Article IV of the Outer Space Treaty of 1963 forbids placing weapons of mass destruction in space. I don't know if global-spanning space billboards count as mass destruction.

Billboards are hostile one-way communication devices similar to other weapons but targeted at your wallet instead of you. Generally economic and aesthetic damages, the origins and methods and goals of all idealized war, are glossed over in favor of the visceral and violent and murderous reality.

However, I don't think small de-orbiting satellite to clear space junk would count as a weapon. A billboard certainly counts as visual junk. It's entire point is to get in your way.

Putting billboards in the way of astronomical equipment pisses off people who can afford expensive toys to look at sparkling balls of gas and the rocks they light up. A crowdfunding page to 'bring back the night' could afford a few space clearing tugs in the cubesat size. Or at least a government grant to test clean up efforts.

This might even spark a race to the solution for Kessler syndrome. Or just render near-earth space truly useless for humans.

many game developers are deciding to drop support for an OS with sub 1% market share and 30% of bugs reported

How much of that 30% is bugs on Linux and how much of that is just bugs in the software?

We have to remember that the culture of Linux is very different from the culture of Microsoft, including the Windows desktop product. Linux users are encouraged to report fully and properly any issues they encounter. On the Windows desktop maybe you have a wizard that pops up and mails your private information to an insecure server out on the internet, if you are truly desperate you can always pay people more money to try and help you.

But Linux is actively losing the desktop market. Poor bluetooth support hurts. New hardware like stream decks are only supporting Microsoft Windows, often with religious fervor. The joke that is Linux audio support means shopping for hardware that support your favorite distro instead of the other way around. And as always, major application suites dedicated to Windows-only and Windows-forever means you probably still need Windows for your job.

Ubuntu may never be able to close bug #1 (Microsoft Windows is the dominate desktop OS). But I won't cry if a few more MOBA clones or the latest also-ran game requires WINE or a Windows VM or partition

Imagine if half the resources sunk into JWST had been used to make sure there were 2 or 3 Hubble clones floating up there now and for another 20 or 30 years.

We don't really have to imagine much. The Hubble design is straight out of a NSA playbook for mid-century film-based shuttle-requiring spy cameras designed to look down, not out. After all, since the technology went out of style, the NRO just up and gave NASA the old spares.

James Webb is a traditional Cathedral Project, complete with the homilies about planting trees that you won't sit under the shade of. It even has controversy about being named for someone that offends some groups..

Those taxpayers who paid a lot of engineers and scientists salaries over the last quarter century just hope that James Webb becomes a 500lbs gorilla and not a 1,500lbs white elephant. It's good to provide money to skilled people to do awesome work and not just to dig holes and fill them back in. But also, you hope that the shake table did more than a single loose strap could. After all, the telescope has to survive riding on top of a slow bomb aimed at nothing.

Hopefully we get a transmitter to go with the receivers a little faster than the visible light version. Personally, I find centuries for a usable communications device is a bit of a gap to mind.

Galileo Galilei was looking and writing down what he saw through a telescope in 1564. Dr. Theodore Maiman developed the first working laser, which is used in these detectors, at Hughes Research Lab in 1960.

We've been flashing lights at each other from mountaintops with campfires and blankets for ages. But I presume we are talking about something a little higher bandwidth than two if by ocean and one if by sea. And people have been putting lenses together for centuries before Gallileo thought to write down just how un-firm that Holy Firmament was, much to his local church's displeasure.

Plus, any method of jiggling space is probably useful as a propulsion system. Or possibly a new kind of weapon.

The young adults focused on living, instead of just continuing, need a higher signal-to-noise ratio than Facebook's sea of old people, cranks and commercials.

One thing that made Facebook win verses the many other social networks started at the same time was signal. They were exclusive. At first is was just for college people. Not random people. Not the average joe. The educated (or attempting to be so) and the cool kids you should look up to. The idiot selling snake oil or the cult pretending to be a pollical party were still busy on the street corners with the other beggars.

Then Facebook went mainstream. The signal went down with noise from everyone. You feed became full of their petty, not-cool-to-me updates. Facebook hooked in the monetization engine to pay for this. Pointless clicker games, pay-to-win time sinks, and sponsored advertising took over.

Between the sea of garbage from people who really should learn to shut up and the corporate shills, Facebook still managed became required for 'normal people' to live. They controlled the quality of the user experience and preventing the User Interface horrors of myspace and the wild wider web of personal websites.

But Facebook is dependent on users to login and post. So it cannot control the content, cannot control the signal. Just the noise. They dialed noise to the max. Now people flee. The source of that content is moving to new sites with higher signal to noise ratios.

This is a temporary age of social Balkans. Not one, but many services. Social tweakers of all ages are hooking up on telegram. Bored people getting kitten pics and serotonin highs from Tik Tik shorts. The gamers coordinating through discord communities built around their favorite Youtube videographers and Twitch streamers.

