From the center of the mass.

That is exactly what it meant. Regulation (from Latin rex = king) means: per the King's law. Or as Wiktionary has it: Borrowed from Latin regulatus, perfect passive participle of regul (“to direct, rule, regulate”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), from regula (“rule”), from reg (“to keep straight, direct, govern, rule”).

You can do the calculations yourself. To break apart, a rotating object has to reach its escape velocity at its outer perimeter. Otherwise, the gravity would pull back anything that was trying to break apart. A black hole by definition has all its mass within its event horizon, and the event horizon is defined as the surfaces where the escape velocity equals the speed of light. That means that a black hole would have to rotate so fast that its equator surpasses the speed of light to break apart.

One of the lessons we've had as the Federal, multi-branch nature of the US governmennt has frustrated Trump is that the government may be fucking us over, but it's not doing it in *unison*. It's doing it piecemiel, on the initiative of many interests working against each other, just as the framers intended. The motto on the Great Seal notwithstanding, there are myriad roadblocks to consolidating power in the hands of a single individual. It takes time and repeated failures. This is why the second Trump Adminsitration is worse than the first; they've figured out ways around things like Congressional power of the purse, put more of their henchmen in the judiciary, and normalized Congress lying down and letting the president walk all over them. It's a serious situation, although fortunately Trump isn't long for this world.

But in the case of the UK, it's a simple logging device. It does not hamper the operation of the car it is connected to. If it fails, the insurance company has no data. But the driver can still start the car.

This would actually be an improvement, as now, a car is occupied by two people instead of one, reducing overall traffic.

Nebulously talking about known problems without naming them just shows you don't know the problems or won't enumerate them in fear of sounding ridiculous.

If I have my own source of electricity not relying on the grid, then that is my decision. If it makes business sense, why should I forego it? If it satisfies me as a hobby project, why should I abandon it? If the utility wants to pay me for my leftover electricity, why not sell it to the utility? This is none of your concern.

And the alleged problems for bird life are about the same than each single tree on the landscape. Yes, birds sometimes hit trees, because either they have misjudged their trajectory from the start (birds can be clumsy too), or because a sudden gust of wind blew them away. I sometimes find birds knocked unconsciously on our terrace, because they flew against the wall. Shit happens. To make this a problem of wind turbines is just arbitrarily and selectively projecting blame.

Even in a minimal setup right now, you need three: ignition/fuel injection management, battery management and managing the drive train between internal combustion engine and electric motor.

A lot of those computers are necessary to squeeze out the required efficiency of the car, both in mileage and in reduced exhaust pollution. It would be far more expensive to try to recreate the same with purely mechanics and fluid dynamics. Imagine recreating the functionality of the motor chip with something else! You would either have a very simple setup, which can only be tuned for a narrow range of conditions, and everything else sucks. Or what you need in a car would dwarf anything in a mechanical clock with ten complications. And for all the riding comfort, you won't be able to recreate it anyway. Electronics are the cheapest way to control a car.

A typical modern gasoline engine consists of about 1300 parts. But it allows your car to get 200 hp from a 2.5 liter engine without your mileage dropping being below 10 mpg, and without your engine blowing up after 40,000 miles, or you having to replace the cylinder gaskets every 5000 miles. You can have a look at American cars of the Malaise era to get an idea how a low electronic car would look like, 3 liter six cylinders barely getting above 90 hp.

Chinese EVs (and similar Korean cars) cost the equivalent of $10,000 in China. That they sell for $25,000 or $30,000 in Europe is due to the adaptation to European standards, of the cost of getting them licensed in Europe, and because of tariffs.

Apparently, the quality of Chinese EVs is quite o.k.. I've recently seen several Chinese EV converted into cabs, and those get high mileage and high usage. If the base car was crap, they won't last long.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

Here lies a big illusion: The Resistance does not exist. This is not Star Wars. This is Iran. There are many factions here, and one faction, Shiite technocrates, is currently on top. Women, Kurds, Baloch people, Azeris, Sunnites, Parses all have their own set of priorities and gripes. Sunnites probably won't allow women any more rights than the current elite. Azeris won't cooperate with Kurds, mirroring their conflict in Türkiye. Baloch people, being an ethnic minority, want their own autonomous region, but being only 2% of the population, won't find any supporters in other factions. Parses and Bahai are not Muslims, so they are viewed with distrust by everyone else. And those groups are not even mutually exclusive. There are Azeri women and Sunnite women. Most Kurds are Sunnites, but most Azeris are Shiites, in line with the Persian majority, and a huge part of the Azeris are aligned with the current regime. Azeris probably would support the Pahlavi crown prince, but Kurds would not, having had bad experiences with the old Shah.

On the other hand, a lot of people belong to the ruling faction, and a big part of that are owners and managers of a large part of the economy, and they have a lot to lose if conditions change.

You get something wrong here. Usually, a driver is legally required to stop after a few hours of driving. That's the point where the 20%-80% recharge comes in (which isn't too impressive, as the Daimler eActros series or the Scania 40 R A4 have about the same charging speeds). While the driver is resting, the truck recharges, and the next 300 or 400 miles of range are available.

On YouTube, there is a channel named "Elektrotrucker" by a German guy who for a year has driven fully electric semi trucks on long-haul services (like Germany-Spain or Germany-Türkiye) and reports his experiences in a video blog. It was never an issue to recharge without compromising his schedule, and he was running on the same schedule as every other truck driver with a diesel powered semi. His employer now has a fleet of 80 electric semi trucks, given the experiences of the last year.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"