It's a flex. Same reason people buy $1000 bottles of iffy vodka for their friends in a night club.

I didn't write that, the person I was replying to did, and you didn't even get the quote right. But I'm done here.

The bulk of that cash isn't a subsidy (as those numbers point out), it's payment for services. I was talking about subsidies specifically, in reaction to this (surprisingly common) statement that lumps SpaceX's earnings and subsidies together, suggesting that they live mostly on handouts.

It's true that SpaceX would struggle without those federal contracts... so would many other companies. Lockheed Martin and RTX come to mind.

SpaceX received very few subsidies, they got a few tax credits and some money to develop stuff for the government. And all those lucrative federal contracts? The taxpayer is getting an absolute bargain with those.

Meh. Hästens mattresses start at around €10k, and their base model is about as comfortable as good run-of-the-mill mattresses (under €1000), and doesn't do anything other than being a mattress. Yet people are happy to pay €20k and up for these things, even if they have issues like getting hard and lumpy if you don't regularly "massage" them.

Having a cloud that requires users to sign up also makes your company more valuable to potential buyers.

Not really. Photographers might be swapping SD cards in their cameras all the time, and leave the ones not in use lying about, in a camera bag, coat pocket, or whatever. They are small and easy to lose, so encrypting them at least ensures that whoever finds your card can't get at the images. You might even want the manufacturer to have a copy of the key; in this application the convenience for data recovery in case of damaged hardware outweighs the small risk imposed by such a back door. Maybe it makes less sense on a camera mounted on a vehicle, but still.

Another issue is the lack of affordable public charging. Especially here in Europe with our sky high petrol excise, an EV might be a bit more expensive to purchase but a lot cheaper to run than an IC car. If you can charge at home, that is. Charging at a public charger can be twice as expensive, and if you're forced to use a fast charger it's even more. That changes the economics of EVs rather a lot.

I hope that doesn't mean the modern game system experience.
80s console: Turn on, 5 seconds later the game is ready to play.
Modern gaming conveniences: Turn on, wait 30 minutes for the console to patch, then another 30 while the game pulls in a 1 GB update.

The EIAJ standard barrel jacks (usually yellow tipped) are designed to fit only in the corresponding size socket and in none of the other sizes. Each size is for a specific voltage range, the different plugs are supposed to save you from accidentally over-volting your devices.

Reset copyright to 14 years, one time renewable for another 14 for a hefty fee, worth it for blockbusters and bestsellers, not for anything else. And no more "moral rights"; derivative works should always be allowed if they are not blatant copies. If some Star Wars or Harry Potter fanfic book or movie is shitty, then the market will take care of that. And if is not shitty but good, then the public will be well served with new content they will enjoy. That was the purpose of copyright, once. Let's make it so again.

While major media companies are wiping their arse with the social contract that is copyright, I do not feel one tiny bit of obligation to uphold my end of it, and I will turn to piracy when and where I can. Screw them.

The only thing that's getting pegged are the people who buy them. This incident, and the crash or loss-of-peg of other stablecoins (Luna, Terra, USDe, Tether, Titan) shows that these things are only weakly attached to the underlying currency they are supposed to be pegged to.

Though some central banks have plans to issue stablecoins of their own, which will probably be actually stable.

AIs are getting a lot better. The current generation of "AI" support I get on the phone or an online chat can barely make sense of my question, usually responds with "can you word that in a different way to help me understand". I'm already happy if they understand the phrase "I would like to talk to a person" and put me through to one, and that's a pretty low bar. But the latest AI support systems that are beginning to be rolled out are surprisingly helpful.

The newer ones promise something new: they can act as 1st and 2nd line of support at the same time, solving more complex issues without having to kick it up the support chain. That's probably why SalesForce claim such a large reduction in ticket resolution time. And offering a similar service with human support staff would probably be way too expensive.

That's: "Shouldn't be".

I do see you point about big and small players: the danger of looser copyright rules is that the big players are in a better position to steal your work and then just bankrupt you in court. But that is a failure of the court system rather than copyright.

That depends on how similar the movies are. There is more than one "work" in play here: the script / story, and the movie made from that script. Even if the new movie is in a completely different style than the original (a cartoon instead of live action, perhaps), different enough to make it a derived work rather than a copy, there's still the matter of the script / story being almost the same. The bar for something being a proper derived work of an original story should be rather high, it should be a new story... but it most definitely should be allowed to incorporate characters and lore from the original... Or write a similar story but with different characters in a different setting. The criteria for when something is a copy rather than a new work are not so easy to define... but the line should be where they are now, where you get copyright strikes for using a tiny sample of someone's song in your own, or for showing a brief clip of a movie in a review.