GP links their wevsite with email and home (?!) address in their bio here, so I don't think doxxing is much of a concern! I'm seeing a creation date of 1998 on that domain as well, which is farther back than my knowledge of internet history goes, so I am guessing that is the domain/email address in question.
1998 is when the registration was transferred from AlterNIC to InterNIC: which is only part of that story. The original WHOIS record history has been lost to time (and ext2 filesystem bit-rot).
> Were Martian environmental parameters less well-known (e.g., how gravity, air resistance / wind, and scree dynamics interact)? Bot performance in Martian environment (e.g., motor power output) less well-known? Were they being understandably conservative with their irreplaceable bot?
I haven't worked on the Mars rover programs, but I have worked on a NASA moon rover. Based on that experience I would hazard a guess that it's all three of these things.
Environment: We actually have quite a bit more experience roving on Mars so I expect the environmental uncertainty is a bit attenuated for the Mars missions, but one thing I was really surprised by during my time on the moon rover mission was just how little confidence our scientists had about the physical conditions at the specific landing site we are targeting (which is quite far from the Apollo missions for example)
Performance: Building accurate hardware tests on Earth for operations on another planetary body is incredibly hard. Of course NASA engineers are smart and can do this with fairly high confidence, but it's far from perfect. For the moon's 1/6th gravity, we couldn't just build a copy of the moon rover and test it on Earth because the suspension would collapse, so we had a whole separate copy of the moon rover mobility and suspension that was built to operate in Earth gravity yet mimic the performance the actual rover would have on the moon. That unit in and of itself is a feat of engineering that is definitely not immune to mistakes.
> That's not a good enough reason to recommend TOTP instead
In what way is TOTP an "instead"? My understanding of passkeys is that they basically replace the username/password combo, but do not provide any kind of second factor. I know at least one service (I think Amazon, but I'm not 100% sure) still requires TOTP when logging in with a passkey from an unrecognized device.
TOTP also does not imply a second factor, it's just a time-based password calculated from a shared secret that can be stored anywhere, for example in your password manager alongside the username and password. And worse than your password, of which only a hash should be stored at the service you have an account with, they store the shared secret too (which can thus be leaked from their side), so TOTP is never fully hardware-bound, it always exists in at least two places. Passkeys _can_ be fully hardware-bound, with the secret only existing in the secure chip of your phone or hardware security key for example, not at any moment in its lifecycle exposed to user, service or potential attacker.
> Amazon (..) still requires TOTP when logging in with a passkey from an unrecognized device.
I noticed Amazon does that and it annoyed me greatly.
My understanding is that the passkey branding is specifically for copyable, user-verified keys. So the second factor is the biometrics (or equivalent) of your device. But yeah there doesn’t seem to be consensus yet about still requiring TOTP with passkeys.
Not GP, but I also run a cheap VPS to host my personal website. I don't want to depend on GitHub or Cloudflare. I don't need better infrastructure or scaling, and $5 is ~0.03% of my monthly salary, which is indistinguishable from free. What benefit is there to using a more complicated platform to host a simple website?
which is fine if you have good reasons not to depend on them (you can actually do the same kind of thing with a bunch of things) and somehow depend on whoever provides your cheap VPS instead? I have a VPS as well for bots (digital ocean), though VPS hosts containers and the containers run the bots. A decade or so ago I used VPS for websites, but now it seems a lot simpler using things like cloudflare. Thing about websites on little VPS's you have to be more concerned about patching/security etc which you can mostly automate but really need alerting then for when it goes wrong. Which all seems way more hassle.
Assuming we're talking about performing this transaction in a jurisdiction where prostitution is legal, how is it any different from any other business transaction? I don't think anyone is particularly mad about payment processors refusing to process illegal transactions, it's the refusal to process legal but morally controversial transactions that is problematic.
