At this point, I think Idiocracy should be taught in schools just like Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 are.

It's an allegory of how Stupidity is just as dangerous as Totalitarianism and Cencorship.

Bookmarking? In 2025?? Well that's just uncivilized!

In 2025, I need all of my content links uploaded to the cloud so it can be paraphrased and narrated by an AI that sounds like Patrick Stewart complete with corresponding random vertical videos of random things getting assembled from my smart hub screen as I fall asleep at night to maximize content retention. Anything less is too much of a bother.

Where I live, Most of our stations are owned by either IHeartMedia or Cumulus. The "DJ's" are all nationwide cookie cutter Random Factoid Top 40 Celebrity News spewers that are basically placeholders to give them an excuse to tell you what car dealership bought the Studio, News desk, Weather center, Traffic report, ETC's Naming Rights in between more commercials and playing stingers of one of their station "Brands" such as Kiss, Froggy or Real.

At this point an AI DJ would be an improvement. They might actually play music on the station instead of commenting how a gecko loses it's tail when it feels threatened and how he wished he could do that when confronted by his girlfriend. (actual random factoid one of our stations used BTW)

AI, while it may in the next decade, isn't cutting jobs. If anything, Telecommuting is. and when I mean telecommuting, I mean halfway across the world.

The Reason H1B's exists, and the reason you have politicians on both sides of the isle fighting tooth and nail to keep them even though it displaces high paid American workers out of jobs, is because even though it's a job held by a foreign employee, it still counts as an American Job on paper complete with it's tax revenue. Simply put, if H1B's disappeared overnight, then thousands of jobs would basically disappear in the US and reappear on foreign shores overnight thanks to VOIP and Teleconferencing.

Here's an example. Where I work, the finance dept is working on transitioning their old accounting system to a new accounting system created by the Big O due to someone hearing their pitch of "Visibility and Control" and "Single Source of Truth" on the radio against our better judgement. Once they singed the contract the Big O sent us to an Implementer headquartered in the US (since that was a requirement) to transition from our old system to the new system. Imagine my zero reaction shock and awe when we had to open India on our firewall because none of the programmers could access our servers or even chat with our staff because their Webex server cluster was based in India and our staff couldn't join their Webex sessions. The same goes for their Microsoft Cloud service since they use Indian based cloud locations.

TL:DR: COVID proved that Telecommuting works, H1B's are getting harder and more expensive to get, and it's cheap to rent a former scam call center in India and fill it with minimum wage coders than hiring coders that are expecting big bucks to pay their college loans in the US.

It depends. Right now I can pull 1-2Gbps+ symmetrical from my phone on Verizon on 5GUW. It's faster than the 1Gbps I get from Spectrum and both are faster, less latent and cheaper than Starlink. (with spectrum being the cheapest and not throttled for usage, although not symmetrical.) It doesn't make sense for me to get Starlink here.

5 Miles north of me is Amish Country. It has very spotty Verizon DSL in some places and can barely hit a Verizon tower at 4G speed at absolute best. Chances are you'll never see Verizon run new lines there unless they absolutely have to because it'll literally serve 1 house per sq mile at best and they can serve you better with a new cell tower since they don't have to worry about lines breaking from Plows or Severe Storms. Spectrum won't run lines there for the same reasons. Your only other option is Hughesnet which is basically DSL speed at 10x the cost, or Starlink, which is the same price as Hughesnet but with 10x the speed and 5x better latency.

In those areas it makes sense to utilize wireless like Starlink or LTE Home internet because it's much cheaper to give everyone who wants high speed internet a Starlink dish or LTE Router instead of running millions of dollars of network infrastructure in a 20 sq mile area to serve the equivalent of 10-20 homes. Even paying Verizon to build a million dollar 5G+ tower to serve that area makes more sense since your covering a huge radius of land and some Amish utilize cell phones for emergency and business purposes and want nothing to do with anything attached to their homes.

Just uninstalled Chrome because they finally killed off Ublock Origin.

Now I hope Mozilla fixes their TOS before it's too late.

Until Microsoft's documentation on MV3 changes, I wouldn't take this DEV build as being set in stone.

I don't see Microsoft flushing away it's only good chance to pull users from Chrome when the Ublockalypse happens in Google land. They know as soon as that happens there's going to be a mass exodus of Chrome users to other browsers, and they want to be the one people and businesses flock to since they're based on chromium for maximum compatibility and they also make it easy to Sync your Google account Chrome Profile to Edge without having to use Chrome to Import.

