There are laws against stalking. The problem is police officers using Flock surveillance to stalk people. Guess who was watching them: no one. Guess who would prosecute police officers for stalking. Probably no one.

Perhaps it's time to apply the same methods here that helped deal with spam back in the day: start threatening the ISPs that don't deal with users infected with proxies with having all netblocks belonging to them blocked unconditionally. That works by shifting the complaints from people the ISP doesn't get paid by (the services being scraped) to people it does (it's users who can't access services). We even have the tech needed already: DNS-based RBLs. Condemn providers who host scrapers who don't provide useful user-agent strings or don't comply with robots.txt to the same fate.

We don't need regulations to do this. The services belong to the people who run them, and they've got pretty much free rein to take actions to protect themselves. Is it severe? Yes. Is it disproportionate? Also yes. But then, to avoid it they just have to do one easy thing: not be assholes. If they can't manage that, are we obligated to shoulder the costs of letting them freely be assholes? IMO, no.

FWIW, here are numbers:

Gasoline-powered cars: 1530 fires per 100,000 sold
Hybrid cars: 3475 fires per 100,000 sold
Electric cars: 25 fires per 100,000 sold

Source: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/s...

An interesting aside: The delivery trucks used by the US Postal Service for the last 40 years are crazy fire-prone. I learned this recently because my brother is a mail carrier and a few weeks ago he was out delivering when he saw wisps of white smoke from under the hood. He pulled over and jumped out to investigate, but by the time he got out it had turned into large black streams of smoke and by the time he walked around to the front he could see small flames. Instead of popping the hood he ran to back and started pulling the mail out. The fire truck arrived about two minutes after he pulled over (this all happened about 100 yards from the fire station) so a couple of packages in back got a little damp but he got everything else clear.

His boss brought him another truck about 10 minutes later and he loaded it up and finished the route. Neither snow, nor rain, nor external engine combustion stays these couriers, you know.

Mail truck fires are so common there's even a web site that tracks them: https://mailtruckfires.com/. This is my brother's truck: https://mailtruckfires.com/uta...

There are four or five distinct serious design flaws that make mail trucks fire prone. Mail carriers are excited about the new trucks that are coming, which should be much better. Many of them will be EVs.

No. I refuse to allow Trump to redefine conservatism. True conservatives may be criticized for caring more about economic competitiveness than people, but Trump doesn't care about either.

I do not think that word means what you think it means.

The constitution is clear. Trump is ineligible to become president after January 20, 2029 unless he becomes Speaker of the House (the highest line-of-succession post in which he can legally take office) and both POTUS and VPOTUS resign or die, or unless he takes some post even lower in the line of succession and an even larger number of people resign or die. And even that path to the presidency isn't clearly constitutional; it just isn't absolutely black-and-white unconstitutional.

So no, Trump cannot win a third term. He cannot even legally appear on the ballot for a third term, short of him somehow managing to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment and subsequently getting three-fourths of all states to ratify that amendment, or somehow managing to get two-thirds of all states to call for a constitutional convention, neither of which is much more likely than him winning the lottery.

He might, however, be able to win a Senate or House posting, in which case he could continue to be a distracting thorn in the side of proper governance for years to come.

The Gulf of America Act didn't make it through the Senate. It was never codified into law, and the name will be reverted by executive order on or around January 20, 2029 unless the next Congress has enough of a Democrat majority in the house to formally reverse it sooner.

Nowhere in the Constitution does it grant the president the authority to rename bodies of water by executive order. And constitutionality questions aside, this will likely be overturned; it's only a question of whether it happens now or in the first week of the next Congress.

Compounding that is the racism problem. The name Ontario is a Native American word that means "Great Lake". So not only is our president (illegally) renaming the great lake of the Great Lakes, which is bordering on idiotic on the surface, but he is also replacing a word that has meaning to the cultural heritage of Native Americans with the name of a dead white guy from Europe. You can't get much more offensive and flagrantly racist than that.

This is Mt. McKinley all over again, but without decades of historical precedent for the non-native name, and I find it to be an utterly disgusting, contemptible name change by an utterly disgusting, contemptible president. I have never looked forward to any day more in my life than I look forward to January 20, 2029, when all of this racist insanity can start being rolled back.

