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Comment Re:Think of the school children (Score 1) 75

>I would be interesting in hearing from people who _want_ the twice-annual clock change.

I don't think that's it. It's whether we should stick to a single "time." The US tried year-round DST back in the '70's. It was quickly repealed. Because it's idiocy. For centuries (millenia?), noon was when the sun was highest. Business/working hours were made around that simple fact. In the 1800's, the railroads created "standard time", with timezones, which made scheduling vastly easier because they didn't have to figure out local time (noon) for every stop. Timezones were a compromise where "high noon" was somewhere in the middle, adjusting for political and geographic boundaries.

So, now it's those eastern elites who live on the eastern edge of a timezone wanting permanent DST. For them wall time is still only 1/2 hour off from true "high noon", just in the other direction. But they give no consideration for those on the western edge of a timezone, who are forced to live 1 1/2 hours from the real noon. Fuck them.

Comment Re:"Processed foods"!? (Score 1) 187

Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 1) 39

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

Comment Re:Lets Race! (Score 3, Interesting) 39

Their mission is not over ambitious either, it's a medium size lander and proven technologies. Blue Origin is also going with a reasonably conservative lander, but Starship is a much greater risk.

All true, but it's worth pointing out that if the Starship lander succeeds it will enable us to do a lot more, a lot faster. The whole "15 refueling flights for every moon trip" seems kind of crazy on its face, but if you look at the costs (assuming Starship works and become fully reusable), it makes the total cost per kilogram delivered to the surface of the moon insanely low and enables comparatively massive payloads to be delivered.

Big risk, big (potential) reward. Running both the Starship and Blue Moon projects in parallel is probably a good risk mitigation strategy, but if Starship succeeds completely, Blue Origin's lander will be a relic. Of course, it's also possible that Starship will just fail, or that it will succeed but be difficult to man-rate, in which case it may become the delivery service for lunar cargos, while people fly on Blue Moon.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 1) 69

I was never offered a free upgrade path and I only have 2 accounts: mine, and the admin one they force you to pay for. I was on the legacy plan and they forced me to pay.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

Comment Re:It's okay, they'll shut it down soon. (Score 1) 69

You should all know by now that as soon as your company commits to this, Google will shut it down: https://killedbygoogle.com/

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

Comment Re:Do they really need to make a buck here? (Score 2) 69

No, they don't have a free upgrade path for individual (or family) users. The key thing was the custom domain, which is only available with a paid account. When it was available, it wasn't that uncommon for a tech-savvy family to have their own custom domain backed by G-Suite. Now, there's no free option for this anymore.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Comment Re:Why is this surprising?? (Score 1) 118

But you still somehow perceive them as coming with an agenda that just doesn't exist.

No doubt Microsoft's agenda today is different from what it was 30 years ago, but it's still Microsoft's agenda. Microsoft can be relied upon to do what is good for Microsoft, and any dependency you form on their products can and will be used as leverage to extract money from you.

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