This is how nearly all ICE cars have operated since the mid-90s. Most people just haven’t learned to take advantage, and still drive full speed up to red lights and slam on the brakes at the last second.
My original brake pads in my '17 Nissan Micra 5spd went 100k kms before failing inspection.
This is sadly true. Some places are so dry that capturing rainwater can disrupt the local water table (this is a wild guess). Other places are governed by idiots.
My city gives out rain barrels a couple times a year.
The volunteers’ work is in no way being stolen. All contributors agree to release their content in perpetuity under CC-BY-SA (or similar licences that preceded it), meaning that all content is free for anyone to use, including commercial uses and derivatives, with the only restrictions being requiring attribution (credit the original contributor) and releasing under an equivalent license. The WMF can’t restrict access to any use complying with that license. Meaning that if AI companies want to scrape Wikipedia’s content for a compliant use, they will and they are fully legally permitted to.
The Disney example is not apt: Disney produces content to make money, and reserves all rights to that content. It is not intended to be free nor to make money for third parties (absent a licensing agreement), and they were right to sue when AI companies misused their content. Wikipedia’s goals of creating a large collection of quality information and making it available to everyone for free are far from the same. The WMF does not own the content anyway, only the servers where the content resides.
The WMF negotiating paid privileged access to data streams for these large clients is a win for everyone. The purpose of Wikipedia is to disseminate information, not gatekeep it, and the WMF has literally no right to decide who can access it and who cannot. AI agents’ ridiculous server demands threatened to impede access for everyone else, and the deals they have made sidestep that impending problem while also generating some revenue for the WMF.
The Wikipedia community (its editors) could decide not to allow its content to be used by AI, but it has not. It would be very legally complicated, anyway, given the content’s license.
I’ve been through a few branding/packaging exercises in corporate life (I’m an accountant, not an artist at all). My experience was that the branding can be artistic, but then marketers get ahold of it and shove the artwork into preconceived notions of optimizing shelf appearance and drawing the customer’s eye. So there’s genuine artistry in it but it’s distorted by corporate pragmatism.
Rain barrels are a really good solution to water needs for home gardens, and usually pretty inexpensive.
I got a couple of flavouring barrels from a food plant I worked at, an adapter to hook them to my downspouts, and a submersible pump that lives inside powered by a solar battery. They’re sealed so no issues with mosquitoes, and the pump feeds a garden hose so I’m not carrying buckets around. I basically never use tap water in my garden at all.
The CDs were coasters for sure, but the floppies were free extra storage once you formatted them. Was a handy service AOL provided for a while, distributing free storage.
Doom Shareware was among the top-selling games?
There would be if every vehicle wasn’t a small tank, and cities so poorly designed that everyone always drives everywhere.
Also if you overheat Teflon it releases toxic fumes. You probably won’t get it hot enough by cooking, but if you accidentally left an empty pan on a lit stove it could get hot enough.
My understanding (not a lawyer) is the difference is intent to kill. Murder requires that the accused clearly intended to kill the victim, while manslaughter only requires that the accused intended to do the thing which resulted in the victim’s death.
“Hard to argue”, sure, but that’s not the standard of a legal trial. The prosecution would need to prove beyond doubt that the driver meant for Rapp to die, not just that he meant to hit her with his car.
The CEOs are earning way more than 200k. The lowest paid of the US auto CEOs earns north of $20 million.
The “modern electronics” you mentioned are very low-power devices in the range of things you can power from a household socket. They’re also low-voltage DC, which means that no matter what voltage/frequency you can get from the wall it is being converted, and converting AC to DC is electrically very simple. The difference in circuitry between converting from 110V or 220V is just a transformer with a center tap, and the frequency doesn’t matter at all since DC is 0Hz anyway.
