HP... Most laptops I just reinstall the OS from the source media but HP especially. Even MS makes it easy to download it these days.

Dust off, nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

This,

Healthy alternatives are available and people are not addicted to unhealthy food like they are to nicotine (if you go of chicken nuggets, you don't get withdrawal).

My concern is, as what happens with so many good intentioned ideas it gets implemented poorly. See the UK's sugar tax, good idea in practice but realistically just shifted the problem to foods and drinks that were not covered (and also didn't raise nearly as much as predicted).

People forget that it wasn't just the high tax on tobacco that reduced it's usage, it was the concerted efforts to stop young people from picking up the habit in the first place that really cut down on tobacco usage. Without an effort to educate as well, efforts to restrict will be at best ineffective but more likely counter productive.

Part of the problem is that a lot of people can't recognise unhealthy food, especially as a lot of it is window dressed as healthy. "low fat" but high in sugar, high carb or high calorie products marketed as "gym food", so on and so forth.

Here in the UK (and many other nations) there have been attempts to put warning labels on them (like the hexagons commonly found in South American nations) but these small warnings are often overshadowed by smarmy marketing using weasel words and pictures of happy, smiling healthy people on products that are well, shit.

Another part of the problem is that a lot of people have no idea how to cook, what foods go with what, how to prepare vegetables (other than boiling the shit out of them). Basic cooking lessons are stupidly hard to find and online recopies that call for 100s of specialist ingredients are counter productive too.

RAM shortage or no, the days of cheap consoles are long gone as Sony/MS are tired of making losses on them, they can no longer afford to wait 5+ years for a payoff that might never come so they cant afford to keep the hardware as a loss leader.

Here's the thing about robots... they're not necessarily going to be Androids. An android is a robot or automaton in humanoid from (from the greek Andro, meaning man, also where we get terms like androgynous which combines the prefix for woman, gyno, so a female android should be called a gynoid).

But I digress, Rosie the Robot in this scenario will be the espresso machine. A lot of coffee chains already have swapped out the old manual machines for automatic ones because ultimately, if you care about good coffee you're not going to a chain.

Here's the thing about drugs son,

When I buy drugs, I don't want shit drugs. I'm not some strung out addict, I can afford decent drugs. It's the same with coffee, when I want a coffee I want something remotely decent and when I order a coffee at a cafe I want something at least on par with what I can make at home with my sub £200 espresso machine. Hence whenever I go to a Costa, I order and iced chocolate. Starbucks doesn't have a "coffee flavoured" free iced chocolate.

Which really tells me that Republicans have difficulty telling the difference between a man and a woman.

That would explain why I see so many man-like women in the Trump pressers.

Lola is a classic song BTW, a lot of songs around that era would address taboo in the same way, completely outwitting the rather strict censors at the time. Although I'm glad we don't have the religious police vetting what is allowed to be published/broadcast any more I do feel a little bit of creativity has been lost as artists no longer have to get around them.

That's the way it works sunshine.

Introducing the $2000 Iphone... same as the $1000 Iphone you bought last year but twice as expensive... and the fanboys will still buy it.

His user ID isn't far off mine and I joined /. in the mid 00s. The really low UIDs will probably be on their way out of midlife by now.

P.S. you're welcome on my law, just pick up after yourselves.

Better design bought on by better regulation (notably from Europe), seatbelts becoming mandatory were both huge improvements in safety, airbags are debatable as in some situations they can be more dangerous (I.E. if you drive with your hands in the "douchebag" position, meaning one hand at 12 o'clock, airbag goes off and you will eat your radius and ulnar and be lucky if it doesn't cause a lot of damage). If you take your car to a Run What You Brung track day, it's advisable to disable them (as you will be wearing a skid lid and possibly a HANS device, negating the airbags function).

Collision avoidance systems are something I believe will eventually be shown to cause more harm than good with the way people treat them. It's called "risk compensation", as we feel safer we start to take more risks. The introduction of seatbelts resulted in more dangerous driving, this is why in some cases deaths went up because a lot of cars still didn't have seatbelts to begin with nor was it mandatory to wear them, however over time it was shown that the safety benefits of a seatbelt outweighed the additional risks being taken, with collision avoidance systems people will start treating them as "the car will automagically save me" if they haven't already done so. This will lead to even more inattention on the road which in many western countries has already overtaken alcohol as the biggest cause of collisions.

You are right that these handles have to go simply because a car is expected to last 20+ years and these things seem like something that will break easily.

This one is still light rail, it's an EMU (electric multiple unit) used for passenger services on a branch line. Many branch lines in the UK are not electrified and still run DMUs (Diesel/Diesel-Electric Multiple Units). The rolling stock in question is a DMU (British Rail Class 230) that has been fully electrified, so replacing the diesel engine with battery packs for the electric motors.

The Greenford Branch Line is a 2 mile line London with 5 stops between two major rail lines (Great Western Main Line and the New North Line). It's not a major line, but it's not out in the middle of nowhere either.

It's a good test to see if the tech is up to snuff as a lot of branch lines would benefit and it's easy to install charging infrastructure at stations. However I suspect it'll be a while before they replace the DMUs on the Reading-Guildford route.

This is something that has bothered me about the Jetsons... What the living fuck did they do to the surface that was so bad everyone had to live in the sky?

This is basically how it ended up in the UK. Charging stations end up in supermarket car parks. 3-5 of them owned by a 3rd party who rent the space from the supermarket, only 1 or 2 working at any given time as the 3rd party nor the supermarket give a crap once they've been installed (government subsidies were for installation, not maintenance).

Wallmart is likely making a deal with a 3rd party to install their chargers in Walmart locations and collect the rent. It's an easy win for Walmart as they don't have to worry about anything except collecting the monthly rent and passing customer complaints onto the 3rd party.

I spoke to an old friend back in Australia a few months back who's coming to the UK for a holiday and wanted to hire an EV (tried to talk him out of it) I warned him that Michael Portillo didn't do a series called "Great British Tesco Car Parks" for a reason.

And the average media consumer doesn't care as long as they get their reality TV.

TVs have reached the point of "good enough" that there isn't really going to be anything revolutionary, rather evolutionary. A panel gets slightly better colour, higher refresh rates and lower G2G times become cheaper, a new panel that uses less power. Nothing to make you race out and buy a new TV but enough over a few years that you might notice a difference between a new TV and your 8yr old model.

It's a lot like Blurry, sorry, Blu-Ray, all that money spent to bury HD-DVD and get DRM on everything and it turns out everyone moved to streaming and downloading. Not a care in the world for how "WOW" the Blurry was. So much so they're still selling DVDs because DVD was good enough and BluRay offered nothing new worth buying..

Most TVs I see these days are being sold on software features, which are solidly on the enshitification track.

We joke about this happening to cars of course but it car manufacturers thought they could get away with it we'd be bombarded with the same kind of enshitification in vehicles. They're already trying in car advertising on for size, it won't be long before "we've noticed you're near a Turd Burgers, stop in for a double colon blocker now, we will automatically redirect your navigation in 3... 2... 1..."

Of course the part of me that enjoys driving will say that cars have been on the enshitification track for years. Automatic transmissions, soft suspension, computerisation, drivers aids with their useless bings, bongs and warbles, SUVs, cars getting bigger and lardier with each iteration. It's hard to find a drivers car these days, a nice, simple, RWD, lightweight 6sp manual (they don't even need to be that powerful, my 140 HP MR2 never failed to put a smile on my face). Kids these days have no idea of the unadulterated joy of nailing the perfect gear change (You are welcome on my lawn, just don't make a mess, K, I can still remember being young).