Incoming Chinese carmaker Xpeng

Australian firm Pegasus Aerospace Corp received airworthiness certification from CASA for its driveable Pegasus E flying police car last year

you would need a pilot’s licence – not simply a car licence – to be able to eventually fly the X2 in Australia.

likely to be bungled in red tape for some time before it could take to the skies

We can take orders… you can secure one with a fully refundable $100 deposit.

So I guess a more accurate headline would be this:

“Australia’s” “first” “flying car” “now” “on sale.”

Voyager has been working well for me.

Seems like they don’t work exactly the same as they used to, as they now use MTP instead of USB mass storage, but while annoying, it’s generally a pretty trivial fix and your OS may already use MTP devices with no trouble. It seems there may be some other knock-on effects with fonts not sideloading right and needing a Calibre plugin to make pagination work how it used to.

So yeah, it’s getting worse, but Amazon hasn’t figured out how to bring the hammer down yet.

Calibre has always been a small price to pay, but if sideloading goes away, I’ll certainly never “upgrade” again, and I’ll trash my 11th gen Paperwhite if they somehow make it stop working. Usable e-ink ereaders are even doable as DIY projects now, and Kobo will probably stay less closed-off than Amazon for a good while.

That said, reading the comments and the article it seems like as long as your OS (or some app) supports MTP, everything should still work more or less as it has, which is to say kind of annoying and with Amazon pulling little microaggressions like deleting your cover thumbnails, but overall sideloading should still function.

Yeah, I don’t think this goes to trial and rewrites the lawbooks or anything, but there’s enough here to litigate, and I reckon Tesla will settle to avoid going to discovery.

This is a bit different, in that it’s not a trademark claim, but rather a copyright claim. They’re saying that the still isn’t meaningfully trying to be anything other than a Blade Runner still, and Musk’s use is not protected by any sort of Fair Use. There would likely be a statue of limitations or something for the specific cause of action, but you can’t lose copyright the same way you can a trademark.

One could argue it’s an uncreative derivative work not subject to a fair use exemption, and actively used in commerce to make money for Musk, while simultaneously it damages the Blade Runner brand if, as claimed, other car companies assume Tesla and BR have a relationship, or the BR brand is inextricably linked to Tesla and Musk. The fact that Tesla and WBD hurriedly sought a copyright clearance, once Tesla realized WBD didn’t have all the necessary rights, doesn’t speak well for Tesla’s position, nor does the fact that Musk referenced Blade Runner at least twice in his presentation.

Meanwhile I’m over here playing in the through-hole kiddie pool or dead-bug handwiring keyboards.

Tres comas, indeed.

I think it sorta works, mostly because I never really bought the original as being particularly authentic of, well, anything. It’s a fun party song just begging to be covered on cruise ships for the next 40 years. Astley is a solid pro who clearly never stopped performing and didn’t skimp on the arrangement.

I actually kind of like that Apple has become a boring and iterative company for the most part. I just use the same glass and metal rectangle until a few months after my upgrade eligibility on my work plan (because I always forget when it is), then I get whichever glass and metal rectangle is cheap now. I routinely forget which iPhone I use, and my life is no worse because of it.

Okay, I just looked it up. It’s a 13, and I did remember, but I was not at all confident.

At my kid’s elementary school, they just have a charging rack full of cheap Chromebooks and the kids check one out in the morning and put it back in the afternoon. The middle schoolers get to take them home.

Well, that is exactly the song I would have expected from the Fancy Like Applebees guy if he were tasked with writing a soul-searching meditation on family life and addiction.

A little bit of casual misogyny and toxic gender roles here. A little bit of underexamined personal philosophy there, where the subtext of self-loathing is literally the only interesting direction the song could have gone. We’ve got soft-pedaling the message enough that no one in the audience feels compelled to change their behavior (we all need a beer, just trying to “avoid AA”). We’ve got the dissonant images of “can’t afford $35 for an oil change,” but also writing a mainstream country radio hit as a reasonable professional goal. We have bizarre shoutouts to (famous college football coach) Nick Saban, John Deere, Skoal, and Nicorette. All of it in a sing-song cadence a toddler would be proud of and ending up in a line-dancing bar with big tiddies dancing around.

Fucking hell, Nashville, this is why I have to justify and cajole people to listen to anybody with a southern accent. Contrast the Walker Hayes garbage with Jason Isbell also doing a lightly up-tempo song about the struggle to stay sober and do the right thing.

Or, if that one’s too subtle, here’s him doing a semi-autobiographical (and it’s only barely “semi” from what I understand) roots rock confession that’s literally about an alcoholic in recovery. Seriously, compare “Keep muh dawters off the pole!” with “Last night I let myself remember… my daughter’s eyes when she’s ashamed.” There’s probably half a dozen other lines like it, that are “comparable” but… well… NOT comparable.

Also, what the heck is up with your link #5? It’s definitely not the linked song, I don’t think it’s a Walker Hayes song, and I can’t seem to find any of the lyrics on the interwebs. Is it an AI hallucination? If it is, it’s somehow slightly better than Walker Hayes.

This one is not really filling up my outrage meter. Amortize it over the first year before you finally admit you don’t want to pay a monthly fee to subscribe to your ad-hoc coatrack, and it’s 8 bucks a month, and you’re already paying $45 or whatever for the whole shebang, including what have to be some pretty expensive live classes from Instructor/Influencers who have a certain amount of leverage. At least there’s a real service involved, and likely the new bikes subsidize some of it. They should admit that’s what it is, but… meh.

I mean yes, in a certain sense mbin is exactly how open source is supposed to work when things go sideways: fork the code, change the name, leverage the original work, leave Ernest in peace, whatever he’s dealing with.

I mostly play older games on my Ryzen 5 2400g with 16gb of RAM and an RX 580 I bought off a crypto miner, though I did manage to get Starfield running at 1080P in Win10 with a framerate and detail level that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out. Still, I think I should be pretty undemanding for the current state of Linux gaming, and I’m just about ready to bail on Windows but haven’t yet. Currently dual booting with Kubuntu.

Beyond a few stubborn games, I have Windows CAD software I think I could run in a VM with maybe 8GB of RAM and access to my GPU. What’s the easiest way for a motivated amateur to get that set up? Having come up with MS-DOS, I am comfortable with a CLI conceptually, and I can copy and paste commands like a mofo, but I generally don’t know the exact use and flags well enough to do much on my own beyond apt and mkdir. :-)

In the six months before the Indian elections earlier this year, YouTuber Akash Banerjee created content highlighting the shortcomings of the incumbent government.

The political satirist made videos about topics such as the government’s divisive campaign pitch and its crackdown on the opposition parties. “Independent creators put their neck on the line to reach voters,” he told Rest of World, describing his work.

But for the past week, Banerjee has been stressed about the prospect of having to shut down his YouTube channel, The Deshbhakt, which has over 4.8 million subscribers.

That’s because the Indian government has plans to classify social media creators as “digital news broadcasters,” which would make it mandatory for them to register with the government, set up a content evaluation committee that checks all content before it is published, and appoint complaint handlers — all at their own expense. Any failures in compliance could lead to criminal charges, including jail term.

In the unlikely case you were under the illusion that this was some sort of consumer-protection move.

I run all of my DIY keyboard builds (here’s the latest) off of Pi Picos or clones with USB-C.

This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we’re years away from a final disposition.

For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.

I have an old M560 that I actually really like. Other than ABS shine, the only sign of age is that the “back” button you click by nudging the scroll wheel from right to left does double clicks. Do you happen to know if that is similarly fixable?