Names

Face recognition is the one feature I want in a wearable. I have a great memory for faces and a shit memory for names. I can look at a crowded room and spot the three people I know. I couldn't for the life of me tell their names unless they are close friends.

If I could get a tech device telling me just their names, I would be happy. I don't need their FB profile or such. I don't need the names of people I don't know.

That said, I'd rather go without than having Facebook handle that. Nope, you can fuck right off, Zuckerberg.

Oh, not sure. The whole cryptocurrency scene routinely throws around millions.

But yeah, UK.

In the US you would probably give it back, then sue them for twice the amount due to the "emotional distress" of thinking you were rich and then having that shattered.

Sorry, what? A NEW analysis? A solid decade in this? Took them a while, didn't it?

But in this case it was sent to the correct recipient, and it was sent explicitly as a gift. Assuming the prize amounts were not published in advance, there's no way I can KNOW that it was in error. I might assume, believe, think, etc. - but not KNOW.

Yes, nitpicking. But law is essentially all nitpicking.

Why? They called it a gift, didn't they?

This option is so often overlooked, it's almost comical.

Same in most political debates. You are strongly pushed to take a side. The option "both sides are full of shit" is often ignored.

Sure, I'll grant that, in general.

But still, is it 50% more trouble, or 0.5% more trouble? The first should influence your buying decision, the second is a rounding error.

My current BMW has over 150,000 km on the clock and is now 8 years old. The only thing where it is noticeably different from when I bought it (used, at about 2 years old and 40,000 km) is that one rubber switch on the steering wheel is worn off and I'll ask to replace it the next time it goes in for maintenance.

Maybe I'm lucky. The point is: There are plenty of perfectly fine used cars out there. Many of which are no trouble for their owners.

Personally, my next car is likely to be another BMW, as soon as the dashboard designers get off drugs and put the display back into the dashboard instead of sticking it on top like a cheap after-market add-on.

Two or three years from now, they will be ubiquitous on the used car market. A lot of cars go to the used market when a leasing contract ends.

Never heard that and at least for both of mine it wasn't true.

They're not that expensive used. My 2nd car was a BMW - 11 years old but in excellent shape (and old gentleman owned it and basically drove it from his garage to his company garage twice a week or so). It cost 8000 Euros. I drove it for years and was very happy with it. Then I sold it for 4000 Euros.

Word has it that both Tesla and SpaceX essentially have "Elon handlers" - people who know how to talk him out of or into things so he believes it was his idea.

Matches my own professional experience. I did the same to the head of HR for a couple years, though only now and then and not as a full-time job. It definitely is a very effective strategy.

And I think the crazy and the stupid come together. You often need five stupid ideas to get to the crazy-but-could-work one. The trick is in not implementing the stupid ones along the way.

Shouldn't we introduce a "doh!" section for stuff like "vibe coded software has security holes", because it's... well... I mean, what else did you expect? Have you SEEN the results of vibe coding?

Has someone told him about the heat problem in space? Vacuum is cold, but it's also a near perfect insulation. Getting rid of heat is a constant problem for space craft because there is no heat exchange and radiating it off is the only option you have and it's terribly inefficient. And last I checked, GPUs generate quite a bit of heat.

This, more than any "but you can't see the difference anyways" comment is the core problem.

If there's no content, then there's no point in having an 8K TV.

Where high resolution makes sense is computer displays. I'm writhing this on a 5K display, and it lets me keep text at virtually any size readable. You rarely read double-page text content on a TV.

Good point.

So here's my counter-offer: Instead of an Airtag, put a coupon for 20% off a box of donuts into the car. Make sure to let them know when you report the theft. Now they have double incentives.

No, that was all cars stolen. The point was: Airtag or not, 85% of cars are eventually recovered anyways, and the ones that are not you would most likely not recover even with an Airtag. Or do you really think that the cops will unload and search a container ship because you say there's a ping on your FindMy app?

Why?

First, police have been repeatedly reported as being reluctant to go where owners tell them their hardware has reported in. We've had this with notebooks and smartphones. Second, you don't need Airtags to get location data. My current car is 7 or 8 years old and I can ask it for current location via an App, or make it flash its headlights or honk if I lost it in a huge parking lot. That's ten times more useful than an Airtag. But if thieves were even one bit professional, they of course know these things. They will disable them first. As for Airtags - they have this anti-stalking feature, so if the thief is driving around in your car for a bit, he'll be told that there's an unknown Airtag following him. At which point he'll stop, locate it and you can send the cops to an empty ditch at the side of the road.

Two tracks for redundancy and to go both directions. Additional tracks for local trains or freight can go above or below, since we're building vertical anyways.

Disagree. If you have on- and off-ramps, the engines don't have to be in the pods, they can be in the ramp. The main problem with any and all "pod travel" concepts is that instead of one huge engine in front of a train, you now have a hundred little engines. Which is not only less efficient, it's also a maintenance nightmare.

Along the outside wall you could have the largest graffiti ever. :-)

That's an interesting physics question. Over enough time (a couple years, say), would all the air inside the station spin along with it? My intuition says yes.

But we get away from the topic. It's been an interesting little discussion. Thanks.