However, it's because I believe many great consumer technology leaps were driven by porn: photography, home video, the internet, the smart phone, etc.

The smartphone??

I mean it was convincingly invented, if not widely used by IBM in 1993. It was made to look very impressive (albeit wired) in the late 90s by Olivetti. And of course PDAs approaching from the other end being more computer and less data. J2ME phones came out which were a pile of shit. Maybe you could get a shit game on them. I don't really know if Blackberries count: they were messaging first but did they have any generality beyond that? There was of course the legendary N900, and some impressive (for the time) yet deeply wonky Symbian devices.Then in 2007, Apple came out with a rather good dumbphone which was turned into a smartphone by Cydia, which Apple then got in on the game a year later (which is a bit weird if you think about it).

None of those were porn. It was all about connectivity and messaging and nerdy shit especially businessnerd shit (except the N900 which was real nerd shit). Then fashion, then just plain old usefulness.

I mean that's not to say people don't watch porn on a phone on a plane (shit head in 23A knows what I'm talking about you utter wanker, but not in that case literally thank god), but I don't there's a convincing case that porn had a significant role. Pocket computers were obviously useful, even more so with a data connection, and people had been trying to get them working for years before it finally took off.

Is this true for animated films too?

Yes.

What about hybrid live action and animated?

Yes.

Animated films that are CGI based rather than hand drawn/painted?

Yes.

Hand drawn that are computer "painted"?

Yes.

""Run as fast as you can.""

Translation: Me like money

As an anti-racist with a geography degree, this is solving a problem that doesn't exist. Walk into any classroom on earth and chances are good they won't have the mercator projection on the wall, they'll have something better representative of area, often a Robinson projection.

In the hard sciences, one usually is happy about advancements, not about keeping it secret until one publishes oneself.

Haha, no.

If you don't publish papers, you don't get a job and so you won't be doing hard science anymore due to an imperative to eat and find shelter. So no, no one is happy if someone takes their mostly complete results and scoops them to publication. It's also why that's widely regarded as what's technically known as a "dick move".

Ok, I'm tempted. Not enough to preorder, but if the reviews are good enough I might go for this.

A t shirt?

Maybe a jumper. Maybe when a light jacket at the lower end. But a thick jacket at 12 degrees? Nope!

Wait what?

The nighttime lows in SF were 12C. That's think jacket weather???

I think Americans now spend so much time in climate controlled buildings that they've forgotten what weather is like.

It can, lots of countries, especially America regulate things outside their borders.

Laws can be enforced against local subsidiaries or any foreign executive who happens to wander into an area you have an extradition agreement with. Or in Americas case, any country you can successfully invade to kidnap someone. And in Putin's case anywhere you can get an assassination squad in. Also Israel's Mossad unit is notorious for plausible deniable foreign enforcement.

This isn't a question of should, it's a question of what can physical be done.

Yes, and?

Countries, including America, have investigatory rules where you are not allowed to talk about it at all. Want to do business in a country? You need to obey their rules. And you don't have a leg to stand on complaining if you have similar roles because then you're not saying the rules are morally wrong, you're saying you're special.

It is absolutely not improper for the UK to do such a thing and the US would have no qualms about using a national security letter (is that the right term?) on an American subsidiary of a UK company. It's how laws and jurisdictions work. Having a foreign ownership doesn't give you special dispensation to break a country's laws. Apple UK are absolutely subject to every single one of the UK's laws. They're also subject to quite a lot of American ones, having an American owner, but that's their problem not the UK's, and doesn't give any special treatment other than what America can force on the world under the universal law of might is right.

Note this is all orthogonal to what I personally think of the RIPA (my quite strong opinions are in other much older Slashdot posts).

This reminds me of a case where a British court and an American court each ordered litigants not to litigate a case in the other's court.This was in law school decades ago and I'm too lazy to look it up, but it's the same kind of issue where if you want to do business in either country you can get easily screwed.

"Hey AI

Fortunately, I don't need to engage with AI slop.

You live in a city that has tried to deliberately make life hard on motorist

I do not. Make an actual argument. Don't rely on AI to give you predigested bites of biased news sources in lieu of thinking

Google is punking me

And yet you based your argument on this. Funny though how your argument is exactly the same no matter what.

Boy, let me tell you about my experience

Blah de blah. I got off my bike yesterday on the way into work to help push a motorist's broken down car out of the carriageway (where it was causing a bit of a jam) into a spare space. Do not pretend that cars don't break down, crashes never happen and etc.

Here's the cities I randomly picked

You really need to stop relying on AI as much. The slop is rotting your brain.

Istanbul isn't even 100% IN Europe. You're comparing LA to Venice, a city where the primary motorized form of transport is by BOAT because it's literally built in the sea. Birmingham is the the motoring city where cars were prioritized at the expense of all else and here you are saying how Birmingham isn't working well. It's something they are trying to fix now. And Madrid? Have you ever been to Madrid? It's all fuck-off massive roads all over the place everywhere. It's a car city with horrendous congestion. It does not support your point either.

