It's probably the fact that motors are made to dissipate large amounts of energy. The issue with the EMP gun is that, A.) Most cars are made of metal, which would shunt the moving electrical field, and B.) an electric motor would convert an induced current into a torque differential. So, depending on the polarity, an EMP which manages to get around the metal box is just going to be converted into a small acceleration or deceleration.

Because motors of the size necessary to move a vehicle deal with moving electrical/magnetic fields, the control circuitry must be able to withstand voltages far in excess of the rated voltage of the motor. What happens when a wheel locks and the armature comes to a sudden stop? The magnetic field collapses, with a sudden increase in voltage. Electrical engineers know this, and design accordingly.

The bigger issue is what an EMP would do to engine control components in a typical ICE vehicle, because the wires leading to the ECM are typically not shielded, and the ECM's themselves are only built to deal with 18V.

We should never design software to suit the lowest common denominator of a user who never bothered to understand how the software worked in the first place.

Microsoft has consistently tried to present a user interface model where the user doesn't have to understand how the software works. The idea is that if you need someone to explain it to you, the UI engineer has failed. As much as we like to pillory Microsoft for bad design decisions, UI is one of the few aspects of their design that they've actually gotten right, and the notion that someone would RTFM is entirely foreign to their user base. This is why, even though Linux is more reliable and more secure, and costs less, it hasn't made inroads into the desktop world, even though it's been usable by the average person for more than a quarter century.

A great many things in life can be understood when one realizes the average person avoids thought as if it were a disease.

If the appeal of an Apple product is to signal class superiority, why would they advertise features at all? Why do TTS if your userbase instead uses your product not for it's functionality, but for social status? Apple used to produce leading edge products but it seems they're so far behind they're now going for the computer nostalgia market.

You mean like I have been able to do with my android phone for the past half decade?

That's fair. My bad for jumping to conclusions. There is a depressing element of misogyny online and it truly baffles me. I'm in the middle of the height bell curve, far from jacked/athletic, not rich by any means, and during my manwhoring days (almost exclusively fueled by online dating, not a clubbing person, so it was rare for me to stumble across a physical/mental attraction in the real world) I had no issues whatsoever lining up dates and sex. The incel crowd wants you to think it's three sixes, six inch dick, six figure income, and six feet tall. I had none of those things during my manwhoring phase.

There's no trick to it other than be able to carry on a conversation, have a few interests you can talk passionately about, and accept the fact that sexual chemistry won't always be there. I wound up with some long term platonic friends out of my online dating days, who have been with me longer than any romantic relationship, including a few in other countries that I have since visited. Wouldn't trade those experiences for anything.

Why are you assuming every person on these sites wants to find a partner and never come back? Some people are looking for casual sex, others a situationship, others an activity partner they may or may not have sex with. The ultimate point to any dating site is simply to introduce you to other humans. What you do with those humans is entirely up to you and them.

Look, I'm trying really hard not to troll here, but the marketing on this is just insane. Advertising a feature (speech-to-text) as if it was new when Windows and Android have had that same feature for decades makes Apple and their users look hopelessly outdated.

Dragon Naturally Speaking would run on a Pentium 133 with 16MB of RAM and no internet connection in 1997. It worked.

If you need a new Apple product to do this, I would recommend considering donating your existing Apple device to a museum or selling it to a collector.

If you think sex bots can replace an actual human being you're probably an incel. And if all you're after is empty sex, well, it's not THAT hard to find, unless again, you're a misogynistic incel asshole.

The ratio ain't 10 to 1 either. It's closer to 1.8 to 1. Bumble publishes a lot of these stats if you care to dig into them, unlike the competition, which these days is almost all owned by one company. Bumble's stats aligns with what I saw in the pre-swipe era when it was actually tenable to look at all profiles in your geographical region. I dug into that on OkCupid in the oughts, before they sold out to Match and got lame. In every city I looked at it was between 1.5 to 2.0 men to every woman. I never regarded those odds as particularly burdensome, given the caliber of men that I was competing against, lol.

Maybe if you're working for Mom & Pop, Inc.

It's pretty hard to believe MGM doesn't have a SecOps team and that said team wouldn't be well aware of the fact that most ransomware extortion originates in unfriendly sanctioned countries.

Congress should pass a law making such payments illegal in all circumstances, IMHO, it will remove much of the incentive to commit these crimes in the first place. They'll still happen and a few smaller outfits (e.g., Mom & Pop, Inc.) may chance paying the ransom, but no large Fortune 500 with its legions of lawyers would do so.

Not if the money is going to a sanctioned country, e.g., Russia, which it frequently does.

If they're on-shore, different story, see D.B. Cooper, although still ill advised as all it does is encourage future attacks/demands.

Surely, if anyone needs life insurance it's the Jedi. ;-)

Insurance is priced on risk, if you live in hurricane alley, you're going to pay more, ditto if you have a bad driving record. Would you find it fairer if they weren't allowed to surcharge for DWIs and we all got to pay higher rates?

There's a lot the insurance industry does that I think is BS but this is not one of those things. You've picked a terribly lonely hill to die on if you seriously mean to stick up for all the poor victims of driving under the influence who now have to pay higher insurance rates.

I'm not sure if I should ask where you live -- because I've lived in States (Louisiana) with stupidly high insurance rates -- or if I should bust out my small violin for the poor broke individual that owns four cars. :D

We pay around $1,600/yr for two cars, that we do not own outright and carry collision/comp on, and hell, it was closer to $1,200 before the masses realized you could steal my partner's car with a flathead screwdriver and TikTok video. My 2024 model year costs less to insure than her 2019 model year, lol, how dare USAA price ease of theft into the rate.

Actually, what they'll do, is raise the price of the ad-free tier to the point that it's unaffordable for most. They're on record on earnings calls saying they make more money from the cheaper (to the consumer) ad tier than they do from the current ad free tiers. The Internet allows them to do highly targeted advertising in a way that was never possible for broadcast/cable television, so they can charge a lot more money to the advertisers for the privilege of airing their ads, and as you note, they're unstoppable.

TNG's remaster is 1080 and was extremely well done, you're denying yourself a great experience if you stick to DVD cuts. It's absolutely beautiful in 1080. You can also see a lot of the gags the set designers built into consoles, thinking the text would never be visible on screen. You'll also realize society owes Marina Sirtis a collective apology, lol, but that's a different discussion.

My favorite part of Paramount+ and a few other platforms, when they decided to stick ads in, they failed to do what TV has been doing since the 1950s and properly sync the ads to the scene cuts. Doing a re-watch of TNG with my partner and where the commercial break naturally was, no commercial, you'd get 5-10 seconds into the next scene (the return from commercial in the original airing) and then BANG, cut to ads.

I'm shocked they couldn't find a way to automate this task and failing that, pay some intern an entry level wage to do it for them, "Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to watch 178 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and press this button after each scene change." I'll sign up for that job at minimum wage, lol.

Of course, the real answer is they just don't care about the consumer experience, it's all about $$$

We gave up and signed up for the ad free tier, which is kind of funny, because if you listen to their earnings calls they make MORE money from the cheaper to the consumer ad supported tiers. You'd think they'd want to get it right.