I love you Angle-Westerns, you're all so obtuse!

(That made your whining sound particularly dumb.)

So glad I switched from Fitbit to Garmin. Google has done everything possible to lose me as a customer.

Your metaphor would make a lot more sense if kids were designing Lego sets that Lego then sold and vastly under compensated the creators of those sets (while doing a piss poor job of keeping those kids from being contacted directly by adults)

Speaking as a motorcycle rider, ebikes are dangerous. Not because of the bike but because of the riders. They often don't wear safety gear, they don't follow traffic laws, and many bikes top out at 70-80kph. It took considerable effort to get my Class M. A bike going that fast should require licensing and safety courses and helmet laws. Most people don't realize they can squid out on the road on an ebike just like you will on a motorcycle without proper gear.

I just installed Fedora 44 on my old Win10 laptop. Because Microsoft made sure this perfectly good laptop with 16gb RAM could not run Win11. And Affinity Suite runs great on wine now. And no obnoxious telemetry tracking. Oh yeah, for games: steam and lutris too.

Yeah yeah yeah, linux linux linux

still, Microsoft is in self-destruct mode.

"can't tell the difference between a game and reality"

Uh, while I would argue that you should probably care because that person should be focusing on an investor meeting, it tickles me that you're suggesting somebody playing a videogame during a meeting supports the assertion that "they can't tell the difference between a game and reality".

That would probably amount to a whole lot of people who can't tell the difference between a game and reality (which I don't agree with) rather than a whole lot of people are not focusing on what they should be focusing on (which I do agree with.)

"Having worked in public school education"

Lol. Means shit all for caring about better education.

"as it helps teachers and their healthcare/pension benefits"

Yes, you dipshit, it must be crazy of me to think that paying teachers well leads to better teachers.

Why would teachers want longer school days? School day lengths are fine. Longer school years? Is school a job? The length of the school year is for kids. There's a reason why schools have breaks, its for students. Additional money for after school activities? I mean, at this point I conclude you're a moron (actually I knew you were already moron) - that's a major ask of every teacher strike I've ever seen. (I dunno, maybe you've been surrounded by fellow idiots? Maybe this is what drives your pessimistic view on the profession .. )

Dollars to donuts, your "Having worked in public education" claim is as IT or computer something something, which doesn't make you an expert on public education. More of a useful idiot, every time I read your words.

Side mirrors almost always leave a large blind spot directly behind and close to the vehicle. There's a reason that when firefighters are reversing their appliances they always have at least one of the crew physically get out and watch the area behind the vehicle.

Even a rear window and rear view mirror almost always leave a significant blind spot low and close behind the vehicle, which is why reversing cameras became a thing. When they're done well, they really are significantly safer, as well as sometimes making it a lot more reliable for most people to park the vehicle in difficult spaces.

One of the modern innovations I really would like to have is full AR on my windscreen. I want unexpected hazards highlighted in real time, particularly those that are more easily detectable by non-visual sensors, like big potholes or animals obscured by vegetation near the side of a country road. I want the actual driving line I need to take to follow my planned route through complex junctions overlaid slightly on my view of the road ahead. I want light amplification for night driving, ideally combined with some other technology that can reduce the glare from oncoming headlights to prevent dazzle.

Although I only want all of this if (a) it's implemented well and (b) any additional data it uses is reliably up-to-date and (c) there's an emergency shut-off that instantly clears everything off the windscreen in case anything goes wrong.

Don't worry. You probably have funky modern door handles that don't work when the power goes out anyway. Not that the power in an EV is likely to go out if it's underwater or on fire or anything.

Oh, don't be silly. Next you'll be making even more absurd claims, like that car theft was already a solved problem 20 years ago thanks to immobilisers, or that having separate physical controls for essential functions that you can find and use without taking your eyes off the road for several seconds to mess around with a touchscreen is safer, or that no-one ever hacked 100,000 cars at once from 1,000 miles away back when they didn't have always-on remote connectivity and allow OTA updates to their essential control systems.

Yes, as long as you're the one in the big, heavy car, it's great. Shame if you're the kid it's reversing over though.

Do you ever use reverse gear? What's behind you is pretty important when you're going backwards...

Or just schools, period.

"Data Centers don't seem to bring jobs."

Seems is not a great word in an argument one wishes to make.