> So many people online (not just reviewers) complaining that it's just a spec-bump, demanding a new design.
If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.
I loved the touch bar once I realized all the first party applications actually had useful customizations for it.
When you used the Terminal app, there was literally a "man" button that would open the relevant man page (for whatever command you currently had typed) in a new window.
Actually an awesome feature if application authors got on board.
Making the power button part of the bar instead of a physical button sucked though.
> Ford was really big here at one point but it's a shadow of what it used to be.
Speaking for the UK at least, it's not like we were really getting US-originated models from Ford: it used to be the Mondeo or Fiesta but now it's the Kuga. Similarly GM (AKA Vauxhall/Opel, now Stellantis) pushed the Corsa/Astra and so on rather than, say, the Chevy Suburban.
A majority of them are made within Europe (if not necessarily the EU, between the UK and Turkey) so should avoid tariffs.
Yeah the oversized gas guzzlers of the US were never popular in Europe. They're hard to park here (parking bays are smaller), difficult to drive in narrow historical cities, expensive to fuel etc. And pick-ups are very unpopular here, unless you're a farmer there's no point in such a large open loading bed.
I remember choosing between a Nissan 100NX and a Ford Probe (both about 10 years old) but the latter had way worse fuel economy not being a Europe native model (though it wasn't really a US model either I think). Also the 100NX wasn't really a sports car, it was just a Nissan Sunny compact with a more sporty looking body and T-top. It was a super nice car though.
> And pick-ups are very unpopular here, unless you're a farmer there's no point in such a large open loading bed.
And even if you are a farmer, an american pick-up seems to be a rare choice around here. If you see something pick-up-like, it's usually more a variant of UniMog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unimog .
And for the "small-time farmer without enough money to buy lots of equipment" (rare nowadays), tractors with tons of included functions were often more practical: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fendt_GT (no english version, sorry). Since Germany is more dense and distances are smaller, low speed is less of an issue I guess, compared to the US. And you can pull real farm equipment, which a pick-up car usually cannot.
Yeah it's also that American pick-ups usually don't feature 4WD (unless as an even more expensive option) which is kinda a need if you're into farming. It's a weird niche for people that want to show they are outdoorsy somehow but aren't really.
And for people that just need to move a lot, having it exposed to the open air is usually a dealbreaker. Panelvans are much more popular for that. Or MPVs with removable seats.
I have seen other countries where they are popular though. Like in Australia where they call it a "Ute". But yes also a long-distance country like you say.
In our part of rural Australia ute (utility vehicle) is largely reserved for the classic Australian Ute (eg: 1974 HQ Holden Ute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cztnXaND-Xo) which is a non US car footprint that'd be at home in Europe, cut down from a family sedan to be a single front bench seat in a two door cab, with everything behind as a tray.
Other parts of Australia do vary
As such things get bigger, get more doors, and veer towards a US size they get called crew cabs, trucks, pickup's, etc.
Traditionally, the term referred to vehicles built on passenger car chassis and with the cargo tray integrated with the passenger body (coupé utility vehicles).
However, present-day usage of the term "ute" in Australian English and New Zealand English has expanded to include any vehicle with an open cargo area at the rear, which would be called a pickup truck in other countries.
doesn't speak for all Australians and veers toward city usage.
> (This occasionally leads to fun disputes; for instance see the famous Jaffa Cake court case, or the more recent determination by the Irish Supreme Court that Subway's bread was not bread.)
The FT's been having fun investigating whether Tesco's Birthday Cake or M&S's Strawberries and Cream sandwiches are subject to VAT. The answer seems to be no but maybe they should (although nobody cares, probably). Quality journalism at its best.
> When was the last time you saw an ad to buy a Bugatti Chiron?
Ads don't just have to be a photo on a billboard, though, or the entire thing of influencers wouldn't exist.
How many times has the Chiron been on Top Gear - I reckon at least three times (I can remember once in the Clarkson era and another time in the Harris/Le Blanc era; the magazine's had one at the Nürburgring at least once)? Sure Bugatti's letting them loose with a multi-million euro car out of the goodness of their hearts.
[citation needed], your Economist article [0] quotes 30 a day (which would be <11k a year) but muddies the water pretty significantly:
> Under these laws, British police arrest more than 30 people a day for online posts, double the rate in 2017. Some are serious offenders, such as stalkers.
