https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/29/us/29converters.html

But todays trucks are absolutely more fuel efficient and more reliable. The problem is if they do break, you need a mechanic with a higher level of education to fix them.

I don't think GM will open a fab on their own. Too expensive for what they need. However a joint GM/Ford/Toyota venture seems possible (if it can get past anti-trust laws!), and that would find customers in the likes of Honda.

People might start asking who John Galt is.

This never happened, because outdated makes no sense.

You want a part? People make a part. Older is easier to make too, has more test cycles, failure points mapped, etc.

Automakers are doing things right, by using tested parts. Production methods.

We absolutely don't need new as the primary priority, or iterative, we need stable first.

I think courts sided with an artist that destroyed an original in transfers making one new work. I think they would also tend to side with firmware users that move/modify copies but don't expand the number of production units running derived copies of the code.

Its classic hyperinflation market. Too much money chasing too little product. The only way to crack the hyperinflation would be to boost interest rates on credit cards over 2600% making speculation unprofitable or for the endusers to abandon the marketplace and let the price crash or boost the manufacturers production until they flood the market down. The CC interest rate thing would not sell well in an election year LOL. The manufacturers cannot outproduce the demands of the entire financial industry money printing press. The only option is market abandonment.

The common usage of “a few bad apples” has changed to mean the group isn’t responsible, as a whole, for the actions of a few instead of the old warning about removing the bad ones before they corrupt the bunch.

Like during the “peaceful” protests a couple years ago. It was the “bad apples” who were burning police cars and looting stores, the group has no responsibility for their actions.

Not so for the Capital Insurrection though. They don’t get to claim “a few bad apples” and the people who were there to peacefully protest and merely held up a sign on the lawn were equally as guilty as the ones who entered the capital to forcefully stop the election results.

Double standard really.

You have to log ID, provide a small payment and it logs the VIN the item is being tied to as well as having a list of stolen parts.

No anti-repair steps needed so you can stop shilling.

Collision avoidance nannies seem substantially more tolerable when the physics equation has 2 zeroes removed from the mass figure.

It's not like arbitrary jackasses can get behind the wheel of these vehicles anyways... there is a reason a commercial licensing program exists.

I'm pretty sure I've seen it used often when the intent is to show "japeneseness".

It isn't hard to melt down the metals and extract the valuable ones. A proper factory can do a much better job (get more of the valuable metals out), but it is something I could profitably do in my backyard over a fire. I haven't looked into the details of refining platinum, but I doubt is is much different from any other metal. (when I looked into it I lived in an area with a lot of iron deposits, I've since moved and no longer have access to iron ore so that potential hobby is dead to me)

Once you have raw metals you can claim any source you want. Just form them into a ring and say you were saving it for your anniversary, but your wife left you - I'm sure you can come up with other ways to make it look like got a legal source.

Playing devil's advocate: in the case of EVs, the hard part is not the motor, it's the battery. If it were easy to build high efficiency and high capacity batteries which are also small and light enough to be used on a vehicle, we'd have EVs everywhere long ago. (A second hard part is the power semiconductors, to convert the DC from the battery to variable frequency AC which can be used by these high efficiency electric motors.)

Something like biodiesel is almost entirely a drop-in replacement, and diesel engines will burn a wide range of flammable liquids. Gasoline engines can be fairly easily converted to burn a bunch of other fuels too.

There's a guy on my forum with an ex-police Range Rover the same age as mine that is now considerably north of 400,000 miles.

I think you'd have to leave the car in the sun for days, just to drive to the 5 minutes away store and back.

Aptera is less extreme than that, but still a lot more efficient than a normal car, mainly due to aerodynamics, plus light weight and three wheels. Take a glance at aptera.us and you'll see how far they took the aerodynamics.

They claim up to 40 miles of range collected per day, if you're someplace like southern California, and max out their panel options. The car is pretty flat and wide, which also helps.

If you don't have much sun available, you can plug into a regular wall outlet and add range reasonably quickly.

Automotive solar panels like they use are about 20% efficient. Your average car roof is....let's be super forgiving and say 2sqm. So in the middle of the day, at the equator, you are generating about 400W of power.

The average EV battery is 50kWh. So you'd need 125 hours in full sun to recharge it fully. During a regular sunny day you'd get maybe.....2-3kWh back into your battery? So yeah, about enough to cover ~10 miles in a regular EV.

Sure it's better than nothing, but remember that this is in ideal conditions. In less than ideal conditions you are talking yeah, enough energy to cover a mile or two per day of charging. It's just silly.

In this example, if you steal a piece of hardware with embedded software on it, it seems unlikely that you're licensed to use that piece of software.

Electron says, "Hold my beer!"

I would love to see lower software requirements, more long lived systems, etc.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is obsoleting... basically the last decade+ of hardware for Windows 11. It's an uphill fight.

Maybe developers should take some responsibility and stop fucking writing code that's slow as shit and unusable on anything past their company-paid for macbook pros.

In an ideal society programmers would be sat down and given a seven year old mid-range laptop and threatened that if their program lags in the slightest they would be fired and blacklisted from the industry.

As far as I know, this is true.

> You don't get to decide if people have to pay you,

No law says I have to, AFAIK.

> or if people have to have your permission first

There’s no law I know which gives authors this right of deciding whether anyone has the right to run the software.

> or if they're allowed to (legally) copy it, etc.

Copying is regulated by copyright law. But once I have acquired a copy, what law disallows me from running that copy however I want?

Maybe in some jurisdictions, but I’m pretty sure many places exclude copies necessary for the operation of the software to not be violations of copyright law.

I mean, extend the same reasoning to web pages. Your web browser downloads a web page (let’s pretend this does not count as a copy). It keeps the HTML in an in-memory cache. The browser then sends the HTML to its internal renderer, which renders the page. Boom, a copy of the HTML (or at least a derived work of it) now exists in the renderer. Have you now violated the copyright of the page author?

Throwing slack / spotify / vscode / steam / whatever else on top of that could easily bump it up several more gb. VScode is pretty good, up until you start adding in language servers. The quality of the rest is really hit or miss.

Edit: Out of curiosity, I opened steam, and it immediately took up a little bit of ram, then by the time it finished "loading" it ballooned up to a gig- presumably because of all the fancy animated images and video players and what not the storefront needs. I could definitely do without those things, though I imagine they do correlate to more purchases (there's a name for it, I forget- something about moving images triggering a capture of attention going back to hunting / fight or flight response).

If this was not so, copyright holders could sue all the router and switch operators in the world for copying pirated works by merely having the network packets temporarily in their packet buffers.

Cars started to last significantly longer when body rust-proofing improved (mostly in the 80s for American cars), when electronic fuel injection reduced fuel wash in the engines, and when anti-collision tech reduced the number of write offs of lower value used cars (ABS being perhaps the single biggest one, which prevents a lot of $2000 accidents from taking a $2500 used car off the road).

A carbureted, unprotected mild-steel car built in 1959, 1969, or 1979 was much less likely to be on the road 23 years later than a fuel-injected, galvanized steel 1999 model is to be on the road today.

And I'm not forgetting it - I'm just saying that the overall gain doesn't seem to be worth it. The cost of solar panels integrated into the car would pay for a lot of electricity from the grid instead.

But Aptera actually has panels on the car. That would be useless on a Tesla, but the Aptera is far more aerodynamic and only has three wheels. They don't claim to fully recharge in a day, just to get enough extra range in a day to cover many people's typical driving needs.