What 'time' is that, exactly?

My car can do a 500km trip with a single half-hour charging stop. I cannot. I need a break in there to piss, maybe shit, grab some chow, and get a stretch.

In a gas car, I'd be pulling in to an On Route, sitting in the gas line for a few minutes, filling up, parking, then going in to hit the can, grab some chow, and leave.

In my BEV, I pull into the charger, plug in, go in to hit the can, grab some chow, and leave.

For this very standard and usual use case, charging while hitting the can and eating is actually faster than gassing up, hitting the can, and eating.

For people that a) go on long trips two or three times a year, and b) don't want to worry about fast charging on those trips, renting a car for those trips is more cost effective than driving an ICE car year round so that you can satisfy what is, in reality, an edge case.

Like, I'm sure you love using a cube van when you have to move a bunch of stuff, but you're not going to make a cube van your daily driver just in case you need to move a bunch of stuff.

It's both. If China were to shut down their dirty power plants and factories today, you'd have better air pretty damn fast.

But if you're driving on the highway in rush hour traffic for an hour or two a day, surrounded by cars with engine exhaust, you're breathing in all that crap right then and there.

And as more cars move to electric, your local pollution drops, which is good.

We need both local and global pollution sources to drop,

And a hundred years ago, you'd have said 'I live in rural America, and a gasoline pumping infrastructure is largely-nonexistent.'

Actually, you'd have said 'a paved road infrastructure is largely non-existent.'

You'd also have argued the merits of horses versus cars for most of the same arguments you make here.

Which is what many people at the time actually did.

Sure, but shouldn't the US government be in the business of protecting the quality of life of all Americans, not just auto workers?

What about outsourcing of software jobs to India, for example, something that people on Slashdot ought to care about if they are hoping to work in the software field.

How can a US citizen, with a US cost of living, compete with someone with an Indian cost of living?

Personally, I think our government should be concerned about people not corporate profits, and should make it illegal for US-based companies to not use US-based labor, but at minimum if they are going to allow outsourcing they please afford us IT workers the same protection as being suggested for US workers, and don't allow foreign countries to take US jobs by effectively using their lower cost of living as a subsidy.

If Cox is liable for user's copyright infringement then Tesla is liable for drivers speeding.

Not if there's a federal law that explicitly declares that middlemen are liable if they don't comply with the DMCA process, while there isn't a federal law saying car manufacturers are liable for speeding.

You might be looking at the underlying principles and making common sense value judgements, instead of reading what the law says.

This is ultimately why politics exists: to influence what the law is, in an attempt to make it more like your common sense value judgements. And it's really hard because these are issues that your congressional candidates probably aren't talking about at all, because they're talking about someone else's "important" [eyeroll] issues instead. We needed to stop DMCA in 1997/1998 and we failed.

The jury seemed to decide that accusations qualify as infringement

However regrettable, it's easy to understand how that can happen.

The jury could have just been told testimony that "we saw xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was seeding our movie" (with screenshots of MPAA's torrent client showing a seeder at that address and the packets they got from that address correctly matching the torrent's checksum). Meanwhile, Cox wouldn't have any evidence refuting it (even though the assertion isn't proven; the "screenshots" could have been made in GIMP for all we know). And then the jury might have ruled based on "preponderance" of evidence.

Kind of like 3 cops saying "the perp resisted arrest" and the perp saying "no I didn't" and a criminal jury (where the bar is much higher) still deciding that the perp resisted arrest. Sigh. You know that happens.

Had Cox ratted their customer out (or gotten a DMCA counternotice from them), then the customer could have been sued instead, and raised doubts by saying "I have an open wifi" or something like that. But Cox didn't, and they certainly aren't going to say "we have an open wifi" since they're in the network business so of course they don't offer free networking to strangers. It sounds like a difficult situation for Cox.

The story is light on details so I ass/u/me some things. The copyright infringement was likely due to torrents, i.e. from the internet's point of view, addresses owned by Cox were publishing/hosting content (under the hood: really Cox's customers seeding torrents).

So if I were an MPAA/RIAA -member company, I'd send Cox a DMCA notice ("Cox, stop sharing my copyrighted work") which really means "Cut that customer off or otherwise make them stop, or else get a DMCA counternotice from them, so I can go after them instead of you." And if that's what happened, then it sounds like Cox said no (didn't make it stop and also didn't pass the buck to their customers. So they sued Cox instead of Cox's customers.

But that's based on assumptions and speculation, hence my question. But yes, I know what a DMCA notice is and I think that mechanism was likely in involved at some point in the story.

It's unclear from the articles whether or not this happened: did the record labels send DMCA notices to Cox, which Cox blew off (thereby becoming liable in place of the original suspected infringer)? Or did the record labels just sue 'em first?

Prior to 1998 they wouldn't have been liable (just like Western Digital and Seagate aren't liable for whatever I may be suspected of doing) but DMCA makes hosting services (and networks? hmm...) a special case, unlike power utilities, computer equipment manufacturers, etc.

The structure is the easy part. It's a solved problem. These printed homes will be objectively worse to the extent it might not be as easy to maintain them as other pre-fabricated housing, which has existed for decades and is arguably superior to site built--every pre-fab experiences the equivalent of a massive earthquake during transit, so their kind of built for that except for the mating lines; but I digress.

Siting is the hard part. Land cost. Foundation. Hook-ups. That's where it gets really expensive and difficult. Best case scenario for low-cost is flat land in an unpopular rural area with under-subscribed water, sewer, and power; but that only happens because nobody wants to live there in the first place.

How about the 'natural experiment' of people having 40 year old CDs and 27 year old DVDs that work just fine?

Given that the page referenced claims that DVD-R will last 50-100 years, but factory pressed DVDs will last 10-20, I think there's a typo for the factory pressed ones.

So far in my life, I've had exactly one optical disc go bad that wasn't explained by severe scuffing or physically breaking it, and that was Kentucky Fried Movie. And that was a manufacturing issue.

I have CDs from the 80s that still play fine, and DVDs from the late 90s.

If your local copy is the same bitrate and sound codecs as the 4k UHD blu ray, great.

But if it's a streaming 4k webrip, the blu ray is still going to be way higher quality.

A million times this! Not once in the past 20 years have I ever pointed the finger at an image as the reason why a page is bogged down. Since I installed script blocking, slow sites are almost always showing an attempt to access *dozens* of 3rd party domains that I restrict by default. This site? It's only using 2 other domains, fsdn and cloudfront. Slashdot loads just as fast as it always has.

Dark Star was aired on late night TV several times in my teens. We're talking late, late night--after SNL crazy late. Something about being a teenager that makes you want to be up at that hour. I probably never saw the whole thing in one sitting, but I know I got to the end once. I admired the gritty, dirty look of it all vs. the unrealistic cleanliness of 2001 or Star Trek. When the Soviet space station Mir began to age and grow mold I was immediately reminded of it. A space station that was behaving like a rundown trailer meant we had arrived in the world of sci fi--the world predicted by Dark Star.