A lot of their reporting is extremely high quality.
Otoh, many of their editorial board and staff are afflicted with TDS.

I strongly considered a phev for my recent dec 2024 purchase because it's like to switch but we have a cabin 4 hours away and occasionally I have to drive to Chicago. Both would be inconvenient in a pure ev.

1) significant price step up from comparable ice cars
2) my commute is 10mi, so the 40mi electric range wasn't a deal killer...until I pressed the dealer on what happens to the range at -40 (which happens here maybe every other either now)... He admitted the electric range would be half of that, or a little less! Seriously...15 miles range electric, then it's just an over heavy weakly engined ice car.
3) we took a test drive, understanding that just local streets it should run mostly in electric and then kick over to gas in certain circumstances. This was complete bullshit. We left the dealership, drove maybe 2 miles in local suburban residential streets, occasionally tried hard acceleration and then about 5 miles highway. Aside from curb-to-parking-lot-exit, it was gas. So what's the point, again?
4) Aside from intrinsically higher repair costs with 2 drive trains, my local repair guy wouldn't be able to fix it so I'd be stuck with 50% higher dealer maintenance costs in 3-4 years when they start to hit.

No thanks.

Linux advocates "it's a tidal wave!"

Everyone = enough in a democracy to change policy, eg a majority.

The rest are just whining bitches in the shadows.

Nope it really doesn't, except in your little self-justifying universe.

Then again, both CAN be true.
It could be racist flame bait (I'm inclined to agree with you) with a small kernel of truth.

And I believe the answer to your questions is almost certainly BOTH.

Yes, they absolutely do. (Except for the wee bit about getting everyone to agree with them and change things, which I think even dipshits like you would agree they did in the last election.)

Then again, it's pretty much the entirety of your posts, eh? Just ceaseless dripping of bile like an infected cunt.

Nope, you don't get to redefine words to fit your moral parameter.

THEFT is taking something that doesn't belong to you. Even very, very small children understand that.

No previous definition of theft ever included "so that I have it and you don't" until hairsplitting internet lawyers wanted to be able to download things they didn't own and not be called thieves.

(shrug) in fact I agree with you that the best description of software piracy is indeed "illegal copying" but in the vernacular, simplest use of the term, it's ALSO theft. If we're splitting further hairs, it's ALSO a less serious category of theft for the reasons you put above, like (for example) taking your neighbors rake without permission, using it, and putting it back. It is absolutely 100% theft; it is also much less important than a theft involving keeping or destroying the thing, I would say that's also self-evident.

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

Paul Krugman, darling of the NYT, insisted Debt is GOOD
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/0...

https://x.com/paulkrugman/stat...
"DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY WE OWE TO OURSELVES
DEBT IS MONEY ....

It only make us poorer in aggregate if it crowds out investment â" which is isn't doing"

(apparently disregarding the obvious, recognized, inevitable consequences of soaring debt)

Let's remember: in the US, about 20-25% of every year's budget is borrowed against the future.
We are the wealthiest society ever in human HISTORY and we still can't afford all the shit we WANT.

That's insane.

Sure they will.
Histrionic language designed to spur sympathy.

No, you're being bought by a big funding firm. Nothing here necessarily implies you're going to be "victimized" in any way.

To be clear, I personally don't like VC takeovers, which is essentially what this is - they DO tend to have negative results on companies in the long run. But if a business is up for sale, the future for that firm is not "Happy lucky everyone happy utopia" vs "terrible VC acquistion". Rather, the options are "long dwindling likely painful death of the business as the incompetents running it who put it in that shitty place try increasingly desperate efforts to solve it" vs "terrible VC acquisition".

No, what this plaintive, emotional please is all about are people who are afraid that DEI really *is* over for them, and the last few years of triumphal leftism-as-delivered-in-games "Hello I'm nonbinary" is ending, so they no longer can destroy long-beloved IP with their political horse-flogging.

So fuck 'em.

I feel slightly bad for the people who didn't participate, but like the collaborative fucks who didn't participate but who "went along with" shit like the Bill Cosby room at Blizzard, to claim they're entirely innocent is also not completely true. Sorry. Ecosystems require turnover, and - while the Saudis might like EA to continue to survive as a money-making enterprise, after all and are reasonably likely to continue to fund the creatively-bankrupt money-printing of games like Madden 912 or FIFA v306 - if they prohibit your overt political bullshit and drive Sweet Baby out of business? All good in my book.

If only Disney were next.

1) most 'piracy' (I suspect) is not massive commercial grey-copy moneymaking enterprises.
1.1) that said, as a society I think it's morally in our interest to NOT normalize low-level theft, which copying someone else's music, text, video, etc without them being fairly compensated is.
2) yet there are large numbers of such organizations that really do deserve punishment
3) at the same time, the idea that "in defense of our IP" the producer/distributors feel entitled to install harmful software without permission is also absolutely unacceptable.

Neither the blurb, the OP, nor the (sort of paywalled) Guardian article note that ITV is ONLY available to UK viewers as far as I can tell? (Maybe there is a pay version)

Or use Tunnelbear, et al.

Note that the NASA one, for all its warts, is available to everyone for free.