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Comment Expectations (Score 1) 37

In the launch, just a few days ago, he called this "a personal experiment". Given that, it seems to be a bit churlish to be beating the guy up over a few rough edges. It's clearly a long way from finished, considering the not-yet-implemented features he talked about, and so yeah, there's some bugs too. Give the guy a break.

Comment Re:Non-military use? (Score 1) 10

People have been experimenting with using wind power to reduce maritime fuel consumption, a recent example being the Canopeé, used to transport parts of the Ariane 6 rocket, whose sails can cut its fuel usage in half. Adding sails to reduce fuel consumption make a huge deal of sense. However these drones don't have to carry a large cargo, just a sensor suite that's presumably as lightweight as possible, and I doubt the practically of using wind or wind/solar alone to power large ships. I'd be happy to be proved wrong though.

Comment What happens when the cells die? (Score 3, Insightful) 20

Each CL1 contains 800,000 lab-grown human neurons, reprogrammed from the skin or blood samples of real adult donors. The cells remain viable for up to six months, fed by a life-support system that supplies nutrients, controls temperature, filters waste, and maintains fluid balance.

The cells last for (up to) six months, and then what? It sounds like growing the cells is a fairly expensive part of the process ("While it cost us quite a bit to make 100,000 neurons...", and I can't find any mention of what the options are. I guess if you have to ask, the "wetware-as-a-service" option is for you.

Comment Re:Captcha (Score 5, Interesting) 26

They're trying to get their hands on the bug bounty. As several people suggested in discussions elsewhere on this, they should consider requiring a small fee or deposit for entries to be eligible for the bug bounty, that might dissuade most of the chancers. Otherwise it's like spam, if it's basically free to make submission, then the miscreants only increase their chances of "winning" by generating more entries.

Comment Re:Do they pay, or pay? (Score 1) 27

...other than if google need to pay so much to get it on there, maybe it's not actually very good?

Most people just go with the default apps that come on their phone for most things (no, I don't have statistics, but Gemini itself says "A large majority of smartphone users, about 95%, tend to stick with the default apps and settings on their phones" FWIW). My parents haven't installed a single app on their phones that I didn't install for them. So Gemini could be an absolute genius app, and most people would still never try it if it wasn't pre-installed.

Comment Re:Does the math add up? (Score 3, Interesting) 37

They've got contracts with several launch providers - after some shareholders threatening to sue them for not using the most cost-effective provider, they even ended up contracting a few SpaceX launces. But yes, other than SpaceX, the rockets they're launching on are all just reaching the operational stage, and so a long way from reaching full launch cadence. So it seems unlikely that they will meet those deadlines. I imaging the play is to launch as many as they can and then lobby for an extension, on the basis that they've proved they're making good progress.

Comment Re:Watts (Power) is USELESS fort CAPACITY (Score 2) 193

The headline may be misleading, but the summary I think is pretty clear, the author is calling for battery capacity to be specified in Watt-Hours, and for power draw in Watts to be a key spec given for devices - the example's right there - he's not calling for battery capacity to be specified in Watts.

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