I live in the UK on a post-war terrace*, which means no driveway. It also means that if I wanted to run an extension cord from my house to my car it would cross a public footpath, so there's no charging at home for me at all. Oh, and I work from home as well, so charging an EV would need to happen at the local supermarket (the 90p/60p option I mentioned in the other thread), in a small shopping park (the cheaper option I mentioned, which has been out of order for the past few weeks) or next to a coffee shop on a nearby industrial estate (which I didn't mention because they won't even tell you what they charge without downloading an app, so fuck 'em).

The simple solution - since you don't drive much, extension cord. Unplug it when you're finished - you don't need to keep your car plugged in 24/7 like your laptop. If you aren't on a busy path, you probably could get away with this for a while plugging your car in for an hour or two each day.

The more complex solution is ask your town council to see if you can get a permit to install an outlet by the street for charging. You'll have to pay for an electrician to run a line from your electrical box to the side of the street. Couch it in terms like renewables and being green.

Another solution, petition your electric utility to install a paid charger. It doesn't have to be a fast charger, but they may be amenable to installing a regular AC charger there. They just want to know if there's demand.

Final solution, there are some overhead arches being developed where you can use to hang an extension cord over a sidewalk. It's literally like a pole you put on your property that then carries a cord overhead like an overhead power line. The outlet dangles from it clear of the sidewalk when you want to charge, then you retract it when you're done so people don't steal your electricity.

The reason these solutions are happening is because there are lots of people in the exact same situation as you wanting to be able to own an EV.

Sometimes having a chat with the town council and the electric utility and you might discover they have programs or such

I've been working 42 years, and I certainly feel like I might be running out of power. And that's with vacations and weekends off, which poor Voyager doesn't get (perhaps they should've joined a better union?).

In America, Bloomberg also reports 605 high-speed EV charging stations switched on in just the first three months of 2025, "a 34% increase over the year-earlier period," according to their analysis of federal data. A data platform focused on EV infrastructure tells Bloomberg that speedier and more reliable chargers are convincing more drivers to go electric and use public plugs.

This almost certainly has more to do with the recent closure of numerous court cases which were brought by various states against the Trump administration after Trump arbitrarily blocked the disbursement of allocated funds that Congress had previously approved for the purchase of those chargers. Unsuprisingly, Trump has lost just about all of those cases since his behavior is clearly unconstitutional.

I think that, despite the undeniable pain and suffering Trump has caused, we should thank our lucky stars that he's prioritized toady-ism over subject matter competence when filling roles during Trump 2. As bad as it's been, it could've been much worse. And it seems increasingly likely he's going to lose both the House AND the Senate this fall.

Alcohol is a flawed comparison. The only positive use alcohol has is as entertainment and even that is problematic. With a "screen", you may be reading a book, learning some things or doom-scrolling.

The main problem is IMO that some content is designed to be addictive. Most social media is trying to be. LLMs are dramatically so. But other stuff is not.

I mostly agree, but I also remember (this was back in the 1980s) a feeling of being inducted into a special fraternity and learning its arcane secrets.

It's funny because, in my home office right now, I still have a SyQuest EZ 135 drive sitting on a high shelf. Hadn't been touched for probably 25+ years until just now, when I pulled it down to remind myself what brand it was.

I have a vague memory of needing to do something similar with an old HP size-of-a-portable-dishwasher disk drive from my very first job. Couldn't tell you what it was, though.

Funnily enough, (somewhat later than your story) I recall my teammates and I spending literally months convincing our still-in-love-with-tapes boss that instead of expanding our tape library, we could get better utility and save money by deploying a couple backup servers (one onsite, one elsewhere) with nice big RAIDs.

Large format projections beyond IMAX do exist, but the generally have very little hold. Most cinema formats have not held - many have been tested over the decades and most have done away.

Theatre owners will likely not invest in the equipment if there's no promising market - they've been promised a lot in the past and been stuck with equipment they bought and no longer used.

True IMAX using 18/70 (18 perf 70 mm) are rare - there are only 30 theatres in the world who can play that (it's a legacy format). Most lost the capability when IMAX moved to digital. The remaining 18/70 theatres will likely remain because there is interest in the format, and to recoup the investment. An 18/70 print costs around $100K and it's something the theatres keep, which is a rarity. Even in the days of 35mm, most theatres would rent the film instead of purchase them so at the end of the run they'd return them. And in the digital age, well, they don't own anything - the projectors have to get a license key every time they show a movie, and that key gets the theatre charged for the showing. They also have another key that unlocks the movie for a set time period.

Disney does have the marketing might to push their own IMAX system, but theatre owners will be watching - if it remains Disney only, they may only stick with IMAX as it's basically booked all the time, while a Disney system will only be used for the few Disney films released

IMAX requirements are harsh - but it's because they hold a standard. The screen must have a certain reflectivity to it (it's changed every 5 years). The sound is calibrated and adjusted - the theatre actually cannot change the volume. If they do adjust the volume, IMAX can remote change it back and the bulb life and brightness is carefully monitored. But that's also why they can charge a premium ticket price for it - you're getting a presentation that's designed to be the same and well presented and adjusted. I've been in way too many theatres where the sound is too loud and having too much bass I felt sick. The premium IMAX ones the bass gives you a nice kick when it needs to but is otherwise restrained. They take advantage of dynamic range.

Of course, I'm referring to real IMAX theatres, and not the moder prevalent "LieMAX" ones which are converted screens. Disney would have a far easier time competing with Liemax

It was remarkable because we had two different media that were not working for us.

