That by itself is no mean feat of engineering.

If the cartridge detects that the user has more than three teeth, it refuses to work.

That's a valid point, though right now while they're facing competition from startups the dealerships do provide them with a moat that they want to preserve. If/when the startup threat is gone, the automakers will go back to hating the dealerships.

I think people forget how everyone laughed at Tesla because everyone knew that starting a new car company in the United States was impossible. Now we also have Lucid and Rivian. Maybe someday Aptera will manage to get off the ground. This is a novel situation for American carmakers.

They had to say it that way, because the more accurate statement is that the dealership law unfairly advantages existing automakers. It's not about the dealerships being good or bad, it's about the fact that setting up a dealership network takes a lot of time and money and requiring it is a good way to keep new competition out.

The correct term is "regulatory capture". Private businesses use the power of the state to protect, subsidize or otherwise benefit them and harm competitors and potential competitors. It's extremely common and the more pervasive the regulation is, the more common it is. Red tape and government procedures benefit entrenched players who have built the institutional structures and knowledge to deal with them.

This isn't to say that all regulation is bad... but a lot of it is. There was never any consumer benefit to banning direct sales. All regulations should be thoroughly scrutinized for their effects on the market, direct and indirect.

I thought exactly the opposite. I think Rocky is far too "human". I didn't mind it, though, because a lot of the humor would be lost if Rocky was properly alien.

I think that's necessary. Providing explanations of depth comparable to the book would require a 10-hour movie. Squeezing the story down to feature length requires cutting a lot of exposition. In many books there's a lot of description that can be replaced with visuals, but it's pretty hard to do that with a lot of the science.

Come visit my website!

Gesundheit.

There's an object lesson here for all the people who have been pushing for the mommy government. Sometimes you get an assole, abusive trailer park mommy.

I'm sure you'd have said the same about Y2K. It's a good thing that some people have more foresight.

First, as someone else stated, a DSP is generally a business. Not an individual. That said, I do know some people who have incorporated themselves just to get around the whole "We deal with businesses, not individuals" rules.

But then, it comes down to what contract terms Amazon offers DSPs. Certainly, nobody in their right mind* is going to partner with Amazon for a price that won't cover their expenses. Rural areas with high fuel costs per delivery will bid more for their service. Or not sign up. Amazon, if they are not dumb as rocks, will add this variable cost to the bottom line of each purchase. After all, they are not the USPS with universal service written into law.

*Uber/Lyft will make a liar out of me. There are people living on the edge of poverty for the opportunity to buy a car, insurance, fuel and maintenance just to chauffeur some zoomers around.

Didn't we just have a No Kings day?

Caveat: I haven't examined systemd's aproach to the "age field", so this may not be easy or possible. But one approach would be to build an "age" record structure. Where one can enter an appropriate value, tied to their system user id. Then ship that off to a certified verification authority together with photo id. The authority cryptographically signs the record and returns it to the user. Who may then pass it on to any "adult-only" sites that request it.

If this could be done, it puts systemd out of the age verification business. Since that record could be stored in any one of a number of place in the file system. Of course any one of these approaches could be defeated by a skilled coder who can root around file systems and find Dad's OnlyFans certificate. Then it's blackmail. You leave me alone or I'll tell Mom.

Then they can fork off their own version of GNU/Linux. China has done so. And I'd venture a guess that these are all Chinese regulatory compliant.

Quantum computing is so yesterday. It's all AI today, baby!