Depends who's shoulders. I vote we use Tom Cruise or Sabrina Carpenter as a yardstick.

There are far simpler ways, if your vehicle either:
Was sold as a commercial vehicle (especially for tax or regulatory avoidance).
Has a kerb weight of 2000 KG or greater (kerb weight is "ready to drive" so filled with all fluids and options, basically everything except the driver).
Seats more than 5 passengers or has more than 2 rows of seats.
Is mainly cargo space (in excess of 65% if cabin length including any tray)
Has a towing capacity in excess of 1000 KG.
Is longer than 4.5 metres.
Then it's a commercial vehicle and requires a commercial license. In most countries commercial licenses carry higher penalties for infractions.

I'm aware that the weight and length requirements will get a lot of expensive limos like Bentleys and Maybachs, but if you want to remove a cancer you need to take some healthy tissue and lets face it, a Bentley is not a drivers car, it's a "being driven in" car so for the most part the drivers are already professionals.

There never really was.

With the possible exception of the first one (and "possible" is doing a lot of heavy lifting) Xbox and Playstation consoles were just trying to be gaming PCs but less useful, less powerful and ultimately more expensive. Even the original Xbox was easily modded into a media centre PC (XBMC was originally XBox Media Centre and ran on the original XBox) and the PS3 was originally able to run Linux... well until the corporate overlords decided they didn't want you to.

Expensive, yes, sure the cost of entry was lower for the hardware which was sold as a loss leader but then everything started to cost you, free services were scaled back or eliminated, hell, now Microsoft wants you to pay by the hour, no longer simply content with just a monthly fee. All those costs add up and soon overwhelm the higher cost of getting a PC in the first place (which after you've paid the cost of entry, savings start in earnest). Consoles had (past tense, the PS5 is almost as expensive as an entry level gaming laptop these days) a lower cost of entry which tried to hide the much higher total cost of ownership.

Add to that the fact that more and more console "exclusives" are making their way to PC, for the most part we're surprised by them and not in a good way, it's more of a "you harped on about this game for so long and it's distinctly mid". Very few games go the other way, from PC to console because ultimately you can dumb down a PC to run console games but you can't dumb up a console to run PC games.

The irony of RAMAGEDDON is that consoles should be able to take advantage of it, with games and OS requiring less of it and both consoles using last generation RAM... However there's nothing worth playing on there as it's dominated by AAA (fuck it, we're going to 7 A's) publishers that take as few risks as possible when producing Generic Sports 20xx. If you like games dump the console, bite the bullet and get a PC. Not only do you have a lot of indie and mid-tier developers producing great games but also a massive back catalogue. Today I've played games from this year and 20 years ago. Hell, I can load up some ancient DOS games if I so desired, also Linux gaming is ready, more than ready. I've not needed to boot into my Windows partition for any other reason than to check that it installed correctly, I haven't even installed the graphics drivers yet and it's been there for months. I might ditch Bazzite for Catchy though.

Oh, you think this is about doing the right thing... the US government... the current US government? I mean it's cute that you believe that.

Adobe, MS, et al. are being targetted because they've got deep pockets. A few million given to the right orange madman and this problem goes away. They don't even have to do it in secret any more.

Erm... notice a pattern there?

Most of these nations are equatorial or not that far off it. Most of them between the 26th parallels. As you get closer to the equator, there is less difference between the hours of daylight between summer and winter, as you get further you get a greater differential.

In Perth, Western Australia (36 S) there's about a 3 hour difference, in London, UK (51 N) there's an 8 hour difference and this difference does not neatly line up around 12 PM so if you had permanent GMT you'd have the sun getting up at 3 AM in the summer disrupting sleep and if you kept permanent BST you'd have darkness until 9 AM in winter causing chaos on the way to work/school.

Perth doesn't have DST (but the eastern states do so that causes problems) because the differential in daylight hours isn't much of an issue (that and Perth is incredibly backwards and resistant to change but that is another discussion entirely) however London does because there is a huge difference in daylight hours between winter and summer.

Before we had mechanical clocks, we used to adjust to the hours of daylight automatically. Daylight Savings came in because we needed to keep doing that as the hours of daylight changed with the seasons, so the solution was to change the clocks.

