Gas is energy dense. Before those gas stations got built up you could take a few cans of fuel home with you and have several fillups available before you needed to go back to the gas station. When there were sufficient cars out there in the boonies then the gas stations followed, but there are still issues there (eg my parents live 14 miles from the nearest gas station).

Now, the same will eventually happen with EV's. People in the city will adopt them, they'll have charging infrastructure. That will slowly spread further out, eventually some of the rural folks will find it acceptable, and they'll switch over.

You have to let that occur naturally though, at its own pace. Setting enforced deadlines ignores the reality on the ground. I'd say that we'll probably see full conversion to electric vehicles naturally without forcing anyone . . . but probably by closer to 2070 not 2030.

You'd likely run afoul of the first amendment. They might rule that some sections of the GPL or any other license might be unenforceable, but just saying "you can't release the source for your code" - no, I don't think that could be done under the constitution.

That wasn't cutting a corner though. The watertight bulkheads used didn't normally go full height of the ship. There was always a tipping point at which the ship would sink.

I mean the Titanic was actually pretty well built - it just had incredibly bad luck and some poor management decisions.

The analogy doesn't hold - hitting someone with a fist is an active, physical act. Despite what the chronically online may be pushing these days, words are not violence, and they cannot hurt.

You don't want the government or another entity determining what information is "harmful". I can promise that had we gone down that route they would have deemed most of the Civil Rights Movement or the Vietnam War protests "harmful misinformation". Every piece of knowledge in our future to be gained is "misinformation" until proven otherwise, but if there is no room to push new information, that proof will never come and we basically freeze our society into its current form.

Well I mean I'm pretty sure Facebook video "views" always counted people scrolling past it (because of auto play), so I wouldn't put it past them.

There are modern workarounds for some stuff though. For example if you don't want to use actual floppy disks on a Commodore 64 you can emulate the disk drive using a Raspberry Pi and flash storage. Kinda weird using a computer with hundreds of times more power than the C64 to emulate its disk drive, but it works (and it draws less power than the original drive did).

Just fix what breaks.

Yeah a lot of old software is happy to keep chugging along. If it worked back then it will continue to work in perpetuity.

That said, old HARDWARE I don't trust. Magnetic media ages, moving parts in drives wear out, and capacitors inevitably go bad.

I'd trust it more running on updated hardware using something like FreeDOS (assuming you can find a BIOS based modern mobo) than using truly vintage hardware.

There is no documented "threshhold" - its up to the cops discretion. In general though its more flat rate than percentages. If you're more than 15mph over the limit you're typically going to get pulled over. Between 10-14mph its possible but unlikely. Between 5 and 10mph is very, very unlikely that you get pulled over (I usually drive 7mph over the limit).

If you're pulled over for less than 5mph over the limit the cop likely suspected you of something else and needed an excuse to pull you over.

Certain exceptions will naturally apply (ie they might be harsher in school zones and such).

Very few places are pulling people over for 10mph over. If the budget is tight or its a really small town maybe, but in general most cops don't bother pulling people over for less than 15mph over.

You assume its only a matter of going faster. If I'm transitioning from a 35mph zone to a 65mph zone and the camera misses it I'm now legally OK but stuck at 45 MPH until I pass another speed limit sign.

Nah, you can't have it both ways. I'm I'm bearing the responsibility I have to be able to make a decision.

Yeah - realistically businesses love to suckle the money teat. You're not going to get them off of a revenue source without forcing them off.

China as a market may be very lucrative. Hell the slave trade was very financially lucrative for the Confederacy - that doesn't mean that you get to keep it.

China seemed to be on the path to eventual redemption for a while, but the last 15 years that train has reversed in a major way and either they need to get back on the right path or we need to sever ties.

I didn't say anything about stealing. I said they're prone to lose things. Like literally misplace them and have no idea where they went.

Half the point in them having a computer is learning to use one. Though I'll admit, they probably can avoid such things until 6th or 7th grade. You certainly don't need a computer to learn to read or to do basic math.

Are the ones they're handing students that price? My nieces bring home Chromebooks to do work on, though its been a while since I've looked at them, but as I recall they were a bit of a tougher built model. I'd imagine that the lifespan of your super cheap Chromebooks in the hands of a preteen would be a few months or less.

Your average cheapo laptop/Chromebook just isn't designed to be used daily, much less by someone who doesn't understand how to take care of them.