If you read the first line as “make a handsome profit”, I get it, but if you read it slightly more charitably to mean “this service [permanent backup] costs real money to operate, so you need a way to fund that somehow”, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Servers, storage, power, networking, and cooling aren’t free; therefore neither is reliable indefinite storage of family memories in digital form.

> I'd love to release a lot of it but I'm torn between releasing artifacts created with expensive software I paid for and thinking that many of those things should really be freely available to anyone

Release it or not, but either way you’re almost certainly going to get paid back the same amount of money: $0.

This is getting a ton of hate here, but I think it feels like a pretty reasonably balanced response to competing concerns: protecting literally billions of non-tech-savvy users from potentially malicious social-engineering attacks while allowing devs and tech-savvy a path to bypass that protection if they’re sure they want to.

What concrete change to the policy would be a strict Pareto improvement keeping just those two concerns in mind?

I'm pretty surprised at the amount of hate here. All the "just build it ourselves!" and "Google wants your data", and almost no top-level comments even discussing the difficulty of dealing with malware and social engineering.

There are at least three moral arguments that can be made:

- Google, as a capitalist company, is ignoring the privacy and FOSS implications, and is guilty of screwing the customer due to greed

- Regular, non-tech folks are constantly being robbed of their privacy, money, and/or identity through malware and social engineering attacks, and Google is guilty of not doing enough to protect them

- Enabling malware delivery and use props up criminals and known bad actors (e.g., north korean), and by not stopping this Google is guilty of supporting these bad actors

I'm not seeing either of those last two points being made strongly. Maybe it's just not the target audience — people here aren't as likely to be scammed, and few of us are regularly thinking about north korea — but I'd expect to see more consideration for the costs of inaction here.

It’s pretty common for techies to overestimate how widely their opinions and desires are shared. If you think a good chunk of the population wants to sideload apps, then this feels like an attack. But it’s really just a decision not to cater to a tiny fraction of the market. It’s the same thing in discussions about headphone jacks or small phones. People act like it’s nefarious, when really it’s just that their desire for those things is pretty uncommon.

Personally I think there should be a lot more work done on how to secure arbitrary apps from arbitrary sources so that they are unable to hurt people, rather than focusing so much on on preventing random apps from being installed in the first place. This would help the average person as well, since these walled gardens still make mistakes. But it’s not realistic to put a box in everyone’s pockets that’s three taps away from sending all their money to some dude in Laos.

There are many cases where swerving will avoid an accident that braking cannot and cars unexpectedly pulling out from the side are often among these. It’s not a majority, but it’s not at all rare.

Firstly, I love levels and thanks for it.

That said, in general for any given comp package, I’d want the lowest possible level I could take and get that package. That gives more upward runway.

The regulation is at least partially informed by physics though.

Braking distances, road damage (scales with the fourth power of axle weight), bridge limits, etc.

If the limit could safely and appropriately be 49 tons for diesel trucks right now, it probably would be.

Isn't "able to sell them at higher prices" a consequence of and an indicator of the demand by buyers?

Surely, if buyers didn't want these vehicles, makers couldn't sell them at high prices, right?

That's where advertising comes in..

Which is...?

Inflation! Just use the money printer to print more money! Subsidy checks for everyone! Unexpected bonus checks for military personnel, brand new accounts for children with money that needs to be invested in an approved stock market index fund, throwing even more money at DHS and the DoD budgets!

How will we pay for it? Debt or printing money!

Agree that SMD hand assembly is easier than it looks, at least down to 0603 imperial. If I can wait the week for boards to arrive, I’ll often skip the breadboard step and go straight to a proto PCB, especially since most parts aren’t available in throughhole without waiting on dev boards anyway.

When you hand someone a board with 0603s on it that you hand-assembled, it seems like magic to people who stop to think about it.

When you're regularly dealing with 01005's, getting to work with an 0603 feels like a luxury.

I tune my resistors by whittling away at the PCB traces you insensitive clod.

You joke, but embedded passives are a thing!

As are laser-trimmed precision resistors...

The latter is a pretty good path towards making the former happen.

I’m not sure what your point is.

Edit: and if you’re unclear on my point, which I assume you are given you think that some rudimentary math invalidates my comment, the point was that a salary does not result in happiness, having money does, a high salary is the thing required to achieve it.