You had floppy disks, where their 1440 kiB/1.44MB (yes, they mixed both IEC and SI units in one format) capacity was limiting. You also had CD-ROMs, which was a great way to mass-distribute large amounts of data, but only in a read only format. hard drives ranged from a couple hundred megabytes to a few gigabytes.

If you needed to move data, the lucky ones had networks, else you had to pack them on multiple floppies. And software taking 20+ floppies was becoming standard if you couldn't count on the user having a CD-ROM. CD burners were around, but were generally expensive and fairly niche devices with media being $20 a pop. And coasters were common.

Zip disks arrived at this time - the perfect transition medium to carry large amounts of data around without an obscenely large amount of disks.

They died not just because of their unreliability, but that burning CDs became a thing making it easy to move data around, and USB flash disks, while expensive, were getting to be a usable amount of storage as well.

Jaz drives had a fatal problem - they did not have an auto-park mechanism like hard drives had. If the power was lost to the drive, the heads will crash onto the platters. And the insertion/removal of the cartridges would often slightly damage the clutch that connects the spindle motor to the platters which result in the clutch falling apart and damaging the coupling even more. They only worked if you religiously ejected them prior to shutting down your PC.

Someone has to have physical control to get to that data

You make it seem like that's hard.

It's not hard - junkyards are common. After an accident, custody of the car may no longer be yours - between law enforcement and your insurance company, they may have legal possession of the physical vehicle.

Often times a lot of that data can be extracted without dismantling the car - the OBD II port often lets you get at the data.

All cars with ABS, for example, will have the last few seconds of the car telemetry (speed, throttle, brake, steering wheel, etc) recorded on it prior to activation in the ABS control unit. Basically every car has a hidden telemetric recorder - a black box - recording details on every drive. That records everything, and insurance companies are known for going after people who take it when they get possession.

I have an actual old car, and it doesn't store any data, what-so-ever, and doesn't report it to anyone.

The qualifier for "classic car" is around 25 years. This includes cars made at the turn of the millennium now which generally means fairly modern ones are "old cars" now.

Even 10 year old cars are fairly modern - may not be connected, but still often have a "black box" of data.

Things like an airbag controller have access to the entire wealth of car telemetry and all store the last few seconds of that data into memory prior to airbag activation.

Basically now any car with an OBD II port can be considered "old".

Well, data science isn't exactly new - big data was something that's been trying to be analyzed for well over a decade. AI hasn't really helped much in the area - it's helped digest it, but it hasn't been able to generate insights.

The only thing we've been able to do is generate a ton more data, and we're needing AI to crunch through it all, so a lot of the data science is getting the the information prepped for AI in a way useful for it.

But here, AI isn't replacing jobs, it's actually needed to manage the flood of data being collecting and the data scientist is needed to work along AI to get your insights.

As for engineering, there's lots that need work. Civil engineers are needed to beef up aging and failing infrastructure. Electrical engineers are needed especially for power systems (the grid is aging, and we're trying to push more for those AI data centers or for handling EVs and stuff). Mechanical engineers are needed to deal with all sorts of HVAC for data centers or for the upcoming automation for those onshoring projects.

The problem is generally the work is cyclical. Civil engineers is basically a government job and subject to the whims and politics of people in power. While power engineers are in high demand because the aging grid and the need to modernize, it's political power play because the stuff you want, the stuff you get, and the stuff you can use change at the drop of a hat, and you'll have to deal with the legacy of equipment that lasts decades. Or stuff installed two decades ago that was supposed to revolutionize things, and was installed as a test experiment, but cannot be upgraded but must be supported

FISA was passed in 1978, and was the worst thing to come out of the Carter Administration (which was actually pretty good about most other aspects of privacy so it's doubtful he envisioned the way it's subsequently metastasized.)

It was expanded post 9/11 to increase surveillance powers. Before it was foreign intelligence only. post 9/11 it included on American soil, if at least one end was foreign.

So before 9/11, it would apply to what the CIA could gather between say, a Canadian and a French person but not if either talked to an American. Post 9/11, it would include surveillance between that Canadian and an American, and the French person to an American.

And that American's conversation could be recorded freely without a warrant, because they were talking to someone foreign.

The Republican holdouts wanted it to become warranted - that to search that database, if it involved an American, it would require a warrant per normal legal rights on every other American out there. The surveillance would've happened, but to legally act on it would now require a warrant. The others wanted it returned back to the original version.

From now on, I'm only drinking soda in October.

You might be referring to Mexican Coke, but American Coke did go back to using cane sugar.

The problem is, though, Fructose isn't a stable sugar in acid - it breaks down to glucose. It takes about 2 weeks for it to do so, after which it gets much harder to tell if it used cane sugar or HFCS even with a mass spectrometer. There are tells, but you're starting to dig into the noise for that. It's about two weeks at room temperature - if you warm it up it speeds up, if you chill it it slows down.

By the time the bottle of coke was bottled at the factory, send to the distribution warehouse, sent to the retailer warehouse, sent to your store, it's been around a month. Nominally at room temperature since there's no need to keep it cold at all. If you're in the south, it'll convert even faster.

Now even though it converts to glucose, that doesn't mean there aren't other tells between cane sugar and HFCS - it's like using artificial vanilla vs. real vanilla extract. Vanillin is the main ingredient that gives vanilla its taste, but the real stuff has other things to it. Just like refined cane sugar still has other things beyond sucrose and glucose.

ACS Reactions (ACS - American Chemical Society - the chemistry association) did an interesting set of videos on it - first just seeing what the hubbub was about Mexican Coke. Then did a followup later on with a mass spectrometer and access to a case of freshly bottled cola from a local manufacturer using cane sugar for more analysis.