At work I could've bought a fiber Ethernet tester, a copper Ethernet tester, and a Wifi tester. I would've spent around $8000 for all three for the degree of testing I was buying.

Instead I bought a $12,000 tool that can test fiber, copper, and wifi. Because carrying around three tools and using three tools if up troubleshooting a streetlight-mounted terragraph backhaul device or AP is really cumbersome.

It's cumbersome to have to carry multiple devices if one device can do the job. I can think of lots of applications where this would be useful if it's durable enough, and they all boil-down to neither having to carry multiple devices nor having to carry a large, rigid tablet.

I'm still flabbergasted of the claim that the original pad that Gagarin launched from is supposedly being set aside as a museum. That simply doesn't make economic sense. First reason, pads are not free to build. They're quite expensive. Second, the facility is not in Russia, so its utility as a museum for Russian propaganda purposes is questionable.

It would make a lot more sense if they simply chose to do upkeep on only one pad, and for whatever reasoning they chose the pad with the now-broken equipment, and the the other pad at the site is so hopelessly out of date due to a series of refreshes to the in-service pad that the costs to refurbish it into usable condition are quite high. That at least would be logical, and frankly isn't a sign of decay in a program either. It makes sense to not spend money on something disused when budgets are finite. But to claim that it's reserved as a museum? Bizarre, to say the least.

Usually they'd book a flight to the nearest coastal city.

Honestly the reason to use such a service in lieu of owning a car is a combination of the day-to-day lack of need to own a car based on how one lives and wants to live, not having a safe, reliable place to store a car when not using it, and the general expenses of owning a car over the term.

In the country or the suburbs, one's day-to-day life might well require using a car if one is going to be able to really go anywhere, at least in a reasonable amount of time. Likewise one might well have plenty of space in which to park said car. And even if one's life may not require it, the time saved driving versus walking or biking (particularly in inclement weather) might simply make the convenience of a personal car a lot more important. It's not pleasant if going to do a fifteen minute task takes an hour when driving there and back would make it take a total of twenty minutes.

I'd actually expect in some ways that it could be easier in the countryside, if one's village is walkable in ten minutes, and if the mass-transit to leave one's village takes one to useful places quickly. If the village is too spread out to be easily walked or if the mass-transit takes too long to travel to other places one might need to regularly go, it would be difficult to not use private transport if one doesn't want to be essentially homebound. If the village is small enough then it might not be worth the company's time to place a rental in town if it simply won't be used enough.

You can't have privacy as long as governments depend on taxes for their finances.

I see something similar today. The shelf tag says "$XX, club price $YY". I am not a member of the club so I just treat the whole store as over-priced, a place to shop as a last resort. Thankfully there are plenty of other stores at the moment that don't play that game.

And if they say at the checkout "you could have saved $ZZ by joining our club" I tell them that's why I avoid shopping there

This is a guess but it's based on how people were when I was in college. The market for these would be people who occasionally need a car for something where they cannot borrow one or where they cannot get a friend to provide a lift.

For a short-duration trip where this service makes sense, that's probably going to be a chore or an appointment. The chore could be shopping where hand-carrying isn't practical and where the shopping needs to be done in-person and delivery isn't practical or available. For appointments, I could see needing to visit doctors or the like where they may not be convenient to mass transit, or where post-visit there may be other chores like picking up prescriptions or going to have bloodwork done would mean an inordinate amount of time on mass-transit.

The issue isn't just crew launches, it's all the supply-launches. The 'progress' cargo craft make regular runs from this pad.

Releasing a database of personal info? Shame on you! But we have laws against that...

Read through the comments in that telegram post, the amount of denial is staggering, the amount of cheerful propaganda is even greater, but there were some worried notes gleaming through all that cheerleading, where someone hoped they would still have a job later on. Someone thinks that the things may not turn out so well, they think that out of all of the options they may end up with the option I listed as number one here https://slashdot.org/comments....

what I can tell you from the very tone of this cheerful post, they do not have all of the necessary components and it will not be simple at all. Obviously they will try to launch Proton in December as scheduled by trying to do it without the service cabin, there is maybe a way, a bunch of wooden planks and ropes, who knows. The number of ways this may end up disasterous for the launch are too many to be listed here.

competing with spaceX is tough indeed, how exactly would you propose the Chinese bill uncle Sam for billions, consistently launching empty oversized buckets that burn up while delivering a banana to the Indian ocean?

Crypto transactions can be traced back through the (public) blockchain. A service where you deposit some tainted crypto and then are handed an equal value of others (minus a service charge) makes tracing those new coins back to their (illicit) source very difficult.

IOW, money laundering.

They don't forget - they simply don't think the same rules the unwashed masses are required to live under should apply to them.

It's like they spent all their time on cutesy little behaviors versus doing the hard work of building an actual functional digital assistant.

Anyone other than me get annoyed when you try to ask Siri something and, midway through while you're still talking, Siri decides to interject "Uh huh?" It's incredibly irritating and distracting. And then, 75% of the time, Siri either does the wrong thing or silently just goes away without doing anything.

This guy put together and managed a crappy team that probably should be let go in its entirety. I'm sure he's got a nice retirement package though, nice work if you can get it.

News for Nuns.