to the Irish is no secret.
But had Ireland not had a monoculture that all rotted away, things would've been less severe. And what you've said only further proves the point I was making: you should grow other crops so that you're not dependent on imports. Britain wouldn't let the Irish import food. It's not impossible for a situation to arise where a country doesn't let Britain import food. Growing alternative grains is the British looking at their own brutal history and learning from it.
> But had Ireland not had a monoculture that all rotted away, things would've been less severe.
Ireland didn't have a monoculture. It exported other crops and meat throughout the famine and required calories never exceeded food production on the island.
The only monoculture was on tenant farmer's personal gardens, which were monocultures by necessity.
> how about you go ahead and multiply those two numbers for me
What are you going to fill in for the third number, though? With an open-circuit voltage of 37.10V at 25°C and a coefficient of -0.35%/°C it can theoretically go up to 75V at absolute zero. And that open-circuit voltage is with an irradiance of 1000 W/m2, should we also account for the possibility of someone building a heliostat around it?
There's no one-size-fits-all number they could possibly quote. It'll always depend on the environment, because that's just how the physics work. The best you can do is provide a figure for the standardized testing environment and the relevant coefficients - which is exactly what they are doing.
At merely freezing, that solar panel would hit 40 volts. In the coldest point of the US in a typical winter, it would get up to about 42 volts. At the record minimum temperature, in either montana or alaska since they have similar records, you'd get up to about 48 volts.
42-48 is not a big enough range to give up over. My impulse is to arbitrarily pick -40 and say the normal max voltage is 45.5 degrees. Now it's nice and obvious that you can only hook up 3 to a 150 volt input, and you'll have a 9% margin of error left over. On that "first cold and sunny day" you'll output 120 volts instead of 160.
> Windows (..) is still orders of magnitude more productive
Is it really, though? Most of the work in the Business Factory is done using cloud software these days. The OS itself has become mostly irrelevant to the end user and has been reduced to the web browser's runtime.
The rest is going to depend heavily on your industry, with some tooling just being better suited to a specific platform. Creative industries? MacOS. Web development? Linux. CAD? Windows. Use the wrong platform, and even if it technically works, you could still end up in a world of pain rather than having it Just Work.
Trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole is always going to lead to friction, that is not a unique Linux-only problem.
Trains run on rails, which doesn't exactly allow them to go off-highway. If you're already spending a fortune on building the rail infrastructure, why wouldn't you spend a few bucks extra to install the extension cord?
Yes, but that's exactly the point the article is making: stop doing expensive one-off purchases! Rather than having 20 cities each buy their own set of 10 custom buses, have them place a shared order of 200 identical buses.
How many of those places have you been to? They might not need year-round A/C like some other countries, but the increasingly-common heat waves definitely require them. The buses are almost intolerable with air conditioning, there's no way in hell they'd ever purchase them without it.
The additional purchase cost is a rounding error, and you're far worse off if cooking people alive during the summer means losing customers year-round as they switch to less-hostile transit options. Maintenance isn't a dealbreaker either: sure, it's extra work, but the equipment is rarely needed. This means the occasional breakage isn't a huge deal, and big maintenance can be deferred to the spring and fall.
I live in the UK and most of our buses in my city don’t have air conditioning as far as I can tell since they usually have open windows, except some the very newest ones
The media are (mostly) just parrotting what the politicians are saying. Having both major parties talking about "stopping the boat" isn't going to quiet down that down, is it? It'll just shift the Overton window.
What's Labour's plan when the boats are stopped and Reform progresses to "round up and deport all the brown people"? They are never going to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants, all they will achieve is losing the left-wing vote.
I think that the boats thing stirs up ideas that migration is out of control, that the government is unable or unwilling to get a grip on the situation, that the system (even if they don't know what the system is, or even if there is a system) is being abused and somehow cheated. That's (IMHO) why it's so easy to get people riled up on irregular migration.
I'm not sure if they end that route that they would need to out-anti-immigrant the anti-immigrants any further, but in the current climate they will need to be able to make the case that the country can decide who comes in, and that migration is to the benefit of everyone, migrant or not.
