I'm sure that serving you a lot of ads is the point of the excessive length of internet recipes, but there's another reason, too. A simple list of ingredients, or a list of instructions (like how to build Ikea furniture) cannot be copyrighted. I think many of these overly verbose recipe authors really do want to make it appear that their own takes on the recipes are distinct and innovative, and that helps them secure their own content from being scraped wholesale. But of course, AI just says, "fuck it, I can summarize," and it's pretty hard to prove it was your recipe it summarized..

A few reasons. First, depending on the age and use of the battery of the Leaf, it may well be due for a new one. A quick Google search shows that those things are between $5,000 and $15,000 depending on model; I'm not saying $20,000 puts the vehicle in 'rich person' territory, but it DOES put it in the realm of off-lease ICE vehicles.

But the real reason your scenario is a "rich person's car", is the first half - "around town". A car with 100-200 miles of range on a single charge assumes that there is a secondary vehicle to use; lower-middle class buyers may well have two cars, but the idea that one would get an EV with known limitations comes from the notion that one has multiple vehicles at their disposal depending on need.

Similarly, a vehicle with a relatively low range would require frequent charging, to which the most likely answer is "so charge it overnight". That's correct - with the installed charger on the side of one's HOME, right? Such a vehicle would be a troubling proposal for anyone renting a basement apartment, or living in an apartment complex which does not have chargers available, and many complexes don't even have garages or any form of parking available, requiring one uses street parking. If one lives in such a place, one would have to move in order to accommodate the "charge overnight" plan.

Alternatively, one would need to go to a charging station more than once a week, and the Leaf doesn't (to my knowledge) do the ultra-fast charging...so, one would have to have enough time to charge at class-1 or class-2 charging speeds, plus a potential wait time for the charger's availability, in order to make *that* plan work...which means that the owner probably couldn't have a second job, because that 30-90 minutes would likely come at the expense of one job or the other...unless one happens to have a job with a charger, but one would then need enough job security to ensure their car would not start becoming a liability after the first round of layoffs.

So you're right, the *car* isn't expensive. The *infrastructure* that makes 200-or-fewer miles of range an invisible source of limitation is the expensive part.

Unfortunately, I think at least a *part* of it has indeed been the unintended consequences of Obama-era legislation.

From the 70's through the 90's, we had station wagons. They were the family car, along with the minivan. They got 20-30 MPG, and could fit between five and eight passengers, depending on model. In the 2000s, minivans and SUVs became a bit more popular, but the station wagon still existed.

Then, the MPG mandates came. Cars had to get a certain amount of MPG, irrespective of other factors (e.g. not MPG/passenger). A car that fit seven passengers simply couldn't physically make that possible. So, the station wagon died...and instead of getting 30MPG in a car, people got 15-20MPG in an SUV, because they were classed as 'trucks', which weren't required to meet those criteria.

So, anyone who would have *wanted* a smaller, car-like way of transporting larger amounts of people or things, were stuck getting an SUV or a minivan. The squeeze continued, because the sedans that *did* exist had ever-more-stringent MPG requirements placed on them, which tended to involve design changes that reduced cargo space in many cases.

Also, with more and more higher vehicles, driving a regular car means getting blinded at night with floodlights from cars at mirror-level right behind (I *always* have to turn my side mirrors down to the point of uselessness in order to avoid getting blinded by SUVs behind me), and the feeling (irrespective of accuracy) that an accident between a sedan and an SUV involves the SUV walking away with a fender replacement, and the sedan driver ending up in the morgue.

I remember a few years ago, going to California for the first time and taking note of what was driving with me on Interstate 5. California - tree-hugging, forest-fire-having, $7/gallon-gasoline California...3/4 of the vehicles within visible distance were SUVs. Really? *ALL* of them wanted an SUV purely as status symbols, and wouldn't have preferred a station wagon, or something like it, if they were both available and common enough that they felt safe in them? Don't get me wrong, I love getting 51MPG in my Elantra...but you can't tell me that the laws intended to push automakers to make that possible didn't end up putting at least *some* pressure on consumers.

For Aldi, which uses Instacart, I assumed it was because there is no 'fee' for pickup, but they have to pay someone to shop for you. I consider the difference a convenience fee.

That said, by not shopping in store, I end up getting only what is on my list and end up paying FAR LESS than I would if I was wandering around.

It's true, seifs are for ease of reading ... but so is Calibri. However, I believe Calibri was created for ease of reading on screens, while this article talks about documents on letterhead. So it's possible the choice of Calibri was misguided to begin with. Furthermore, according to the article, the number of “accessibility-based document remediation cases” – which I take to mean instances where somebody requests a document be reformatted for accessibility reasons – has not declined. So he's saying that, while this is a purely subjective aesthetic choice, the original change to Calibri never helped anything anyway.

