But that's a valid point, as it openly demonstrated intent. It also facilitates induction of those without much prior intent.

OTOH, I suspect that the "prior intent" is there for practically all teen-aged boys.

When do you see human drivers being trustworthy?

I've evaluated my skills as a driver, and over a decade ago I decided that they were not sufficient. I also thought myself a better driver than I think most other people. (I'm sure my skills have declined since I stopped driving.)

If you are really only claiming that AI drivers won't be trustworthy, then I agree. But who bears the risk? And in many situations they are already more trustworthy than many human drivers that consider themselves capable. (Yeah "many situations" isn't sufficient. A driving episode encompasses a huge number of situations.)

That's not clear. One of the big problems with EVs is the ability to charge them. Lots of people don't have any way to do this at home, and the away-from-home chargers are often iffy either in access or availability. (Reports say they are often broken.)

FWIW, I won't be interested in a new car until full-automatic driving is included. So my observation of the market is a bit sketchy. But if I were to buy an EV I'd have no reliable place to charge it.

I wouldn't wager much that your last paragraph is correct. Apple is a large corporation, and different pieces of it don't necessarily talk to each other. This may have been a decision that the marketing department made without checking with legal.

Apple being in the music business breaks the court agreement that they made with the Beatles. Of course, that's probably expired by now, but they didn't wait for that to break the agreement.

I'm not at all sure it's beyond the limits of the technology, but I rather expect that properly training it would be more expensive than the call center.

Are automated agents worse than someone who only reads from a script?

You're correct, but I was thinking of more than one model. My first thought was actually the Komodo dragon style, but that's too big. So on light flyer and a larger ground model Nothing in paleontology actually looks like a wyvern, but I was aiming in that direction.

No. You also need to mod the body to a reptilian pattern. Some of the dinosaurs would make a good model. How about a flame wielding pterosaur?

Actually, I think violet, or a least indigo, eyes are more plausible. All that requires is an additional pigment.

That was the reason I switched to Linux. Of course, I could have switched to BSD, but Debian potato was easier to install.

The hero tale is one with a long history behind it. I think it's always been the dominant style. So that's not really a legitimate criticism...not unless you are making an encompassing claim, and if you are, then it's false. (I've encountered several books with a heroine.) And the dominant style always reflects the zeitgeist. (In the late 1940's and early 50's there was lots of WWII echoes, often re-staged in different settings.)

FWIW, my tastes have always been quite narrow, and minority, but I think they've narrowed over the years. OTOH, possibly it's just that the net doesn't provide exposure to the tales that I would like. Perhaps they're still out there, but I can no longer easily browse through and tell that they're something I'd be interested in.

Part of the problem is definitely the sales channel. Grocery stores only carry "best sellers". (They may not actually be best sellers, but they're marketed as such.) 20 displays of 10 books, and two or three with only a few...probably left over from last month.) Also a few books that I already have on my shelf, from a decade ago.

Even book stores lean in this direction, sufficiently that I no longer want to browse in them. (OTOH, I always preferred science-fiction and technical books.)

But I really think part of the problem is the zeitgeist. Nobody wants to read it. It's like when the anti-hero became "popular with publishers". People found reading that stuff unpleasant, so they stopped. Except for a few. And some of those will be picked up, eventually, as classics that everyone should read. Just like "Jude the Obscure" was. Nobody that I ever met liked that story, but some academics thought it was important enough to force everyone to read it.

The last technical book I bought used grey ink for the examples. If I'd been able to see it before I bought it, I wouldn't have. I think they probably had a decent book, but the only editing was for the e-book, and that used color, but they printed the book in black and white.

Another turned out not to have any index. The text was decent, but just try to look something up.

The editors of print books are ... not quite worthless, as they may do a decent job for e-books, but the print version is merely an afterthought. If it weren't painful to read long text passages on the screen, I'd have given up on books.

That's overly specific. How about "can, in principle, be at least as effective as a photon drive". I don't think one can really rule out one that's a bit more effective, even if I've no idea how one would make such a thing. (I believe that a photon drive has theoretic limits on it's efficiency that are a bit more stringent than the more general limits...but there might be some way of generating light that got around those limits...so perhaps "can't be any more efficient that a totally ideally optimal photon drive".)

Even so, I'm not sure. If it's something that can't ever return, most of the arguments about the maximum efficiency fail because there's no way of performing the measurements.

Also there are these cute arguments about drives that essentially require the mass of Jupiter (or more) to distort space-time. Some of those seem to be valid arguments for a drive without a reaction mass. They are just essentially impossible to build.

That said, perhaps these extreme devices...things involving zero point energy, FTL drives, reactionless drives, etc. are really just pointing out a place where the theories are wrong. None of these devices are actually buildable, so nobody can test them, as they all require some form or other of unobtainium. (Constructs with negative mass, portable masses heavier than Jupiter, etc.) I still remember "Rotating cylinders and a global causality violation", even though the plot of the story was a bit ... acausal. (The story doesn't seem to have any on-line references, but *it* was a reference to https://www.franktipler.com/ti... )

More to the point, if they don't collect personally identifiable information, how do they know that you've paid.