I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

microwave labotomy ... We just put the machine against your head here for a bit and those bad urges go away, all better.

Another poster mentioned that it's actually focussed ultrasound.

Still sounds like breaking a piece of a system by stirring the brain with a knife (lobotomy) or burning it out with heat (cauterization), electricity (electroshock) or mechanical shock (blow to the head) - just carefully focused without (substantial) damage to other parts of the brain or its casing.

Ultrasonic destruction of a piece of the brain's reward/punishment/desire/avoidance mechanism rather than persistent unwanted fat.

You might want to read up on how current hybrid vehicles actually work, 'cause it seems you have more than one misconception going on.

I have. For instance, my latest vehicle is the Ford F-159 XLT,, the full-hybrid model of the F-series pickup truck line. Power train is:
  - 6 cylinder dual-turbo engine. (runs low power but approoximately doubles output when a lot is needed.)
  - 47 HP motor-generator "pancake" on the engine side of the ttransmission, to scavenge / return power to./from a 1.5 kWhr lithium battery.
  - 10-speed automatic transmission, working with the lithium battery;s main alternator to fine-tune match the engine/mogen to the current driving situation. Max power of engine plus hybrid mogen; 430 hp.
  - full four wheel drive.

So it's primarily a gas-engine power train with an electric-car motor mechanically coupled to the engine shaft. Many other hybrids, from the venerable prius onward, are similar, with plug-in variants having a big scavaging/peaking battery good for pure electric operation of tens of miles rather than a minute or so and a wall-powered charger added.

What I'm looking for is essentially a pure electric - totally electronic "transmission" consisting of alternator(s) between the batteries and the motor(s), plus a tiny engine-generator able to burn gas and feed some teens of KW of charging power into the batteries when running down the road or parked near it.
 

Do the Waymo batteries use one of the lithium chemistries including cobalt, or a non-cobalt chemistry such as lithium iron phosphate?

Cobalt chemistries have a higher power/weight and energy/weight ratio, which made them the go-to chemistries for vehicle batteries. But they also produce oxygen when the cells overheat, leading to an unextinguishable runaway fire hazard: A burning cell makes enough heat to ignite the adjacent cells, so the whole assembly of them goes. Bad enough when it's a car's worth, but a disaster if it's a shipping-container sized module of a utility energy storage site. (And even worse when the site is a building full of racks, which someone had "protected" from fire with water-spraying, equipment-shorting system, so the whole site burns up, as happened recently with one in California creating a toxic mess.)

That's why purpose-built stationary lithium energy systems use non-cobalt chemistries - heavier, but a shorted cell just kills itself without getting hot enough to light off its neighbors.

I want to see inexpensive plugin hybrids.

But not like the current ones, which are primarily an engine/tranny powertrain with a motor/generator + small battery for scavenging downhill/braking energy for later accelleration/uphill/cruise/power-boost.

I want ones that are primarily a battery-electric with a small aux engine-generator (say 15-20 HP range), big enough to power crusing with a bit left over for gradually charging. That would let you range-extend by the size of your gas tank plus fillups (i.e. indefinitely if only gas is available) or go from battery empty to back on the road in a couple tens of minutes.

The backup engine would only run at max-efficiency speed and could use an atkins-like cycle (see "liquid piston engine") to get the max power out of the fuel. Most operation would use power-grid charging (when available and cheaper than fuel).

And a douche bag of a president who drops bombs next to schools and kills 135 kids . Should resign on the spot for that.

Look up "human shields", the practice of siting military targets among (or in or under) large collections of non-military civilians, in order to deter strikes against them or produce propaganda claims of atrocities when they're attacked anyhow.

In such situations the fault for the "collateral damage" is assigned to the side that set up the arrangement, not the side that hit it.

Nevertheless, it should be noted that the US has been trying very hard to use precision munitions and extreme military intelligence to take out military targets with as little harm to the innocents they're embedded among as possible, with impressive success. Compare the amount of collateral damage in this war to any of those conducted in the 20th century.

He's doing the bare minimum sniff test of verifying that *you* are the guy whose name is on the bookings and not someone sneaking in on someone else's name who can't even pronounce the name on your fake id.

At least in the case of people claiming to be returning citizens I've been told that they're comparing your accent to your claimed residence (or residence history).

Different words are acquired at different ages, and many are pronounced with regional variations. An expert can talk to you for a few minutes and come up with a pretty good age-map of where you lived as you grew up. An agent with a modicum of training can detect a mismatch between how you pronounce certain words and your claimed residence and pass you through quickly or keep you around and drill more deeply. (If you now live in an area with a regional accent wildly different from where you grew up it can help to answer a where-do-you-reside question with "Footown, but I grew up in Barstate".)

I presume they are doing something similar, though no doubt with lower resolution, on the world-wide level for visitors from other countries.

