![](/static/253f0d9b/assets/icons/icon-96x96.png)
![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8f2046ae-5d2e-495f-b467-f7b14ccb4152.png)
No way this isn’t struck down. It’s got to just be a political signaling play.
No way this isn’t struck down. It’s got to just be a political signaling play.
This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.
I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that’s why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.
A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.
As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.
But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.
Of all the billionaires who do exist Bill and Melinda would probably agree with you. Bill has been pretty clear that he always played the game to win but he’s also stated he intends to give it all away and he’s openly recruiting other billionaires to give it all away as well.
I suppose evil billionaires could give it away to make the world a worse plCe, say by developing something like sharks with lasers on their heads, But again in these guys case they’re giving it away to help eliminate malaria around the world.
If all billionaires were like Bill and the Melinda I suppose the world would be a significantly better place.
Now Elon can like his favorite OF creators without anybody knowing it’s him.
These old stodgy dudes have two things going for them that young guys don’t (yet) have - a lifetime of building a support network of donors and mastery at playing “the game”.
They should retire at 60 and pass along their donors and skills to a few proteges, but recently they cling until the very last breath.
Impressive, I don’t think I’d heard of Ceefax. It seems like it was broadcast and then recorded, and then this set top box knew how to interpret and parse the data into this format.
I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.
That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.
A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.
Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.
All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.
The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.
As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.
The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.
Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.
I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.
In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.
My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.
Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.
Thank God. I own a business and this thing was obnoxious. Google promoted it heavily as a feature businesses should turn on to improve ranking. But it was junk.
Anybody seriously believing this has a misunderstanding of how little people care about what OS they use and how much they care that it works the way they expect.
died Thursday in New York from complications of cancer.
It seems like government investment in education is one of the best possible ways to allocate funds, even if not every person is directly impacted by being offered more schooing or degrees.
Think about it. More educated people around you is always better than fewer educated people.
Because after taking a quick look at that first or second page, I don’t even go back. I just head to another search engine 😅
By rewarding mysterious “quality content” indicators that SEOs know how to game with shit people absolutely do not perceive as quality.
I’m sure a lot of the problems are regulation related. For example I don’t think you can drive golf carts on most city streets.
Some preplanned communities have separate road systems for smaller vehicles. But if it’s not baked in from the start, it’s probably tough to add later.
Unfortunately, I think the auto lobby is largely responsible for much of this, and will fight hard to keep it this way.
This is dumb. Americans are being ripped off by car prices and manufacturers who aren’t investing in this cheaper tech.
The Chinese cars are cheap because they’re going back to basics. Compared to any US DOT approved vehicle, they’re slow, they’re light, they don’t have any bells and whistles. Four wheels, a motor, some simple electronics, and a battery.
Ultimately, that’s all you need to get from one place to the next if you don’t need highway speeds or crash ratings…
Will high tariffs cause local manufacturers to develop their own version of cheap electric vehicles? Doubtful.
They need FF to exist… But doesn’t necessarily have to work well.
Got to hand it to this guy. He pulled billions of dollars out of a hat. And just when things were starting to look pretty bad.
Now he can basically afford to pay his way out of any penalty. Must be nice to be able to do that.
Pretty much every country in the world where citizenship, nationality, and ethnicity are the same thing you find xenophobia.
All home delivery services can be suspended. Like the Amazon guy, the UPS guy, the mailman, the pizza guy, nobody is coming to your door anymore pretty soon. It’s only takes a few quacks for this kind of thing.
Wouldn’t be surprised if there was an exceptionally well funded US startup that makes a debut before TikTok is blocked if they don’t sell. TikTok has to weigh the possibility that they can’t compete if they don’t exist.