Used DVD's, games, and Blu-Ray discs also do something quite valuable you didn't take into consideration. They create a secondary market for used goods that people want. That market creates economic activity (buying, selling, new business creation) that would have been impossible with digital-only goods. Streaming eliminates that opportunity and insures only the suit-weasels get their cut.

Sounds like you are, in fact, interested in real salient facts unlike Gweihir's suggestion to the contrary. This thread is a good demonstration of what happens when smarmy meets well-informed. Looking forward to your smarmy reply, Gweihir. Go ahead and rebut all those points. I'm here with some popcorn... waiting.

This is the reason why I'll never own another EV. They design the batteries and the BMS with full DRM. You guys remember DRM right? Remember the DMCA, the thing that makes you a criminal for trying to find out how your car works? Well, yeah, the car vendors all (except NIO in China) took advantage of that and made damn sure you couldn't replace the battery with a third-party part or service center. They did this by intentionally locking out the user. This, to me, is sounding very not-geek-friendly and pretty ridiculous, but it's how 99% of the EV makers do it.

So, it doesn't matter if your car is in decent shape overall when your battery capacity starts to decline below your needs. You're "allowed" to go back to the vendor who sold it to you and you're allowed to bend over. Sure, there are a few EVs such as some Tesla and Nissan Leaf models that can be swapped for a wrecked battery. Some vendors offer cell-swaps for refurbishment and there is even a 3rd party battery for the Leaf now made by a Chinese vendor (CATL). The problem is that after you pay the import fees and installation (not to mention the expense of the battery itself) you're still very near what Nissan would charge (it's about $10,000 for the cheapest, low capacity, 3rd party battery replacement on the Leaf whereas Nissan's cost is $11k). I'm keeping my Leaf just to see if the CATL option gets cheaper in the next few years, but for now, my ICE cars are much more usable and cost far less to maintain over their life once you factor in battery replacement costs. If it weren't for the battery and BMS DRM, things would look a LOT BETTER, but don't hold your breath for that day.

That is part of how they are made. The other part is where they go to some mountain in Myanmar other poor country and flood the whole thing with toxic chemicals where the natives have lived continuously for 3000 years and are now having their rights stomped, and then collect the goodies (and a fraction of the toxic chemicals they use) via the runoff at the bottom. The mountain is now a toxic waste site and is unlivable. Nothing grown there can be eaten for a very long time.

This is all environmental science 101. Strange that the EV bigots cannot see/hear this and appear to think that ignoring the health and rights of poor/brown people in Asia is worth having slightly cleaner air in Western cities. Those same EV bigots would likely claim to be "anti-racist" and plan activities on Earth Day. These are the same people who freak out when someone suggest trading applications that burn bunker fuel might be replaced with LPG or something less polluting. These are hypocrites in other words.

I'm an old systems programmer with a 30 year career. I started in the mid 1990's. I must say that my experience with VS Code, Cursor, and NeoVIM + LLMs is the same as yours. It has helped me write code I find boring or for spot-fixes of VERY specific problems. I'd say anything under about 300 lines of code it can tackle, assuming very good & detailed prompts. If you need a whole application with proper headers and, say, 30k lines to nail the app together, then you can absolutely forget about it. LLMs will make a dog's dinner of that project in under an hour. You'll wish you'd never tried it'll be so sloppy and buggy. Just look at the basically fake compiler Anthropic just relased a month or so ago. The press ate it up, but I actually tried to use it and realized it's just a paper false front. It has no working assembler and other core bits. It's just a preprocessor at this point and a non-optimizing terrible "compiler". The press just took that as "it's over. Oh man, you guys are outta luck. It's SOOOO over."

In my experience, the folks most excited about AI coding and who have the loudest and biggest opinions about it are the utter posers and non-coding manger suit weasels. Real programmers are laughing up their sleeve about their glee at never needing coders again. Keep dreaming.

Ignoring the science was the specialty of CV19-era censors and authoritarians. Why do you think they embraced so much censorship in the first place? If they were so correct and properly skeptical scientists, why couldn't they withstand any critical voices or counter-skepticism? Any "scientist" who cannot debate their own thesis seems like they already know they are wrong or suspect they'll lose the debate they are running away from. The powers of status-quo during the pandemic clearly could not tolerate any dissent. This is why they made suing Big Pharma for their vaccine side-effects or deaths mostly illegal & impossible and went full-tilt Stasi on social media censorship.

So, if your pet "scientists" were so rational, skeptical, and evidence based, why did they need Big Brother to censor all their critics and skeptics? Do you think people are so stupid that they needed Big Brother to protect them from "misinformation", "disinformation", and "malinformation"?

