I have Netflix and Prime. I don't even mind paying for movies on top of my subscriptions if the price is reasonable. The problem is that I live in Germany. Sometimes, Amazon or Netflix will get the licence much later. I was complaining once about the delay of a particular season getting to Netflix Germany that was already there for Netflix US and people suggested that I download it illegally. I actually didn't want to because I wanted Netflix to see me as interested.

The other issue is dubbing/Synchron. Sometimes either the translation or the choice of voice actor is bad. Sometimes Netflix/Amazon doesn't have the right to stream the original in Germany and can only do the dubbed version. Not good either.

Sometimes due to the mess of international rights to a given product, typically TV series never makes it to a legal streaming service in Germany.

And they wonder why we pirate....

And I don't see what Musk did wrong.

Hmm, when a publicly listed company makes announcements, they must be 100% correct as regards to any material claims. This is a measure taken because some companies in the past have been known to manipulate their stock price by disclosing information that is not correct.

Let us forget about electric cars and look at big oil where abuses have happened in the past. A company may announce that it is looking for oil in place A. That is fine. They can announce that they have found oil in place A, but they had better have done so and again if they announce if they have found oil in commercially viable quantities. If they cannot back up those assertions, shareholders may complain to the SEC. The 'crime' being an attempt to manipulate the market with information that is either untrue, or not confirmed to the best of its knowledge by the company.

If we go back to Musk's issue, he has made a claim that directly affects the share price. If he says that he is considering an offer for funding, then he better have one in writing. If he says that he is considering taking the company private at $420/share then he had better have have the backup of either an agreement or experts. If he doesn't then his announcements can be construed as misleading his shareholders.

In the USSR (and for sometime afterwards), if anything went wrong, they would cry sabotage. Particularly if management had say, failed to service a machine because of cost and it had broken down, they would shout sabotage and start looking for a perpetrator. They would usually find the person who complained about that machine not being regularly serviced to blame it upon.

Of course, such things would never happen in the west....

MH17's transponder was not found to be either inoperative or switched off. You may have confused this with MH370.

The problem is that a BUK system deployment normally contains both the TELAR (launcher) and a surveillance radar system known as the TAR. By itself, the TELAR has limited target acquisition capabilities and a very basic military IFF interrogator but it is supposed to be tasked by the TAR so multiple TELARs can engage different targets simultaneously but each has to be "pointed" in the correct general direction. The TAR usually has a full 360deg surveillance capability and can interrogate civilian transponders (depending on the model). For whatever reason, only a TELAR was used not a TAR. Perhaps the latter was considered too high a risk if lost?

The German manufacturer, Braun might like a word if it still had an independent existence. Dieter Rams their industrial designer was an inspiration to Jony Ive and in particular the rectangular device and display with rounded edges. If you have a display with rounded edges, then rounded icons are a an obvious extension.

Having a single source of truth is not a good idea, even if Musk keeps it at arm's length. Having multiple checking sites operated by unconnected organisations would be good so I can get a view of the reliability of a source or story and compare them.

What about big lumps of finished ceramic like toilets, bidets or washbasins? Like glass, they can be broken, but they tend to be pretty tough and break into recognizable shards. Pots can already last over a thousand years, but they tend to be quite thin. However, a big lump should be much tougher.

Interestingly many collision avoidance systems use radar rather than Lidar. It always was apparent that you get a lot of information with Lidar, which must be processed (usually to get a point cloud) whereas a straight radar will just say closing on an obstruction at such a range and speed. I'm not sure if Uber uses both, but there definitely seems to be an argument for it particularly as radar is relatively cheap.

If something is safety critical then the information should not be proprietary. Source code may be, but the type of sensor and overall algorithm description should not be, especially what to do when the vehicle has conflicting information.

The main issue is that "spark gap transmitter". Apparently they have more modern diesel vehicles too. The radiation from injectors etc is not so much of a problem.

It reminds me of a VW ad. They are the sponsor of a big radio telescope in Germany.

They show a radio telescope and a researcher picking up an interesting signal in the early evening. Next day, they point it at the same place, it shows the same so it is escalated to telescope managent. The next day, they see the same signal at approximately the same time with various levels of brass.

The researcher who first saw the signal is pushed to the outside and happens to see from the control room one of the admin people using a remote key to get into her VW diesel car.

Not really. I am having to get rid of a perfectly serviceable printer because the software was never properly updated to Win 7 and onwards.

Sure, a highend graphics driver I would expect to have OS dependencies hanging out of the whatever, but an ordinary USB printer driver?

We were told that the Concorde was not commercially viable even when tickets were 5-10x the price of coach for the same route.

Nope. It made money. However a first class passenger on a 747 made much more money for the airline even if that person was slower. What has happened instead is a rise in private charters. You can be on board in a private charter if prebooked and alerted within 10 minutes from the kerb-side and it can often be more direct (flying from more local airports rather than only major ones), Some private jets are quite fast and have good range too. The airlines try to counter that by fast-tracking first class passengers through checkin and security procedures, but even with lounge to apron chauffeur driven cars, they have difficulty in managing less than about half an hour or so, often twice that for long haul.

Otherwise we already have ways to hold meetings in France in the AM and make it to NYC in time for dinner, it's called videoconferencing.

Unfortunately, videoconferencing has many limitations. Particularly when you are doing high end sales.

Tractors are interesting examples. If looked after well they can last three decades. Sure they won't be as effective/efficient as the latest/greatest but the fact that smaller farms can continue to use their older equipment helps to keep overheads down. The fact there was a good secondhand market actually helped those farmers with large holdings who wanted to keep current. But sorry John Deere, you can't sell a new tractor.

Still the Russians continue to produce a good selection of field maintainable gear. Not as a high tech, but they last forever.

Dell get a lot of shit but their repair guides are great, and go down to the "how to open without breaking". Latitudes are considered "professional", I don't know if it applies to all their models though.

If you wrote code in 2002 would you still understand the code 15 years later?

Weirdly, yes and from 1992. It might take a bit to get back into understanding the environment where it works but usually, I have provided enough annotation to pick it up again quickly, and that includes assembler. It is possibly though because I mostly stayed clear of the very clever stuff and I had enough experience to know that I could be haunted by old code and wrote accordingly.