You are absolutely correct, but you left out one important detail - you have to register only if your car does not have Belgian or Dutch plates (at least for Brussels) - so it will indeed only catch out tourists and other unaware people. Still, registering for each city is moronic. France still requires you to register if your car does not have French plates, but at least you get one certificate which is valid for all France. They expect you to permanently stick this certificate on your windshield, which is another brand of moronic - if every country did this, you would not be able to see out of your windshield from all the stickers you would need.

Keep in mind that many countries in the EU also require you to buy a highway pass if you are from out of the country, and they also require you to stick that on your windshield. Displaying it in a holder on the windshield is not enough, it has to be specifically stuck. Why? They already have your plate and payment in the database. Also, none of those stickers unstick easily afterwards. Short-sighted morons abound when it comes to environmental regulation, no matter the country.

Also, if they are able to find you and send you the fine from another country at your home (and they are), which implies there is a procedure to access your national vehicle database, why doesn't that procedure allow them to check your emission levels in the first place?

I think we need to be careful not to accept a sales pitch without analysing it. Disruption is not necessarily a good thing. The printing press was disruptive, and changed everything after that. But a bomb is disruptive as well. We should make sure it's the former and not the latter - the ones selling it certainly don't care either way as long as they get paid.

At its most basic level, it was a way to obtain space capability by defining a clear, attainable and inspiring goal. Reaching for the moon.

As a result, it extended the limits of human exploration beyond our own planet. It showed that human space exploration is possible, and also showed its constraints.

Most of all, and possibly the most important of all, it provided hope. In a difficult time, it showed then when goals align and everyone pulls in the same direction, the sky is literally no longer the limit.

A formula like this, if possible and implemented, would just remove any competitive advantage for the rest of the world, while keeping all the existing competitive advantages for the US. Taken to its logical extreme, it would freeze most of the imports, while decreasing the quality of life for the population of the implementing country – more expensive items mean you will have to buy less. No, higher wages will not compensate this effect.

This ignores, of course, that other countries are independent, rational agents as well and they can see that accepting this would just mean they get taken advantage of in areas where they have a competitive disadvantage, while getting nothing in return to compensate. This would, of course, make them take retaliatory measures that would just wreck the automated formula and the end state would just end up being worse for everyone, with no upside even for the implementing country.

Cheaper does not mean better, but this does not mean much when there is no other easy way quantify what makes one product better than another that you can input in that formula you propose, for one, and when the purchasing decision by the final consumer is made with the price being the first, largest, and sometimes the only criteria taken into account.

Trying to remove this issue of consumers buying the cheapest items via a formula administered by the government, meaning in the end the government is the one who decides what, how much and at what price the population can buy starts looking, in my opinion, like the Soviet Union with extra steps.

I think in this particular case you are missing the forest from the trees.

Every individual type of resource taken by itself is, physically, limited, but this does not make everything a zero-sum game. Exploiting a resource can also lead to the creation of new, more valuable resources.

The classical example is oil - which was at its discovery something close to worthless. But later the chemical industry found ways to use it to make more and more things from it - and each discovery made oil more valuable, the chemical industry more valuable as well, and created entire new industries that were not even dreamt of before. Synthetic fertilizers created by the chemical industry made natural gas more valuable, the chemical industry more valuable and absolutely exploded the value in the agricultural business. That was a win-win-win of epic proportions.

Some things are zero-sum and will probably always be so. But there are so many examples to the contrary that claiming it as an universal rule is definitely wrong.

Both Sunni and Butch have flown on the Shuttle and Soyuz before. They are extremely experienced astronauts, which is why they were selected to test the Starliner in the first place. They will be fine. Dragon is very well-tested at this point, having any issues on the way down is extremely unlikely.

And Starliner is not blocking any docking port - the capsule returned to Earth, flying autonomously, back in September.

I don't have an Iphone so I can't confirm that that issue that you found on a 6 year old reddit post and for another car is actually valid for my car or not. I use Android Auto, my car is an European model and everything I said about the radio operation is correct.

You still have not invalidated the point I was trying to make, which was that any issues with CarPlay or Android Auto implementations are the fault of the manufacturer and not with CarPlay/Android Auto itself.

My car has a very decent Android Auto implementation. If I had an Iphone and it worked less well, I would still blame Ford, not Apple, for not implementing the same system for CarPlay.

It does not use CarPlay and Adroid Auto at the same time (how would that even work) - it just supports both, meaning you can use either an Iphone or an Android phone on the main screen exactly the same way.