It's problematic because the ability to conveniently and send and receive money without using cash is vital in modern society. It effectively acts as a utility. Utilities don't get to pick and choose based on their execs' valuable opinions. The bar should be at refusing illegal transactions and always allowing everything else. Their purpose needs to be serving people and businesses, not dispensing moral judgements by banning businesses they don't like from participating in the cashless economy.
These kind of rights are something which only physical persons should have, and card networks aren't infringing on the rights of real humans. Businesses aren't people, and they shouldn't have any inherent right to be provided with utilities or payment solutions. And as it stands today they don't.
You as a real human should have a right to have a bank account and to send and receive money. Just as you as you as a real human should have a right to access any other basic utility.
Your business should not have any such rights. If the power company doesn't want to provide your data center or steel factory with electricity, then your business shall have no right to it.
If a card payment company doesn't want to provide their services to your brothel or your weapons factory or your weed shop, then your business shall have no right to it.
First of all, payment processors don't grant this 'right' to individuals either, so I'm not sure what the point of arguing this is. Lots of payment-related companies will ban you if you do legal, but 'wrong' transactions over them, a lot of which is driven by pressure from the payment processors.
The other thing is, why are we separating businesses and people at all here? I wasn't talking about rights that groups have, this is about the obligations of a provider. If you're in the business of processing payments, you process all legal payments - that's it. It is what you do, it's the business. It is not their job to care about what organizational structure is behind the payment any more that it's their job to care about the gender of the payer. I simply don't see the relevance.
The line you want to draw also doesn't make any sense. So, say I provide services to other individuals. If I do it through my real name and self, it's alright, but if I pay $20 to register a sole proprietorship, I lose my 'rights'? Why?
> If the power company doesn't want to provide your data center or steel factory with electricity, then your business shall have no right to it.
Payment processors are far more egregious than that. They don't create anything like the power or water company does, they are middlemen. It's like if the power company and my business agreed that I will pay them for power and they will supply me with power, but a middleman who handles the transmission lines goes "nuh-uh, I disagree" and cuts my power line. This is how payment processors work. I want to pay someone for a legal good or service, they want to provide me with a legal good or service, payment processor says no.
I can't express enough how much I don't understand wanting to deny businesses the 'right' to financial relevance while going full-steam-ahead on giving businesses the right to pick-and-choose customers based on their whims when they're providing a universal service that society relies on.
In SoCal at least, public chargers are barely cheaper than gas, even with gas at $6.30/gal. Electric only makes economic sense if you can mostly charge at home.
This used to be true, but gas is $6.30/gallon in California now with no particular reason to think it is coming back down. I haven't actually re-done the numbers, but I have to imagine the ~40% increase in gas prices over the last year have significantly moved the needle in CA.
I'm suggesting they self-identify by resisting changes customers want.
Detroit fought against safety features until it was forced on them and Volvo led the way. They continued to fight against infotainment, offering horrible in-house trash, until Tesla shamed them with something from this century. All the Japanese makers fought against the EV wave by putting up a fake signal with H2, which they knew would never fly, which let them continue without retooling.
Now, BYD shames them all with scores of features at a reasonable price. If it weren't for protectionism, they'd be wiping up western markets. And to your point, yes Hyundai is old but they're listening to demand and responding by delighting customers.
This is probably too broad a category for anecdata to mean much, but just to balance the scales I've recently started looking in a job category that I thought was niche, but not that niche. I've heard back from something like 11/13 applications, often the same or next day.
The nature of science and exploration is that every mission is harder than the last, which is a reasonable first order proxy for expense. For NASA specifically, there has also been a large focus placed on making delivery to orbit and the moon a commercial service rather than something that NASA has to do in-house which has held us back.
And as others have said, there is really no such thing as a cheap rover. As a recent example, there was recently a push by NASA HQ to refurbish a Mars rover engineering unit (basically a one-to-one copy of the one sent to Mars, kept at JPL for use in ops planning and issue debugging) into an operational lunar rover. The estimated cost to take this existing piece of hardware and make it fully flight ready and suitable for the new mission was hundreds of millions of dollars.
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