I mostly drive a C3 Picasso and the speedometer at least is easily visible, however I find myself having to take my eyes off the road longer than I would like if a warning light comes on (and wouldn't notice it unless accompanied by an audible signal). The C4 has a narrower central console, I think.

My main complaint, though, is about the extent to which the additional "safety" features (lane warnings, speed limit warnings) are becoming a distraction hazard. A particular bugbear on a recent hire was the reporting of phantom speed limits accompanied by ever more urgent beeping and then a fleeting message appearing on the display urging me to "pay attention" which I could only read by not paying attention where it mattered. I can do without the assistance and infotainment, but that's not the choice on offer.

Both sides are going to want to get a great deal more evidence to support their positions - Tesco might want access to e-mails and strategy documents from Broadcom and they might want internal documents from Tesco showing what actual difficulties they encountered in migrating away. These will then have to be digested by experts capable of presenting them to the court and a case/defence built around them. All that takes a great deal of time. The aim of a civil case is to get financial restitution for the damages allegedly caused and the full amount probably won't even be known until the migration process is complete. Filing the case allows the discovery process to begin.

Courts will only intervene urgently if there's a threat of harm that could not subsequently be compensated adequately by monetary damages. In this case, all parties are large corporations with deep pockets whose continued trading is not in question.

I sing in choirs and the majority of people are long past retirement age and seem to be relatively alert and mostly quite sprightly. There's clearly a difference in outcome between singing and being sung to...

That would be Zweistein.

Different countries have different electrical sockets, different supply voltages, different RF spectrum allocations, different building codes, different taxation systems, even different grades of petroleum-based fuels. These are as much the products of history as the different languages and cultures. Most industries cope with this just fine and build their products and services to accommodate market requirements.

It's a peculiarity of the IT industry that it has historically been resistant to acknowledging the existence of a world outside the US. Basic things like currency symbols other than "$" were inconsistent afterthoughts. Western languages other than American English were gradually accommodated by a variety of inconsistent hacks. Support for Asian languages was largely left to subsidiaries in the relevant countries to remedy. While end users can now generally use computer systems and phones in their native languages, the same isn't true if you're trying to actually write software. Much of the "additional cost" over the years have arisen simply because the suppliers failed to account for a global market when they developed their product and are stuck with inflexible solutions that don't actually meet market needs without extensive re-engineering.

Yes, commerce would be much simpler if the world were homogeneous. It isn't. Your job, as a developer, is to serve the market that exists. If you don't want to, others will. The US has a large domestic market, but it's an increasingly small part of a world market with increasing local technical capability. It can't get away much longer with dumping its domestic products on the world on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

This. If you only want to think about politics once every four years and take no responsibility for what happens in between, Trump is what you get - before it gets worse.

The killer combo is going to be that US technology is now essentially toxic since dependency on anything American has become a means of conquest.
Even the stuff that works now has a limited shelf life. Those countries that have been ripping Chinese technology out of their critical infrastructure (at the behest of the US government in some cases) are going to be repeating the process with US kit, though they'll be doing it silently.

There is always the possibility that this says much more about the abilities of even the 'best' salesmen than it does about the abilities of AI.

The problem is that the movies that would take advantage of that level of equipment would be extremely costly to make. Difficult to recoup that if you only have a relatively small number of locations in which to screen them. You'd also only have the capacity to screen a relatively small number of movies per year. That's not very attractive to an audience that demands variety and choice. If only a few movies are being made each year, the infrastructure that supports them (studios, distribution) is probably not viable.

This isn't new - cinemas used to be massive and they tried all sorts of technology fixes (widescreen, multichannel audio, 3D, smells, etc) to drag people back from their TVs. It didn't work. The multiplex turned things round for a while by increasing the likelihood that someone wanting to go to a cinema would find something they wanted to watch, but there's now more choice at home (assuming you can navigate it) and you don't have to smell other people's food or hear their conversations or try to see the screen through the glow from their constant texting.

Unfortunately, it's the poor experience that made the economics work so it's unlikely there's a better experience to be had.

Unless you pay extra to assign a specific seat, Ryanair only allows you to check-in for your flight between 24 and 2 hours prior to departure.

As they treat each leg of the journey as a separate single booking, you already are pretty much obliged to have Internet access in your destination during those specific hours if you actually plan to fly back.

One of the frequently-admired features of Unix is the fact that a lot of the basic utilities are filters - they take text on stdin and produce transformed text on stdout that can be fed to another filter in the chain.

C is a really terrible language to use for text-processing, even more so once you move beyond ASCII. How it ever survived for writing such programs is actually quite hard to imagine. In fact, I can't really think of a use for which it is particularly suited - it doesn't give you the real control you need to write system code (it only works for writing operating systems because of known compiler behaviour and the ability to inline machine code) and it barely qualifies as a high-level language. It continues to exist because it's the ubiquitous least common denominator - everything has a C compiler.

The problem we have today is that we're essentially trying to use procedural languages to describe programs that don't proceed with a traditional control flow - the familiar ideas of scope and lifetime that came from languages like Algol don't really apply and are hard to describe when there are asynchronous threads that may or may not also be running in parallel. I don't think Rust is actually helping us with the description, it's simply making the problem more clearly manifest.

We're in the "something must be done" phase but have yet, I fear, to identify a "something" that moves us sufficiently far forward to be worth the upheaval.

Back in the days when people left their houses to see movies, they purchased a "ticket" that gave them the right to view the picture once.

You're still buying a ticket, though the number of viewings is undefined.

The vast majority of Bluesky users are using that app, however. Whereas Bluesky is decentralizable (up to some point) very little seems to be decentralized in practice.

The biggest issue, I would have thought, is that the main feature of the decentralization mechanism is that everybody in principle gets to see everything: the user identity exists to authenticate the origin of posts only. It's ultimately up to the app what posts the user gets to see. I'm not sure whether under a strict interpretation of the law Bluesky would be permitted to accept the word of a federated app that its users were of an appropriate age and would take responsibility for only selecting appropriate content for display because in principle the operator of the federated app could be an 11 year old.

You'd struggle to find one. Being in the US without the appropriate permission is a civil, not a criminal matter. I'm not even sure most Americans understand that. I doubt you can encapsulate the ambiguity of that in a single word. I rather suspect the word you'd prefer to use would deny the basic legal reality.

What "illiberal" men have been saying most recently is that the reason women (and minorities) are under-represented in, for example, IT is that it's just that they're naturally less adept and that "DEI" is undermining this natural superiority for political/societal reasons. When it comes to men being under-represented, suddenly there's a problem with "society's depictions" of men and men are demanding affirmative action for their uniquely manly problems.

Throughout most of time, men have had the advantage of physical power and have shaped a world in which power was the ultimate determinant. That world no longer exists - physical power is largely irrelevant and the structure of modern societies discourages the use of physical power for personal advantage. That's the thing the MAGA crowd object to - the fact they can't use their force to override societal norms any longer. It's the reason the MAGA government is using illegal detentions and deportations and sackings: to demonstrate that power once more has the right to overturn the law and the democratic consensus.

However, that's not a problem for men in general, only the ones who've been brought up (by mothers as well as fathers) to believe in their innate superiority and to expect the indulgence of their whims. This isn't some major crisis - there's yet to be even a single female US president - it's simply the old tradition of daughters being little more than trading commodities working its way out of the system and erasing all the traditional male excuses in the process. It's hardly surprising that after 100,000 years of not having to make the intellectual effort men might be a bit rusty. But it's hardly the end of masculinity as we know it if men have to put in a bit of effort for a change.