That’s only cheap if you don’t consider how long it will survive and the replacement/repair cost. A slab phone with no moving parts will last much longer than a foldable making the $/year cost much lower.

It’s also worth noting it was always supposed to land with the solar panels on its side, the issue is that they ended up pointing west (in the shade, not producing power) instead of to the east (towards the sun).

The fact that it still handled the asymmetrical thrust after the nozzle broke off one of its two engines to make it down in one piece, and only the orientation happened to be wrong, is still a great achievement.

If the hardware survives the chill (heaters not running from lack of power) it might still resume its mission when the sun changes position in the sky and the panels start getting light.

Yup. Serve the body of Christ? Straight to jail. Your sermon is so boring someone dozes off, believe it or not, jail.

Of course, this doesn’t really happen, through the magic of selective enforcement the only people getting the boot are those preventing the homeless from freezing to death, ruining the plans of the local administration.

Do the stores not have free WiFi? I’ve never been in a Walmart, but all bigger stores here in Europe have WiFi.

This is the store policy making the experience suck.

Random checks at Kaufland (European supermarket chain) only require the employee to visually inspect your cart to see if you scanned everything and they only need to rescan like four items, to verify the employee actually took the time to check instead of just waving you through, so it’s all very fast.

Also, all employees can clear restricted items, so that’s fast too. My only gripe is that alcohol-free beer also triggers the age verification, but that’s a minor issue.

I love the hand scanners since thanks to them wonky scales and weight limits are a thing of the past. They really make checkout faster, as long as the store isn’t using them in a boneheaded way.

This might be the point, offering an opt-out no one will reasonably use while complying with regulations and still tracking most users, same as before.

Google RCS and RCS the standard are not the same thing. Third party apps are not allowed to plug into Google RCS. This is why you won’t find any RCS open source alternative for Google Messages.

Google is just trying to promote their own walled garden under the guise of an open standard. If they were genuine about this they should allow you to just use any replacement, just like you can replace the stock SMS app on Android.

As far as I know Google doesn’t allow third party apps to plug into RCS.

This is why them bashing Apple for this particular issue always seemed hypocritical to me, they want this to be their own closed ecosystem, with Apple being the exception because they have enough clout to actually go it alone or even take users away from Android.

Ideally you’d have apps like Signal plugging into the same end-to-end encryption for interoperability, but Google won’t allow that because they just want people to use Google Messages for RCS, and nothing else.

What they’re asking for is a public portfolio.

Obviously, you can’t give them code that legally belongs to a past employer and they’re not allowed to look to avoid accusations of copyright infringement.

Especially if they do any reverse-engineering for interoperability, there must be zero suspicion that they were inspired by code they’re not allowed to use.

This is where open source contributions under permissive licenses come in.

Something shown to work in a real project is also viewed better than out of context code snippets.

When you’re essentially saying you have nothing to show them, you’re indistinguishable from someone who actually has nothing and is lying about their skills, so the onus is on the interviewers to vet you, which for various reasons may not be possible, so they’d rather just move on to someone with a clearly proven track record.