How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
> How many of those 30 were for "online posts" (and of which nature - Lucy Connolly is a favourite example cited by the likes of Vance, but she was arrested for trying to stir up racial tension when there were already race riots going on)? Who can tell, because the article didn't seem to bother asking.
I googled Lucy Connolly out of curiosity. It indeed appears that she got 31 month of jail for a single tweet? You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
> You don't think this counts as "arrested for online posts"?
You've definitely missed some context. For example, and fairly significantly:
> Connolly previously admitted intending to stir up racial hatred.
If you plead guilty to a charge, there's not much defense left.
The offence she admitted to doesn't even take account of whether it's committed online - it's law that was passed in 1986. An aggravating factor that led to the sentence she got was that she had in fact posted multiple times in the same sort of way.
So the context: she posted similar things online multiple times, she pleaded guilty, and the law in question can apply to offline activity as well -- all right, but all this still literally translates into "arrested for online posts".
She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
This alone makes free speech proponents upset, regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not, or whether they agree or disagree with her political position.
I wasn't saying the context I gave was an exhaustive list, I was suggesting that having Googled her name and maybe skimmed a couple of news articles, you might need to do some more reading before forming too much of an opinion.
> She didn't throw rocks, she didn't set things on fire, she didn't stab anyone -- it was her speech that got her a multi-year jail term.
Your contention seems to be that incitement shouldn't be an offence?
That's at odds with legal systems all over the world, including the US, where Brandenburg v Ohio [0] holds that if inflammatory speech is "directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action" that is an exception to the First Amendment and can be prosecuted, which seems to be at odds with "regardless of whether there were riots ongoing or not".
The original point of my first post in this thread was that lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number makes the argument seem utterly dishonest. The fact that so many "free speech proponents" fixate on one example when, if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year is a good demonstration of that.
- Posted that three federal judges "deserve to die" with their photos and addresses
- Result: Conviction overturned as protected political hyperbole
Connolly's "set fire to all the hotels" would likely be viewed as angry hyperbole in the United States, not meeting Brandenburg's strict standard.
The distinction: The US prosecutes actual incitement (directing a mob to attack a building RIGHT NOW). The UK prosecutes offensive speech that merely might inspire someone, somewhere, someday. Your Brandenburg citation actually proves this difference rather than refutes it.
You want thousands of examples? Check Twitter during any US political crisis - they're not prosecuted precisely because Brandenburg protects them.
Point taken, but incitement is still an offence in other countries. That the US has specific, and particularly permissive, laws around what constitutes speech is neither here nor there.
> You want thousands of examples?
Of people people prosecuted for innocuous speech in the UK, the original claim in this thread. Brandenburg doesn't apply there.
I misunderstood what you were trying to imply but still think your premise is mistaken. My reply is merely directed at anyone implying the US's free speech-laws are somehow comparable to the authoritarian anti-free-speech laws the UK has.
Edit: If I remove the reference to Brandenburg, I'm not sure my point substantially changes:
Incitement is an offence in the UK and also in other countries. You can argue whether that should be the case or not but that's completely orthogonal.
Gathering a whole lot of offenses which happened to include online activity to produce a big number of people who you can claim were prosecuted for something that you can claim is as innocuous as "online posts" is dishonest.
You're playing a shell game with definitions to justify authoritarian speech laws.
> lumping together arrests for stalking, incitement to violence and other forms of harassment to produce a big scary number
But that's exactly the problem - the UK defines "incitement" and "harassment" so broadly that ordinary political speech becomes criminal:
UK "Harassment" includes:
- Misgendering someone online
- Posting offensive jokes
- Retweeting protest footage
- Criticizing immigration policy "grossly"
UK "Incitement" includes:
- Lucy Connolly's Facebook post (31 months)
- Jordan Parlour's "every man and their dog should smash [hotel] up" (20 months)
- Tyler Kay's "set fire to all the hotels" retweet (38 months)
NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US. They lack:
- Directed at specific individuals
- Imminent timeframe
- Likelihood of producing immediate action
> if the stated number is true, there should be thousands of examples every year
There ARE thousands. In 2023:
- 3,537 arrested for online speech
- 1,991 convicted under Section 127 Communications Act
- Hundreds more under Public Order Act
You don't hear about most because "UK citizen arrested for offensive tweet" stopped being newsworthy years ago.
