Sometimes it's the car, but sometimes it's the phone. The iPhone's volume controls were already poorly designed before adding CarPlay, and they're downright horrendous with CarPlay. It took me a while to figure out that various CarPlay features have their own (effectively hidden) volume levels that can only be changed while that specific volume level is being used, which is often when you need to actively focus on driving. Bottom line, you end up risking accidentally changing the wrong (and various) volume levels every time you touch the music volume knob in your car.

The first time I turned down the music while pulling up to a drive-thru window, it ended up silencing both Siri and Google Maps. After I noticed it was completely mute, I tried a number of things to get it back (including walking through all settings on both the phone and the car and a factory reset of the car's system). It took more than a few Google searches to find that the trick was to "perfectly time" when you turn the volume knob while driving. I fixed Siri first, and then when I tried to fix Maps by timing the knob with upcoming turn announcements, my next use of Siri screamed at me at max volume. The design is so bad it's almost comical.

It's also a drop in the bucket compared to how much covid relief money went to fraud committed by people/organizations in the US. These Chinese hackers were pathetic slackers compared to US scammers.

How about injecting some bleach, or wasting money on ivermectin, or how about forsythia? Yes, these "conspiracies" are so dumb even the movie Contagion poked fun at them (and how dumb people are to fall for them). People who follow conspiracy theories are just dumber sheep following a dumber wolf in sheep's clothing. You think you're not sheep because you "stand out" from the rest of the sheep. You do stand out, just not in the way you think. We pity you.

Feel free to bleat loudly like sheep do when they're upset or uncomfortable. Most of us on slashdot have heard it all before, so many times that the words have no impact. You're not nearly as smart as you think, or as persuasive, and you're not actually upsetting us the way you think. You're just making us pity you more. So, please continue to bleat all you want.

Getting back to TFA, RIP Kevin Conroy. Voice acting is very important to making a series good, and the animated batman series really was.

"Where, exactly, do you think they are going to make up that revenue? By charging more (way above the BOM cost of the hardware) for every car, including for purchasers who have zero use for a seat heater."

They're charging you more for it, and marking up the hardware costs, whether you pay a monthly fee to use it or not.

"For driving up prices of cars"

Let's assume that somewhere close to 0% of car buyers chose to subscribe to a specific feature, but the physical hardware is still installed in every single car. You do realize that you're paying for that extra hardware no matter what, right? The car manufacturers aren't going to sell that hardware at a loss the way Sony lost billions selling PlayStations with blu-ray players for less than the blu-ray player itself cost.

This also isn't the same as TV manufacturers selling units below cost and making up the difference with ad revenue (not unless they add a HUD to the car that shows the driver ads, which will lead to lawsuits over extremely annoying/distracting ads causing wrecks).

In this case, there are two types of customers: those who pay for the extra hardware once, and those who pay for it once and then pay for it again every month (or year depending on the pricing model). That makes these subscriptions pure marketing BS. The only paid subscriptions for a car that make sense are things that require resources external to the car that cost money to keep running, like satellite radio, connections to cell phone towers, internet use and web services on that those connections, etc.

Hell, I don't think they went far enough. IMO they need to outlaw the requirement for every car have electronic entry with a key fob (that costs hundreds of dollars to replace, which is also marketing BS) and a "Start" button. I want a basic metal key that unlocks the doors, opens the trunk, and turns the ignition to start the car. As a programmer, I don't want anything that I could study for a little bit and find a way to hack remotely. If someone wants to pay extra for that, fine. I sure as hell don't.

"I never understood how those sterility genes could last very long. They would be selected out."

I doubt the GM companies would want to have to stop selling this solution they worked so hard to develop after the first successful test. There's WAY more money in controlling the threat than in killing it completely.

"as you tend to work more on the problem, then the syntax", and then the closing parentheses. ;-)

Sorry not bashing your insightful post, and yes I realize the extra phrase is redundant. I felt similarly when learning it back in 91-92. Since then I've wondered if LISP would be more popular today if we'd had the code editors we have available today to automate the more painful aspects of the syntax. Or perhaps if different flavors of the language had come out that had more palatable syntax but identical principles and functionality.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: "What are we going to do, throw rocks at them?" "Yes."

While it would be awesome if humans could steer asteroids away from the Earth, it would also imply that humans could steer asteroids toward the Earth, and that would be a lot less awesome. Can't have one without the other.

Yeah, I know. I'm not surprised at all about what they did, just how poorly they tried to explain it. The term I'm looking for involves digging yourself in deeper than necessary by trying to explain more than is necessary. It's like the difference between saying "Sorry" and "Sorry this upset you". Those 3 extra words do the opposite of helping your apology, and that's exactly what they did.

"Scaringe said, noting that the company "failed to to appreciate" how customers viewed their configurations and pricing" - Is there actually a term like "mansplaining" but for companies trying to explain why they did something indefensible?

We should go ahead and call the first one AppTorrent.

You completely missed my point. In general, the most "modern" feature I want in my car is AC. I don't want the fob, I don't want the alarm, I don't want the extra electronics. I don't even want power windows.

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't object to a USB/Bluetooth setup for hands-free calls and a small screen for Android/iPhone features, but it should be a small/dumb display screen relying on the cell phone, it should NOT be a touchscreen, it should be restricted to use as little power as a cell phone, and it should be isolated from everything else in the car except the stereo system.

How much for an old-fashioned key? The fobs themselves should be an option, and not forced on everyone.

Still no cure for cancer...

Damn, we may not be able to use that line anymore in the near future. Maybe we'll have to change it around like the Seinfeld joke about putting a man on the moon...

How is it that we can manage to find a cure for cancer, but we can't fix tiny problem X?

Damn, beat me to it. I miss the days when this would've been the first post. ;-)