Usually, I think when people say they want the option to buy directly they're not expecting dealerships to go away entirely. We'd probably end up with something like how it works now with Apple, where if you need the product right away and aren't interested in waiting for a deal from a 3d party retailer (like how Target and Best Buy regularly seem to put iPads on sale), you can just buy direct from the manufacturer's store.

Dealerships would be where you go to waste the entire day playing games with incentives and enhanced trade-in values (because the dealership can make up some of their profit by selling your trade-in at some overinflated price to the next sucker, whereas the manufacturer has no interest in your used car), and you might leave in your new ride while spending a few less bucks.

I've actually dealt with the no-haggle, no-dealership side of things back when my partner and I looked at the Tesla Model 3. They lowballed on the trade-in (again, they're not a dealership so they just push trade-ins off on some car buying company) and the price for the new car was what it was. We ended up just walking out, and because it was Tesla, they didn't even care that they'd lost a sale. Ultimately, after a whole lot of back and forth, we were able to get a price we were very satisfied with on a '23 Bolt EUV at the local Chevy dealer.

I already hate that I need a smartphone app to charge my EV at most DCFC stations (the one saving grace is that I don't need to fast charge all that often), but having to use an app every time you want to get your nicotine fix would be a real pain in the ass. Something tells me if this actually caught on, vapers would just go back to smoking the old fashioned combustion form of cancer sticks.

It does suck, but if I had to pay full sticker price for a car with no negotiating (even if it does take all damn day), I'd probably just have my work vehicle and an e-scooter. Screw $4/gal gas.

Ironically, there's probably some folks on a particular subreddit that would consider one less car in private ownership to be a good thing, even though my car happens to be an EV (just not one of those fancy expensive ones).

LGBTQ+ youth getting tossed in with adults is exactly what happens when you don't have age-appropriate resources available to them. Back in the day, I hung out on adult BBSes and later the m4m AOL chatrooms, because nothing age appropriate existed when I was that age. Fortunately, younger me had enough sense not to do anything stupid in real life (the worst that happened was I'd initially made the mistake of including my real age in my profile on AOL and my damn Windows 3.1 computer kept crashing from getting too many IMs from pedophiles all at once - yeah, it really was that bad back then). To buy myself a bit of peace, I just lied about my age and that seemed to solve the problem.

Don't get me wrong, I also do agree that modern social media doesn't qualify as an age appropriate resource. It's probably just as full of pedophiles as the old school AOL chatrooms. But you've gotta provide the age appropriate resources before you tear down the old inappropriate ones, or you're just going to make a bad situation worse.

You're assuming parents and/or specialists that are going to be supportive. Not every LGBTQ+ youth is lucky enough for that to be the case, and quite many of them are raised in homes where parents (and the local political leadership) see any kid that isn't straight as a problem that's in need of fixin'.

You may want to read up on LGBTQ+ suicide statistics. A depressingly significant amount of them never survive to that point.

Well when you address the Need Congress that is Slashdot audience and mention aliens in Dune you trigger a strong reaction from us because the whole point of Frank Herbert's Dune universe is that there are no known aliens, all the weirdness of that universe is human derived. Purity of the Human evolution only on the Golden Path's door step.

The only references to alien intelligence is the human created machines that we're defeated once during the Butleriam Jihad and which survived and escaped by travelling away from the human controlled sphere of influence in the Universe and who will come back in the future to annihilate the Humans once again unless the Humans are so strongly subjugated by Leto II God Emperor that after his death they will explode into the Universe so far away from control control that not even the machines will be able to find nor catch them to exterminate them.

The only other reference to other aliens are the bringers of the Sandtrout which turn into the Sand Worms on Arrakis (Rakis) [Dune] planet and there might be an inference that they are from another Galaxy.

Finally the last weird somewhat alienish are the two facedancers overseeing the events with almost prescient powers but they are just further genetically engineered humans by the Tleilaxu genetic butchers.

Yep, I completely agree with you ZipNada, but I knew that the book is not going to offer up some phenomenal new science fiction shift of a paradigm type of a literary invention.

I wanted something that was very much like The Martian which was a science fiction-based adventure in space instead of on Mars. I would say science fiction lite and enjoyable like a shoot-em-up heist movie except for nerds and geeks with some nice science thrown around; and without having to do any equations or discuss quantum mechanics only special relativity and bit of raw space gamma radiation.

