Nowadays: 30 miles per gallon is pretty pathetic. You should expect about double that from any decent car nowadays. (at least in Europe...)

Unless of course: you put it into sports mode and drive it as if you stole it.

The mere phrase "election investment" sounds more red flags than i can count....

What sort of a system are you guys running over there!!??

This is literally budgetting for what anywhere else is called outright bribery!

And for Meta: this is merely a cost of doing business - an expense they can subtract before taxes!

So its worth repeating: What sort of a system are you guys running over there!!?? Really?

Well - if you can get away with not publishing stuff (that you are required to) because you "do not agree with it" (and in the USA: Companies apparently have "rights" just like people??), what's next?

"No - we refuse to publish our financial statement, as it conflicts with our right to free speech!" (translation: It makes us look bad. Can't have that)

Sorry if this sounds rather despondent, but ....

What is wrong with people? Users have become so accustomed to "eat what the big company provides for you" that being allowed to tweak some little thing is suddenly *news* !?

Yeah. I know. I totally forgot to drink the kool-aid...

Interesting: Apple refuses to create back doors for the UK. Which I can understand (back doors are dangerous etc etc etc).

What I am missing is: There is no pressure from the US for Apple to create equivalent backdoors... And yet the US security services would have the same needs and wants as the UK ones...

Any security service would surely try to put pressure to _have_ such back doors. But there is no outcry from the US 3-letter-agencies?

Either the US 3-letters-agencies are incompetent. Or they already _have_ backdoors, and thus do not need to put pressure on Apple. I suspect the latter.

Basically: I think the story is that "The US only wants the US have to have backdoors. Not anybody else."

Call me a cynic - and you'd be right....

Next week (or tomorrow by the speed thing change over there) I fully expect Trump to announce that the US governement has "invested" billions in Trump's own cryptocoin. Thereby accidentally giving Trump a lot of money, and making the white house spokesperson come up with some other lie.

Isn't that how he normally operates?

Wasn't this entirely predictable?

He has long said that he'd run the government like a business. Because that what Trump thinks the government is.

He has no notion of the government being "of the people, for the people" or anything like that.

To him, it's a business. And businesses need to generate profit. And (to him): the main share holders are himself and the people around him. It is (quite literally) what allows him to think of himself as a King.

(like many of Trump's businesses, it may go bankrupt - but not before he and his "friends" have made a nice chunk of money first. Others can pay the debts. That's why it is so important to increase the debt ceiling)

No. It's just enforcing EU regulation IN EUROPE - even though the company may be US-owned.

It's not like US-owned companies are allowed to NOT follow the laws of the country the operate in.

Looks like the servers which provide the Ubuntu downloads are struggling....

So... Use bittorrent instead if you can: https://ubuntu.com/download/al...

"But self-driving cars, if they one day become ubiquitous, could have more cooperative programming"

The word "could" is essential here. It points us in the direction of an ideal world. A utopia.

In reality, there will be some drivers willing to pay to get there faster. And there will be car manufacturers willing to add a (pay-for) option to "overtake whenever slightly possible", "cut-off mode" and middle fingers on rearwards-facing LED displays.

People are people. And some people are idiots.

They already sabotaged e.g. the power cable between Finland and Estonia. Officially blamed on a Chinese ship which "accidentally" dropped its anchor and dragged across the power cable, severing it. They claim they didn't notice. Anybody familiar with the procedure for releasing a 6-tonne ship anchor will tell you that it's not something you do by accident.

Strangely enough, a Russian oceanographic "science" ship was zig-zagging over the damaged area in the weeks before the cable was accidentally cut. An interesting ship - with armed guards on board.

The same ship was recently spending a lot of time in the southern baltic between Lolland and Germany, where we also happen to have a number of power cables across the sea floor.

Strange. If only there was a way to put two and two together.

I'm amazed that there isn't a relevant Dilbert cartoon to go with that. Come on people, prove me wrong!

(I don't want to make light of the fact we're talking about person who died, but the circumstances _are_ a bit unusual...)

The "finally admitted" part is BS ...

The USSR never questioned that the moon missions were real, since the Soviet (and German, by the way) space scientists closely observed the flights and received the telemetry data and other transmissions from the Apollo spacecraft.

The authorities actually _congratulated_ the USA on the achievement at the time.

It _is_ true that the footage was not shown live in the USSR - but it was 3am in Moscow at the time. It was shown the next day instead.

They were quite graceful in defeat there. So much so that most Americans now believe that the USA got to the moon first. They didn't. The USA was the first to land *a human* on the moon. The USSR was the first to land a spacecraft on the moon - in 1959.

Yes: they missed a trick.

Considering their motto of "det bedste er ikke for godt", I'm somewhat disappointed! They can and should do better!

It's amazing what they'll do to avoid roundabouts! (not quite the same as the USAsians call "traffic circles")

Looks like this design (and similar ones) only take only cars and motorcycles into account. And possibly busses and HGVs. But what about cyclists? Pedestrians? Pedestrians consigned to wheelchairs? Sight-impaired pedestrians? Elderly pedestrians?

They seem to want lots of big cars over there, and this is the result: lots of cars => lots of traffic. Bigger cars make people feel safer. Cyclists / pedestrians will not feel safe, so they have to get cars too.

This isn't solving the underlying problem of "too much traffic" - for that you will need other measures such as "decent public transport", but that is not the american way...

Next you worry about pollution and obesity and wonder where that came from...