*what NOT everyone can afford to do...

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.

I did the maths on the BBC article and it turned out that they made something like £76 REVENUE per customer per year. God knows what the actual profit was per customer. You'd literally do better just selling oranges by the side of the road.

They were clearly just haemorraghing money from the start and it just never took off.

I know of only one couple who ever used them and they lived a weird lifestyle. Lived in a stupidly expensive part of London and had to get a Zipcar or similar to even go grocery shopping. Every time they went somewhere, they had to find a Zipcar. Even if they were planning a week away, they spent a long time trying to book and track down and GET TO a Zipcar if there wasn't one nearby.

Irony was that, unusually for those kinds of places in London, they lived in a gated community with parking and so could have just... bought a car and parked it there.

Unregulated currency = money laundering.

It's the only reason for Bitcoin to exist.

Comparatively, nobody touches the regulated cryptocurrencies because... they don't facilitate money laundering.

It's like cash in that respect. The only reason for any business to choose to deal exclusively in cash is to facilitate money-laundering. And all the big money laundering operations are usually hidden around cash-only businesses.

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

competing with spaceX is tough indeed, how exactly would you propose the Chinese bill uncle Sam for billions, consistently launching empty oversized buckets that burn up while delivering a banana to the Indian ocean?

So many questions, so many dollars.

And wham, pre-reviews show folding and creases, like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Thick and heavy for a phone, but if you want something that can be an actual tablet, you gotta make some serious trade-offs. When when using it as a phone OR tablet on a table, there is that bulge with the cameras so it can't sit flat. And that inner big screen is soft and scratch-prone. Hmm.

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

I've seen videos of these waymo lots and it is far and away the most idiotic system designed by people who are probably rather intelligent.

The problem is insisting that a charging depot for autonomous cars should look and behave as a traditional car park. It should be a fully enclosed garage, to keep out the rifraff, with a palletized racking system. When there is vacancy, the car would be signaled to drive onto the pallet, and the robot in the garage slots it into an available spot, silently. When the charge is complete, the car is put back out to the road and oriented such that it doesn't need to back out.

It could be built underground, above ground or adjacent to a traditional car garage. The neighborhood would be insulated from equipment noise, car noise, and it would occupy a fraction of the real estate.

"Society" isn't a monolith. Choosing to dwell on the bad to the exclusion of good is just that, a choice.

Plenty of clear-eyed, clear-headed yet well-adjusted individuals have survived and found some measure of happiness, if not prosperity, under Communism, serfdom, and everything before and since. "The injustice of it all" is demonstrably *not* too much for people who are capable of compartmentalizing.

Yeah. Better lock it down so it only allows posting on slashdot.

>"In practice, it is seen more as an unwanted evil, like car crashes, than as bad choices that needs the attention of family members or mental health professionals."

What it needs to be is children not having unsupervised access to devices that have unrestricted internet access. Social media is certainly detrimental, but there are millions of other "dangerous to children" sites/apps, not to mention texting or media'ing to/from strangers. Children cannot comprehend or deal with the crap they read/see/hear on the Internet. In many, it can cause all kinds of agitation, addiction, bullying, psychoses, dysmorphia, depression, obsession, suicidality, etc.

Children do not need smart phones. If the parents want their children to have them, then the responsible thing is to lock them down with a very small whitelist of safe sites and apps, and call/text/media only to/from known contacts that the parent knows and approves. Same goes for tablets/laptops/desktops.

There is tons of good educational stuff available for devices without the risk of being brainwashed, picked on by other children, sucked into conspiracies, led down who-knows-what rabbit holes with hallucinating AI's, groomed by pedophiles, amplifying any stupid thing they might have ever written, lured into scams, thrust into adult concepts and conflicts, etc. It is hard being a minor, why would a parent want to make it 100 times worse? So it is convenient to shut them up? Because "all my friends do it"? Because it is cheap "entertainment"?

Yeah, because it's the nomenclature that's uncomfortable, not the reality it described.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

you understand that the war that was supposed to last for maybe a week or two is now closing on 4 years, right? That all of the western powers were absolutely certain that prior to 2022 ruzzia was a world level super power with the military that was somewhere in the top 2 or 3 maybe, right? That this supposed super power was stopped by a country with 1/3 to 1/4 of the population, with 1/28 of size, with no oil or gas mining to speak of. Today ruzzia is occupying significantly less territory than at the end of 2022 as well because Ukraine got some of the territory back, for example the city of Kherson and most of Kharkhiv region.

More than that, Ukraine was able to enter ruzzian territory for whatever purpose and was able to hold some of it for about 6 months.

Currently ruzzia is actually a much more dangerous enemy than it was in 2022 to the rest of Europe, it gained enough knowledge, learned new tactics and is capable of taking out any European army in a conventional fight, I am certain of it. Should Ukraine fail and fall, putin will attack Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and then will go further and nobody will stop him without nuclear weapons if the USA decides to retreat, the Europeans are not in a fighting mood and will not be dying for their homes, they will be enslaved by putin if nuclear weapons are not used, this is certain. Europe's best chance at preventing this is seriously helping Ukraine, at this point with some man power as well.

As to the story we are talking about, ruzzia does not have factory capacity to build a new 8U216 service cabin and this has nothing to do with 'brilliance of people they are attacking', you are not reading me correctly. I am saying they do not have the capacity, they do not have the resources to manufacture this cabin unless they actually stop the war, retreat and restart normal manufacturing. It is also unclear that this type of a cabin can be built at any of their plants, maybe at the Cherepovets metallurgical plant. There is a reason why the USSR was manufacturing this thing in Kramatorsk and it wasn't about brilliance, it was about capacity, ability to handle a task of this magnitude. What, do you think you can just turn any factory into something that can manufacture a structure of this size and complexity? You are the one living in a fantasy world.