Andy Weir Is able to capture a nice science fiction-based adventure that is very linear and enjoyable to read and watch. He does introduce a few new concepts which are very enjoyable and then he just builds the story on them and moves it forward with little mishaps and issues that have to be resolved until the final outcome.

His other book Artemis that takes place on the Moon is also a very enjoyable lite science fiction read. Would make for a great movie with an awesome chic actress who'd need to have a bit of attitude and spunk about her, a real character of a lady. Gosh, so many choices for casting. I'd love for someone to suggest a few actresses who would fit that role.

Think of Project Hail Mary as a Science Fiction X-Com Bromance Adventure in Space with Biological Power Cells!

What hurts LGBTQ+ minors is the political environment that considers such topics age inappropriate unless you're 18+. In saner societies, teens with teen-level site filtering set up are able to access the resources they need to understand that they're not broken and they do belong. It's just here in parts of the USA that we have certain backwards segments of the country that labor under the delusion that if you prevent a teenager from learning that there's nothing wrong with being LGBTQ+, they'll just "choose" to be straight. (No, it doesn't work like that.)

The age gates aren't the problem. The mindset that LGBTQ+ youth aren't deserving of love and acceptance, is.

Changes will most likely be age gates rather than reworking the sites to make them less "addictive". If social media can't get adults to stick around doomscrolling all day, they'll go out of business. Kicking all the rug rats off (or walled off in a sanitized "kids only" section of the site) might be a slightly more survivable outcome.

Yeah, just like the cigarette companies of old, the social media companies have been operating under the assumption that if you don't hook 'em young, you may never get them as customers. The reality is probably a bit more nuanced than that, as we're not dealing with something that's physically addictive. Social media also has aspects that make it more appealing as you reach adulthood, such as being a place to share pictures of your family and vent over political disagreements, whereas if you didn't start smoking when you were young and stupid, you're probably not ever going to start.

That was always one of the suspension of disbelief breaking aspects of Star Trek, too. As if anyone would deal with all the responsibilities and risks involved in being a starship crew member when you could just fake the entire experience in a holosuite instead.

Of course, open source developers working on their own time have the worst of both worlds - along with the rest of us, they're not living in a Star Trek post-scarcity society, and they're also not getting paid. I've always been kind of surprised that the movement didn't immediately fizzle out. If anyone asked me to do more of the same tasks I perform during my day job, but for gratis during my free time, I'd tell them in some not-so-kind language exactly where they can stick it.
 

Yes, it's worth seeing the movie.

Sorry about the bad grammar in the original subject. I was dictating it and the phone while walking in the market. I didn't see the mistake.

I ended up hearing about this movie coming out from the same author that did the Martian whose name is Andy Weir.

So I immediately got the book and read it and after that went to see the movie. I ended up reading his other book, the one that was in between about the girl at the space station and that was pretty enjoyable so.

This movie's definitely enjoyable and we want to see it in a nice theater where we have dinner and drinks and it was definitely worth it. Since I read the book week in advance, it was a nice little visual representation of the book and it was very faithful to the book.

The author definitely captured the ability of doing hard science space stories and making them appealing in book form and also in visual movie form.p

"mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune as the planet of at least one alien species."

Editor David is using AI generated slop again. Because that code is patently wrong and could only come from some AI hallucinations.

Consume, consume, consume, yep, that's all you can do on modern social media - pointlessly shout into the void or read the insipid ramblings of people who are more rich/famous and/or more socially/politically connected than you. Because if you're just Joe Nobody, may the algorithm have mercy on your soul. Come back when you're wealthy or a public figure.

That's why I haven't bothered with BlueSky. If I wanted to circle jerk over famous people or shout into an empty void, I can still do that just fine over on the site formerly known as Twitter.

Don't care. If your shit shows me ads, it's not getting into my kitchen. Note to self: Don't buy appliances from Samsung anymore.

Yes, I am vocal in how much I hate ads. I believe the CEOs of advertising companies should get one hit with a stick for every time their ad bothered someone even in the slightest.

Exactly what I'm saying.

The fact that users and enterprise customers are not demanding better software from Microsoft with the same fervor their ancestors demanded that the witch be burnt speaks volumes.

And I'm specifically talking about operating systems here. Software can crash for all I care. I'm fine software quality being all over the place, the market can sort that out. But operating systems are natural monopolies and the foundation for everything else. We should not accept shoddy quality there.