Profits have never been higher, and yet their offering continues to get worse. Remember when you could watch your total storage climb in real time? When was the last time you really felt like Google was innovating on their Gmail product? Enshittification continues unabated.

Where is one of the last places you'd expect a rear-view mirror?

The SR-71 had one.

The practical use case was checking the deployment of the landing parachute.

Speaking of forensics, if you're a law-abiding citizen who just wants to keep private information private, iOS lockdown mode will reported halt the Coruna forensics tool in its tracks. Source, Eva Galperin at EFF. It's a royal PITA to use though.

Or, as Robert Morris Sr. said about breaking confidential communications, "Look for plaintext. It comes up in the darnedest place", or words to that effect.

Okay, but that's not really helpful if you're looking for something comparable to a firestick but still want to sideload Android apps.

Or just don't fight it and get an NVIDIA Shield. It's a 10x better experience anyway.

Some have been wrong. Some have been delayed but eventually delivered. Some have been right. What most people seem to miss is that by setting insanely optimistic goals, it creates the possibility. Teams across his companies seem to be motivated to deliver more often than not, even if the optimistic deadlines slip. So why not set a push goal now and re-calibrate when physics or some other issue rises as they dig further into the problem?

Microsoft has progressively been making everything an instance of Chrome. They've seemingly altogether given up the notion of native platform rendering. The win32 api for native ui elements hasn't been touched in two decades. There have been a few failed attempts to move on from it like Siverlight, WinForms, UWP, LightSwitch, etc, but they never bothered to revisit their native UI library. So now everything is a Chrome instance.

My preference would be for them to focus on fast, native rendering again, maybe with a new 'win64 api'. But I'm not sure that talent or expertise exists at MSFT anymore.

The rest of the industry will surely follow suit in short order.

To clarify, OS X was descended from NeXTSTEP, which was built on Mach and BSD.

Ah, I remember this one. I also remember that the Guitar Hero tracks didn't have the insane loudness and compression that the official track had, so the community made a number of "remasters" that sounded miles better than the album. The Moderus III remaster was the most circulated I believe.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

In the USA is it common to have self service tills at supermarkets that accept coins?

If it accepts cash, it should accept both coins and bills. Any change I manage to accumulate usually gets fed into the coin slot at a self-checkout before I swipe a card to provide the rest of the payment. It's better than handing it off to a Coinstar machine, as those skim off a percentage of what you feed them.

Science? Really? There's a lot of soft-brained, unscientific and technophilic pseudo-religion in the article.

Let's work with the argument's load-bearing phrase, "exploration is an intrinsic part of the human spirit."

There are so many things to criticise in that single statement of bias. Suffice it to say there's a good case to be made that "provincial domesticity and tribalism are prevalent inherited traits in humans", without emotional appeals to a "spirit" not in evidence.

The REAL headline and buried lede for the original post should be:

Trump guts nuclear safety regulations

“The president signed a pair of orders on Friday aimed at streamlining the licensing and construction of nuclear power plants — while panning the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its ‘myopic’ radiation safety standards.”

We now have industry capture of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Who here knows about Admiral Hyman RIckover? All of this is worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyman_G._Rickover#Safety_record