Hindsight is always 20/20. Back in 2012, when the first Tesla Model S arrived, it was not clear that battery technology would take this path. It was generally assumed that batteries are fragile, expensive parts with mediocre capacity and low charging speeds - prejudices you find in a lot of Slashdot comments until today.

My dishwasher is a Samsung. Never had any problems with it. It does not have an internet connection either.

I would not keep a refrigerator that old around. They are really power hungry.

There's definitely a scam somewhere in the gift card's history; the guy writing about his situation is upset because Apple glassed his account over it, not over the gift card value. The process of not being credited for the gift card's code and then talking to the retailer to get one that hadn't been tampered with apparently went smoothly; but then the account and everything associated with it got terminated without comment or recourse.

Someone is presumably going to eat the value of the gift card, apparently the retailer either directly or through merchant fees and the payment card processor doing it; but the moral of the story is that you can, without recourse unless you are enough of a VIP to raise a fuss that reaches 'Apple Executive Relations', lose everything connected to your account if you inadvertently interact with a gift card that has been used for some sort of scam activity; even if you have proof that you purchased it from a normal retailer that sells gift cards; rather than some dodgy flea market arrangement that screams 'bagman'/'too good to be true'.

It seems he tried to redeem a $500 gift card that was already redeemed. So obviously _some_ fraud and some scammerinvolved. Apple decided that since they were not the ones at fault, they were not making themselves the fraud victims and pay $500 to the scammer.

Aimed directly at the scammers? Probably not, unless the penalties for the scam are currently insufficient. Aimed at the ad networks who, currently, have zero to negative interest in ensuring that ad spend isn't overtly hostile before plunking it in front of you? Quite possibly more helpful.

I don't know if Google has been caught out as dramatically as ; but based on the sorts of ad impressions they deliver their standards are clearly pretty low or apathetically applied, and more or less the same perverse incentives exist.

Looking forward to plenty of lawsuits. Can their DRM find out which person tried to breac DRM? Or can any idiot effectively destroy my console by trying to play a game they shouldnâ(TM)t?

Yes and no. It was always a solution based on a lot of ifs. If capacity of EV batteries remains low, and if charging speeds remain low too, it might be a viable solution (and manufacturers like Nio and Tesla at least implemented the possibility). 10 years ago, those ifs were very present.

But both problems are solved now. You can buy a 180 kWh battery for some EVs already, albeit I would not, given the price, but even standard EVs come with 300 miles ranges. And 4C charging (4 times capacity within an hour) is available, and 6C charging is on display for some EV models, which means charging from 10% to 80% within 6 mins. Given that you need fast charging mainly on long distance trips, you will on average spend less time charging your EV than refueling a gasoline car.

This pulls the rug under battery swapping schemes.

Sounds like a program perfectly suited to kicking welfare in the direction of preferred corporate allies(both in terms of what tech gets adopted for federal use; and who gets to use the government payroll as an internship/evaluation program) and for ensuring that none of the departments with significant technical requirements who had their own internal expertise DOGEd to ribbons will get to regain it; instead periodically getting the Accenture Experience from a free-floating layer of loyalists who don't give a fuck because they'll be off to the private sector in 18 months anyway.

When that predictably turns out well; we can presumably grab some folksy Reagan line about how the government can't do anything right; and just directly farm out the contract to palantir or whoever.

If you think theater is a 'sacred space' perhaps you should get on theater management about that. Outside of some very atypical or heavily stage-managed cases the movie theatre experience is typically fucking dire. Paid admittance to a half hour of commercials; seats packed to remind your knees that they are trying to maximize the headcount per square foot(see also, seats in blatantly undesirable positions relative to the screen); dickheads making noise or fucking around on their phones, some asshole who decided to bring a screaming-age child, the works.

It certainly remains very possible for a proper large scale theatre install to handily outgun anything you'd get at home, and definitely the 'whatever is cheap and 65in' best buy experience; but there doesn't appear to be much interest in making the overall experience a compelling sell.

If all you do is attend directorial release screenings with your colleagues I assume that isn't a you problem; but if you genuinely care about the viability, and survival, of the theater experience maybe you should care more; because it's not like people are staying away from theaters just because they are philistines who hate art and desire aggressively mediocre experiences; it's because the theater is an aggressively mediocre experience that squanders much of its remaining technical edge to apathy and cost cutting that can definitely make it more miserable than staying home; but will never make it a better value.

So the new AI is going to be so 'opt-in' that it needs a killswitch you can use to get rid of it?

I realize that marketing and PR flacks are subhuman enemies of communication; but that's not even pretending to be what 'opt-in' means.

The characterization of "risk of artificial intelligence overpowering humanity" as the substance of an 'AI debate' seems itself like a strategy in trying to forestall it.

Sure, there's some fun sci-fi there; but most of what actual people are actually concerned about is what specific parts of humanity are using 'AI' to do, or justifying doing in the name of 'AI'; not fretting about how skynet might kill us all. And it's exceptionally handy to pretend that that is what people are fretting about; both because it's a distant and vague enough problem that you can justify punting most action without even lying; and because it's not even false that (perhaps outside of a handful who have outright cracked and started thinking about it in religious terms) even the most psychopathic techbros are also against skynet exterminating everyone; both because that would include them; and because Judgement Day would not be a good time for social media engagement metrics.

So what? What damage do you think can he cause with a non-existing flight ticket except some financial damage to the airline who will be forced to fly him back to Heathrow if he managed to get to LAX, for example? He cannot even use it to give me a paper cut because he doesnâ(TM)t have a bloody ticket.

In Germany he would easily get through security, because security checks security, not whether you have a valid passport, ticket etc. You can kill someone with a knife so security confiscates your knife. You canâ(TM)t kill someone with a fake passport, and definitely not with no ticket, so thatâ(TM)s not their business. Making sure you have a ticket is someone elseâ(TM)s job.

I had a colleague who had studied architecture. He told me they made little clay models of houses and for that you need a clay cutting tool that is sharp enough to cut clay. For all intents and purposes this tool is just a knife, but with an extremely sharp edge. Will make an absolutely clean cut through clay, which many knives cant, and cut your throat very easily. But officially itâ(TM)s not a knife, itâ(TM)s a clay cutting tool. They let him carry it on flights.