Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Merz is riding a dead horse, (Score 1) 108

People do want EVs. Look at Norway, almost every car sold is an EV. Put in the infrastructure and people love them.

It probably has more to do with the subsidies, the ability to park for free, drive in bus lanes, ride on ferries for free, etc, than it does for any innate love of electric vehicles.

Comment Re:an 18 inch iPad? who asked for one? (Score 1) 27

Was there any person out there that wanted a tablet that is 18 inches?

*Raises hand*

I actually want one that is 20-1/4", the same size as a sheet of tabloid sized paper, but I'd settle for one about 14", the size of a sheet of letter sized paper. In an ideal world, it'd have an e-ink display.

If you know who, can you go beat them with a rubber hose.

Fuck you, too, I guess?

The weight will be insane, there is no avoiding it... it's just a matter how terrible it will be, not a question of IF.

A portable 18" LCD monitor weighs about 2-1/2 pounds, and I'm sure you could take some of the weight out of that. Fitting a hypothetical 18" ipad into a roughly ~3lbs envelope seems reasonable.

Aside from a few niche areas, this will struggle to find a problem, where it is an optimal solution.

Niche at first, but I think engineering and manufacturing would eat them up in the long run.

Comment Re:Alternate title: (Score 1) 167

To quote myself from another comment above: I'm not a fan of Darth Cheeto, but it's a stupid take to blame him for something that is the result of 50 years of bipartisan policies. IF I was putting the headline "China has overtaken America" at the feet of any specific individual, it would be a toss up between Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The "so much winning" in that context was the idea that we would convert the Chinese into western style democracy by growing their economy.

Comment Re:So much winning (Score 2) 167

I'm not a fan of Darth Cheeto, but it's is a stupid take to blame him for something that is the result of 50 years of bipartisan policies. IF I was putting the headline "China has overtaken America" at the feet of any specific individual, it would be a toss up between Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. The "so much winning" in that context was the idea that we would convert the Chinese into western style democracy by growing their economy.

Comment Re:PDF is an awfully shit format. (Score 1) 146

Yes, it absolutely is a shit format, but for distributing documents it's a widely deployed lowest common denominator that works for everyone. Unless you're suggesting we go back to fixed width text files (or you can figure out how to get the entire world to immediately start using LaTex) it's probably the best distribution format you're going to see without falling into the xkcd 927 trap.

Comment Re:How are they updating the bricked models? (Score 1) 85

Ford Mobile Service isn't just for a King Ranch, it applies to anything--it doesn't even have to be a Ford vehicle. They also do concierge pickup/drop off service--when I need an oil change, I just call the dealership, they schedule a pickup, come get the truck out of the parking lot while I'm at work, and bring it back. I typically don't even talk to the the driver, it's full no contact.

They do not charge for this service, and the drivers don't even ask for/expect tips.

Comment Re:Car manufacturers are correct (Score 1) 105

The problem is, those rules only applied to "cars". Almost all US car manufacturers have stopped making cars, and the ones they are building are largely big muscle cars, and not fuel efficient ones. Instead, they are building SUVs that aren't "cars" but are classed as "trucks" and exempt

The 1990s called, they want their talking point back. CAFE applies to light trucks (up to 8500lbs GVWR) and was expanded under both the Dubya and Obama administrations, and light trucks are included in the fleetwide averages.

Comment Re: The people running the Archive are stupid assh (Score 1) 46

It was always said that someone should start pushing against the grotesquely unbalanced copyright laws by just breaking stuff and challenging the norms

Come on. I agree wholehearted that the current copyright regime is horribly broken, but the morons at the Archive didn't "start pushing against unbalanced copyright laws" they simply decided those laws were null and void because reasons. This did nothing to advance their mission and everything to undermine it, that's fucking stupid.

Comment The people running the Archive are stupid assholes (Score 3, Interesting) 46

The organization is known to purchase physical copies, which it then digitizes to lend out to patrons, one copy at a time. This self-digitizing project was previously contested in a U.S. federal court, where the publishers ultimately came out as the winner. They argued that the Internet Archive project competed with their own licensing business for book lending.

That's certainly one way of describing what happened. Another, more accurate, way would be to point out that the morons at the Archive decided to ignore that whole "one copy at a time" bit "because Covid" and gave the publishers a set of facts for their lawsuit that would not have supported their position any better if they'd been purposefully designed to do so.

Comment Re:Join a union (Score 1) 62

Your romanticizing of "the government only allows so many yellow cabs so the artificial scarcity leads to medallion costs spiraling ever upward" is fucking bizarre.

Before the 'ride share' apps, taxi cab drivers was a highly paid position.

That's horseshit. People who owned the medallions made money leasing them to people who would work their fingers to the bone to cover the costs of their leases and support their families. You also ignore that most taxi companies weren't running medallion taxies with the right to pick up a hail, but rather "private cars" that had to be dispatched to a pickup location by law. More on those later.

The badge that let you drive a cab in NYC sold for $1 million dollars. You would drive it yourself 1/3 the day, then hand the cab off to employees. You would make enough in 10 years to buy another badge, then in 5 years get a third, etc etc. Your employees would save up for 15 years to buy their first badge and start the process over again.

Ignoring that "employee driving a taxi has a million dollars in savings after 15 years" would be the exception and not the rule, that sounds suspiciously like a pyramid scheme.

The apps charge you money which you think goes to the driver. Nope, most of it goes to the company. They pay the driver barely enough for the gasoline, car payment, and insurance. They expect the driver to make a profit from their 'tip', treating them as a waiter, rather than the owner of the equipment that makes the business possible.

Remember those "private car" services I mentioned above? Other than them typically owning the vehicles rather than the drivers, this is exactly how they operated. My mother drove for one in the mid 80s after her brokerage went bankrupt and she was looking for a new firm. My aunt was a dispatcher for another one for years. The drivers got shit pay and no benefits.

Despite your claims, the "ride sharing" (I think we can at least agree that part is total bullshit) companies have not meaningfully enshitified taxi services. They were always shitty.

Slashdot Top Deals

10 to the 6th power Bicycles = 2 megacycles

Working...