You might be confused between Android Auto, which is a screen casting technology for Android phones which is basically identical to CarPlay for Iphone, and Android Automotive, which is the car basically running Android. There are cars running Android Automotive which support CarPlay as well. It's just screen casting and it costs almost nothing to the manufacturer to enable it. Polestar US is one, if you want to check. Here in Europe, the Renault Megane electric runs Android Automotive and supports CarPlay and Android Auto as well.

And the temperature preset is very simple - the climate controls block has its own tiny but wide screen (I mentioned it was a different screen), and it shows the set temperature for the right and the left side, fan speed (if not set to Auto) and I think that is all. Seat heating butons have three tiny LEDs on the buttons themselves, which show if they are on and how high.

The car is a 2017 Ford Focus - you can look up pictures online and see how it looks inside. You don't even need to exit the Android Auto interface to enable the radio - there is a Source button that switches between all the possible audio sources right under the main screen. Since the radio supports AM and FM, they are considered as two different sources as well. Surprinsingly well thought out.

I would think that this is an issue with the car manufacturer, rather than CarPlay or Android Auto.

My car allows me to use CarPlay/Android Auto and listen to the radio at the same time, including switching between station presets or even scanning for radio stations, all from the physical buttons on the steering wheel (for presets) or physical buttons underneath the screen (for scanning). I can also see the temperature preset on a different screen, and all climate controls are physical dials and buttons as well.

So it is absolutealy feasible, and saying that since some manufacturers are doing a bad job at it is a good reason for them to not even offer CarPlay at all, and instead we should pay to use their inferior navigation is absurd.

If your CarPlay experience sucks, it is because the manufacturer has intentionally made it suck.

Manufacturers would really like to make you pay for map updates, pay for another internet connection, get access to your private data (contacts, calls, messages, current location, favourite destinations, driving habits) and sell it to whoever wants to pay for it.

This is all this is - nobody invests in the "vehicle experience" because they want to - this is very, very hard and very, very expensive if you want to have something even barely usable. They want to take even more money from you than they already do.

When you hear car industry CEOs speak against CarPlay, everything they say is bullshit.

Most likely it was allowed to live exactly to raise these types of questions. We do not know what price they are actually paying and what conditions they had to agree to. We do know that other major app developers were trying to contact Reddit and being ignored - https://www.theverge.com/2023/.... Reddit has been lying about this entire process since the beginning - the main beef with Apollo's developer was that he was (legally) recording them and exposed those lies to the public.

Selling to conservatives is fine. Selling to anyone else is politics.

Most reporting on this is getting it wrong, even though the EU Commission has been quite clear in their notice.

They are not blocking it from official devices, but from personal devices enrolled in a BYOD system. If not uninstalled, the devices will be kicked out of the system and that it is all.

Nobody was able to install anything by himself on any work-issued devices anyway, the installs are centrally managed by the IT service and they would have to have a reason to get a specific app installed. Those installs would have to be used in an official capacity. Those devices would just have the app uninstalled automatically, no user intervention required. I wonder how many TikTok accounts the Commission was running.

The restriction refers to personal devices, where you can install applications by yourself, as those devices via the BYOD scheme can also access work information.

I think Taiwan has no intention of letting the top process fabs get off the island. Let's face it, if they did the West would most likely turn a blind eye and refuse to engage in order to protect their investments and market access in China instead. The US will offer relocations for fab equipment and the all-important personnel in case of invasion, if TSMC takes it the island is gone.
Taiwan needs to be essential in order to be helped, the numbers do not make sense otherwise.

USB-C has latches as well, they are inside the male connector. It's not just friction fit, otherwise it would never work.

I think it is more likely that these are just highly binned 8 Gen 1 chips, which would explain their limited availability. Having a completely new chip for just a few devices does not make sense, especially from someone like Qualcomm.

They had the entire Android smartwatch market, and did not make a new, better chip for it for six years (2014-2020). Their 2020 effort is still current, and still sub-par. They killed Google's WearOS in the process, and what we have left now is just Samsung's Tizen with the WearOS skin on top - Samsung being the only one who did not use Qualcomm chips in their smartwatches.

Qualcomm will reach M1 parity, of that there is no doubt, the only question is how many years it is going to take them to do so. Apple is incentivized to keep innovating in this space, as their whole hardware ecosystem, which is the foundation of their services ecosystem (where their money is), rides on it. While Qualcomm is a quasi-monopolist sitting on essential patents that is more incentivized to coast. They are not a patent troll, but they are a patent bully.

M1 is never coming to Android, or to Windows laptops, so what is the motivation for Qualcomm to hurry? They also have the exclusivity for Windows laptops, just to make sure they will never have to compete.