On the last fillup of my old ICE, I noticed the pump seemed faster than usual, so I timed in my head - about one litre every 1.3 seconds, giving a full tank in 90 seconds.

Even living in an area with a full house with garage, it's really convenient to park on the front verge. Once other members of the house get cars, the verge and driveway will be essential, making it impossible to share a charger in our single garage. Running extension cords across the garden would be silly, as would paying $1000s to install fixed chargers down there.

Still, everyone got used to the daily charging of mobile phones, perhaps this is just an additional inconvenience we'll suffer for the greater advantages.

Related anecdote - our end-of-trip bike room at work has just finished installing chargers for all the e-bikes, so now most of the floor racks are marked "e-bike only". In the car world, we can look forward to finally finding a parking spot then having to reverse back out when we see it say "EV only".

+1 insightful. The other aspect is that The Onion has shifted towards political humour (usually left), possibly an indication of societal polarisation. This type of humour is more serious underneath which works against it. It's difficult to separate my own change and jadedness but I feel they used to take a more abstract and philosophical (or wacky) approach.

Didn't you read the summary? Higher-quality background blurring in Teams meetings! The killer feature that will render non-AI computers obsolete!

But there is something here. iPhones now have NPUs, and I confess to being unaware of the class of apps that makes use of this. Given that the AI that has amazed the world is cloud-based, feeding on massive data models that took mind-boggling amounts of computing power to pre-process, a personal NPU is probably doing something far more modest.

Perhaps Dell was hyping this for publicity, perhaps they were stating a mundane hardware fact and it was the journalists hyping it up. Meanwhile my brand new Dell Precision work laptop with dock doesn't have enough USB ports to plug a thumb drive into*.

* For the record the laptop has one (type-C), the dock has three (type-A, all in use with mouse, keyboard and headset).

It doesn't tell you or give you the option though. If you install W11 and login with your Microsoft account (something you are essentially forced to do) then Bitlocker is on, your recovery key is in the cloud, but nothing is ever mentioned.

My understanding is this legislation is prompted by The Greens, so it's more part of their political grandstanding/vision than solving a real problem. Like you, I don't see Australia has a culture of workers being called up by managers for info or additional work outside of hours. Happy to be shown otherwise, I only work in a single industry.

Yes he is but he's usefully correct here. His definitions are helpful to the financially illiterate person who views anything that can be sold (has value) as an asset and ends up wasting their money on depreciating items. For them his books are a revelation.

For others his books are rambling, motivational fluff. I suspect all of his anecdotes are fiction and most of his wealth came from books sales and the talk circuit, not actual investment.

This has (mostly) always been true. The process for creating professional-sounding music is much easier and more accessible to individuals than the process for creating professional-looking television or videos. Music is probably the most saturated, over-supplied market in the world so will never be profitable for the majority of practitioners.

This is probably one of the reasons why 'Spotify for TV' doesn't exist, and why the multitude of services only contain a sliver of available content even for studios they have agreements with - studios don't want to dilute the market because it lowers the profitability of their new content. The other reason is that TV licensing has always been more convoluted with restrictions differing between countries and regions. Might be to do with the much larger number of people and sub-industries involved. It may happen but will take a long time to sort out.

You're critiquing or deliberately misunderstanding libertarianism. The idea is that the governement (or 'majority of voters' ) cannot compel you to place your resources in the common welfare pool. If the majority wish to do so with their own resources then libertarianism (probably) doesn't find that repugnant.

I do think some of your criticisms are on-point - what is the purpose of liberty? Surely some positive human consequence, not an end in itself.

"Bard, generate me a version of this YouTube video without the ads, paid product placements and remove the presenter's spiel of subscribing and hitting the like button."

This is what the future of ad-blocking may be - an AI intermediary that knows the format you want, in an arms race with the source AI to defeat yours. Similar issues with online game cheating.

uBlock doesn't, but F. B. Purity (https://www.fbpurity.com) does a good job of keeping up in the cat and mouse game of blocking.

The benefit of Xbox Chat would have been obscurity rather than encryption. Obviously this is a guess, but it's unlikely the FBI were hacking or even requesting access from Microsoft to watch the chats. Typically one person has been interviewed over suspicious finanical gain and given up the info willingly.

What you really need is an encrypted chat that does not store sent messages, deletes messages one minute after they are read, and perhaps notifies the sender of the unread/undeleted count. Even then, if one party is stupid and screenshots/notes down you are at risk, and if they are compromised (becomes an informant as above) you are busted when future chats are sent.

This translates as helping manufacturers create the cat equivalent of junk food, where it is tastier but stuffed with less nutritional, cheaper ingredients.

In some countries pet food can only be called "beef" or "chicken" etc. if it contains over 20% of that (I forget the actual percentage but it's well under 50%). So manufacturers can make one batch with 20% each, dye half of it and sell it as a different variety.

Often protected-origin products have to be made a certain way and meet quality standards, e.g. scotch whiskey from Scotland. It's especially true for export. Countries known for wine, for example, have boards that decide whether a certain producer's plonk is good enough to be sold overseas. If not, then sorry, you're deemed to be diluting the reputation and cannot participate in foreign trade. The "free market" tends to be more of a concept within a country than between them, where collusion and manipulation are standard.

Don't downsell it with your cheap sarcasm. All inventions are a continuation of earlier work that introduces a novel element. This is heavily influenced by the solar sails used on satellites, a "wind sail" if you will.