Mom, Dad, Grandpa and Grandma just didn't notice while they were buried in 401k forms, dental appointments, soccer practice and the latest weight loss fad. But the kids sure did.

Thanks to money, though, all Facebook has to do is buy or build the right set of services. The smart people (Google, Amazon) bought into the game (Youtube, Twitch.tv) while Facebook was busy playing Farmville like it was still 2009. They won't have to be Facebook anymore, but can still be a place to be. And get all that new money.

As they say, "For the Shareholers!"

There is also a limited amount of helium on the planet, mostly a thorium and uranium decay by-product. A fusion factory for production in useful quantities of that can be profitable in itself.

This is not just party balloons and the Goodyear blimp. If the lithium blanket can generate helium-4 then a lot of useful science projects would pay top dollar for it. They already do for unstable natural deposits that literally go sky high on the regular.

This won't apply to designs that don't use tritium catalyzed fusion unless they used lithium to bleed off hot neutrons on purpose. But that's a good fraction of the designed being considered and we have experimental evidence these shields work.

You could market it as '100% Organic Natural Flypaper" and subtly smear Big Flypaper as a corporate conspiracy in your marketing literature.

If politicians can misuse human logical errors to climb to power on falsehoods about medicine, you can exploit the same thing to help spread and domesticate an endangered or rare species. Or make a quick buck selling flowers that grown right on people's doorsteps for free.

After all, the best survival strategy right now is to be cute, useful or baring that at least tasty, to people.

The EIP 1559 paper, available on GitHub, introduces a new type of transaction that does a number of things. It makes some claims, but they are dubious. Most of the text covers the intent of the changes which does not align with the actual impact it will have.

tl;dr - adds a neat way to keep prices of using the Etherium network low but throws in an unrelated tax on the poor and actual users to benefit the rich early adopters who hoard their tokens.

Most of the changes are unrelated, but just bundled into the new transaction method. If it were a code commit I'd have requested they break it up into different parts. It's worse than a government spending bill after the lobbyists had their way.

Transactions are processed by miners and the miners are rewarded like in most other distributed finance or 'bitcoin' systems with some coin for doing that work. This includes 'gas' or a direct fee to the person who requested the transactions. This proposal changes this gas system.

Some of the features are good such as discounting gas to encourage miners to set lower costs on processing and penalizing higher than average gas costs. The replaces the free market that drives the cost up to match how hard it is to compute the transaction.

The EIP also requires gas be ETH. The EIP claims "This ensures that only ETH can ever be used to pay for transactions on Ethereum" I do not see how this excluded extrinsic payment method mechanisms. But without this the burning feature is avoidable by just using some other token for gas.

The proposal splits up the gas being paid into two buckets. One that you, the miner, is paid for processing the transaction and that is variable and controlled by the rate discounting. Another part, the base value, is sent to a dead letter wallet. Thus a small tax is paid to nobody by the miner instead of captured as value from performing the mining.

The burning of the base gas value This is intended to control ETH inflation according to the justification in the EIP. The burning system, presuming someone cannot actually get access to the dead wallet addresses and make themselves instantly rich, creates deflationary pressure.

Inflation is reduction in value over time of the token as a value holder of currency, Inflation is generally used in an economy to encourage people holding currency to spend their money into the economy instead of holding onto it. Basically a "use it or lose it" scenario where money in savings becomes less valuable over time but investments continue to track or beat inflation.

Deflation in any value proxy token, fiat money or bitcoin or anything else with floating value, is very very bad for users. But it is great for passive holders and token hoarders. Collectors do nothing useful and see their coins gain value every day. Those who actually use the token watch as the system burns their tokens. This actual users are penalized. They could do better by just sitting on their coins instead of using them for value gaining transactions.

This could be seen as a rate limiter on use of the network. Or as a 'screw you, I've got mine' proposal. This is the wealthy taxing the poor for the later having to use their money to survive.

Burning also complete irrelevant to the features for controlling the market price of gas through discounting. The burning feature only requires the ETH type to be forced to give it the teeth to be useful. Otherwise nobody would want to use ETH for gas as some of the price tag on the processing is being lost to the miner as a tax.

The former is a reasonable idea. It pushes the gas price toward the low price. That reduces miner profitability but still enables them to big the price up as needed. This can encourage efficient miners and push out inefficient ones, presuming it doesn't result in too many idiots (i.e. those playing the game at a loss.) The later burning feature is just a money grab by the already invested.

In Tolkin's tales the seven given to the stocky dwarves toiling in their dark caves did not turn them to the master as expected. Instead they honed their greed for delving deep.

Likewise any security system is at the mercy of shipment. Once in hand it is the hardware owner who has the control.

Your typical serf might not even be able to deal with the failure of a network card.

But these Linux and GNU and BSD folk toil endlessly in those deep caves. They have proven time and time again to be quite capable. If of any they, they are able to wrest shinning jewels from the dross piled high into mountains in these monetary kingdoms of doom.

At the worst, it's a new source of entropy for low-security processes.