With most clocks being automatically updated these days, you barely have the excuse of having to change the clocks to oppose DST. You go to sleep on one time and wake up in the new one.

Well, there's been at least 3 posts about it so clearly, somebody cares.

A good cop in a corrupt society is the same as a "good guy with a gun" in a society obsessed with guns and violence... such a tiny minority that they're pretty much non existent.

Cardinal Richelieu once a said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him". Show me a cop in the US that's never taken a bribe, even just a sweetener for doing the right thing and I'll show you a liar. Even if just through the people who contribute to their pensions. Even if you can find someone who has managed to walk through that and some how remained completely clean (in the words of Londo Mollari "I can only assume you have not been paying attention") then back to what Richelieu said, he'll have still done something technically wrong even if it wasn't morally wrong. For example, the nice officer who let me off for speeding on the A4 near Heathrow a few years back with a bit of a tongue lashing, technically he broke the law as I was speeding and he should have wrote me up but he didn't as I wasn't a knob or driving like an idiot (and clearly the officer wasn't a knob either.. this is what happens when nice people meet).

And that's the UK, the US has long tolerated higher levels of corruption but in recent years that seems to be taken to truly herculean levels. With the egregious and obvious levels of corruption you're tolerating in your highest office, and there is no "I didn't know" excuse, you elected him twice... why would you expect the people with a little authority like beat cops to be goodly and honest when your entire country is no longer simply permissive of corruption, nor just expecting of it but openly supporting it.

Often they're not even doing the design themselves but Google has never claimed to be a hardware company, their branded phones were always and openly, someone elses, right back to the Nexus series.

Of course they realise that... Which is why Palantir and AI have been blamed already, they know that they can't keep relying on the Republicans to keep them out of trouble so they're laying the groundwork to make sure when heads start to roll, it's not their head. That way they can retire and get a cushy private sector gig before the investigation even finishes let alone any kind of war crimes tribunal (which the US will still protect them from).

It's not just desperation but also greed. Especially in countries where workers don't have many rights and a lot of costs like the US.

Greed is the most successful attack vector in most scams. The temptation of more money tends to blind even some of the most astute people, especially in a mercenary culture.

It could be worse, Consumer.

This is pretty much the last media company Disney doesn't own... although it is owned by Larry Ellison so it's not really that much better.

Remember to consume mindlessly Consumer, and it can get worse, it can always get worse.

This is the elephant in the room that no-one wants to talk about, especially those who are benefitting from it.

Social media isn't just targetting kids, they're targetting everyone and it's not just the under 16 who are vulnerable. Loads of adults are as well, in particular the elderly. Social media is radicalising a large number of older people as well. If we're going to restrict SM for younger people, we should also be doing it for the older people who are just as susceptible to propaganda and misinformation, in many ways, more susceptible.

Top Of The Pops must have made many enemies over the years (and not just because of Jimmy Saville).

Jokes aside, this is largely an American problem as companies there are permitted to be as abusive as they like.

If a store tried to force me to use their app and refused to take an order via their web site they'd lose an absolute shitload of business (not just from me). Same with banks, however there are laws with banks that mean they must meet standards of accessibility and forcing people into a proprietary app is going to violate a few rules there. My bank still uses a OTP sent via SMS.

Obviously the long term solution is legislative, but good luck with that given you keep voting in corporate shills.

Yep, pretty much this.

When you have a physical datacentre, you take backup off site in case the site fails, when you're in the cloud you're really just in one physical location unless you're paying through the nose for co-location.

"Cloud" has pretty much taken the LCC (Low Cost Carrier, A.K.A. Budget Airlines) model to compute and Amazon is the Ryanair of that world. Sure, they advertise a £19 flight to Magaluf but want a seat that isn't shit, pony up, want to take luggage, gonna cost you, don't want to take the red eye flight from "London" Isle of Skye airport... you get the idea and before you know it that £19 flight is a £190 flight. Amazons price structure is the same, cheap headline price, what you actually pay is much, much higher.

A good manager would... Sadly there are a lot of bad managers out there.