In the 1990's when I was at a company that did software development, I was in charge of hiring people for a small project. We had a policy that candidates should see Dark Star and share their impression of it with us during their job interviews. One guy had already seen it before his first interview, and was amused by the humor, and we hired him immediately.

The expendable version of Starship is estimated to cost less then expendable version of Falcon Heavy (due to production savings on the vehicle itself). So SpaceX doesn't need refueling in order to make a heavy launch vehicle that is worthwhile to the space industry. They just need to make it to orbit, which they were pretty close to doing on their 2nd flight test. Of course, the current moon mission architecture requires re-fueling, but saying that Starship is junk is just not correct.

Who is this "They" you are talking about? One thing I find annoying is the ability of people to paint so many other people with such a broad brush. I think you're wrong, and that very few people hate you or yours. People have lots of different policy positions, and a lot of them conflict. I think the majority are interested in advancing them peacefully and in good faith. A minority of extremists get a lot of media coverage, and stir up a lot of trouble. I'm not ready to start a war, or even a fight with those I disagree with, because of media potrayals of extremists.

I suspect that the number of people who actually hate the "other side" is lower than it seems. Probably not a full 100% on both sides. But even so, I think another option is reconciliation. Sometimes that works in marriages, and since the alternative here seems to be a new U.S. civil war, I think reconciliation is worth a shot. (no pun intended :-)

While I agree with your other points, they claim in their paper that they DID have a mechanism to revert any harmful patches, before they were integrated into the mainline kernel.

From the "Ethical Considerations" section on page 8:

Personally, I think it was very naive to assume that failing to catch these bugs would not be damaging to the maintainers involved. Thus, this study had significant ethical problems. However, they do seem to have made efforts to avoid code damage from their vulnerability-introducing patches. Given this quote from the paper, it is unclear to me how the code that Greg just removed is related to the study.

Spacex is a big user of Linux in their rockets and satellites. As of a few months ago, there were already over 32,000 instances of Linux running on StarLink, with an estimate that there will be over 2 million in a few years. Source: https://zd.net/30kdr4y The real-time version of Linux they are using may or may not be running the hardware control on Starship, but I'm not sure "consumer software" is a good description of Linux these days.

What about, say, Catholic Charities, or Mother Teresa? Do you think those are stupid and motivate atrocities? Most religions are neither all good nor all bad. To ignore the good they do is myopic.

You have to be trolling. What about the people who shot up cars (with occupants) in Atlanta and Provo. The guys in Atlanta killed an 8-year-old girl. What is wrong with you? https://apnews.com/article/914... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a...

Trump didn't twist the media's arm. If it's a new normal for the press to publish rubbish from twitter, that's on the press, not Trump. Actually, it's rather an indictment of the whole business structure of the press.

I think I'll let some experts in the field dissect the value of this study, before spending too much time on it myself. Of course, lack of peer review never stopped the media from jumping all over a story and putting a narrative on it.

I'm not saying people can't resist ads or take responsibility for their purchases. All I'm saying is that an irrelevant ad is less taxing on me in terms of distraction. I often hear people say they prefer not to see ads that are irrelevant, and that is a reason to prefer targeted advertising over generic advertising. I have a different opinion. If you're goal is less distraction, then a generic add, not a targeted one, is preferable. Obviously, not having an advertisement at all is superior to either.)

On the one hand, I don't buy at all the Oracle argument that the API signatures are copyrightable. Setting that as precendent would be the death knell for interoperability. No more making a replacement library for one that is broken. It would be a big a blow to Free Software. (Beside just being wrong, I think, in principle.) On the other hand, Google could have picked a different base development platform and obviously had the resources to build their own. They could have gone with something based on Javascript or Python, and with some elbow grease gotten all the functionality they needed. But they were too cowardly to come out with a new, unknown, platform. They thought that the existing base of Java phone developers was critical to the success of Android. It's hard to say even with hindsight whether they were right or wrong. But I don't have much sympathy for them, since other options were available.

Actually, I'd much rather see an ad that is not relevant to me. I don't want corporations pushing me psychologically into purchases. An add for something I don't want is much easier to ignore.

Umm. No. SoftBank paid $32 Billion for ARM 4 years ago. Nvidia is paying $40 Billion for it now. The price hasn't gone down (let alone down due to COVID). I'm not sure if that was a joke or not. ("whoosh" on me if so. :-) )

However, it's quite possible that COVID has played into Nvidia's outrageous market valuation increase this year, which stands today at around $320 Billion (more than Intel's). You can do lots of interesting things with that kind of market valuation. I guess buying one of your IP suppliers is one of them. Note that NVidia's market cap in 2016 was about $33 Billion (in August of that year), making it about the same size as ARM when SoftBank made their purchase. My how the tables have turned!

Words mean what we mean when we say them. According to the dictionary decimate means: "to kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of."