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Comment Re: Cloud computing is one the dumbest ideas ever. (Score 1) 77

And you have not considered to enter offline-first, the service worker API has to load?

The first time you add a website to your home screen, it installs the website's service worker. You have to use the Internet for that, just as you have to use the Internet to download an application from Apple's App Store.

Again, Grab has been doing this for 12 years.

And I'm curious about what the blockers for even a partial PWA implementation have been during each of these 12 years.

PWA is not new and they have chosen native apps.

All I've been asking is what features of Grab combined with missing features of PWA likely led to their continuing to choose native apps.

But most of us did not assume to know better than Grab unlike you.

I don't see where I "assume[d] to know better than Grab".

Comment Re:Rejecting my card... (Score 1) 143

On the other hand, if your card got refused at that grocery line - would you go back? Likely not.

I doubt many such businesses would risk the customer ire by refusing some cards.

What I DO forsee as happening is some businesses that aren't time sensitive but routinely deal in high $$$ transactions not accepting some such cards. IE, (ironically) - airlines. If you're buying several thousand dollars worth of airline tickets the rewards (and in turn, the merchant fees) can add up quite a bit.

Comment Re:That dog won't bring home Huntsman's Rewards (t (Score 1) 143

Maybe they're in another country? Here in the US a guy selling tomatoes beside the road is likely to whip out a Square reader attached to a phone and take credit cards.

I live in a small town and I can't think of a single business that DOESN'T accept cards. The last holdout (an old diner thats been there for decades) gave in about 7 or 8 years ago and got a reader.

Comment Re:That dog won't bring home Huntsman's Rewards (t (Score 0) 143

As a direct result, no, but as a net result, yes, they will. Large companies like Walmart have razor thin profit margins. They just make insane profits because of the volume of product that they move. Those margins will always be just a small amount above whatever their net costs require, and credit card fees are part of those net costs.

You might not like them as companies, but there's a reason why Wal-mart and Amazon are almost always the cheapest place to buy something.

Comment Re:That dog won't bring home Huntsman's Rewards (t (Score 2, Interesting) 143

Most airlines aren't even setup to make a profit from ticket sales anymore. They at best break even there, and then make their profit off of agreements with credit card companies for CC miles/points.

Its a very weird system that we've gotten ourselves into.

Comment Re:American Express (Score 0) 143

There is quite a difference between Visa and MasterCard (one type), and Amex and Discover (other type). Both Amex and Discover are essentially one-issuer-cards, either backed by American Express or by Discover Financial Services. Visa and MasterCard can be issued by any institution which has a contract with Visa or MasterCard. Visa and MasterCard are Clearing Houses, companies tasked with processing inter-bank-transfers.

Comment Reflections on Rusting Trust (Score 1) 70

The main reason that people worried about a spec in the past was to avoid vendor lock-in. An implementation which is available under a public license is a good solution to that problem also.

Even apart from costs associated with proprietary software, the other reason to avoid vendor lock-in is to avoid self-propagating backdoors in the compiler. Ken Thompson described how to make such a backdoor with C in his 1983 "Reflections on Trusting Trust" speech. David A. Wheeler described "diverse double-compiling", a defense against compiler backdoors that relies on the existence of independent implementations of a language. Stable Rust doesn't have that because it's such a moving target, with widely used programs relying on language and library features less than half a year old.

See also "Reflections on Rusting Trust" by Manish Goregaokar

Comment Re: Missing Rust Language Specification (Score 1) 70

> Bruh. Apt already relies on Perl, which has no formal language specification. What nonsense is this?

You are right, which is why I don't think this is a huge deal.

Though perl5 compatibility back to c.2000 is pretty good.

Today's rust code most likely won't run in 2050 on modern compilers.

But perl4 code doesn't run well today either.

Yet nothing in trixie needs to run anything from buzz - so as long as everything works within a version or two it's hard to imagine anybody being negatively affected.

Comment Re:What will make up that lost capacity (Score 1) 88

I have a UPS package shipped Overnight/Saturday Delivery on Friday and it now appears to be on a truck near Chicago. It was originally scheduled to transit from South Dakota to New England.

New delivery date is Tuesday. I hope the sender gets his money back!

(I didn't need it that quickly but the sender was making good on a delivery date guarantee, at a loss of his profits).

Comment Re:Remains to be seen... (Score 2) 41

I have a floppy controller on order that doesn't know how to read disks; it just passes through magnetic field data to software which is supposed to be able to reconstruct the disk image.

Hopefully these tapes will be OK to read as long as somebody can build a magnetic read head of the correct type.

Maybe with ML there will be a reasonable chance of reconstructing faded regions. Old audio tape is still mostly fine, so fingers crossed.

BTW, what a great job these folks have!

Comment Re:And this will go on and on. Until? (Score 2) 132

> No need for all that. Either "Judgement is for the other side" or "Case dismissed." Clears the docket, and slows down these kinds of submissions until they're at least doublechecked.

Interesting. I think you've changed my mind about this.

Economic incentives are probably the way to go.

Comment Re:Rediscovering the wheel... (Score 1) 33

> Hopefully there are more relevant "science objectives" than this dead issue.

It's an exoteric story. Really they want funding to build rockets and this is a technology demonstrator.

But there is a theory that the asteroid belt is the former crust of Mars. More data on that would be interesting.

It's of course "widely discredited" but not with a scientific method or anything. Comparing isotope ratios would be fun someday.

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