Except it won't, for three reasons

• Using PHEVs on workplace charging is really wasteful, because they charge up in three hours, but you're there all day, and swapping cars around really doesn't work very well, so you typically end up with low charger utilization.
• If people don't install a charger at home when they get a car, they usually won't ever install one.
• Chargers in random locations can actually be more expensive than gasoline.

It's not an infrastructure problem. Hybrids are intrinsically a mistake. It's just too much easier to keep using them as ICE cars and not put in home chargers, and without home chargers, you're going to end up doing most of your miles on gasoline.

Apple made that change in March of 2015. The EU didn't even *start* talking about standardizing on USB-C until roughly January of 2020. So I can't say for sure what made them start using separate cables, but I can say with near absolute certainty that the reason was *not* regulatory pressure from the EU.

The study said that they're better: 19% better. That's not nothing! It's just not the 75% better that lab testing showed.

The link you provided is the experience of one driver, one who is conscientious and focused on minimizing fuel consumption (within reason; hypermilers would do better). The study looked at the real-world results across 800,000 drivers, most of whom apparently didn't take so much care to minimize fuel usage.

Also, it's not true in general that "hybrids use generators rather than ICE". That's true of PHEVs that are strictly serial hybrids, but most are series-parallel or "power split" hybrids, meaning they can drive the wheels with the electric motor, or the combustion engine, or both. Often both the electric motor and the ICE are too small to provide the target maximum performance so must be used in parallel when you step hard on the accelerator.

One fascinating strategy for power splitting is "through the road", which has no mechanical connection at all between the ICE and the traction motor, and uses the wheel-driven traction motor as the generator. The way it works is the ICE drives one axle and the traction motor drives the other. Battery charging is done "through the road", using the road itself to transmit power from the ICE-driven axle to the electrically-driven axle. The ICE spins one pair of wheels, driving the vehicle forward, which forces the other pair of wheels to spin which turns the electric motor which charges the battery. This only makes sense in AWD drive cars but it's peak design elegance.

"repairable"? Its a system on a chip. For the most part ... either it works or it doesn't. There's not much to repair. That said.. yeah, I've got an intellivision flashback that died pretty quickly - so i guess its a valid concern.

I'm disappointed in the game selection on the Spirit. It doesn't have the Dungeons and Dragons games (which also go by minotaur and crown of kings to avoid licensing the DnD name).

It does say it sports a usb port for "game expansion" - so maybe there's a way in there. (official or otherwise).

HDMI and wireless are nice though. I really can't be bothered to hook the original one up with its its whole ancient antenna hookup system. The flashback was nice while it lasted because it was at least RCA. I use jzintv now on a PC.

I currently have usb adapters for both the original system controllers and the littler ones that came with the intellivision flashback a few years ago - works very well.

But wireless would be nice, so I might still buy it for the controllers if someone figures out how to get them working with a PC.

If 100% of jobs meet some standard, we'll pick a higher standard. For example, consider the standard that employees not be chained to their benches, fed nothing but moldy bread and be brutally whipped if the overseer feels like it. 100% of legitimate jobs in the US exceed that standard. OSHA exists to ensure that jobs meet minimum workplace safety standards and minimum wage laws ensure that jobs pay at least a certain amount, so we don't discuss whether jobs meet those standards, we take them as a given and set the quality bar higher.

If a study finds that 40% of jobs meet some standard, it means that the researchers did a reasonably good job of writing a description of the median job, then tweaked it upward just a bit. It's not like there is some universal, eternal standard for what constitutes a "quality job". It would be interesting to take the current standard and apply to historical working conditions, 50, 100, 200, 500 years ago. I'll bet the 1975 percentage would be half of the 2026 percentage and the older percentages would quickly tail off to ~0.

Of course if you get rid of capitalism then you get a different systemic problem, massive shortfalls in production, making everyone worse off. Much like democracy, capitalism is the worst system except for all of the others.

FWIW, my profession was computer programmer. I was also an artist using various traditional media. (Not professional grade, but not bad, either.) I didn't like it for itself, but only for social reasons.

So....
Artist is an ill-defined term, but since any piece of garbage text is (automatically) copyright, I see absolutely no reason that a cleverly manipulated bunch of pigments shouldn't be copyright, no matter WHAT tool was used to create it. And no matter how *I* rate it's esthetic appeal.

OTOH, what this really means is that I think the copyright laws are a foul mess, and should be repealed. But with the laws as they are currently implemented, there's no reasonable justification for refusing to grant a copyright.

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

There's a chance I might have accidentally caused that. Way back, when the original MagSafe chargers were around — probably about 2008 or 2009 — I filed a Radar asking for removable MagSafe cables, pointing out that I kept having to throw away $80 chargers over a $10 cable, and that this had been a problem with every Mac charger I had ever owned from the PowerBook 145 all the way up to the MagSafe stuff. And I pointed out that having removable MagSafe cables would also provide a permanent solution to the problem of external battery makers not being able to provide cables that hook up to the MacBook. I think I laid out a pretty solid case for why the charger cables should be detachable.

To be fair, the transition to USB-C might have been the only factor, and my bug might have just sat in some hardware team's queue and never gotten looked at, but other companies do build USB-C supplies with non-detachable cables, so I like to think that maybe at the very least seeing my bug might have gotten someone thinking about the possibility.

I wonder if somebody got to close that Radar as "Hardware Changed" a decade after I filed it. I wonder if somebody is looking for that bug now, trying to get credit for closing it. :-D

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

That's "would be legal under this act", but if, say, ChatGPT collected non-public data (I believe it does, but probably not about rents) then iwould it be legal? And if it merely collected "a wide span of data in various formats" it could plausibly have the same practical effect. So some would be inspired to write an additional piece of legislation.

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

AI will probably add some interesting twists to this. Will it be illegal to ask ChatGPT "What should I rent my house for?"?

Folger's Crystals already did this experiment this back in the 1980s. Then they publicized the results ad nauseam.

No.

This room-temperature ice is simply a plot device that demonstrates the sheer stupidity of human behavior.