I mean, it depends on exactly how fast the water is moving (as well as how deep it is; both things matter). If we're talking normal river current (say, 1 foot per second), most adults can stand in eighteen inches and be fine, if it doesn't catch them off guard. If the current is faster, then it doesn't have to be as deep to have essentially the same effect, or if it's deeper, it doesn't have to be as fast.

There are of course some caveats to the above. One is, once you get past about 4-5 feet deep (depending on the person), you're floating or swimming anyway, so additional depth doesn't matter very much at that point; but additional velocity still makes a difference.

Oh, forgot to mention I'm from the Midwest. There's no room in the garage for a _car_ of all things, haha, that would be ridiculous. No, the garage is where we keep the garage stuff. You know, the lawn mower, snow blower, garden tools, step ladder, extension ladder, bicycles, sawhorses, sports gear, extra bricks left over from when the patio was put in, spare pieces of plywood, hedge trimmers, mattocks, old paint buckets, hula hoops, bungee cords, antifreeze, grill, charcoal, lighter fluid, and so on and so forth. There are four people in this household, so the garage is pretty much full. It think there might be a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor out there.

Your conclusion isn't wrong, but your supporting argument suffers from selection bias, confirmation bias, and a really small sample size.

Among other things, young people are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics if their parents also were (and you can spend arbitrary amounts of time arguing nature-vs-nurture on this; my conclusion is that it's both, and they're usually in synergy with one another on this issue), and statistically that means they are overwhelmingly more likely to be interested in academic topics, if their parents have enough money to *buy* their kids things like books, magazines, and subscriptions to learning-related services (CrunchLabs, Curiosity Stream, Brilliant, etc.) Statistically, the majority of public-library users are below median income, and they're in the public library because it's affordable. Children from lower-income households, statistically, are more likely to check out a video game or a movie, than a book, unless they need the book for a project that someone (usually a teacher) is _requiring_ them to complete (and sometimes they don't even bother then). The kids who enjoy learning, *tend* an awful lot of the time to have access to information that is not dependent on the public library. Though of course there are exceptions. And sometimes there are people who *prefer* to use the public library for ideological reasons, even if they could afford to be independent of it; but such people are in the minority.

For what it's worth, I'm in the same camp as you, someone with a fairly academic bent who grew up relying heavily on public, free sources of information, especially public libraries. My dad had a graduate degree, but it was in a field not known for large salaries; my mom, who is no dummy but doesn't have a bachelor's degree, was actually the primary bread-winner throughout my childhood. (She attended a hospital-run nursing school, back when those were a thing, and so was a registered nurse.) But, statistically, we are in the minority on this.

With that said, it's absolutely true that lack of interest in information, is a much bigger problem than lack of access to information, in the modern world, especially in the developed world.

You:
> I need my system administration routine down around 30 minutes per month.

Also you:
> I want GUIs for all common tasks

Yeah, those are *fundamentally* incompatible goals. Doing system administrative tasks using GUI tools is always going to take a lot of extra time, because GUIs aren't really scriptable. I mean, yes, you can use fancy window-manager features and macro toolkits (like xdotool or whatever) up to a point, to recognize certain windows and automatically click certain things, but this is inherently brittle and high-maintenance, in addition to taking a *lot* longer to set up, than throwing a handful of commands in a script and calling it a day.

If you're doing system administration in a GUI, it's going to be more like 30 minutes per month *per major service* that you administer. So 30 minutes a month for the web server, 30 minutes a month for the RDBMS, 30 a month and sometimes more for the mail server, 30 minutes a month for the firewall, and so on and so forth. If you want 30 minutes a month total, you need something you can easily script and run on cron jobs, and that means command-line tools.

GUI tools seem attractive when you're new, because the learning curve is lower. But it's a trap. In the long run, they will continue demanding large amounts of your time month after month, year after year, decade after decade, until you finally get fed up and kick them to the curb.

Am I the only person on the planet who still opens the garage door with, you know, my hands? Is that completely crazy? Am *I* crazy?

The general dearth of atmosphere, is the main thing that would be holding Mars back from having any really substantial weather phenomena, including lightning like we see on Earth. But apparently there is just about enough atmosphere to support... this version of it.

> I wonder if someone with my "punish disobedience" attitude
> just wouldn't succeed as a teacher, these days.

Yeah, the problem is the school administration doesn't believe in it, so they undermine you. For example, if you send a misbehaving kid to the office for discipline, they'll generally be given candy or other treats. Yes, really. Every time. Which means every kid who has ever been sent to the office for bad behavior, is going to misbehave again and again, hoping to achieve similar results.

And you *absolutely* cannot punish them yourself; that would end your teaching career.

No, I'm not making any of this up. My sister is an elementary school teacher.