Same as when a drunk falls onto subway tracks: it's capitalist society's fault.

And?

>"I actually know quite a few people with Fold phones and precisely zero of them think the creases are in any way a discouragement"

My point (which probably wasn't clear) was that the links and info provided for this article didn't show anything about how it folded or that there are creases or that it didn't lay flat, etc. But the youtube review did show that useful info (and a lot of the positives too).

>"Make no mistake these phones are not designed for everyone, they are a niche product for a minority."

Indeed... my mouth was watering over it. Super cool and useful. But it isn't practical for me for the way I would want to use it, and probably most others. And that is even before the $3,000 price tag.

Also, there is something a bit off-putting that one of their main listed features is that the *FIRST* screen repair is half price!!! Their marketing department needs some serious reprimand on that one. :) LOL!

>"Literally every Samsung Fold phone has a 1st party case (as well as 3rd party cases) that are designed specifically to cause the phone to sit flat with the camera bulge."

It might have that 1/3 lay flat, but it will be considerably higher than the other 2/3, so it will not be flat in totality. It just won't be rocking on the camera.... which is a plus, but something potential customers might not expect.

In any case, it is a marvel of technology and I wish them the best. But if someone gave me one for free, I am not sure I would want to carry around something so bulky and heavy. So I encourage someone to send me a free one and I will try it out and report back ;)

And you bet people will be waiting in line on day one to buy it...

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.

*what NOT everyone can afford to do...

Horseshit.

I spent decades never spending more than a couple of hundred GBP (Slashdot Classic still ddoesn't let me type £ properly... see?) on a car, then throwing it away and buying a new one when the MOT failed. They often lasted years.

What now everyone can afford to do is BUY IT FROM NEW or lease the damn thing. Both are ridiculously expensive ways to "own" a car. Honestly, that's a modern disease thinking that you have to lease the thing, with balloon payments no less, and then have it serviced exactly according to their schedule. It's horseshit. Just buy a car.

Stop buying from car salesmen with huge lots and a minimum of 4 figures on the crappiest of cars, stop paying £1000's (grrr!) for a basic cheap shitty old used second-hand car with a history you have no idea of, and stop getting into ridiculous finance arrangements or thinking you have to preserve a service history that NOBODY gives a damn about.

I did the maths on the BBC article and it turned out that they made something like £76 REVENUE per customer per year. God knows what the actual profit was per customer. You'd literally do better just selling oranges by the side of the road.

They were clearly just haemorraghing money from the start and it just never took off.

I know of only one couple who ever used them and they lived a weird lifestyle. Lived in a stupidly expensive part of London and had to get a Zipcar or similar to even go grocery shopping. Every time they went somewhere, they had to find a Zipcar. Even if they were planning a week away, they spent a long time trying to book and track down and GET TO a Zipcar if there wasn't one nearby.

Irony was that, unusually for those kinds of places in London, they lived in a gated community with parking and so could have just... bought a car and parked it there.

Unregulated currency = money laundering.

It's the only reason for Bitcoin to exist.

Comparatively, nobody touches the regulated cryptocurrencies because... they don't facilitate money laundering.

It's like cash in that respect. The only reason for any business to choose to deal exclusively in cash is to facilitate money-laundering. And all the big money laundering operations are usually hidden around cash-only businesses.

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?

So many questions, so many dollars.

And wham, pre-reviews show folding and creases, like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Thick and heavy for a phone, but if you want something that can be an actual tablet, you gotta make some serious trade-offs. When when using it as a phone OR tablet on a table, there is that bulge with the cameras so it can't sit flat. And that inner big screen is soft and scratch-prone. Hmm.

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.

I've seen videos of these waymo lots and it is far and away the most idiotic system designed by people who are probably rather intelligent.

The problem is insisting that a charging depot for autonomous cars should look and behave as a traditional car park. It should be a fully enclosed garage, to keep out the rifraff, with a palletized racking system. When there is vacancy, the car would be signaled to drive onto the pallet, and the robot in the garage slots it into an available spot, silently. When the charge is complete, the car is put back out to the road and oriented such that it doesn't need to back out.

It could be built underground, above ground or adjacent to a traditional car garage. The neighborhood would be insulated from equipment noise, car noise, and it would occupy a fraction of the real estate.