Is this finally the year of Linux on the desktop?
Is anyone here old enough to remember that joke?

Batteries are too expensive because they are too big; supposedly to deal with Americans' range anxiety (a situation mostly created by big oil propaganda). American EVs are big, heavy SUVs and crossovers with giant batteries for long range despite the fact that many people just need to commute back and forth to work. It's almost impossible to find a small, light commuter EV in the US (or even a commuter gas-powered car for that matter). European and Asian carmakers have no problem producing affordable compact and subcompact EVs.

In many ways, a plug-in hybrid is the worst of both worlds. When running on gasoline, it's less efficient than a normal hybrid vehicle because it's hauling around the extra weight of an unused larger battery. When running on electricity, it's less efficient than a full electric vehicle because it's hauling around the extra weight of an unused internal combustion engine and fuel tank.

However, when it comes to vehicles, many people are oddly willing to put up with a lot of inefficiencies in the name of occasional convenience or peace-of-mind. How many people drive a pickup with a huge cargo bed that only gets used a couple times a year?

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

art is made by artists, not robots

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

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?

They mandated CCS2 for electric vehicles.

MacBooks do comply with the EU standard because you can charge them via the USB-C port. The fact that there is an additional option for charging isn't a problem.

Apple do supply the attachable cables. I've got the UK, Euro, Swiss, and Italian ones for my charger, but I did have to visit the Apple shops in the respective countries to buy them.

Only Apple has the courage to remove the plus from their name.

Surely it must be possible to write a law in a way that bans the likes of NordVPN without banning the VPN I use to phone home from outside, or connect to my work's internal network?

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Doesn't removing the artist's signature usually reduce the value of a work?

That this isn't the case for Sora 2, tells me something about Sora 2's reputation.

Yes there is, because MacOS is an immutable distro, so you don't get to modify the kernel.
Immutible linux distros were also immune, but mutible distros (most of the mainstream ones) were not.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"