I saw some the other day when visiting my mum. The ads drove me crazy, I haven't really seen one in a decade, and I can't imagine how we used to put up with them. Between streaming services, my personal media library, and a YT Premium subscription, my viewing is ad-free.

Microsoft got shafted by Nvidia. The high failure rate of the Xbox 360 was mostly Nvidia's fault.

The PS2 was the best selling console for a long time. The Xbox didn't gain much traction in Japan, so as well as missing out on that market, if you like Japanese games it's not a great platform.

All engineering is influenced by other engineering. Most aircraft look more or less the same because that's the state of the art most efficient shape.

This company got the first methane powered rocket to orbit.

For manual labour perhaps, but for clerical work, and especially for complex work like engineering, 36h/week of high productivity would be exceptional.

Around here the police usually won't come out to surveillance alerts, unless a human has manually reviewed them first.

It's how the cops use every new bit of tech. When DNA came in, they were arresting people on very flimsy DNA evidence that later turned out to either be flawed or easily and obviously explained away.

Happened when IP addresses became their new toy. Still happens with fingerprints, which, despite what CSI may tell you, rarely present an exact match.

Been there done that, during crunch time, with paid overtime or time-for-time for the extra hours. It's fine as long as it's compensated, if the work itself is good, and if it's temporary, a few weeks max.

I could see myself doing it for longer periods in a promising but understaffed start-up... but if you expect me to work and be motivated like a founder, you better pay me like a founder too, with an equity stake, or options that I can take with me if you fire me (looking at you, Facebook...)

I do think disappearing people is wrong, obviously, although I'm not sure that's exactly what happened to Ma. Keeping in mind the damage it would have done to him to be publicly arrested or rebuked, and the fact that later the Chinese premier convinced him to move back to China, and then he attended various events including one with Xi... Well, it's not quite how it was portrayed in the Western media. Not good, but we don't really know what happened.

There has to be a balance somewhere between that and the EU's not-quite-strong-enough regulation of tech companies.

All that matters is if Trump believes it was Made in USA or not.

I really doubt that Chinese rocket scientists are simply copying without understanding.

Thanks, that's interesting. Sounds good, corporate responsibility.

It's a flex. Same reason people buy $1000 bottles of iffy vodka for their friends in a night club.

I didn't write that, the person I was replying to did, and you didn't even get the quote right. But I'm done here.

The bulk of that cash isn't a subsidy (as those numbers point out), it's payment for services. I was talking about subsidies specifically, in reaction to this (surprisingly common) statement that lumps SpaceX's earnings and subsidies together, suggesting that they live mostly on handouts.

It's true that SpaceX would struggle without those federal contracts... so would many other companies. Lockheed Martin and RTX come to mind.