These drone delivery services that have to operate in line-of sight and comply with a gazillion FAA regulations are doomed to failure. You could deliver the order faster using a trebuchet over such distances and with fewer liabilities or costs.

Manna Aero has moved to the USA for its trials because it effectively had so many problems in it's home of Ireland and Just the other day another 85lb Amazon drone crashed and burned.

Given the costs, both from a hardware, labor and systems perspective, they'll never compete with a gig-worker on an ebike.

Another option is to use software like VeraCrypt to encrypt sensitive data into a file on your PC. Make it look like an innocuous system file and put it in the system folder somewhere. Don't leave VeraCrypt installed - it will run installer-free, download it at your destination and remove it before traveling again.

There's a double level of security if you use the option where it has a second dummy decryption container in the same file that you can give away.

But yea, if you can securely download what you need, the ultimate choice is to not have the data with you at all.

So they're taking all your data, selling it, and making you pay for the privilege? Must be a nice business if you have zero scruples.

Why do you need OnStar? Who would want to steal a GM car? All the GM brands are at the very bottom of Consumer Reports reliability index for 2026.

OnStar uses cellular service to connect, so if you have an emergency, either both OnStar and your cell phone work, or neither work. So there's no advantage to using OnStar rather than just dialing 911. 911 services are allowed access to your phone's GPS location regardless of settings.

It just seems like a pork package to sell along with the clear coat. Not to mention the theft of your data without compensation, whether you subscribe or not. You have to physically disable the modem to avoid that.

Tesla is awful due to the lack of physical controls where they would really make sense. It is an actively driver-hostile car. Other than the powertrain, which is amazing, the car is completely obnoxious. The door handles in particular are a huge problem and have been banned in China. Why would you intentionally make door handles that are super awkward to open rather than just pull? Why would you make someone dig through a menu to adjust the mirrors, or adjust the A/C vents and other controls? Trying to shift with the right stalk? Awkward and horrible. I think they thought it was sexy to just have a screen and nothing else, but in reality it just absolutely sucks. Before you say, "but have you owned one?" Yes, yes I have. It's my wife's current daily driver. And I avoid driving it like the plague.

I figured if I read the comments on this post, I'd find all the incels and rednecks whining about Fark. The truth is, it hasn't really changed much, other than the fact that the people running the site grew up, and the site grew up with them and shed that frat-boy mentality.

They also had to get rid of adult content due to Google becoming the morality police of the internet when it comes to sites that they will allow ads to be run against. They are in turn pressured by various right wing lobby groups in the United States, who also pressure credit card payment systems not to support adult content. Blame the religious right for that. A legacy of our puritan origins. (Fark tried moving all the Boobies links to foobies.com, and that experiment ultimately did not work.) They have to police comment photos as well for that reason.

Fark is still a terrific link aggregator with funny headlines, and no AI or algorithms to filter it. The traffic has fallen off a good amount from its peak years, but it's still very lively.

I also find it funny that people here are complaining that fark is 'woke' or whatever, when I see plenty of borderline socialist ideology on display in posts every day on Slashdot. If you are complaining about that, why are you here? Yea, Fark is certainly anti-fascist, and I'm great with that.

I'd say Slashdot is in a much more degraded state than Fark. The original sense of community on Slashdot is long gone, though it still provides a useful aggregation of privacy and security focused tech news, which I appreciate. The comment sections here are far nastier on average. Fark is still fairly civil other than a few trolls here and there, and it's easy to block them.

Free speech includes lying.

> "mnemonic"

Johny who?

I wrote a lot of assembly (back in the day) for both the Z80 and the 6502. The Z80 was like a Mac truck. It had some really powerful instructions (LDIR etc) and a great register-set but the 6502 could be a lot faster on one condition -- that you had space available in page zero to exploit the indirect addressing mode that relied heavily on the first 256 bytes of RAM. The Z80 had the advantage that it had on-chip support for refreshing dynamic RAM so systems with more than 4K or so of memory were much easier and cheaper to build using a Z80 than a 6502.

If you were building and programming a system from scratch then the 6502 was the obvious choice but if you were programming a "store bought" 6502 system such as the Apple, Atari or Commodore, many of those valuable first 256bytes (page zero) were already in use by the ROM-based system software so things became a bit trickier.

Ah... happy days.

I learned from here on Slashdot the two best tools to deal with Win11 at the moment you get the first windows setup screen. Used the shell trick to create a local-account-only, then installed O&O Shutup10+++ and Winhance. I used those two tools to remove every single piece of telemetry, junk software, spam, spyware, AI and forced updates from the OS. All of this before ever connecting it to the internet. (I loaded those two pieces of software from a thumbdrive.) The result is a super clean install that just does what I want. This is an older Microsoft Surface so it needed to be clean to run well with limited RAM. It's my throwaway lightweight laptop for international travel. No personal information on it. This register article is also handy.

On my main machine I'm still happily running Win10. My browsing habits are pretty boring and I run Ublock Origin, AdblockPlus etc. in Firefox to keep anything unruly out. I used to run noscript but pretty much no sites work with JS disabled these days.

Merit should always consider strictly value.

The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.

...that it's just New York City. Hopefully the idea will spread.

Laissez faire capitalism is great if everyone is honest. But in this reality there are a lot of incredibly dishonest people who will do anything for a buck. A modicum of base regulation is desirable to keep consumers from getting swindled at every turn. I applaud efforts like these.

Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.