Just to make it clear - I am against governments
Your post history contradicts that. The correct statement is that you are against governments that are not run by your Lord and Savior. For you, the first rule that needs to go is the separation of church and state, you want to fuse the two forever together.
Surely, Slashdot is allowed to take spell checkers?
Under strict supervision, yes. Unfortunately there is no supervision left as there are only two people working for slashdot and they both have real jobs in the outside world that pay the bills (Taco of course left years ago).
And don't ask about the unicode support they were working on 20 years ago...
long after his cadaver is consumed.
Smart money is on a Lenin-style mausoleum for Trump with a body permanently preserved in a top-secret cocktail of preservatives. Not that he hasn't already begun that process with his diet...
Ultimately, it was just a car lugging around all the things required for an internal combustion engine AND electric vehicle parts at the same time. Double the complexity and a rolling compromise.
That was my experience owning a hybrid. Ultimately, the controller part that mated the EV and ICE vehicle parts was what failed, and the cost of trying to fix that negated pretty much any fuel savings we'd ever get out of the vehicle.
A plug-in hybrid with a proper battery that can run as an EV for short trips and use ICE for backup makes a lot more sense. The range extender hybrids are just extra complexity for what's just a hack to reduce fuel consumption. But to maximize that fuel consumption, you kinda need to tweak your driving patterns to optimize for EV behaviour, which is also a technique that can get significant fuel savings on an ICE car.
despite the fact that no one asked for it
Not exactly true; Unity was first seen in the netbook edition, and it was darn near perfect for that environment. The netbook edition was shipped pre-installed on various netbooks until Microsoft got their thumb out, so I'd argue that someone definitely asked for it, and Ubuntu delivered.
Switching the non-netbook Ubuntu to Unity maybe wasn't the best choice, but at the same time, that's around when both KDE and GNOME kinda lost their collective minds and decided to rewrite just about everything, so I kinda consider Unity to be the desktop that got Ubuntu users through that mess until we had more sane alternatives.
Something can be 'technically superior' but still not the 'best' solution, because 'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'
100%. If the superior solution always won, Microsoft Windows would have been relegated to the dustbin long before Windows 95 existed (and we wouldn't be dealing with the disaster pile that is Windows 11 today). Similarly if the superior solution always won we'd have high speed rail in the US connecting all our major cities, but that hasn't happened either.
'solution' includes a lot of factors beyond 'technological superiority.'
Including whose wheels you're willing to grease to get your inferior solution a leg up on the ones that are better.
In other words, we are toast. Sad because AP was once one of the original newspapers/sites with journalists rather than editorialists but that ship has sailed for most if not all of those outfits. It's hard keeping up with the Kardashians/Jones, whatever.
You're missing the point of the AP, and it's actual composition. I worked at a daily newspaper most of my way through undergrad and knew the ins and outs of the AP better than most.
The main use of the AP was to get international news to outlets who couldn't afford to place staff in places further away from their own location. A great example is any international war, though even big national events (9/11 being a great example) are also places where AP stories are valuable.
The AP carries very little editorial content. Yes there are a few editorial writers who publish there but the volume from them is minimal compared to the objective news reporting. Some people like to claim otherwise but that is from those who aren't actually looking at the body of work on ap.org.
Unfortunately the newspaper model is indeed dying. Many of us are lamenting it and we're not sure what solution could bring it back. Printed news was supported by advertising, both display ads and classified ads. In the 90s your local daily paper likely had 4-8 pages of classified ads, every day. Now the majority of that is on craigslist or facebook. On Sundays your paper had full color printed advertising inserts from over a dozen retailers; many of those retails have since gone out of business and many of the ones who remain don't advertise that way anymore. Online subscriptions can offset a small part of this, but only a small part. Online advertisements are blocked by most readers' browsers, so that isn't productive for newspapers in many cases either.
The tabloid and editorial "journalism" you refer to is successful because it does a better job of selling crap to its audience. Don't confuse it with the professionals at the AP.
"'Tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 'tis true." -- Poloniouius, in Willie the Shake's _Hamlet, Prince of Darkness_