"A modern passenger car" varies widely depending on what locale the reader is in. A passenger car in Jakarta is not at all the same as a passenger car in Los Angeles.
Why do you think that a platform with so many customers as to be industry defining, with dozens of interface options, with a massive feature set, with a global footprint and basically flawless uptime requirements, could be kept running by two guys?
Expect an error but this will depend on the brand.
"Smudging" is a common trick. Just dab some face oil on the lens, just enough so it can't get detail but not so much that the system can tell there's a covering.
It's remarkable how often I hear about brilliant products being released by asshole personalities who were hard to work with, but still stayed engaged.
The other two extremes tend not to produce much of interest; the committee of people pleasers who have nothing passionate to argue about, and the group of absolute psychopaths, don't ever seem to be the origin story for industry-changing products.
Well, Oracle may have done fine, but IIRC open sourcing the JDK was Sun's very penultimate move on its deathbed. Oracle inherited the license to the trademark, but the actual JDK was already free.
Personally I loved it. The Japanese aesthetic is subtle and delightful. Also, riding my bicycle in the countryside with very few traffic signs to mar the view. Just the necessary ones, at exactly the right places. They assume you are not an idiot, and somehow it all works out!
Ah, the fixie benefit is in every stroke, especially the ones where I'm slowing down with my legs and doing whatever else I want to be doing with my hands that doesn't involve the brakes. I wish I could transmit to you the pure zen-like joy that I experience when riding the fixie. It is not "worse case" anything. It is absolutely a wonderful experience and I will never, ever, give it up.
You do you. I have a fast and light road fixie, and I have a nice carbon fiber road bike. Do I ride my road bike in fondos? Yes. Do I ride my road bike around town and for training? Mostly, no.
Why?
Never in my entire life have I ridden a flawless bicycle. Inevitably, small imperfections in the drive train creep in. A flawless bicycle isn't flawless for more than a few hundred miles. All it takes is one whack on a bike rack, one hurried toss, one oops where the bike falls over as I'm grabbing my gels from the pantry. And never mind actual crashes! Ever broken a derailleur hanger?
The fixie keeps going basically no matter what. A problem for the fixie is the kind of problem that sends me to the hospital. Which is to say, that the fixie can take a lot more abuse than I can. Does the drivetrain wear out? Sure! And it costs basically nothing to replace!
Personally I think any serious cyclist should have one. They are super fun to ride, robust, cheap to work on, and they make you stronger. What's not to like?
Affirmative action is by design discriminatory, but not against nationality. It's discriminatory based on race and sex. So I think your grudge is not striking the right target. And in any case, affirmative action has been mostly wound down, which began to happen when Obama was President. Not because he did anything, but because SCOTUS declared that his election was evidence that affirmative action was no longer required and thus ruled against it in new cases.
It is kind of a hard problem to solve. Sure, we can have expensive and custom equipment flying around, but the invasion of Ukraine (and really, any war when it gets bad enough) is all about economic efficiency. The question is not can it be done; the question is, can it be done repeatedly, can it be scaled, and can it be cheap?
We will have a fully autonomous Siri that is actually good before Ukraine gets autonomous motherships making targeting choices to repel Russian assault corps. However, given the pace of the war and the pace of AI development, that may actually happen. But it isn't happening today.
Autonomous weapons are actually a really interesting branch of this and deserves a little more.
Yes, autonomous weapons were explored and were found to be poor performers compared to actual pilots. The breakthrough is in terminal guidance and dozens of other little techniques to get quality human control extended into the far reach of the battlefield. And of course, AI assistance in logistics and analysis. But actual autonomous weapons making any more of a choice beyond "something is moving, kill it" have been, at least for now, mostly a dead end.
This is because it's very difficult to economically load the rather sizable compute requirement into the compact one-use weapons, and of course reliable communications aren't assured either.
That will probably change some day, but for now, cheap automous command drones making battlefield analysis e.g. mapping out enemy movements from afar and launching cheap autonomous kamikaze drones is not a thing beyond occasional limited testing.
Check back in 5 years. This is going to age poorly.
The reason is that, despite what many think, AI actually is able to create novel ideas and solutions. That's why AlphaGo was so important; it couldn't beat the world's best Go player just be being a fancy autocomplete and a big processor. It had to create new discoveries and then use them effectively. That was the turning point. It's been a decade of improvements since then, and AI is already making discoveries we couldn't have made without it. The impacts are already here and in your world, you just haven't recognized them as such yet. But in a few years it will be undeniable to even the most uneducated observer, since changes that could not be possible will be present in every person's life as the effects ripple out across basically every industry.