HR bitches will wreck your company if you let them do your technical hiring. They basically need to run the criminal background check and the education background check. If those pass, please fuck off HR ladies, the technical interview will determine the final outcome.

Sunbird was a dedicated calendar client with CalDAV support. Man, I need that working well much more than I want a redesign of Thunderbird & Lightning or of Firefox. As the description said, Firefox redesigns tend to end badly.

IF you really want to redesign the browser, use a popular browser from the past as a template. My first choice would be to re-create Opera version 12 (pre-bloat-party Opera with basic tabs and sane/working session saving options). Firefox's session saving is both less reliable and less usable than Opera or Tab Mix Plus, which is now only available for old versions of Firefox as a plugin (or you can switch to Palemoon, which is a Firefox 59 fork). Another good option would be to re-create the look and feel of classic browers like Netscape or new-school browsers like Vivaldi, Brave, or Opera/OperaGX. Firefox could also use some better controls for full cookie sandboxing/visibility and easier per-tab javascript control and more restrictive Javascript defaults.

The problems come when you let "UX/UI Designers" get involved to RUIN (uh, I think they mean "Fix") the interface and do things that normal users aren't asking for, don't care about, and wouldn't add in a million years "because stupid visual-design reason here". UX/UI designers don't listen to USERS because they believe they know better (hint: they are dead-wrong). Those guys (or gals as the case may unfortunately, be) should mostly simply be dismissed from these projects and run off completely or set to writing documentation. Regular programmers and project members did a better job before those clowns existed, as we clearly can see with the proliferation of UX/UI "designs" for shitty smartphone apps and other crapware they participate in.

Maybe, but I'm wondering how much different this really is from simply tracking a license plate using OCR / plate readers. That's even easier in many cases. Plates are a unique ID, too.

Well, that and a few trillion dollars of disposable income from North Sea oil wealth spread out over a mere 5.7M people. That certainly impacts their ability to spend and their largess spent on NAV, infrastructure, defense, etc...

Oh, I'd say Norway is more than a little bit out of line. They are a oppressive anti-free-speech state (Penal Code Section 185) that not only has had hate speech laws since the early 1900's but also updated those laws (in 2020) to "protect" transvestites and other deviants from any "insulting" speech. How nice for one small group of liberals and foreigners to get protection from this vast (didn't you just say 2%) horde of hostile natives. Heaven forbid someone hurt a trans person's feelings or criticize mass migration of Muslims in Norway. Norway prosecutes hundreds of people a year for it and the conviction rate is around 90%. Those convicted face fines, jail or prison time, and a permanent criminal record.

Yeah, you guys have a real "free speech paradise" going there. Keep patting yourself on the back for some idiot journalists RSF rating while meanwhile throwing people in jail and fining them for pointing out the truth or hurting some Sami's feelings. The freedom to express dislike toward something the government wants to protect is still a real freedom and the laws sit there like a viper, waiting for even greater misuse and abuse the minute folks get irritated. Let's see, I recall ... there was another group who had the government jail people for speech they didn't like, too.. gosh.. who was that... Imperial Japan... wait, close but,... Stalinist Russia.... yes, but.... hmm, I just cannot remember.

In the USA, understanding this is key. It's a giant organized voting block. There's "democracy" allowing collectivists to fondle the controls, again. Private schools regularly kick the dogshit out of public school results, with more than twice as many private school students getting a bachelors degree before 30. Not only that, but private school students regularly score 20 points higher in math and reading by 8th grade. Also, since private schools get better results for less money why not just close them down and let teachers compete for jobs like any normal person in the private sector has to? In other words, vouchers make way more sense than continuing to run a broken system that fails it's students more or less universally.

So much for the collectivist fantasy that government is the source of all good. In this case, it's literally institutionalizing harm to students to provide a retirement path for teachers. Realize folks that many public school teachers are on the bench, not teaching anyone, who never contributed jack shit to a 401k, and are getting retirement pay from publically managed pension funds that pose a huge risk to the taxpaying public.

Found the guy with a polysci degree.

No, that was for Archie Bunker. Sorry for the ambiguity.

This will enrage the normal Slashdot viewer. How dare you say one bad thing about EV's or being green?!?

There is very little chance it'd taste the same due to exactly the reasons you cite. There is also the chance that because it's not subject to the same conditions, stress, hormones, and biology as regular meat, that it may contain something harmful or cause cancer. There is no proof that it does or does not, but there also isn't much in the way of data or long term studies. It's like artificial sweeteners that were good for you, until they found out they weren't!