Changing the base color of your car is illegal in quite a number of countries, unless filling out some forms at a formal technical inspection agent. The police has access to that data.

""let AI make decisions for you" is eroding our autonomy" Already happened with navigating and GPS; without their phone most people get lost.

There's a difference between teaching how to use spreadsheets and how to use Excel, most people have gotten the latter...

Got an Epson EcoTank 8550 and photo prints on decent inkjet paper are really good. The A3 format is outstanding for pre-print proofing, if you happen to publish photos in books or magazines. With this printer I spend much more on paper than ink ;-)

Why let the phone spy on you? Plenty of options for more privacy, you can even buy decent phones with preinstalled e-OS or Graphene, depending on your preferred level of paranoia.

The calculations for time and [maritime] navigation are closely related, so that one solar hour is an angle of 15 degrees in longitude. We could easily adapt metric degrees and time today, but for those without atom-clocks and satellite navigation this relation was essential.

The Scandinavian countries are progressively switching over to 'kilometrage', here in Iceland it happens this New Year (and I have until 20th January to submit my numbers on the counters).

Just to be pedantic; there are plenty of 3D-printed parts in modern Airbuses - mostly laser-printed titanium airframe parts. Quite impressive videos to be found on YT and the Airbus website.

I always found it a bit funny in images from protests against COVID-vaccines seeing how many of those people were heavily inked (and perforated, BTW), knowing that big part of the inks are non-certified and made by obscure entities.

A local here; what interests us in this story is not the fact that those three specimens could arrive to Iceland - there's a big industrial port on the opposite coast in this fjord AND there's a company cultivating and importing plants in the vicinity already culpable of importing other foreign species into the country - but what intrigues us the most is how the beasts have managed to stay alive until October - and that's related to climate changes. We'll know more next spring.

"Sono Pazzi Questi Romani" is a frequent phrase uttered by Obelix, translated to Italian.

Most of the companies I know of in my line of work that have been taken hostage by ransomware, are in the CAD/CAM business. One of them was fortunate enough to keep a separate Linux-box with copies of all the settings, while the others had serious downtime.

To me it seems that the turning point came after the 1973 energy crisis; American products (cars, appliances, etc.) continued to be big, energy inefficient and unprogressive, while mostly Japanese and then South-Korean products took over the European market (and elsewhere). Reduced shipping costs and assembly plants nearer to the markets became the norm.

"Yeah, the government investing in this would so totally be "big brother watching" heh...." But right now corporations are investing in this and it's totally "unaccountable big brother watching", hmm...

Everyone should know that liver-oil from sharks is much better and gives crisper light.