You're using the word "incitement" to equate UK thought policing with legitimate US restrictions on speech that creates immediate danger. That's like defending China's censorship because "every country bans fraud."
The definitions matter. The UK criminalizes hurt feelings. The US criminalizes immediate threats to public safety.
How many of those were examples of "hurt feelings" and not "put a whole lot of foreigners at risk of their lives" or any of the other classes of "online posts"? We don't know because in their rush to say "the UK's arresting 30 people a day for posting things online", the Economist didn't bother breaking that down.
> NONE of these would meet Brandenburg's standard in the US.
None of them happened in the US so that's irrelevant. My misunderstanding of the precedent around incitement isn't central to my point.
If I post "I'm going to kill the president, at $location tomorrow at $time" and I get arrested, was I arrested for "an online post", or was I arrested for "threatening to assassinate the president"?
Both are technically correct. People who want to threaten to assassinate the president more often will call it "arrested for an online post". People who think assassination threats are bad and think it should happen less often call it "arrested for threatening assassination". The former group are currently much louder and their propaganda has worked.
Muddying the "simple argument" would be lumping stalkers in with people inciting violence against foreigners and posting nasty comments about the Prime Minister, to make some kind of point about the police. That would be ridiculous.
It's slightly more nuanced. Attacking people for protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability, gender, sexuality, is also an offence.
You can be a cunt all you want, just make sure you're being nasty about them as a person not their religion or race or whatever group you might feel they belong to
All cases I've seen have been cut and dry in this regard. Racist or homophobic usually.
Indeed, I didn't mean to imply those three were the only categories of things within "online posts"! Rather, that it's disingenous to lump all of that under one umbrella and suggest great swathes of people are being arrested for a tweet.
Except, in some countries, it is a crime. Why do you think it's not one? Are you familiar with UK law?
In Germany there are even stricter laws. Insulting someone is a crime, even if the things you say are factually true.
And then you have repressive dictatorships, like the UAE, USA and China, where you can't disagree with the government on anything. It's definitely a crime there, to say the president looks like Winnie the Pooh.
I am sorry to disappoint you, but posting nasty comments is a crime in the UK under the 2003 Communications Act, which means it has been a crime for decades.
Section 127(1) makes it an offence to:
"Send by means of a public electronic communications network a message that is a -
(a) grossly offensive,
(b) indecent, obscene, or menacing, or
(c) false, known to be false, for causing annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety."
Section 127(2) adds that: "A person is also guilty of an offence if they cause a message or other matter to be sent that is similarly offensive or menancing.
Online Communication Offence Arrests
Volume 847: debated on Thursday 17 July 2025
> The tendency to police—literally—what people are saying has been encouraged and enabled by not just this Government but their predecessors. The Malicious Communications Act 1988 and the Communications Act 2003, specifically Sections 1 and 127, give the police the power to arrest individuals for what they say online. On average, 30 people are arrested daily. In 2014, under the coalition Government, something called non-crime hate incidents were introduced—words uttered that are not yet criminal in themselves but which the police should officially record none the less and hold against people. Since 2014, more than 133,000 such incidents have been recorded; that is more than 13,000 each year. Some of those who have had their names recorded in police files are children whose words were taken down when they were below the age of criminal responsibility and may be held against them for the rest of their lives. The innocence of youth has been replaced with the presumption of guilt.
https://hansard.parliament.uk/lords/2025-07-17/debates/F807C...
If you use too much moist code, is there a risk of getting a soggy bottom? Considering how many names seem to be derived from memes these days (all the -strikes and so on), a language that guarantees " safety" as a metaphor for correctness would probably do well.
> Like, for crime, the USA treats gun control as outside the Overton Window saying e.g. "we need guns for self defence"
Without a hint of the self-awareness that the most likely person to be shot by your gun is yourself, either in the obvious case of suicide or where the gun has been taken from you either by family or theft.
> I remain a bit mystified about why it would be a hard maximum, though. Did such motherboards prevent the user from installing 4x256MiB for a cool 1GiB of DRAM?
Probably not - it's not that rare to see the supported maximum memory be a function of the biggest DIMM you can buy, I guess as a reflection of the biggest configuration the manufacturer could test.
If ever there was a case of "be careful what you wish for" - whether it's the Touch Bar, deleting ports or the butterfly keyboard, a redesign isn't necessarily a positive.