One of the easiest vehicles to parallel park that I ever drove was an 84-passenger ThomasBuilt. Great mirrors, great visibility, good turning radius (for a bus). I do generally fine with my current vehicles, but they're mostly older. The newest is a 2014 Honda Pilot, and the hood is high enough it took me a hot minute to get used to the degraded visibility. By contrast, my '94 Suburban is pretty easy to see all around, and my '78 K10 is a dream (a non-moving dream at the moment, but hey, visibility is great!).

The whole fad of making everything taller and more square and agressive-looking to sell to the a-holes who want to intimidate everyone else on the road makes me wish for progressive licenses not allowing over a certain curb weight/size/hp vehicle until much more stringent training/testing has been completed.

Initial license should limit someone to a small car with reasonably low HP (something akin to a civic, accord, etc.). Want a bigger/faster/heavier car? great... do ALL the training and testing, and one single road rage / reckless / tailgating / aggressive driving incident, and you're back to square one for a LONG time.... 10 years ought to be enough, probably. Second incident? License revoked, permanently.

Half our US society is creaming themselves over gun control, when asshole drivers kill far more people through inattention, aggression, and impairment. Time to get some far stricter policies around who can drive on our roadways, IMO.

...now I can't upgrade my ancient GPS-based time server appliance that's running Slackware 4 on a 486, if I ever plug it in again.

What is this world coming to?

dentist advise you not to rinse after... and to swallow any residual... for what they call "a systemic effect"

It's funny, I give my wife the same advice.

Those people here who have day jobs dealing with tech might very well wish for something they can just plug in and it works for their own personal stuff tech.

I have the capability to build a FreeNAS (or whatever) box. I don't have the interest, and I don't really want to make the time. I have a Synology because it just works; it was easy, and I don't have to worry much about things breaking, or dependency hell, or whatever... I slapped drives in it, powered it on, did some basic config, and Bob's your Uncle.

I don't spend 8+ hrs/day doing this stuff for money, just to get to the end of the day and spend hours doing it for no money. The premium isn't that much if you just buy the box and slap drives in it, vs. buying a decent system board, chassis, etc. The time savings, on the other hand, is significant.

At the same time, are any of the internet-required features actually important? I have a Bosch 800-series with the same stuff... but really, "scheduled start time" is not a feature I have ever had on a dishwasher, and adding physical buttons for that feature seems cumbersome, costly, and unnecessary. It has that feature for people who want it, along with a feature to run at specific times of day when power is less expensive (which arguably may require some kind of feed from utility providers, I don't know as I've never used it).

But for basic dishwasher functionality (ie everything I actually need/want in a dishwasher), it's "open the door; load dishes; add soap; press a few buttons; close door; wait for red light to shut off indicating it's done."

So this whole thing is a lot of people complaining about unnecessary features being locked behind an unnecessary cloud-based API/app. *yawn*

I connected mine because it was interesting, and if I'm out with my wife I can see a notice that it's done, and tell the kids "go unload the dishwasher." That's about all I use the connected features for.

My preference would be both. Terrestrial networks don't tend to do well in storms, etc. Our last major wind storm, I lost all cable and cell service... but guess what still worked? Starlink.

Guess what I'm looking at buying for my primary residence as backup for my regular cable internet? Starlink (with the plan that can be paused).

If I had to choose one or the other, it would be Starlink, easily.

It's not a conflict of interest unless he's involved in the selection process - and he's not.

If I have a brother who owns a company, and the company I work for buys a product from my brother's company, is it a conflict of interest? If I'm the supply chain person making the decision, yes. If I'm influencing the supply chain person making the decision, yes. If I'm in an area of the company completely separate from supply chain, and have no say or involvement in the decision, no.

Could there be some back-channel chatter muddying the selection process? Perhaps, but we have no direct evidence of that. So - likely not any conflict of interest here.

Is it definitely corruption, though?

Elon is a rich asshole.
Starlink is by far the best option for internet service in a whole lot of places, from rural US to parts of Caribbean Islands to who-knows-where.

Both can be (and IMO are) true; Elon being a rich asshole doesn't mean Starlink shouldn't get the subsidy, if it's on the table and Starlink is qualified. I strongly dislike AT&T also, but if they're going to make rural broadband available they should be in the running.

I have a property where my choices are Starlink or 1.5Mbps ADSL. Guess which I chose, despite not really wanting to give Elon any of my money? And it generally "just works."

In large swaths of the country, it's the *only* thing that "just works" and provides a remotely fast connection. Sure, there are WISPs and 4G connections, and 5G starting to become a bit more of a thing, but WISPs are generally expensive, not that fast, and finicky. Cell connections are a great backup, but often severely restricted.

So.... if you take Elon out of the picture, why would Starlink *not* be eligible for the subsidy? It seems like they're the ones doing the most to actually make service available where it wasn't before.

