Tell that to the folks on ISS who ride back and forth on Soyuz all the time. A couple of people went up to ISS from Russia just one week ago.

To be fair, at the moment, future ISS launches from Russia won't be possible because of some launch pad damage incurred by a recent launch, but Russia still has the capability of launching crewed rockets into space from other pads. They just can't send any to ISS right now because its orbital inclination is incompatible with the locations of those other pads while staying within the fuel capacity limits of their rockets.

What are you talking about? On average, engines last 150k to 200k miles in the U.S., complete with CAFE standards.

And the main goal of the current CAFE standards was to push hybrids and electric vehicles. Manufacturers rigging the game by trying to make pure ICE cars with ridiculous mileage is an unanticipated negative side effect, mostly because the folks coming up with the rules did not expect automakers to be so stupid that they would do something like that.

For the most part, oil change schedules are set so that car dealers can make money off of mandatory service so that you keep your warranty. In reality, if you periodically change your filter, use a filter with a smaller pore size, and use synthetic oil, there's at least potentially no need to change the oil at all, at least within the typical lifetime of a passenger car.

Semi goes 1 million miles without an oil change.

The problem is not the CAFE standards per se. The problem is that they are trying to meet them by playing tricks instead of with actual design changes. And even though they come with thinner engine oil, 90% of people will put standard oil into the cars at the first change. So they get higher MPG for the first 5,000 miles, and then the same as they did before the CAFE standards.

I suppose that in theory, you could argue that the standards are flawed for not requiring normal oil weights during testing, but that's about it.

The correct way to hit the MPG targets is to use more electric drive trains. If you make your cars hybrids, you can improve the efficiency of the electric drive train and find ways to engineer the vehicles to weigh less by using more modern materials, and you won't have to work too hard to hit the standards.

Better yet, push actual EVs, which typically have an eMPG of 100+. If just one-third of your vehicles get 130 eMPG and the rest get 30 MPG, you're averaging about 53 MPG already.

Not with a tattoo gun, but yes, microneedle delivery is a new experimental way to deliver vaccines. It's less like a tattoo gun and more like a nicotine patch or a bandaid, though.

Okay. Thanks for all but admitting that exactly none of those needs are actually solved by the feature we're talking about.

You don't have a need. You just don't want your routine to be disrupted by a company taking away a feature that works for you. And it's entirely okay to feel that way. But it's not really a good reason to have designed such an overly complex and, at least in the real world, frequently under-performing protocol in the first place.

Keep telling yourself that I'm the one who doesn't understand the tech if it helps you sleep at night.

Then neither will casting, because casting by definition requires the TV to have Internet. It's a handoff process whereby the TV itself retrieves the content from the Netflix servers, and all your phone does is handle the authentication and key delivery plus playback controls.

You can do screen mirroring with a non-Internet-capable or disconnected TV, but not you can't use the ridiculously designed feature that I'm talking about.

So everything I'm saying is useless is useless for you, too.

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

Not really, no. If I wanted to use the TV to do all of the networking and playback, I would have just used the TV's app to do it. The number of hotels I've seen where the TV supported Chromecast or AirPlay streaming but did not have a built-in Netflix app are literally zero.

From my perspective, casting is a complete disaster by its very nature. It relies on the display device having full Internet access, which isn't a given. Literally every time I've wanted to do casting, it has been because the TV set's Netflix app wasn't working because of a network problem, and it couldn't get access to the Internet, so I was trying to use the phone's network connection. By shifting the network connectivity back to the TV set, it makes the entire system completely worthless, because the exact situations where it could be useful are the exact situations where it isn't.

The figures can be entirely correct and still the answer can be "no". Why? Because Android might use the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux distro in any meaningful sense of the word. And Steam Deck and Chromebooks *can* have some reasonable facsimile of a Linux development environment, but I'd expect maybe 0.1% of users to actually turn it on.

So most of those folks are Linux "users" in much the same way that TiVo owners were linux "users", i.e. they are using a device that deep down, at a level that the user is unaware of, runs some small subset of what a Linux distro typically contains, with a bunch of stuff on top that they mostly aren't in control over.

It's like calling Mac users UNIX users. It's technically correct — the best kind of correct — but grossly misleading.

You do realize that what you're describing is all of about ten lines of Javascript with the right libraries (audioTrackList property, subtitle library, currentTime property), right?

Great opportunity for open source web services. :-)

There's no good reason to use it. Just encode your video for random-access streaming, set up Apache or nginx with a URL that you make sure isn't indexed, require a client cert on the directory if you really want to be careful, port forward to it from a port on your router, set up dynamic DNS, and use a web browser. No arbitrary restrictions, just your content on your terms.