> Ford made the Ford Ranger EV 1998 to 2002

It seemed designed as mostly a company fleet vehicle, not a consumer vehicle. If there is a lot of wait time between deliveries, then you don't need big/efficient batteries. For example, for repairs, the average onsite repair may take two hours. The EV doesn't have to use batteries during that two hours.

Many believe it's a reinforcement mechanism between flowering plants and insects. Once both plants and insects got into the symbiosis pattern, it flowered (pun half intended) as both sides gained a big advantage: one was able to disperse its DNA further, and the other got an easy meal.

Why nature didn't invent it earlier is hard to say. Maybe because most insects have crappy eyesight. One then happened to have good-enough eyesight that they could spot flowers at a distance, and evolution improved both bug eyes and flowers after that.

Indeed! AI can certainly replace lousy human service because it's hard to suck more than the existing batch. Many service desks are just outsourced India call centers who service hundreds of companies, pretending to be dedicated, and know very little about each co's products; they just follow scripts. They are already de-facto bots.

AI is not near ready to replace competent experienced human service desks, but those are too rare anyhow, unfortunately.

They are new at it. You don't get great overnight.

Taser company selling body cam transcribers? That's an easy task, most output will resemble "Oooww oouch stop zapping me! Aaaooow!..."

Reminds me of when I worked for an environmental cleanup company that was eventually bought out by a chemical company. The company was thus paid to clean up its own messes, via Fed Superfund money.

> sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas

Why is that? Is it to simplify communications? The lakes would certainly be more interesting.

researchers have discovered the more memorable an image, the more likely a person is to think they have been looking at it for longer than they actually have.

Goatse is the secret to immortality!

Happens to me when I take off my undies.

Han shot first via his 3rd arm.

Boogeymen drive votes. (Boogypeople?)

I believe courts have interpreted it to mean people on US territories or citizens (even when abroad). Conservative courts have also assigned corporations and organizations many person-like legal qualities, which liberals often balk at because it gives them a potentially overly large voice on political issues traditionally considered only to be rights for individuals.

When BattleBots escape

Courts may rule evidence is needed before "punishing" Tik Tok, otherwise could be considered unequal treatment.

> They can't [handle?] any base load under many, many conditions

I know there are limits, but when we know the power is out, we could avoid certain activities such as doing laundry (unless everything else is off).

> Or you can buy an ICE generator (gas/diesel/natgas) at a fraction of the cost and have it working as long as you need, under any conditions.

Those are noisy and smelly.

I once was asked to use data scraped from a competitor ecommerce site without asking. And at another company to use MS-Access as the app's database but claim it was MS-Sql-Server to a potential client. (We were working on the conversion, but it wasn't ready yet.)

And another time the software wasn't finished yet, so they sent a coder to the client's site under the guise of "monitoring the roll-out", when in fact the coder was finishing it then and there.

I took these as a sign it was time to leave those companies, but during the dot-com slump that often took a while.

Someone justified it by saying, "if one doesn't lie, they will lose to those who do".