They're either going to support Ublock Origin until the heat death of the universe, or they are going to implement a built in customizable ad blocker baked right into Edge ala Brave.

If they Kill Ublock Origin with Chrome they know the world+dog will migrate back to Firefox. Even though Mozilla is doing a bang up job screwing themselves out of the running with their Agreement Shenanigans.

Hollywood is all about these references.

In the 80's It was all about post apocalypse movies because Reagan/Thatcher was going to start WWIII. Also during that time there was scenes of drivers just fastening their seat belt, or commenting about how smoking is bad if someone smoked on screen.

It's the Corel and Broadcom for hardware instead of software.

HP is where hardware goes to die.

The goal of transitioning to electric should be to maximize electric use on short trips, relegating ICE use to long trips only, and minimizing maintenance costs. Electric minimizes routine maintenance but have a huge back end cost when the battery fails. ICE cars have an exponential maintenance curve as the car ages, but is overall cheaper than replacing one battery in a electric. Hybrids, while they have the worst of both worlds, they still have less overall maintenance and a more manageable battery cost when the battery eventually fails.

Hopefully, it means BMW is going to bring back the Range Extender ICE in their electric line. Although it didn't bring much range to the table, what it did do was bring a fully electric powertrain with no crazy ICE coupling to complicate things. It was simply a motorcycle engine directly attached to a Generator feeding directly to the battery to maximize generator to battery efficiency. It just needed a slightly bigger gas tank and the car would have easily sold twice as much. This design gave you most of the maintenance advantages of an electric with smaller ICE maintenance costs (since the engine was simpler and there's no complicated transmission) and a smaller (which means lower cost) battery.

This coupled with more efficient motors and you would have a very interesting design, and when I mean more efficient, I'm talking about space efficiency. This was one of the reasons I was interested in the Lordstown Endurance because it's hub motor design freed up a ton of space in the mid section of the car, which could be used for a larger generator setup or at the very least a larger fuel tank for longer trips. Also the Hub motors were crazy simple to replace if issues arose since it was basically removing the wheel from the suspension.

The other thing that has to happen is industry standard modular battery packs. There needs to be an industry standard for battery sizes and connectivity to the point that swapping battery packs is like swapping a traditional car battery. Once you get multiple companies making cars using the same modular design, battery costs will drop significantly to the point that people will be more comfortable owning an electric car longer than 8 years. This will also benefit PHEV's at first but once you get the battery swap to under $10000 for a long range electric vehicle, The electrics will displace the PHEV's for most drivers.

If Chrome isn't Supporting your plugin anymore, why are you supporting Chrome?

I'm sure Edge, Firefox and Safari would appreciate your plugin while Chrome is actively trying to kill you.

And before you say "market share" keep in mind that the reason Chrome has so much market share was because it was faster than Firefox and supported plugins. Now that they're killing Plugin support, and everyone else is just as fast, whats the point with staying with them other than obligation?

Is it because of your phone? because if it is there's Edge and Firefox on your phone, and Firefox for Android unlike the others supports plugins so even though it's slower it's still faster without ads than Chrome ever will be with ads.

Last I recall, 15 sailors got court-martialed for a Starlink on a ship.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftech.slashdot.org%2Fstor...

After this incident the Navy probably thought that if it worked for these guys maybe it could be used for more military purposes.

Not sure about the Pixel 4a, but I can tell you from experience that the Pixel 4's have battery issues.

When the Pixel 4 first came out, I gave one to my cousin for her birthday. Like a typical teenager she would run the battery until it was basically dead. She killed her first phone in 6 months due to the battery not charging and would show a question mark when you tried to charge it. RMA'd with no problem and got a replacement in a few days.

4 months later, The second phone died almost exactly like the first with a question marked battery. RMA'd that one. This time they gave me a much harder time and it took over three weeks for a replacement.

Then that phone started showing degraded battery life 2 months later. At that point, Verizon was doing a promotion to trade in any phone for an iPhone, which is what she ended up doing against my better judgement, but how could I talk her out of it after three dead pixel 4's in a year?

Meanwhile, my Pixel 3aXL had excellent battery life for 4 years (and still does as my backup phone) and I only swapped when they stopped updating it to a Pixel 7 Pro, which also hasn't shown any battery degradation after 18 months. And to think I almost upgraded to a Pixel 4 when my Pixel 1 wouldn't hold a charge after 4 years on it and google kept delaying the Pixel 5 due to COVID. Thank god Google had a sale on the 3aXL to clear their inventory and I bit on that.