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Comment Re:Strike Two (Score 1) 62

Still trivially though for any talented reverse engineer. Somewhere in the code they have a function that checks if they think they're 18 and returns a boolean. Change the function to always return true. It would be harder if it was sending the image up to the server to analyze, but local is easy to break.

Comment Re: Holy shit, that's autistic (Score 3, Insightful) 89

I have a dead former coworker. His family has access to his account. Every so often, they browse fb on it and like a post. It feels icky and wtf every time. In fact the first time I had to go back through old DMs and emails to double check that he was actually dead and I wasn't misremembering, it was that fucked up. This would be the last thing I'd ever want, for my loved ones or myself.

Comment Re:Congratulations (Score 2) 162

Doing a crappy C compiler was basically a semester course I took in college. Everyone more or less finished, while taking 3-5 other courses at the same time. So yeah, if it can be done by 1 engineer in training in a similar amount of time to it being done by 1 agent, while it's kind of cool I don't see this as a major accomplishment.

Really you can use lex/yacc for parsing and tokenization. You can find the C grammars online. C is a very simple language, if you aren't looking to optimize you can map each operator to a set of instructions easily. I'm pretty sure an experienced engineer could do this in 2 weeks easily. Absolutely so in 4, and probably start working in on optimizations. Instead you still paid the engineer for those 2 weeks, plus 20K on cloud costs.

Comment Re: Yes we have, but you won't fix it. (Score 1) 172

Like I said- there may be a small single digit percentage of people that actually do like not having access to a car. But that's all it is. This isn't just me talking- it's every time I've had this conversation with everyone else who lives in Manhattan, the one area of the country where a car is actually not practical. In the 12 years of having that discussion, nobody has ever said that they like not having a car. Not once. The amount they missed it differs, but every single person has wished they could drive on occassion. Just not enough to pay for it given the costs.

Welcome to reality- you may actively dislike cars and driving, but you're a small, miniscule minority. There is no major car hatred movement. There's pro-transit movement, but that's a different thing (and I'm also pro-transit, there's a variety of reasons why driving isn't practical or possible for everyone, and fighting conjestion is worthwhile). But you need to get out of your bubble and realize that people do actually love being able to drive, and cars aren't ever going anywhere. At most, you're 2% of the population. Although since you like suggesting people move, I'll match that- Mackinak Island exists. It has pretty much the entire population of people who feel like you. You should check it out.

Comment Re: Yes we have, but you won't fix it. (Score 1) 172

Car free life isn't popular. I live in Manhattan, the biggest car free center in the US. I don't own a car, nor do 95% of the people I know. But we all wish we could.

We don't not own cars because we don't like them. Or because we have no use for them. We don't have them because due to the cost of parking them they aren't practical. I would one hundred percent prefer to be able to drive to a grocery store, shop for myself for a week or two, and drive home. So would everyone else I know. We don't because it would cost $600 a month to park the car at our place and another $30 every trip to park on the other side (minimum). It doesn't make financial sense. So we make a dozen time consuming walking trips to tiny stores that don't have great selection, or we instacart and hope the guy picking our produce is good and that they actually message us if they need to sub out stuff (they rarely bother to).

Nobody likes car free life. There's just enough here that's a positive that the benefits outweight the negatives- Broadway, museums, jobs, comedy clubs, sporting events etc. Especially when combined with the traffic making east-west driving in Manhattan a nightmare. But nobody likes the fact we don't have a car, and damn near 100% of us would have one if we could. You're in dreamland if you think the number of people who prefer to not drive at all is more than a small single digit number of the population.

Comment Re:$1.3 BILLION product sales = failure for Apple? (Score 4, Interesting) 57

Experience only matters if you make a new version. Otherwise the experience has no value. The patents are only useful if enforcable, and if they provide defensive value against companies they don't already have defense against, orif the category becomes big enough to leverage against others who do succeed. Seeing as they shut down production, it's unlikely they will create a new version anytime soon. There's not enough demand. They have an extensive patent portfolio, so the defensive value is questionable. The offensive value is also negligible, as they're unlikely to get much out of it given the lack of success in the category. So no, not a good return.

Comment Re:Woah (Score 4, Insightful) 57

Its useless. It doesn't do anything anyone needs or wants. Which is why VR headsets have failed in the market repeatedly, and at much cheaper pricepoints. That's why it's not a fantastic value- it's no better than existing tech, it doesn't solve a problem, nobody wants the category, and it's priced at nearly 10x the competition. On every front it's the exact opposite of value.

Comment Re:$1.3 BILLION product sales = failure for Apple? (Score 4, Insightful) 57

WHat were there expectations? If they were much higher, then it's a disappointment. If it was inline, then it isn't. How much did they spend in R&D on the device? Again, if it was a net loss, it's a disappointment. If it was a profit, it might not be. (A loss might also be ok if it launches a category that becomes successful, but this doesn't seem to be the case here).

Given that they shut down manufacturing, it seems very likely they sold way under expectation and overbuilt capacity. It also seems likely in that case they lost money. Which would make this a disappointment.

Comment Re: They'll get 0 in the end (Score 2) 25

They probably can't. There's limitations on the ability to sell pre-IPO options. Both legal limitations with SEC regs, and limitations by the terms of the agreement that gives them the options. Not being allowed to sell them at all pre-IPO unless given explicit permission by the company is pretty much universal. The company doesn't want to risk a hostile takeover via random entities buying stock options.

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