With high-power devices, pretty much anything with a motor or a heating element, the device is designed to match the voltage and frequency available in the region they’re going to be used. An AC motor’s speed depends on the frequency of the power supplied to it, and a heating element depends on voltage, which is why electric kettles and ranges boil water much more quickly in 220V regions. Travel adapters are basically just a transformer, which changes the voltage but not the frequency. The difference between 50Hz and 60Hz isn’t that big so most motors will still run but with impaired performance and maybe timing issues, but others will fail in spectacular and dangerous ways. Supplying a heating element with the wrong voltage will make it either not heat up, or heat up too much and start a fire. The different plug types ensure that you don’t plug in a high power device to power it’s not designed for.
If we were going to standardize on one plug type, we would also have to standardize on one power signal. Ignoring the political issues, that would mean that any region that doesn’t already use that standard signal would have to immediately retool all of their power plants, their entire transmission system, every industrial facility, and adapt or replace every AC household appliance. And there’s not really any good reason to do it, other than convenience.
To elaborate: in 220V countries a kettle can pull 3,000W. The spec for USB PD 3.1 is max 240W and requires a specialized cable.
Using an online calculator: a 1m cable capable of handling 3,000W at USB-PD voltage would be almost 9mm in diameter.
As a punishment for Canadian wildfires, Trump raises taxes that only Americans pay.
Make it make sense, challenge level impossible
Nicolas Cage had a small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, as one of Judge Reinhold’s coworkers at the burger joint. Credited as Nicolas Coppola.
Tobey Maguire had a part in Empire Records. His scene was cut but he still appears in the credits.
Jacob Wysocki (of Dropout) has a small role in Pitch Perfect.
I’m not a civil engineer but did some civil engineering in university and have a bit of an interest in urban planning. Still, I’m mostly guessing.
Regardless of where storm drains are placed on a street, they don’t have infinite capacity. In a heavy enough rainfall event, they will flood. The placement or frequency of drains isn’t the limiting factor, it’s the outlet capacity. In nature, rain falls on the ground and is absorbed, and finds its way into the watercourse slowly. In urban areas, storm drains gather up rainfall over a wide area and channel it towards the watercourse much more quickly, and if that outflow isn’t controlled it can lead to catastrophic flooding and erosion downstream. Look up 1952’s Hurricane Hazel and its effects on Toronto for what that looks like. If more rainfall flows into the system than the outlet can handle, there’s nowhere else for the water to go and the drains flood.
With a crowned profile and drainage at the sides, excess water will pool only up to the height of the gutter before overflowing and finding ground or another low spot away from the road, so the road will only be partially obstructed at least until the flooding is much worse (and by then you’re probably well into an evacuation). If the road were sloping towards drainage at the centre, then floodwater fills the entire road basin before overflowing, and your road is blocked, and stays blocked until the drains can take the water again, long after the rain has stopped. Blocked roads make managing an emergency much more complicated.
In North America we’re being conditioned to accept ever-larger vehicles as normal, and it’s working beautifully (for car makers, much less so society or the environment).
My mom drives a Mazda something-or-other crossover, and gets annoyed when I call it her truck. She insists it’s a “car” and “not that big”, both arguments made foolish when I roll up in my Nissan Micra.
A while back I was comparing the 1987 Ford Ranger (what I learned on) with a more recent Ford Maverick, out of curiosity. The Maverick is nearly the same size as the Ranger (the box is a bit longer) but thirty five hundred pounds heavier. No doubt a lot of that is battery, but holy shit.
Nice to know Toyota still has a hatch. Nissan stopped selling the Micra in Canada and almost nobody has anything that small in their offerings now.
If you’re using the dongle that came with the mouse, that’s a proprietary wireless connection made between the mouse and the dongle. The device your computer sees is the dongle, which is connected to the computer via physical USB connection. It doesn’t use the computer’s Bluetooth radio, so turning off Bluetooth doesn’t affect it.
If you want to test if your computer’s Bluetooth is truly off, you can probably find a Bluetooth device sniffing app and see if it detects your computer when you’ve disabled it, but I don’t know of one to suggest. You can pretty well trust that if you’ve turned it off in software, it’s off.
I only sub to Deezer, a French streaming service that actively filters AI music and blocks it from their algorithms and search results.
Well, cancelling successful products is pretty on-brand for Netflix.