What happens when you're sick and lose your voice? Or maybe go to a concert/sports game and yell too much? Or have obnoxious passengers who won't shut up, or like to mess with things (think children). Voice controls can sometimes be ok (I use them on my hands-free device while driving), but for a great many things they fail miserably. Last thing I want is "tttuurrnnn. onn.nnn the... seatt... heatttter... its... f'ing.... cold..." followed by "I'm sorry, I'm programmed not to respond to those words. Would you like to have a friendly conversation about the weather?"

Yeah, no thanks. Give me my physical buttons and knobs, and a real handbrake and manual transmission while you're at it. I'm currently looking at a Subaru BRZ because it's one of literally only a few models on the market that still has all those things.

Oh crap! People might have to cut back on their cigaweed, or cook 2 meals a month at home instead of shopping at McD's all the time, to afford their TikToks and Instagrams! Will the atrocities never cease?!? What if they have to cancel one of their streaming services to pay for the internet connection?

Broadband at home is not a right, or even really a necessity. It's really helpful sometimes, yes, but... public libraries have it. Pretty much everyone (in the US) has a phone that has it now. And if they don't have it on their phone, they can go get it for free at McDonalds while feasting on their sloppy meals for 4x the price of cooking something healthy at home. Or they could go work for 2 hours somewhere to pay for a month of service (left coast wages, anyway).

I've known a lot of poor people. The vast majority of them aren't poor because things cost so much, they're poor because they make poor choices. They eat fast food because someone once told them it's cheaper than cooking at home (it's not, unless you buy particularly expensive food). They buy crap they don't need on Amazon and Temu. They don't like to work, and blame the world when they get fired because they don't show up or act professionally. There are a few legit reasons it can be hard to hold a job, the biggest one is for single parents - child care is a PITA. Kids are a PITA. Truly. They can make it really hard to hold a job. But even so, the cost of "Broadband" for a basic plan is not that much, and many of the people wanting these discounted programs are spending far more on hair, and nails, and streaming services, and other stupid crap they don't need, than they would on a basic cable internet plan.

Definitely fun times. We had a place here in Ottawa called Century 21 (No relation to the realtor) that had used computer...stuff. Everything from Mainframe tape drives to all sorts of weird an obscure stuff. I traded a bunch of Apple ][+ manuals I dumpster dived for all the RAM I needed for the Apple ][+ clone I was building. It was a great place to hang out and oogle weird looking equipment and try to guess what it was for.

Most people forget, or never knew, that OS/2 was a joint IBM and Microsoft project. So with MS's marketing and IBM project management, it could have done well. But MS feared that it would compete with MS WIndows 3.x...whichwas true, it would have blown the doors off Windows. I wrote a kiosk application on OS/2...started on OS/2 2.1 just before OS2 3.0 Warp came, using what was called "IBM's Audio Visual Connection", or AVC, which later became the Ultimedia Builder. The big trick that AVC had was a IBM video capture and playback card that cost upwards to $5,000 or so I seem to remember. It could capture then play back video in either a resizable window, or full screen. The kiosk had a touch screen, and AVC could interact and control it all running under OS/2. The kiosk program I wrote was a tourism app called "Touch Ottawa/Hull". After using the touch screen to select the area Otawa you were interested in, and what you were looking for, eg Fast Food, it would bring up a menu of Fast Food resteraunts in that area. When you selected the fast food place, it pop up a screen that would show you a picture of the of the place, and/or some text, and would open window beside that to play a video clip, usually a commercial for the place. Then, if the place offered it, you could have it then print out a discount coupon for the resteraunt.

The company had me make a modified version of it, and it was renamed "The Electronic Trade Show". Again using the touchscreen selection, it could bringing up a commercial or just a graphic and text, it would allow businesses to advertise at trade shows to anyone who walked up to one of the kiosks and touched the screen. It could also optionally print out a business card or contact info for the company. The Government of Canada used this all over the world.

Fun days.

Oh, true, where "fringe minority" means racists, fascists, misogynists, etc. And "unacceptable views" means hatred and intolerance. Right on, 100% true!

Nabu was an Ottawa, Ontario Canada company that built their system around the North American Presentation-Level-Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS) for providing information over the Cablevision networks. It had some amazing technology but like the Hyperion Computer, it was another "Next Great Thing" that failed...not from the tech, it was excellent for its day, it was the lack of venture capital to grow the company from the respectable beginnings into an international product offering.

That's the reality and why so many figures are undisclosed. These do have a niche in the supply chain where they'll shine, local and fixed route trips where you'll have chargers at birth end points. They're FAR from replacing OTR trucks for long hauling until there's some maybe leap in battery capacity, even getting charge times down to parity with diesel is no good because stopping every 500ish miles will eat into efficiency substantially.