Everything is gambling now.

Meanwhile, the most preventable of diseases are becoming commonplace.

It'd make my year if he went back to that. Ever since Hasbro bought them, they've looked like these useless contraptions made by Dr. Seuss; we need to get back to the CPS2000 and the other turn-of-the-century models that were actually effective at their intended purpose.

The Windows 10 Decrapifier Script, combined with most of the tweaks available in WinUtil should reduce your workload pretty effectively.

Sad it needs to happen...but I hope it helps streamline things for you.

True as that may be...for $2,450, one could buy a Galaxy S25 *AND* an S10+ Tablet *AND* a Michael Kors bag to put them in.

Or, with a few compromises...one could buy a Galaxy S25FE, a Galaxy Tab S10FE, a Samsung Galaxy Book 5 2-in-1, *and* a leather Samsonite briefcase to carry it all.

Props to Samsung for figuring out a way to enable those with a pile of money to visibly demonstrate their affluence, but that price tag is so eye-wateringly high that there's no amount of functionality that can justify just buying a phone and a tablet.

Yeah yeah, it's an easy shot to just say, "Trump would harm the environment if he knew there was progress made somewhere"...and for the record, I have *never* voted for him. ...but I think the fact that a number of comments in the thread echo the sentiment reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. The ban on CFCs worked effectively due to global cooperation, but also because of another reason: it was an incredibly easy transition.

There was no ban on in-home refrigerators or freezers. There was no mandatory removal of existing home refrigerators. There was no mandate that cars were sold without air conditioners. There was no fine for using hair spray. Industry had drop-in replacements that worked at least 90% as well, were of similar cost, and worked with existing systems which required those chemicals for operation.

Had the CFC ban required buildings to do six-figure HVAC replacements, or mandate that new cars didn't have air conditioners at all, or perform a blanket-ban on aerosol products completely, or require everyone to replace their refrigerators, or if HFCs were a.) ten times the price, b.) required a top-off once a month, and/or c.) only got half as cold, it'd still be a wedge issue and that hole would be triple the size.

Peel back the layers of rhetoric and sensationalism, and you'll see that there is an element of truth behind a lot of the pushback. Did anyone like drinking through those paper straws that tasted like toilet paper tubes? No; they were about as universally unpopular as a colonoscopy, and I've never once seen a report that they nudged the needle on improving the environment.

My state is talking about banning gas cars and gas stoves and gas furnaces...but over 80% of the electricity generated in my state is generated by...burning oil and natural gas. Does burning oil pollute less when my local power plant does it instead of my car? ...So why is the Red Team in my deeply-blue state so backwards-thinking for pushing back against a ban that won't meaningfully improve its carbon footprint while *also* causing homebuilding prices to go up, *and* gas prices to go up, *and* insurance prices to go up, *and* electric rates to go up?

The CFC ban was easy *because* it was trivial to implement, and caused little to no impact on consumers as a result. I'm pretty sure that *most* environmental regulations would receive bipartisan support and consumer acceptance if they were that easy to do...but somehow, the Red Team are the curmudgeons who don't care about the environment because they don't want to drink cardboard or give up gas stoves to achieve no meaningful improvement on climate change numbers. They're terrible, uneducated, backwater hicks for saying, "build enough climate-friendly grid capacity to handle the expected increase in usage and THEN roll out the mandates", especially when those who shame them suddenly start saying, "not in MY backyard" when windmills and solar panels start getting proposed in THEIR neighborhoods...

...so yeah, Trump's rhetoric on the climate is terrible, no argument. The Republicans *generally* give more pushback on climate initiatives than Democrats, fair. But the CFC ban worked because HFCs were cheap, easy, effective, drop-in replacements, ready to go by time the bans took effect. When climate solutions look like that, they get implemented. When they look like an expensive headache for nominal improvements, they get pushback.

Want proof? Who was the US president who signed on to the Montreal Protocol in 1987? Ronald Reagan. Who was president when it went into effect in 1989? George H.W. Bush.

I got a desktop computer in 1995. It had a 686 Cyrix at 166MHz, 16MB of RAM, an 8x CD-ROM, 1.6 GB hard disk...and it was one of the fastest computers in my circle. By 2001, it was unusable. USB was on its way to replacing serial and parallel peripherals, which Windows 95 didn't support. 166MHz was slow, compared to the 600MHz P3's that were available (and a year later, they'd hit 1GHz). 48MB of RAM was nothing (64MB was common, 256MB was available), and while 1.6GB was a bottomless pit when Word documents was all I was creating, and 50MB installations for video games were considered pigs, 10GB drives were available...and needed for the CDs I was ripping into MP3s. Six years of computer progress was clear, obvious, palpable, and using the old computer had a clear feeling of constraint.

