Slippery slope. Consumer protection is typically selective and specific, and, above all, exclusive instead of inclusive. As in: you must not utilise substance X, your product must not exceed energy consumption Y, it must not employ material Z etc etc.

Forcing actors to provide a specific service for the convenience of others is bad. Or rather, would be bad, because I don't think this will fly even in the EU.

Yes, Hungary does. AI summary: "Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law (Alaptörvény) contains a clause stating that the official currency (legal tender) of Hungary is the forint. This means the currency is embedded in the constitutional framework rather than only in ordinary legislation."

, and the outcome is not actually a foregone conclusion.

Worth remembering.

By and large: no.

My personal take (that is, my 0.05€) is that European sentiment towards the US covers the entire range from admiration over friendliness via exasperation to slight weariness. But animosity is by no means the dominant sentiment. Europans, too, understand that there is a common base here, and that a few years of a slightly runaway administration won't necessarily shift all paradigms.

Mod parent up. This has been a major grievance of mine with every desktop Linux System I've ever used. One application doing runaway memory allocation, and the entire UI invariably grinds to a complete halt with zero interactivity. It takes minutes for the OOM kill to unblock things, if ever.

I can work around such things, but hard to explain to Joe User how a 'superior' OS can fail in such a basic fasion in 2025.

nice try, 90s guy

In his own way, Lem was a visionary. Aimed to be more of a philosopher than a SF writer. I love all of his works, including the Cyberiad.

On the topic of AI ("humanoid" robots, in this instance), I vaguely remember he had one of his characters say something along the lines of: you can either create equals (then with all the flaws they come with) or dumb serfs. You can't have it both ways.

Also, his take on what a superintelligence might actually sound and feel like ("Golem XVI"), is super deep for his time.

Not just in Finland though

I haven't watched linear TV for a long time, and I'm pretty old, plus rather cantankerous, stubborn and grey-bearded. Yet I find it puzzling that this kind of medium is actually holding on so strongly.

It's a new {Space,Robotics,AI,...} race. The West clearly has the means and the resources to keep up, we just need to get our act together. The Chinese put their pants on the same way as we do, they just have a different scale and certain methods at their disposal that we don't have. But they also have weaknesses of their own.

Stanisaw Lem, my favorite SciFi author, may have been obscure and wrong about many things, but he got this one right re AI: you can either create mindless serfs, barely useful, or you must face creating entities way beyond your control. There seems to be no space in between. His novel "Golem XIV" is a good read.

Don't be silly. Automatic is as readily available as stick shift, AC likewise. The problem isn't availability.

I didn't say they were.

Just as likely on the car ride to the airport for the plane to Arizona.

Or, on my side of the pond, as I heard someone say recently: people drive their cars from Hamburg to Alicante, where they're then scared of being eaten by a shark.

afaik:

only one gear switch, completely different location and bigger

gear up: switch up; fuel cutoff: switch down

fuel switches are mechanically locked against accidental operation