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Comment Yep (Score 4, Insightful) 50

"Our secret sauce isn't secret, please regulate our competitors away."

I think they may be playing a game with the fight they picked with the math folks over the Navier Stokes finding, too. To normal folks that looks greedy and shortsighted. To a wannabe dictator, that looks like a magic mirror.

Comment Wrong on all counts (Score 1) 222

- Trump is a piece of shit public servant, not a king. I have as much authority to rename landmarks as that ambulatory colostomy bag. So do you.

- I expect decent humans to stand up to authoritarian shitheads. Granted, Google leadership exited the "Decent human" category a long time ago, they've become the short of trash you don't call back. But the point holds; if you're going to support ethnic-supremacist authoritarians in my country, fuck you, you will not see a dime of my money and I will do what I can to hurt your business, because it is just as much my adversary as the rest of them.

- I empathize with wishing to avoid politics, but you cannot. Word to the wise - eventually politics comes for you, and then you're at a disadvantage because you were trying to ignore it.

Comment Re:Modal interfaces (Score 1) 185

"Hi, BYD, set the temperature to 21 degrees."
"Hi, BYD, turn off the air conditioning."
"Hi, BYD, volume down/up."
"Hi, BYD, next song."

Saw this on an Atto3, and it worked surprisingly well. Not perfect, but just about all the controls you might need to adjust while driving that are not on the wheel or stalks are covered. I also prefer physical controls that I can operate through muscle memory for everything, but voice control seems like a good move to address the obvious safety concern that moving to many controls to a touch screen brings. Fact is, this kind of UI is what Millennials and later have grown up on, so barring some safety edict from a major market, like China's ban on retracting door handles, it's not going away. That leaves those of us that prefer physical controls to either get used to it, find a car that keeps the balance sane (VAG group seems to be moving in this direction), or squabbling over the declining supply of roadworthy cars that predate the screens taking over.

I think there may be a bit of back-and-forth while marques work out which controls are adjusted while driving and probably ought to have a tactile control and how best to present the UI to minimise eyes-on time by the driver if they do try and adjust things while moving, but the battle to retain fully tactile controls is probably already lost. Either way, any controls are almost certainly all going to be linked into the same car management / data capture system, and any physical controls will be no more independent that those specialist control keyboard add-ons you can get for PCs. That data can be monetized, and there's no way any marque is going to pass up on that - ultimately, as BMW has demonstrated, they want as much control over their car (what, you thought it was yours just because you paid for it?) as Microsoft has over a Windows PC.

Comment Re:In a small change, (Score 4, Insightful) 137

Joking aside, there's a much more subtle change too. Look at the quoted wording from the astronauts: "*our* nation", "inspire *this* nation". Even at the height of the US-Soviet cold war it was still "for *all* mankind".

I get Trump's order is very much aimed at the NASA and the US (and probably getting his name onto it somehow), so can give that a pass, but the astronauts had an opportunity to rise above all that partisanship and slip in a message of much needed global unity, yet failed to do so. There are precious few institutions left in the world that can at least try and claim to be at least somewhat above / outside the direct influence of politics, and it looks like we're about to lose another one. Quite possibly for good once the ISS is finally decommissioned.

Comment Re:Seems reasonable (Score 2) 63

and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data

It really depends. ATT makes substantial amounts on their LEO customers. I understand Verizon has a similar program, and after Worldcom, all smaller the telecom companies fell in line.

Give Google and Zuckerbook and the others a decade of mature market profits and it'll get around to optimizing lines of business like that, too. They just make more money on other stuff now so they don't bother.

Comment Not ethics (Score 5, Insightful) 57

Like most companies, Apple has been ethical when it suited their interests. There's always been a slimy side there - Jobs cheated Woz before Apple even existed.

No, What Apple lost was taste.

They used to profit from producing products they'd want to use. Now they make profit-maximizing devices.

I'd argue that the OSes are starting to suffer, too. I mean, bugs are up again, but that's always been cyclic. But I feel like they're losing coherence, too. And a lot of subsystems more technical users like are rotting or being made much more difficult to work with (Gatekeeper and shell scripts, for instance). (I also find it ugly now, but that's subjective and it has has ugly iterations before, too.)

Anyway, yeah, Apple will make a ton of money for a long time to come. But I'm pretty sure it is losing its sense of taste. It might make the most popular and most profitable phone, but they aren't trying to make the phone people want anymore.

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