Crashes are now rare in general. When I was a kid, it seemed like there was a major air crash in the US almost annually. I may be wrong, but I don't remember a full-sized airliner (bigger than a regional jet) having a catastrophic crash in the US since shortly after 9/11 when that Airbus lost its tail and crashed in NYC. (Being a natural pessimist, I find this outcome hard to believe and would have lost a good deal of money if I had bet on it.)

However, there still continue to be a large number of hard landings, runway slideoffs, engine fires, cabin fires and other emergency situations where the passengers still need to evacuate quickly because their lives are at risk. (Not to mention the "Miracle on the Hudson".) The safety briefings are still relevant in all those situations.

So they're taking all your data, selling it, and making you pay for the privilege? Must be a nice business if you have zero scruples.

Why do you need OnStar? Who would want to steal a GM car? All the GM brands are at the very bottom of Consumer Reports reliability index for 2026.

OnStar uses cellular service to connect, so if you have an emergency, either both OnStar and your cell phone work, or neither work. So there's no advantage to using OnStar rather than just dialing 911. 911 services are allowed access to your phone's GPS location regardless of settings.

It just seems like a pork package to sell along with the clear coat. Not to mention the theft of your data without compensation, whether you subscribe or not. You have to physically disable the modem to avoid that.

Tesla is awful due to the lack of physical controls where they would really make sense. It is an actively driver-hostile car. Other than the powertrain, which is amazing, the car is completely obnoxious. The door handles in particular are a huge problem and have been banned in China. Why would you intentionally make door handles that are super awkward to open rather than just pull? Why would you make someone dig through a menu to adjust the mirrors, or adjust the A/C vents and other controls? Trying to shift with the right stalk? Awkward and horrible. I think they thought it was sexy to just have a screen and nothing else, but in reality it just absolutely sucks. Before you say, "but have you owned one?" Yes, yes I have. It's my wife's current daily driver. And I avoid driving it like the plague.

I figured if I read the comments on this post, I'd find all the incels and rednecks whining about Fark. The truth is, it hasn't really changed much, other than the fact that the people running the site grew up, and the site grew up with them and shed that frat-boy mentality.

They also had to get rid of adult content due to Google becoming the morality police of the internet when it comes to sites that they will allow ads to be run against. They are in turn pressured by various right wing lobby groups in the United States, who also pressure credit card payment systems not to support adult content. Blame the religious right for that. A legacy of our puritan origins. (Fark tried moving all the Boobies links to foobies.com, and that experiment ultimately did not work.) They have to police comment photos as well for that reason.

Fark is still a terrific link aggregator with funny headlines, and no AI or algorithms to filter it. The traffic has fallen off a good amount from its peak years, but it's still very lively.

I also find it funny that people here are complaining that fark is 'woke' or whatever, when I see plenty of borderline socialist ideology on display in posts every day on Slashdot. If you are complaining about that, why are you here? Yea, Fark is certainly anti-fascist, and I'm great with that.

I'd say Slashdot is in a much more degraded state than Fark. The original sense of community on Slashdot is long gone, though it still provides a useful aggregation of privacy and security focused tech news, which I appreciate. The comment sections here are far nastier on average. Fark is still fairly civil other than a few trolls here and there, and it's easy to block them.

is why I'm sticking to just toggle switches and blinking lights.

I learned from here on Slashdot the two best tools to deal with Win11 at the moment you get the first windows setup screen. Used the shell trick to create a local-account-only, then installed O&O Shutup10+++ and Winhance. I used those two tools to remove every single piece of telemetry, junk software, spam, spyware, AI and forced updates from the OS. All of this before ever connecting it to the internet. (I loaded those two pieces of software from a thumbdrive.) The result is a super clean install that just does what I want. This is an older Microsoft Surface so it needed to be clean to run well with limited RAM. It's my throwaway lightweight laptop for international travel. No personal information on it. This register article is also handy.

On my main machine I'm still happily running Win10. My browsing habits are pretty boring and I run Ublock Origin, AdblockPlus etc. in Firefox to keep anything unruly out. I used to run noscript but pretty much no sites work with JS disabled these days.

I don't know why your reading comprehension is so bad. I would have totally preferred it if any of them knew how to drive a manual or wanted to learn how. But they didn't. How does that make *me* sexist?

The biggest deterrent: Girlfriends and/or wives. They don't know how to operate one, and they have zero interest in learning how. Now you have all sorts of logistical problems.

America will retake the lead in AI the same way we did with EVs: Just ban the ones from China. Problem solved.

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Because a zero-day is any flaw made public before the developer knows about it. One of the main ways this happens is by noticing that hackers are breaking into systems using a heretofore unknown exploit.

I suspect GP's point is that every malware blocker in every browser is likely to treat this kind of script as hostile, except for Chrome because Google are currently nerfing the ability for blockers to intercept hostile scripts in one of the most blatantly user-hostile changes they've ever made.

If Apple play along with Safari then every other browser and its malware blocking plugins are about to be toast in a huge retrograde step for Internet privacy. But not even Cloudflare is going to get away with blocking every iOS device if Apple continues to allow blockers to intercept this kind of script.

Did anyone mention recently that simultaneously controlling both the most popular web browser and several of the most popular ad-supported web properties might be a little anticompetitive, and that it's about time that Google was broken up? It's probably time for that drum to start beating a bit louder again.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Your statement would apply if these data center space nutters could certify that everything they launch will reach escape velocity.

For everything else, what goes up, must come down. Right back into our jurisdiction.

...that it's just New York City. Hopefully the idea will spread.

Laissez faire capitalism is great if everyone is honest. But in this reality there are a lot of incredibly dishonest people who will do anything for a buck. A modicum of base regulation is desirable to keep consumers from getting swindled at every turn. I applaud efforts like these.