I'm going to play the stupid "plug shit into google/AI without thinking game" too.

LA average commute time: 30-35 minutes
LA average commute distance: 9-14 miles.
That make the LA average commute speed somewhere between 15 and 28mph. That's pro car? I can apparently commute faster on push bike than many people driving in the car utopia of LA!

Exactly how much do you think public transit infrastructure costs? By the time they gutted it, California's HSR project

Right of course you picked the single worst example of infrastructure planing in the entire world. The Elizabeth line cost about 16 billion and at peak time past the busiest point moves about twice as many people as one of the largest highways in North America. And it did that without introducing any significant amount of air or noise pollution into the city it runs through.

so let's look at France, probably the cheapest HSR builders in Europe per unit throughput. The London-Lyon corridor - LGV Sud-Est - cost â4,65B to build (would be about â8B today). 409km, so â19,6M/km. Traffic equivalent of a 6-8 lane highway. A 6-lane greenfield highway in Europe costs â12-20M/km. So even the French don't beat road costs with rail.

Firstly France ain't the cheapest. Second you've underestimated the rail capacity. Thirdly that makes it in the same ballpark as ot which somehow you determine is a pro-car point. And finally, railway speed is well over twice that of the road, making it the fast option not the slow one. But somehow speed only matters if it's cars, but is best ignored if it's trains!

Yeah, try telling a 3 AM medical emergency

Do you not have ambulances where you live? Are you supposed to drive yourself with a major head injury?

For the love of YHVH, develop some actual reading comprehension. You completely misread section 5.1 of your own link. The report states that 76% of all DUI-involved vehicles were cars - not that 75% of car crashes involve DUIs. Cars make up 80%+ of all traffic on the road,

Cars don't make up 80% of the mode share, sure traffic because they're so inefficient, but not moving of people. That means there is a disporportionate amount of damage caused by car also. You've now gone from posting slop to just making up facts.

Maybe in the future try actually checking the data first before reaching your conclusion?

You literally posted numbers supporting my counter claim then say that means I'm wrong somehow? Are you on glue?

Are you fucking serious? Have you ever actually been friends with a disabled person,

This here is the absolutely most digusting thing about the car brained and their obsession with disabled people. To you they are just a prop, just a tool for your arguments. Literally every point I made has been taken DIRECTLY from the elderly and disabled family member I help around on a regular basis. Apparently he doesn't count because he doesn't support your narrative of how cars are just he best and necessary all the time for everything. You can fuck off frankly. I'm going to stop reading right here.

Which I've always hated because it makes no sense.

Lots of things make no sense in physics. How can a single particle split itself in half and the interfere with itself but only if you're not watching too hard? Nonsense!

You're playing semantic games, splitting the unsplittable

Right I mean I only used the well established terms "elastic" and "inelastic" which have been in use across a variety of domains from traffic engineering to economics.

It's beyond foolish for you as a completely lay buffoon to dismiss areas you clearly know nothing about.

People need homes. People demand homes People need to work. People demand work.

Housing real estate is a bit elastic. On one end, people can cohabit which reduces the number of dwellings needed. That's why flatmates are mor common in expensive cities. And on the other end people buy second homes for leisure and convenience.

Demand doesn't mean people stamping their foot shouting about having a house, it's economic demand. Here's a wikipedia page you won't read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Wikipedia is splitting the unsplittable too! You are such a tool.

Traffic engineers, whose jobs should be to meet the needs and demands

You don't understand the term "demand" do you? Nope! And it's not and should not be the job of traffic engineers to satisfy the angry whims of morons on the internet.

All they end up doing is making life fucking miserable for everyone.

Ah we have an armchair traffic engineer here who has infinite budget for a 16 lane highway and the budget to buy out all the pricey in-city land on which to build it and its feeder roads!

I think we're having a semantic argument. Demand isn't being caused by adding more roads, the demand already exists and people aren't making trips because the cost of doing so is too high to justify.

Semantics is where the meaning is. Demand is usually elastic.

If someone added a 10 lane highway between two cities in remote Alaska would they magically fill up. Of course not. But why did they fail to induce demand in the same way that building more lanes in LA or Houston magically seems to do. The demand was already there and adding more lanes better lets people make the trips they already wanted to make but were otherwise avoiding.

Alaska doesn't have the population to fill a 10 lane highway at all.

We build other infrastructure to satisfy the wants and needs of the population it serves. Roads should be the same.

Well, no. You have confused need and demand. Demand we're talking about in the economic sense, it's semantic but if you want to have a precise discussion you need to use precise language. If you keep doing that you end up with the Katy Freeway and it's still inadequate at rush hour. How many more lanes do you think they should add?

A&E demand is not very elastic. If you've broken your leg you need to get it seen to right the fuck now no matter what. Doubling or halving the number of hospitals does not fundamentally change the number of people who need emergency services[*]. Demand for road space IS very elastic.

[*]Ignoring a broken healthcare system where people go there to get any treatment as a last resort.