Again, it doesn't really matter if it's an actual problem, it is an important enough perceived problem that they need to be able to show they have a grip on it and are running the show in the interests of the average Brit on the street.
Then to really put the issue to bed, they'll need to do something about the failing services and general feeling of decline in the UK. As I said in response to a sister comment - you don't get many nazis when people feel their lives are going well. It's not so concerning if some out group is getting a slice of the cake if you feel you're getting yours too. It's when your slice seems to get a little smaller every day that you start looking for scapegoats.
Of course the other question is - will they actually lose the left wing vote? Or would they win it back?
Opinion polls in UK politics (from what I've heard on the radio) put the politics of 'Reform' voters left of centre - they're keen on renationalising rail, water and electricity for a start. All solid left-wing ideas outside of immigration policy, that you'd usually expect to hear from Labour supporters.
Recently the prime minister delivered a speech and then later walked the entire thing back saying that he hadn't read it before delivering it. A man who has declared that he is nothing more than a text to speech engine probably doesn't have a plan.
If I understand correctly, it basically works the same as Trusted Boot on a local machine, with the host's CPU used as the root of trust. The difference is that the CPU creates multiple completely independent environments, with for example independent memory encryption keys.
Once you've got that, it's the usual TPM dance: each phase of the boot process verifies the next step and "ratchets" the TPM forward. The final OS uses the TPM's attestation to prove the TPM is genuine and not emulated, and the TPM's final state is used to prove it's running a genuine image booted through the proper process.
AMD had a whole bunch of SEV extensions for stuff like this. I reckon Intel isn't any different.
Absolutely not. Why would they spend a significant amount of time and effort engineering a special mode which is far more complicated, less secure, and will rarely be used?
And how is it even supposed to work? How are you going to handle billing? Does a cell phone tower even know the phone number of the connected devices? What's going to happen when the recipient disconnects mid-SMS? What happens when the same number is in use by multiple SIM cards?
Of course. After all, it is mathematically impossible to prove the correctness of all valid and safe programs - the halting problem clearly shows that. The real question should not be "Are there valid and safe programs Rust will reject?" but "How common is it that your well-written valid and safe program will be rejected by the Rust compiler?".
In practice the vast majority will be accepted, and what remains is stuff the Rust compiler cannot prove to be correct. If Rust doesn't like your code, there are two solutions. The first is to go through the rituals to rewrite it as provably-safe code - which can indeed feel a bit tedious if your code was designed using principles which don't map well to Rust. The second is to use `unsafe` blocks - but that means proving its safety is up to the programmer. But as we've historically seen with C and unsafe-heavy Rust code bases, programmers are horrible at proving safety, so your mileage may vary.
I don't want to be the "you're holding it wrong" person, but "Rust rejected my valid and safe program" more often than not means "there's a subtle bug in my program I am not aware of yet". The Rust borrow checker has matured a lot since its initial release, and it doesn't have any trouble handling the low-hanging fruit anymore. What's left is mainly complex and hard-to-reason-about stuff, and that's exactly the kind of code humans struggle with as well.
Common misconception: Ireland actually had a little problem with the British. Even during the most intense parts of the famine Ireland was still exporting food. The British absentee landowners simply did not care that their peasants were starving. The ruling party wanted to let the "free market" solve it, with some politicians considering it "divine providence" or a "lack of moral character". This was made even worse by refusing aid to small landowners, which killed sustenance farming.
People often forget that it was a European famine, rather than an Irish one. The Irish potato yield was reduced by 30%, while the potato yield in Denmark was reduced by 50%, The Netherlands by 71%, and Belgium by 87%! Tens of thousands died in those countries, but it is only Ireland where the population was reduced from 8 million to 4 million.
Monoculture (as decided upon by the absentee British landlords) was indeed the direct cause, but it only got as bad as it did because the British elite chose to let them die. Had they imported alternative crops to feed their peasants, or even just stopped potato export, it would've been far less severe.
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