Well, thanks for the tip!

Still, we're already a quarter into the 21st century and Slashdot still doesn't do Unicode; I'm starting to find it charmingly old-fashioned, like cassette tapes, vacuum tube TVs or the PDP-11.

What do you mean? I have it from the best authority that the price of eggs has gone down by 92% and is now too low. Indeed, I heard it's so low that the US Mint is considering issuing half penny coins for people to buy a carton of eggs.

Terrible sacrifices, indeed! I'm really missing the sweet smell of gas smoke, the beautiful colors on the oil leaks on my garage floor, the mandatory oil changes every few months, the warm feeling I used to get when I saw the bills for gearbox service. I miss inspecting belts, hoses, checking the air filter, the oil and the transmission fluid before taking a trip. Also, topping up the coolant or antifreeze made me feel like a real man. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. This is the horrible cost of EV ownership.

No, you don't understand the subtleties here. Under a Democrat administration, gas prices are the most important thing ever and any slight increase is clearly presaging the end of the world (of Warcraft). Under a Republican administration, such as the current one, gas prices are inconsequential details nobody should complain about.

You probably mean Nurburgring, which is not in Nuremberg; it's in a different city named Nurburg (the first u is supposed to have an umlaut, but Slashdot doesn't do umlauts).

In any case, the fact you're not aware of any EV's beating ICEs only shows what you know. From here: the unrestricted record holder at Nurburgring is the Porsche 919 Evo, which is a hybrid car. The second fastest lap was done by a full-electric: a Nurburgring edition of Volkswagen's ID4.
The fastest production car was also a hybrid: a F1-engined Mercedes AMG.

Yup, I'm sure this will happen: Chinese sellers will reduce their price by 245% - meaning they'll pay you to buy their merchandise!

See, that's the kind of genius math I came to expect from Republicans!

For me at least, this wouldn't matter anyway - even if Musk resigned from all of his Tesla responsibilities tomorrow, him and his family remain large Tesla shareholders, so a good share of any money given to Tesla ends up in his pockets.

You know some moron tourist will carve his initials on it or try to pocket it surreptitiously...

That would be an ecumenical matter.

Down with this sort of thing!

I can't believe you can say that with a straight face. But then, maybe the place you're sitting in is a room without windows, only facing a TV screen locked on to Fox News.

The right hate being told what to do, you say? That's total bullshit. Most republicans have no stable personal opinions or principles. They just parrot what they're told and change their point of view on a dime when told so by FoxNews, Trump or whoever they give their allegiance to. For example, it's disgusting how the Republican party suddenly looks at Russia as a friend and at Canada as an enemy. And none of them says "Now hold on a damn minute". Republicans in Congress all toe the party line - the last time one of them actually did something significant against the orders of the party was McCain during the ACA vote back in the first Trump presidency.

Republicans love being told what to do. And they particularly love telling others what to do - the number of ways the right tries to impose their will on everybody else is too large to count. There is nothing libertarian about that. Where are your libertarian principles when the right bans books, bans free speech, deports people for thought crime, shits all over the laws and the constitution, even tries to enforce their nuttiness on other countries? IMO, anybody who is a real libertarian should be as anti-MAGA as they can.

Anybody saying that the right are libertarians is just either a huge liar or crazy. But then, your user name kind of gives it away, doesn't it?

When the Internet was in its infancy, I had great hopes it was going to bring a new age of enlightenment and reason, since everybody had now easy access to information and could learn whatever they wanted and easily get at the truth of facts about almost anything.

Well, the Internet ended up being a bitter disappointment from the enlightenment point of view; it seems to be mostly used for dumb memes and cat videos :(. Based on this bitter lesson, I think AI will end up with a similar fate. The idiotic Ghibli trend appears to confirm my expectations.

That's your individual reaction, but it's not what lots of other people feel. I had a friend, back in the dawn of time, who got quite interested in an Eliza-like demo program (it came, IIRC, with a Creative Labs Soundblaster card). It was as far from ChatGPT as Pluto is from the Sun, but she still had hour long "conversations" typing in to the computer and said she feels the machine understands her. And no, she didn't have mental or emotional problems, and went on to have a very normal and reasonably successful life.

So, I can believe that some people find comfort in having an outlet for venting - such as ChatGPT. Others don't, and that's OK too. Vive la difference, innit?

On the contrary, DNT worked perfectly for the purpose it was intended: to sabotage alternative solutions to the privacy issue. At the time, privacy and tracking were becoming a concern and there were efforts to fix the problem in ways benefiting the consumer - for example, a proposal sent to the W3C was to standardize ad blocker functionality directly in the browser. Google realized the danger, and, together with their lapdog Mozilla and their other accomplices from the Digital Advertising Alliance, forced the DNT proposal through the W3C with great fanfare. This blocked other initiatives and killed any attempt to standardize on a customer-facing privacy solution.

Google knew very well it's a non-workable design, but they didn't care. They didn't want a working mechanism anyway. As another proof of cynicism, even though it was their own proposal, Google never honored the DNT flag anyway.

I have full confidence that the Congress is concerned about the ink problem, and will act quickly to issue appropriate measures: henceforward black ink will be referred to as "DEI ink".