Today, unless you're doing local AI, 8K video rendering, or a handful of other niche applications, a 6-year-old computer will be perfectly usable. Six years ago, SSDs were already the default, 6-core CPUs were the default, and it was right at the cusp of when 16GB became mainstream. A six year old computer is perfectly usable for most tasks. It runs current iterations of OSes (admittedly a 6-year-old Mac might not because of the OSX shelf life on Intel), it *might* need a RAM upgrade, and it *might* benefit from a newer SSD to some extent...but while a 6-year difference was night-and-day in 2000, it's turned into "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".

And, so too it is with phones. The difference between the iPhone 4 and iPhone 8 was readily understood and appreciated by most users; the storage capacity increases, camera improvements, FaceID implementation, Apple Wallet/NFC, bidirectional lightning cable, and screen size increase were all understood, palpable, and basically sold themselves. I went through the Wikipedia page to get a feel for what changed between the 13 and the 17...and the answers were the satellite connectivity (that may-or-may-not-work depending on carrier), Apple Intelligence (that they famously are still trying to get off the ground), the dynamic island, a few more camera improvements, and colors...oh, and they are more expensive now.

Samsung is kinda the same deal; the foldable phones are nifty, but at $2,000, one can get a phone, a laptop, *and* a tablet for the same price...and the difference between an S21 and an S25 is similarly uninspiring for a $1,000 upgrade.

So yeah, phones have gotten "good enough" for most people, they've been that way for a while, despite the price tags more frequently involving commas. So...yeah...makes perfect sense that with more money expected for less improvement...that 3-year-old phones are the norm now.

It's just below IRC and just above Usenet.

Hate to disappoint...but it was exactly that for longer than it was the P2P network from which it got its notoriety.

Circa 2003, Napster came back as a legit music seller, just like iTunes. They spent a few years selling DRM'd WMA files, but they were between a rock and a hard place because Apple wouldn't license the iTunes DRM that worked on iPods, nor would they license Microsoft's WMA format, and the RIAA wasn't about to let them sell ordinary MP3 files without DRM (God knows how Amazon managed to score that deal)...so, Napster blamed Microsoft for the fact that their sales paled in comparison to Apple.

I'd argue that they were also a bit ahead of their time; Napster To Go was a monthly subscription service that used Microsoft's Janus DRM to enforce subscriptions...the Slashdot crowd hated the DRM at the time, but in a pre-LTE era, that was pretty much how subscription music on mobile was going to happen...and several years later, we have Spotify, which is basically the successor of Napster To Go, enforcing its DRM by other means. They also had a short-lived partnership with XM Radio that allowed subscribers to listen to linear streams of certain music channels, in turn allowing rental or purchases of songs that were liked while broadcast. A decade later, Shazam would do that with Apple Music and audio recognition, but Napster implemented a rudimentary version of the idea before Apple implemented iMessage.

In 2011, Rhapsody acquired Napster, but their niche was in licensing to other businesses. While they kept the "Spotify from Temu or Wish.com" setup for a while, their real bread and butter was in licensing to other companies; many of those music channels available on cable subscriptions were Rhapsody on the back end. They also did 'compliant music for businesses', similar to Muzak and other companies who pumped music into stores and bars and things. Amusingly enough, Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster, and continued on the model, going through a handful of private equity firms, until earlier this year, when once again, the company found itself in court...again...due to unpaid licensing fees.

So...yeah, while they've floundered around for a number of reasons (some their fault, some not), they were a P2P service for about three years...and a (mostly) law-abiding corporation for over 20...and most of the highlights were posted as articles here on Slashdot.

In fairness...

1.) Cisco is far less litigation happy than Oracle is. Not saying they don't have attorneys on retainer, but Oracle is frequently referred to as a law firm with a software sales division - very different tiers.

2.) Cisco owned Linksys for a while, sure, but they haven't owned it in nearly 15 years - Cisco sold it over to Belkin back in 2013, who in turn sold it to Foxconn around 2018.

3.) Cisco may have discontinued selling routers running Linux out of the box, but they never did any signed-bootloader shenanigans that prevented DD-WRT/Tomato/OpenWRT from running on routers for quite some time - I remember running Shibby's TomatoUSB on an AC3200 for quite some time. Ironically, I think Belkin later started making it nearly-impossible to run third party firmware on Linksys hardware (except the $400 ones).

4.) It's not like anyone else took up the mantle...a handful of routers can run OpenWRT, but they're from obscure vendors - it's not like Cisco got rid of OSS-running routers, only to have Belkin or Netgear or D-Link take it up...Asus did for a little bit (the N56U being a better example), but they didn't keep up with it.

So yeah, Cisco has its clear faults...but how they handled the consumer router division, in my opinion, isn't the best example of this problem...and certainly not when being compared to Oracle.