In the history of the biological world, mostly it has been single-celled organisms in the mud. Some of this is likely just survivorship bias. We only get to see the few things that die in a way that leaves behind traces, like oil and coal and giant skeletons of ancient monsters stomping through flower-less and grass-less forests of ferns.

The two things this history tells us is that:

1. Coal, gas and oil should be found on any tectonically active world as eons of bacteria or analogues are processed by geology.
2. Complex life forms will likely include crabs.

The local equivalent of hairless monkeys with ray guns are not expected.

But we may see some interesting takes on seafood. If the Universe is full of edible sushi that's just a bonus.

Modern in the 21st century usually means maximizing advertisement exposure.

To do User Experience correctly you cannot do it like Open Source people do. You cannot expect people to be able to use something just written by you for you. You have to sit other people down and watch them use your product. You have learn from how users actually use your interfaces. User testing, and lots of it, are invaluable and obvious when missing. You have to push that feedback into the system with those "Quality of Life" improvements.

But that presumes you have users and not just products - eyeballs - to sell. The Internet was where people could share things. Then companies made payroll by taking those things and reselling them to us. Then they got rich selling people's access to advertisers.

So I expect the worst. Abominations like mystery meat navigation systems that give more time to view ADs. Dynamically changing toolbars that hide the things you need between AD spaces. Tools that are only links to where to buy that add-on or extension. Help menus with sponsored content. Documentation that is just links to pay-walled training sites. Helpful suggestions of new things to buy that would 'solve' your current problem. Useless white pace everywhere. Un-selectable text (unless you buy our special text selector tool!) Un-resizable windows with roll-under ADs.

Oh, wait. That's already what a lot of applications and websites are like today. Sorry, this is about future designs.

The only user testing I expect on a Modern Design is how much dwell time users have on the marketing packed into their 'customer' experience. Maybe it will be different and Quality of Life will have meaning again. At least for people other than the sales and marketing department for once. But I would not take that bet.

I'm more concerned that the TTL for that ping is apparently 64 decades.

I knew US Internet was bad. But that's like creating an IP Datagram Over Snail (IPDOP) extension to RFC 1149.

Reality at the hands of the bean counters reminds me of a dystopian scifi triller. Requiring online license verification for safety equipment, medical appliances and critical infrastructure like the power grid is like replacing the oceans with gasolone. How long until someone throws a lit match into the ocean of gas just to be to one who did?

Not Free is a terrible argument. Using a Windows computer, particularly a company or school issues laptop, is as free as taking a taxi ride.

At one point is was just a simple way for a private capital owner to rent out their property for profit. And you get a ride from point A to point B.

Now it's a monetizable experience. You will see ADs. Your ride may be quite poor because corners can be cut on cleanliness and quality to extract further profit from each warm butt in a seat. The route may be ordered to enhance the amount of time you see advertisements or take you to alternative locations to make purchases. And you might even get into an unwanted political conversation with your driver, leading to much higher fees as you circle the block arguing about something you might not care about.

It's their car, they own it. You get to rent it. But under their terms.

Microsoft owns your computer as the primary party, by controlling the software you installed on there (either directly or through pre-install). With their office monopoly they can just assume this. Your laptop vendor is probably the second owner who will install and update remote access software to keep drivers and antivirus up to date. Your desktop support team is just the third owner, possibly helping you deal with the B.S. from the first two owners while adding their own.

You though? You are the chap in the back getting taken for a ride.

That is what the GNU Philosophy and GPL was founded on. Unlike BSD or other free licenses, when you make a change to a GPL software and sell, rent or give a copy to someone you must give them ownership of your improvement. You cannot prevent them through law to remove your change, block your change or further improve it. They also are restricted in the same way.

It is pure capitalism. This is private ownership of property and means of production. The only confusion is: who is the owner here?

Hint: it's not you.

The key point to remember about the AI footage is that these tools are creating images that are tailored to look good to the human eye. This is not an accurate representations of the actual events.

It doesn't matter if you think the video footage was on a soundstage or the real lunar surface. The additional frames and changes to the scenes are aesthetic and carefully selected for such. Anything useful of scientific value is diluted or outright removed if it doesn't meet the Hollywood blockbuster style.

As a study of film technique it is excellent. As an accurate presentation of a moon landing it is a failure. Cameras shake while carried. How they do so is useful data. Hollywood uses steady cams and processing to eliminate shake. Even blinding glare off surfaces and grainy dust is data that can be processed by a future PhD candidate into a paper that extends our knowledge just a little bit.

But make no mistake, this is bread and circuses. We are as a species very good at feeding ourselves these kinds of distractions. Fortunately the revolution is happening next door by people not glued to the latest fad.

The only thing I'm bitter about is that we spent the money on the infrastructure to make prettier Apollo footage. Instead and going forward we can invest in better launch capacity. Or we could invest in revolutionary launch methods that make launch cheap enough to do vacations on the moon. Were it so that taking real cameras there and shooting real, new, better raw footage will be cheaper we'd be one step closer to a multi-planetary species.