And Uber drivers are just one group about to be eliminated by technology. The same self-driving will also eliminate tons of truck drivers, though that will probably hold off until people are more used to the idea of self-driving cars on the road. (I would give it one to three years delay.)

We're in for some interesting times.

But Uber will have to build out its fleet of autonomous vehicles.

That's assuming Uber. Tesla is preparing the assembly lines now for the CyberCab, and they could be putting them out at thousands a week by the end of next year. There's a lot to be said for the theory that self driving cars won't be able to handle all weather and all weird roads, but from what I've seen, those are issues that may delay but not stop the self-driving takeover.

Yes, the ReplayTV interface was awesome. And the founder of ReplayTV went on to found Roku, which also has an awesome interface.

They were all in the same house, but they were installed at three different times (2 original, 1 extension, 1 later retrofit), so they wouldn't have been from the same batch. I'm thinking they were all in places where you would often be standing to the side, so there could be side-to-side stress, which is what caused them to fail. They were all from the 90s or later; older switches might have been stronger.

Funny you should say that. I had a ceiling fan that stopped working. Various YouTube videos suggested it could be a failed capacitor in the fan. I took it apart, and everything measured correctly on my meter. The fan was fine. The problem was the switch on the wall had broken. I've had to replace four failed light switches in our house.

They don't make them like they used to.

We had a ReplayTV 2020 back in 1999, and loved it. I always thought ReplayTV was better than TiVo, but TiVo had a lower sticker price with a subscription, and consumers are dumb. We moved to MythTV when we got an HDTV in 2004, recording off of antenna and QAM, later getting a HDHomeRun with CableCard. Last year we dropped cable, as we had mostly stopped watching it in favor of streaming, so MythTV still is sitting there recording occasionally from the antenna, but we rarely use it.

As far as features go, though, MythTV was the best I've seen for recording TV. It's a shame it's a bit complicated to set up; I believe someone tried selling preconfigured boxes at one point, which would have been a great idea, but there were issues with the TV listings.

For people who still want to record TV and are geeky enough to be here, MythTV is still a good option, though you'll need CableCard support from your cable company, and some of the channels will have copy restrictions so you can't record them.

But for everyone else, most cable companies will provide a DVR service of some sort (usually now streaming from their servers, not really recording locally), so you're pretty much stuck with that.

I think the way to measure how successful an automaker is with OTA updates is to look at how many firmware updates they've needed that haven't been able to be delivered OTA.

As mentioned in the summary, many automakers offer OTA updates for limited components like GM did in 2010. Telsa can update pretty much any firmware in the car, in large part because they don't outsource much of anything to other companies, which could make controlling updates more complicated.

Are Rivain, Lucid, and BYD doing just fine like Tesla? Is this another case of Legacy Auto not keeping up, or is this really something special about Tesla?

It used to be 26 episodes per season, with each episode airing twice during the year. It was a nice, simple way of filling the broadcast schedule. That shifted to 24 episodes at some point. There was a bigger shift, I think in the early 2000s, where they started having separate shows for the summer, and seasons started getting much shorter, sometimes more like 13 episodes. Now streaming services will put out 6-7 episode seasons; only a quarter of what a season used to be.

The good part of this is that you no longer get filler episodes. I remember watching shows like Stargate SG-1, and there were inevitably a few junk episodes, like a clip show that has some excuse to edit together a bunch of clips of previous episodes, or some episode that really didn't do much because they clearly spent all their budget already. I don't miss those. But with only 6 episodes, it's down to the same run-time as a miniseries, and things sometimes feel rushed.

For shows that are telling a story over the course of a season, the shorter episodes sometimes work well, but for more episodic shows (like Doctor Who), it just feels like you're getting shorted (because you are).

For many shows, the driving force is the quality of the writing and acting. Would the studios do better to spend less on the production and get more episodes for the same money? Good stories outweigh good effects.

Rides to and from airports are regulated, and there's a lot of money involved. That means the existing players are lobbying hard to keep the new competition out. If this is like everything else in history, they'll succeed only in delaying it. That delay will make the finances that much harder for new players, which may result in some failing, but eventually they'll get in. Considering that Tesla and Waymo have significant resources, they'll probably be the ones to break in to airport rides first. (Tesla just started trying to get the permits in California.)

The only people arguing against EVs on environmental grounds are either people on the far left who are opposed to cars in general or people on the right who don't care about the environment to begin with.

No.
More like basically decent people don't think it's alright to follow the bad example of a few people around them, so the number of people being obnoxious drops to where those who do really stand out. Social pressure can be an effective way to minimize disruptive behavior.

This sounds like an education campaign, not new rules. Unless I read it wrong (or the summary left it out), this is about trying to set the social norms, not about issuing fines.

I keep seeing these posts about what's needed to get people into an EV, and the bar keeps getting raised.

Frankly, we don't need high speed chargers to be as common a gas pumps, as the majority of gas pumps are for local use, and most charging is slow-speed at home. (We do need good solutions for those who rent or have on-street parking, though.) And for trips in the USA, if you're on the Interstate, you shouldn't need to think about it if you can use the Tesla Superchargers. Non-Interstate trips are getting more coverage, so most of those trips work now, too.

Posts about why you can't switch to an EV now sound more like excuses that real reasons, which is why goal posts keep moving. There are many good reasons why people who switch to EVs rarely switch back.

MicroSD has been around for 20 years now, and it's been another 6 years of SD before that. They can now fit tons of storage in the format, but they can't bump it up to modern performance speeds. It's time to find a new format that overcomes that. Now I'm not saying that this is necessarily the right answer, but it's certainly something in the right direction.

YES!

I was going to suggest the same thing. The ship could go into orbit around the best candidate planet in the target solar system, then seed it with life to try to get it to optimal conditions before raising humans to live there from frozen embryos. They could send sufficient DNA to eliminate any inbreeding concerns, and not for humans, but all the species introduced. And in many cases, it may be simplest to have a database and synthesize new DNA as needed for each new seed or embryo.

I imagine sending out a fleet of them to dozens or hundreds of star systems in the hopes of finding some good planets to colonize.

But at the same time, it's always interesting to consider what it would take to build a generation ship.