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Comment Re: shocked I am! (Score 1) 58

Right. You are at the border. Tired from your long flight. Agent asks for a cheek swab. Your choices are to refuse and at best get turned away and have to go back to where you came from, at worst they arrest and detain you for weeks or months, steal your stuff, trying to break into your phone and computer, and eventually deport you.

Comment Re:What kind of absurd logic is this? (Score 1) 36

From the sound of it they are having issues with under-performance causing lag, and/or bad wireless interfaces. The CPU and the wireless chip are probably soldered to the PCB and not replaceable, so easiest thing will be to just replace the whole computer.

They may also have run into component reliability or software premature ageing issues. Tesla had that with early model computers, where excessive logging would wear the flash memory out in a few years and brick the car. They were very difficult about out-of-warranty replacements, but in the UK if it's a design flaw like that they can't really avoid it.

Comment Re:Who could have seen this coming? (Score 1) 36

Geely is fine. Their other brands have decent reliability records, like Zeekr, Polestar, other Volvo models, even Lotus (as far as luxury sports cars go). They aren't on the level of BYD or SAIC, but they are also not the reason why Volvo is having issues. Volvo is mostly antonymous, they just use Geely parts where possible, and the computer doesn't seem to have anything to do with them.

BYD just set a record for the fastest production car ever. In the video the driver lets go of the steering wheel at 350kph. Must seem slow when you were doing 500kph a few moments earlier.

Comment Re:Sailing the high seas (Score 1) 47

I don't mind short seasons if that's what the story needs, like with Andor or Chernobyl. But they also can't really expect me to subscribe for more than a month or two when there is so little decent content. Often they remove the only reasons I have to come back, e.g. Star Trek Prodigy is gone now, luckily I have it on disc and cracked the DRM.

Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 102

It sounds like the normal kind of politeness that most cultures have. In the UK we often do thinks like thank the cashier when they take our money, or apologize when making a request that is really a complaint.

In Japan it's customary to ask questions in the negative, so that the person answering can avoid outright refusing or saying no. Like if you were asking about someone doing you a favour, you would probably say "can you NOT do this for me?" And if they wanted to refuse, instead of saying "no" they would probably reply "it's very difficult", by which they mean impossible.

Most cultures are not so abrupt and direct.

Comment Re:Sometimes, technology also changes the culture (Score 1) 102

The left to right writing thing is more to do with the introduction of pencils and pens. Japan had the same thing.

With a brush you can write top to bottom, right to left, because your hand doesn't rest on the page. With a pen, you are going to smudge what you just wrote. With a pencil, you will get the lead on your hands.

Interestingly one of the reasons why Japanese computers were often more powerful than Western ones was that they needed to have better graphics to show complex characters, and so the standard design was to have separate CPU and video memories. Western machines usually had a unified architecture where CPU and video shared a single bank of RAM, limiting the bandwidth available to both.

Comment Re:Nuances (Score 2) 12

They are going to fly around the moon to test the systems out, like Apollo 10 did. Also like Apollo 10, the lander isn't ready yet.

Blue Origin is supposed to be supplying the first one. They will need to do a robotic mission to land it and take off again before a crewed one goes, so this isn't as close to the goal as Apollo 10 was. SpaceX is also supposed to be producing a lander, a modified Starship, but again, years away from getting to the moon and being man rated.

It looks like the race with China is heating up.

Comment Re: For now (Score 1) 115

The agility they have is incredible. I was working on a new product a few years ago, and we got some British companies to quote for prototypes. 10 boards, fully populated. The best one was £20k and 8 weeks. Got them done in China for £3k and on my desk in two weeks.

By the time the British companies would have delivered the first one at 7x the price, we had been through thee revisions and were ready to go into mass production. Guess where we had that done.

Comment Re: For now (Score 1) 115

The irony is that climate change is a huge economic opportunity. Lots of new technology, lots of work replacing polluting systems, lots of profit to be made.

Doesn't even have to cost individuals anything, it can be funded through government borrowing since there is a very clear and guaranteed return on that investment.

But we missed the boat and now it's too late. Chinese companies invested, their government gave them certainty and confidence to do so.

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