Comment These need to be shut down NOW (Score 3, Insightful) 14
If the US was a functioning country they would have been shut down on their first day and their employees criminally prosecuted. But since the US is now an utterly corrupt country, starting at the top, that hasn't happened and unfortunately may not happen.
Comment They're about 15 years late (Score 0) 28
Of course, once astronomers have collected 120 regular stars and defeated Bowser twice, they'll unlock the 120 green stars.
I've already done this a few times.
Comment Re:Incredible but doubtful about priorities. (Score 1) 207
The bigger problem will be manhole covers on suburban streets. These will get sucked out of the road not only wrecking your Tesla but likely also endangering the traffic behind you. You can bet that this feature will be geofenced and only available on approved racetracks --which, for 99% of buyers, simply makes it useless and expensive payload.
Comment Re: Debt? USA (Score 1) 64
The stock market's value was not dominated by house flippers back then.
Today, the market is largely tulips.
Comment Re:Incredible but doubtful about priorities. (Score 1) 207
The launch was a circus that PT Barnum would have been proud of.
A handful of specially built show-pony-cars that are ultra-light, only "flew" once (because they probably didn't have a big enough battery onboard to recharge those gas cylinders) and were the ultimate in Musk-level deceptions.
I'm going to do a full technical breakdown of all the reasons why what we saw was 100 percent marketing and why we will *never* see a Roadster 2 with the claimed specifications ever hit the market -- the laws of physics may be inconvenient but ignoring them is not an option.
What we saw in that demo was Musk, once again, coming up with a clever way to get hundreds of millions (perhaps more) of interest-free funding from people who slept through science classes in highschool. What's even more amazing is that this is the *second* time he's promised unrealistic deliveries, taken hundreds of millions in "reservations" and failed to deliver.
PT Barnum was so right.
Comment Re:Impressive (Score 2) 207
And Musk also said "Manned colonies on Mars by 2024" and "Hyperloop" and "Fast transit tunnels beneath cities" and "Solar roof tiles" and a whole lot of other stuff to which the laws of physics and his engineers said "nope".
Comment Re:I'm more interested in the Snake River Canyon j (Score 2) 207
It's not the launch or even the jump that will be the problem... it's landing a 2+ ton car that is descending from several hundred feet above its apex and this has significant vertical speed. Even the gas-thrusters may have their work cut out for them
Comment Re:Fucking Awesome (Score 1) 207
No word about the real-world range of the Roadster 2.
I find it interesting that Musk can create a show-pony car that does cool tricks that nobody would ever allow on a road-legal car but he fails to address the elephant in the room: "How far will it go on a charge?"
Why did he ignore this crucial aspect of any EV?
Easy, because he originally claimed 1000Km and it is much easier to get a lightweight show-car to do jumping tricks than it is to deliver a real-world essential such as decent range.
The Roadster we saw in the display is just a stunt-car, road-legal production vehicles will be just another fast EV.
If people want to risk quarter of a million dollars reserving one then only one phrase springs to mind:
"Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me".
Comment Impressive (Score 5, Funny) 207
This is certainly the most capable vehicle ever conceived for shark jumping.
Comment Re: Debt? USA (Score 3, Insightful) 64
How come markets kept setting record highs since then, providing returns that have been close to ten times inflation?
Because LLMs are the new tulips.
Comment Advertisers are the enemy of the Internet (Score 2) 54
All web browsers should have universal ad blocking built-in and turned on by default. The parasites will of course complain, but we don't need them. (I don't want to hear "but my web site won't survive without advertising"-- I've been running sites since they were a thing and I've never allowed advertising, so I don't want to hear any whining about how it can't be done.) We need to permanently blacklist all advertiser domains on sight, and we probably need to block advertiser networks.
And the thing is: it didn't need to turn out like this. If advertisers had just behaved like responsible grown-ups then we could have grudgingly tolerated their worthless presence and just ignored them. But they couldn't do that; they had to turn their entire ecosystem into a massive assault on security and privacy.
Well, screw them.
Comment They should rename Windows to "egacs". (Score 3, Informative) 91
Eight gigs and constantly swapping.
Comment Re:1,000 contractors hired to patch software :o (Score 1) 65
Comment Holy Shit! Really???? (Score 1) 88
This just in, a report published by a group of people who would be materially harmed by losing business to the EU building its own technical capacity declared it would be costly and unfeasible to ever abandon them.
Up next after the commercial break, we report on how water is wet and grass grows.