…says the guy that thinks there’s going to be a brokered convention that picks somebody other than Biden.

Russia’s high tech side of their military industrial complex is incredibly weak compared to the old USSR days

They’ve been screwed since like the '60s because of the gap in microprocessor tech.

Nah, the only thing that might be worth worrying about learning to drive stick is the clutch, and that’s a wear item designed to be replaced anyway. (Not necessarily often or cheaply, but still, a wear item.)

Even then, unless somebody’s truly hopeless, they’ll figure it out well before putting on any noticeable excessive wear. (Source: I’ve taught at least five people to drive stick using my own cars, including myself, and haven’t had to replace a clutch due to wear yet.)

Still less radiation than coal plants release in normal operation.

Maybe, if you’re also driving an antique that doesn’t have high-RPM lockouts to prevent overspeeding the engine. But even my old cars going back to the '90s have those.

Do I look like I know what a Fiat is?

Eh, not really. The tricky part (which isn’t even that tricky) of learning to drive stick is modulating the clutch, not somehow accidentally downshifting

The truth is that the internet kinda needs at least some ads to be viable.

It really does not.

• Wikipedia does not need ads (it’s supported by donations).
• Bittorrent does not need ads (the load is distributed to the users themselves).
• Labor-of-love amateur websites from the '90s (that had more actual useful information than the SEO-optimized lazily-copywritten (or increasingly, AI-generated) bullshit we have today does) did not need ads.
• Fediverse services do not need ads (being a combination of donation-supported nodes and, in the case of PeerTube, Bittorrent-style load distribution).

Frankly, if all the corporate content that exists only to make a buck off advertising were deleted tomorrow, the Internet not only would remain viable, it would be better off!

There’s a quote that came from ICQ’s heyday that I had in mind when I wrote that:

“The Internet: where men are men, women are men, and little girls are FBI agents.”

10/f/935 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington DC, 20535

Don’t forget to think about how to keep the salt air from corroding the electronics. Either build a spare or two that you keep sealed in plastic, or find an airtight case with an integrated heat sink or something.

Edit: you might want to look into conformal coating and dielectric grease (for the connectors) as well, although I don’t know enough about that to competently give advice beyond the mere suggestion.

Inb4 the “[Choco] Leibniz — [Fig] Newton cookie controversy!”

Neat, thanks! (What about Dragon?)

This, but not ironically. (Please stop subsidizing gasoline!)

Wait, WTF does “removed from the statute block” mean? Did they pass a new law repealing the old one, or did the new government just say “nah” and cross it out without a legislative vote?

to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of… being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them)

I know Soyuz was designed to land in Kazakhstan or whatever, but is Starliner (or Dragon, for that matter) even capable of landing on solid ground without damage and/or injuries?

Nah, just make the alternatives cheaper

Or make the animal stuff more expensive; same difference.

That’s possible, but if that were the case I’d expect there to be a bunch of illegitimate children at his funeral.

That’s an interesting point there, but have you considered that even with a mechanical link and current safety features, it can still override you? I unfortunately almost drove into someone at very low speeds in a dark rainy parking lot, but the cars safety systems overrode me thankfully. I don’t think they would have been injured it was so slow, but just to show that nowadays with cars you don’t always have full control. In that case it was the brakes not steering, but modern cars can and will prevent you from changing lanes into someone in your blind spot for example.

I’ll be honest with you: all but one of the half-dozen (which is too many, BTW) cars I own have manual transmissions, and half of them don’t even have ABS, let alone any other fancy electronic nannies. I mention that to help explain the extent to which I am fundamentally Not On Board with anything that interferes with my manual control of the car. (I’m also a Linux user and a DIYer, which are some more clues to how much of a control freak I am: I expect my property to be exactly the way I want it to be and do exactly what I want it to do, and nothing else.)

Putting torque on the wheel while in these semi self driving modes disables the self driving features, but that’s software that disables it when you take over. What if that software failed and you were now fighting the self driving car also trying to steer and as you tried to steer it put equal power against you thinking the steering was rough?

Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t mind having radar cruise with lane-keeping for long trips on the freeway, but only if such a system were fail-safe enough that even if it were stuck on, yanking on the wheel hard enough would get the car to turn. I would absolutely insist on the maximum torque the self-driving system could apply being much less than the strength of the human driver. I don’t know if that’s the case in late-model vehicles or not, but if it isn’t, I would consider those vehicles to have an unsafe design.