All I'll say is, they're not calibrated anywhere near as accurately as you seem to believe; and that I'm not talking about after-market add-ons, I'm talking about the OEM markup on sub-$100 hardware.

If you're trusting the edge of that cliff to actually be right at the red line on your camera, you're going over anyway.

More to the point, it doesn't take a $6k computer with access to lock everything in your car behind a paywall just to get a video feed from the back of the car to somewhere on the dash. It takes a $20 camera and a $50 dumb display (and that would in most cases give a significantly higher quality image than the garbage auto manufacturers are using).

There is a reason not to have both - Because there's absolutely no reason volume needs to go anywhere beyond a pot inside the radio. The entire rest of the car doesn't need to know or be able to override the physical position of that pot.

The same is true for virtually all features that don't directly affect the operation of the engine itself (and even most of those!). Even when we're talking about something like power windows or HVAC, the buttons don't need to do anything more than physically bridge the dumb-as-shit DC power bus going to the corresponding motor.

We're building modern cars as a giant ball of points-of-failure glued together with software. Software that can fail, can lag, can ignore us when the manufacturer would prefer we listen to their ads. And that the real "cost" here - Nothing to do with $0.25 knobs and everything to do with locking core features behind a paywall.

Ad-sponsored is fine for "free" services like broadcast TV and mobile games. When I'm paying mid-five-digits to own something, BMW can fuck right off with this rent-seeking!

I am actually thinking about my next BMW (my current one is getting old). Knowing this, the iX3 is off the list.

BMW had a great control system, intuitive, possible to do many things without even looking. "Young people prefer" ? Really? The young people that actually buy your cars? Well, they'll learn and not prefer touchscreens anymore on the 2nd car.

BMW Blames Young People

That sounds intentionally deceptive / deflecting. Makes it sound like Young People broke into the R&D labs and rewrote the blueprints, and forced the manufacturers to remove physical buttons, without their consent or ability to say NO.

This isn't about them being responsible for it, it's about car marketing analysts doing research on their customers, and coming to the conclusion that this is what they will buy, while paying little to no attention to what they really want or need. Without thinking about how this will pan out down the road. And now they're seeing all the backlash and pushback and are hunting for someone to blame.

It's like the parents blaming their kid for his cavities, while ignoring their parental responsibilities. "We gave him the candy because he liked it, so the outcome is all his fault!"

Nobody wants to take responsibility for the state of modern car interfaces, because they're all doing it, and the first one or two that accept responsibility are going to take a temporary hit to their image. They all want to change back, but instead they're all standing around looking at each other, "well, c'mon, you do it first!" so they can all quietly make the same change in a year or two and escape the hole they're in. They all want to change back, but nobody wants to be first.

Reminds me a lot of headphone ports on smart phones. Pretty much at once everybody added a headphone port to their phones. It was a bit of a design nightmare, being physically tethered to your phone, but everybody went "all in" on it, and nobody could give it up because they knew their rivals would all jump on the opportunity to lambast their rival for dropping such a mainstream feature. Finally, after bluetooth was starting to mature, Apple finally bit the bullet and removed the jack. And just as expected, multiple big names dragged them through the alley in their marketing, for having gotten rid of a feature that "everybody loved". They kept up the gas-lighting while their designers quietly erased the headphone jack from their next design. Then like a switch, they quit panning Apple's lack of headphone jack as they released their next model that didn't have one either.

I expect the same thing's going to happen with car interfaces. A few manufacturers are going to bite the bullet and make the necessary changes, get slammed in the media for a year or two, and then everybody else is going to quietly make the same change.

Jaguar is the same. My friend constantly complained that it was in the garage and the repair cost was outrageous. He loved the "status" and the looks but hated everything else. He finally sold it and swore he would never buy another one. Since they apparently no longer make cars, that shouldn't be an issue now.

MS has been doing that for a good while, which is why in the few cases I have installed Windows on something, I have had to boot a Linux rescue disk to download a network driver Windows was missing.