Ha. Absolutely not. I have the same thoughts on Bitcoin as I did when I first became aware of it: "This just doesn't seem all that useful, other than for the hope that one day I can sell it for more than I bought it."

When Bitcoin first entered my consciousness it was worth $10/coin, so I clearly undervalued the potential of that "hope the price might go up". I wish I'd bought Bitcoin in the same way that I wish I'd picked yesterday's winning lottery numbers.

IMO, a major headwind facing the price of Bitcoin is that its advocates have already gotten so much of what they could have possibly hoped for. So many of the milestones that boosters viewed as the "next big thing" that would cause Bitcoin to really take off are past us: you can buy a Bitcoin ETF, big banks have entered the market, governments take it seriously, etc.

If you're buying into the Bitcoin market now, there's less to look forward to as a potential "gamechanger" that'll make the price jump, while the same challenging question of whether they hold any real underlying value remain. Sure, there are more hypotheticals to look forward to (maybe the US does eventually go ahead with that "strategic Bitcoin reserve"), but the gap between present reality and potential future upside continues to shrink.

American taxpayers earn in the neighborhood of $28 trillion per year in income and realized capital gains. Between the feds and the states, the government brings in ~$7-8 trillion in tax. You'd need a flat tax of at least ~25% to match that. The bottom quintile of taxpayers pay ~10-15% today.

How do you make that math work?

Counterpoint:

So apparently there's at least some portion of the population able to convince another person to have sex with them while they were actively wearing smart glasses. This was actually the most surprising part of the article.

The problems with this plan are... numerous, but if you did want to dispose of nuclear waste in space, it'd be easier to launch it out of the solar system than to launch it into the sun.

You've got an approach to training and a set of standards that, when implemented, produces developers who never write unsafe code? To the degree that you don't see value in further risk mitigation through choice of language?

Read what I wrote. This is about risk mitigation, not elimination.

You here to debate approaches to security, or to be an ass to strangers on the internet? Happy to engage in the former but the latter is a childish waste of everyone's time.

This is only really a useful observation if you can tell me ahead of time which developers are competent and which ones are incompetent. If you can't, then the safe thing to do is to assume that all developers are "incompetent" (by your definition) and use tools like memory-safe languages to mitigate that risk.

There's at least one guy who pretty famously objected.

Not sure why it's relevant but there's a photo in the first link. Looks like a pretty skinny kid.

Impressive that you've reached such vast conclusions about the Exploration Company and its founder's motivations, given that you don't seem to realize that the founder in question is a woman.

The idea that dark matter/energy can be explained away by a modified theory of gravity isn't a new one and is an active area of research. See: Tensor-Vector-Scalar (TeVeS) gravity as just one example of an (unsuccessful, as far as I understand) attempt.

If you've got a compelling argument for why it's definitely the right path forward, please report it to the folks in Sweden and collect your Nobel prize.

Betting against Apple when it comes to hardware engineering is... a choice.

Say what you will about their pricing, software, marketing, etc., but I can't think of a consumer product company that has delivered a consistently better hard product. I guess we'll figure out who's right in a few months.

"The best camera in the world is the one you have with you."

Yes? The cellular network in my area could use improvement, but my smartphone makes and receives calls just fine.

It seems the opposite to me. Developing these chips in-house had to be much, much more expensive in the short term than continuing to buy Snapdragons from Qualcomm.

I guess you could argue that they should have spent a few more years investing in R&D before deciding that what was released as the C1 was "good enough". But, outside of places like Slashdot, I don't think anyone has any idea what modem is in their phone and I haven't heard of any widespread connectivity complaints, so it seems like the "good enough" determination was reasonable.

The first "Pro"-branded iPhone, the 11, launched in 2019 at $999. That's ~$1300 today. For $100 less you get a phone with more storage, a better camera, better CPU, better battery, etc.

If the $1200 price point is a problem, it's at least not a new problem.