The Prius has had a couple decades of design history behind it now. It would be a bigger surprise if it lost this contest.

I'm not a fan of the Prius myself, but it has its place and its base. We could of course criticize what it actually takes to build it, or the cost of disposing it when the time comes, but it should have little trouble winning this award.

My closest big city is not San Francisco (though I visited San Francisco not long ago while traveling for work). I strongly suspect that downtown San Francisco is seeing similar issues to my own local large city downtown area.

Namely, my city is seeing a chicken-and-egg problem getting retail going. The Macy's in that city left several years ago. More recently Barnes & Noble left as well. They still have Target and Walgreens, but not a whole lot else in terms of retail. Most of their high end jewelers, haberdasheries, suit stores, and the like have left as well.

Before a lot of the retailers left though they cut back their hours as they saw that downtown workers weren't sticking around very late into the night to shop (bar patrons didn't tend to shop much either). This created an unfortunate cycle; workers were leaving right at the end of their working hours because there wasn't much shopping to do while shops were closing because people weren't shopping.

Which leads to a chicken and egg problem of sorts. If retailers stay open later again will people start to shop? Or do the shoppers need to do something drastic to indicate to the retailers that they are looking to shop later? If the latter, what should that be?

My main airport has tried a similar idea in the parking ramps. It sounds great in theory, you can turn down an aisle in the parking ramp and see if there are any green lights in the ceiling that indicate an open spot. It also is supposed to all report back to the boards at the ramp entrance to tell you which levels of the ramp have open spaces.

It all sounds great, except it rarely works. Sometimes the tally is close to accurate on a per-floor level. The markers in the aisle rarely get it right though, and you end up driving hopefully up to several green lights before you eventually find an open spot. There is no rhyme or reason to it, either; it's not like the occupied green light spots are occupied entirely by Fiat 500s or other small cars, they could be filled by any vehicle you can imagine fitting into a standard American parking space.

It's generally wise to not eat a Big Mac, period. I haven't had one in at least a couple decades and I'm certainly no worse off for that choice.

Best Buy no longer carries physical media. Target and WalMart have scaled back. The physical disc is rapidly dying. Disney would only do this if it wasn't making them money.

The first version of office I installed was before Office95. I certainly didn't install all of them (and haven't installed one in some time now) but I don't remember seeing Publisher listed. I also don't remember ever seeing someone send out a file from it.

This might be - at least in part - due to having seen Quark XPress at my work starting in 2000. Nobody wanted to use anything else for layout there. My wife has used by Quark and Adobe InDesign for a couple decades now, and I doubt she ever heard of MS Publisher.

Unfortunately though this likely means the last users of MS Publisher are going to switch to attempting to use Word to layout documents, and we all know how atrocious that is. Honestly the world would be better if people did layout in MS Paint than in MS Word.

That sounds like a great way to gauge how many people are learning those languages. It doesn't tell us much about how much code is being generated by users of those languages though, as people who are especially familiar with a given language are less likely to search for tutorials.

I've been involved in some of the informatics that goes in to "smart farming". When it is successfully applied, crop yields will be improved, and farmers will do better on the same level of investment. One big thing we're already learning is that there are some places where we are simply wasting effort producing the wrong crops. It does take some training and education but some farmers have a lot to gain by changing what they are growing to better fit the combination of ecological and market forces in their area.

As for who will own the tools, that is a minor part of this. Yes some of the best tools will be too expensive for the smaller farmers but they will still benefit from other farmers having them as they can reduce runoff of both fertilizer and pesticides.

Consumers have a general sense of what 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G mean in terms of cell networks. Even my school-age sons have a sense of what it means. Consumers see ads on TV and other places for the latest 5G phones, and they know that 4G and 3G phones used to be common.

Yet now Comcast is advertising 10G service, and there are no 10G phones. Of course that is because the Comcast 10G network is not a cell network - even though they offer cell service in many areas - but that sometimes escapes the consumer.

A better move would have been for Comcast to call it a "10Gig" network, but they know that very few customers on the network will actually ever see that speed. They just want to indicate it as a technical leap forward, and they want to use a very simple acronym for it. They should have sent the marketing team back to the drawing board when they coughed up "10G" though.

If you look at the comcast website you'll see all kinds of overlapping and confusing terms that they have used up to now to describe their internet connectivity options. I think I am on a "blast" plan myself, but the comparable plan has been renamed a few times since I signed up. They should really come up with a standardization for their plan names, but that might encourage people to compare Comcast claims to those of other ISPs.

I've rented a fair number of cars lately while traveling for work. I've seen cars from Ford, GM, Toyota, and Hyundai. Every one of them has had AM, FM, and HD. Most - but not all - have had Sirius / XM. If they are trying to kill AM they aren't doing a great job of it.

I could see some of the high-tech / high-dollar / luxury brands like Tesla or BMW taking an interest in killing AM to distinguish themselves, but I haven't seen it happen with the mainline brands at all. My work car is a 2021 Equinox and it has AM, FM, HD, and Sirius/XM.

Knowing that the first missions to Mars will be one-way, I can think of a few Americans who we could just as well do without. They wouldn't mind the notoriety of being on the list of the first people to land on Mars, so it would be a win-win.

Yes, i know I will be downmodded into oblivion for mentioning this. Go ahead, I have my asbestos underwear on today.

but I am skeptical there is BROAD appeal for watching other people play video games. There's clearly an audience for it, but I just don't get it.

For most games, yeah. However, I actually enjoy watching long-form "no commentary" playthroughs of games that have strong stories. With the modern graphics we're seeing now, it becomes very cinematic.

But I definitely don't want to listen to some dipshit ranting while waving a controller.

It's just frightening how close he is to winning a second term, which could well be the end of American Democracy.

Pew Research and census.gov both put the voter turnout rate for the 2020 election at around 66.8%. That of course tells us that roughly a third of eligible voters didn't vote. Of course some of them were actively disenfranchised by the system, though some of them could have voted but just didn't feel it was worth the effort.

I really hope those who could vote will see it to be worth the effort this time. I can't see how an independent could possibly view 4 years of his vile hatred as being a good idea for our country.