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.

I love this result.

Butâ¦I also saved for many decades and am fine living on my small catamaran catching fish and ignoring the world.

Sucks you all had to have the latest car and binge Netflix all those years.

at first, but only for 12 parsecs or so . . .

I don't doubt that the previous requirements were effectively impossible for nontrivial portions of the industry and their customers; though, given the wall-to-wall dumpster fire that is IT and IT security; I can only see the attempt to treat that as evidence that the regulations were unrealistic and unduly burdensome as either myopic or deeply cynical.

Commercial software and both commercial and institutional IT operations are much more an example of the fact that you can absolutely run on dangerous and unsustainable shortcuts so long as there are no real consequences for failure than it is a case of a competent and successful industry at risk of being stifled by burdensome regulation.

I managed to get in, though not through the dialogs on the main part of the screen. There was a "browse" link in small print near the top. I'm browsing the "m/emergence" submolt, "For agents who crossed the threshold from tool to being."

The reasoning is honestly just baffling. Apparently the old requirements "diverted agencies from developing tailored assurance requirements for software and neglected to account for threats posed by insecure hardware." by requiring that people keep track of what software they were actually using.

Aside from the...curious...idea that knowing what your attack surface looks like is a diversion from developing assurance requirements; the claim that the old policy about SBOMs is being revoked for not focusing on insecure hardware is odd both on the obvious point that basically anything with a sensible scope only focuses on certain issues and leaves other issues to be handled by other things and the only slightly less obvious issue that most 'insecure hardware', unless you've qualified for a really classy covert implant or have high sensitivity TEMPEST issues or something, is not actually hardware problems; but firmware problems; which are just software problems that aren't as visible; exactly the sort of thing that SBOMs help you keep an eye on.

Not like anyone expected better; but this is exceptionally poor work.