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Comment Re:it's how aerospace engineering works (Score 1) 65

Lose a rocket, gain a mountain of data. Work on the next rocket. Repeat

but when Musk does the exact same thing - he's an idiot and has no idea, according the lying legacy media......

Not sure who you're listening to, but I don't hear a lot of people saying that. The technique of trying something, discovering what goes wrong, fixing it, and trying again seems to be working as a development strategy for SpaceX.

People do, however, make a lot of fun of Elon's wildly optimistic predictions of how soon products will reach market (and how soon he will be flying people to Mars. I think we can safely say that he will not launch people to Mars by 2024.)

Comment Grain of Xalt (Score 1) 16

It's hard to know if China's factory bots are practical, CEO's tell Xi what Xi wants to hear because if the bot plans later fail, the CEO won't be alone in fails and not look as bad.

Musk tried using lots of bots to make Teslas, but found they were not flexible enough, and required too much tech staff babysitting that was better spent solving car problems. Xi might not care because the recent high unemployment of Chinese engineers means bot repair is a make-work program for them. The crazy things dictators can do.

Comment To own you, of course (Score 2) 21

Or more specifically, to own your digital artifacts and identity.

Making you authenticate to the mothership makes it far easier to:

- surveil everything you do on your machine and over the network
- progressively make it harder to save files locally - they really want your data in Onedrive
- add metered billing for certain features
- and of course record details about how you respond to ads, which is the ultimate goal of every software company now

Comment Why would folks stay logged in to Youtube? (Score 1) 42

I understand some folks use them as a TV substitute, so in that case I get it.

But for casual users, why? I mostly view videos embedded on other sites, no account needed. Sometimes I'll run a long video in a different tab to listen to an interview or something, still no account needed. I see no reason to care about being logged in.

If this is them "adding value to the logged-in experience", yeah, still no reason.

Comment Sharecrop culture (Score 2) 83

A vocal minority in the US has pretensions of aristocracy, and a lot of awfulness flows from that.

Most of the south actively suppresses labor and wages with the direct goal of being "good for business" - e.g., cheap labor with no recourse or way out.

Now we also have people like Musk and Theil all but openly demanding an end to any political power for anyone but them.

There's a reason guillotine T-shirts are selling well, and there is a certain segment of society that should take it a lot more seriously than they currently are.

Comment Re:Same old (Score 1) 93

Yes, but I have a feeling it comes down to licensing, and until they work out the terms with rights holders they will disable it for everyone. Then, once they work something out, they will graciously enable it for higher-tier subscribers with additional licensing fees. Then everybody wins.

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