Re:A rundown of the new Gmail
by squeaky-clean on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:55AM
(#16921512)
Graphite from pencils breaks into small splinters that fly around in zero-g and short out equipment.
Sometimes I write and review a long email in one tab over the course of an hour or so while still responding to shorter emails in another tab. Just yesterday I had to out together a small report with some log examples and network graphs.
So there's 2 tabs open. Sometimes I'll also have older emails open to refer back to them. Easily brings that to 3, 4, 5 tabs.
It also doesn't properly update the mobile app or notifications, and I have one coworker who shows up as a different name whether I'm using the desktop or mobile app.
Re:A rundown of the new Gmail
by mattkrause on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @09:27AM
(#16921319)
That pen thing would be a great anecdote....if it were true.
It's substantially true. The pen was developed by a private company rather than the government, but "the US spent" is fair if we consider it to refer to the country as a whole. Using pencils in space did cause genuine issues, but the Russian space programme did live with those issues until the space pen was developed.
>but "the US spent" is fair if we consider it to refer to the country as a whole.
Of course, that's not what anyone means when they repeat this nonsense, and the entire point of the story is to create a narrative that the US government is bloated, wasteful, and stupid.
I've seen it more used to create a narrative about US culture as being overly technology-focused and lacking a sense of making do / good-enough. Shrug.
Regardless, using a BS story to push such a narrative is a bad idea.
This reminds me of the joke where, upon realizing that normal pens don’t work in space, the US spent millions of dollars developing a “space pen” that will work in zero-gravity, while Russia just decided to use pencils.