Other options exist; you don’t have to buy either. Volkswagen Group, Audi, Renault, BMW, Fiat etc all make EVs in Europe. Hyundai & Kia also both make excellent EVs.

Buying a Tesla is a choice these days. Nobody trips and falls into Tesla ownership. And although those cheap Chinese manufacturers look mighty tempting, they’re not the only alternative out there.

I’m not exactly a US constitutional lawyer, but I’m willing to bet that snuff films aren’t protected by the First Amendment.

Quakers were

Are. They’re still around. Still a relatively big minority Christian group in the UK.

Still everyone’s favourite Christian denomination. Cool bunch.

Local/national banks with their bankcards and payment platforms

I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, but here in the UK all banks use Visa, MasterCard or Amex for their bank cards.

How the fuck do you know my PIN number?!

If only the biggest problem was messages starting “I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said:”

A far bigger problem is people using AI to draft text and then posting it as their own. On social media like this, I can’t count the number of comments I’ve encountered midway through an otherwise normal discussion thread, and only clocked 2 paragraphs in that I’m reading a chat bot’s response. I feel like I’ve had time and braincells stolen from me in the deception for the moments spent reading and attempting to derive meaning from it.

And just this week I received an application from someone wanting work in my office which was very clearly AI generated. Obviously that person will not be offered any work. If you can’t be bothered to write your own “why I want to work here” cover letter, then I can’t be bothered to work with you.

Unfortunately it’s a combination lock, and the code is written on a post-it stuck on the front of the drawer.

Don’t forget Tizen too; MeeGo’s other bastard offspring.

I think Tizen is still around?

Arianespace has fallen behind, but they’re not out of the picture. They’re still by far the largest competitor to SpaceX, and they’re aiming for their 7th generation Ariane to be a reusable design.

Arianespace is an Airbus and Safran subsidiary, so it’s not like they don’t have the engineering oomph behind them.

Sure, but that applies to the UK too. London has a higher cost of living than Los Angeles; averages being averages, this is weighed against lots of cheaper places to live (with massive unemployment and stagnated economics).

Cost of living in the UK is about 12% lower than the US, including housing costs. But the average salary is about half of the US salary. So you can see that that doesn’t really cover it.

Source: https://livingcost.org/cost/united-kingdom/united-states

Just looked on that link for the UK. The average is listed as £63k, which is $85k.

So you’re not exactly disproving the point that that type of high salary is a US thing.

Ask a non-protesting friend or family member to take it with them about their daily routine?

I’m sure my mum would be happy to look after my phone for a day if it meant getting one over on the authorities. And if anyone asks, I’m just a good son who likes to hang out with his mum.

The real competitor for green aviation isn’t hydrogen, it’s bio-fuel. Bio-kerosene, bio-gas and bio-ethanol all have useful roles in aviation, and are essentially carbon neutral over their lifecycle. Zero carbon at the proverbial tailpipe is a lot less important when that tailpipe is at 30,000 feet.

ReactOS is a very fun project, but anyone expecting it to be a real useable OS is absolutely mad. It’s been going for almost 30 years, and they’re almost at the point of binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003…

Or places which are already heavily inhabited/productively used. Inland river valleys are some of the most desirable real estate, in human habitation terms.

Major river dams are often only feasible in countries which either have lots of sparsely populated wilderness (like North America), or which don’t have a problem with displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying whole communities (like China). Takes it off the menu for a lot of the world.

Would it particularly affect the performance if the sphere ends up covered in barnacles or coral? It’s what’s inside that matters (it’s just a big hollow tank).

You’ve pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.

You can’t force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that’s a different matter.

Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.