Comment Prior art (Score 4, Informative) 29
Also, on Slashdot yesterday: Wendy's To Begin Replacing Drive-Thru Staff With AI Chatbots - Slashdot
Also, on Slashdot yesterday: Wendy's To Begin Replacing Drive-Thru Staff With AI Chatbots - Slashdot
I can't remember who said, that to be successful in our modern world, you must be able to contradict yourself.
This was on
Apple and Google Team Up To Stop Unwanted AirTag Tracking - Slashdot
[...] Blue Origin has over the last couple of years announced 1st that this rocket (New Glenn) will need to redesign the 2nd stage to be reusable to be competitive (the 1st stage is supposed to be reusable) [...]
If I remember correctly, SpaceX (i.e. Elon) considered making the second stage of Falcon 9 reusable, eventually discarded the idea.
To have full reusability you must replace the second stage with a vehicle like SpaceX Starship. Actually, the one thing I am unconvinced about Starship is size - so big! (Years ago I imagined that SpaceX could devise a "stretched" Dragon that could get into orbit on its own means, ditching the second stage altogether. Musings of an armchair rocket scientist
[...] people joke about "Elon time", but it's got nothing on "Bezos time".
If I remember correctly, the motto for Blue Origin is "Gradatim Ferociter"
Sad that he will be remembered as a tax evader.
I have memories of the old days as a self-taught IT guy (fresh from college, so I was the only one in the company who was familiar with these newfangled PCs). We had an outbreak of the Stoner virus (on 5,25" floppies, no kidding!) and I persuaded my boss that we needed some kind of "protection". And it worked! From then on, for many years, we got regular updates on floppy disks - via *mail* without the "e"...
Some times later, we got a "preview" of a new kind of bug - MS Word macro virus (almost surely "courtesy" of a customer from South America). We had no network yet, employees exchanged Word documents on 3,5" floppy disks ("sneakernet"), and the virus along with that. I kept disinfecting the PCs and the damn think kept popping up again and again. In the end I had to enforce what you would call a "lockdown" nowadays - no documents exchanged until I had disinfected all the PCs and all the floppy disks I could find.
R.I.P. Mr. McAfee, and thanks for all.
Regardless of quotes from TV shows, any conceivable self-sustaining (i.e. not depending from a constant flow of supplies from Mother Earth) human environment in outer space will need something like this (among many other things).
(Personally I love the idea here and now; but I am afraid I am too old to see it happen where I live, in time for my departure)
Does anyone here besides me, remember of software products named Dbase II and Dbase III?
Company Ashton-Tate was created by some guy named George Tate. Mr. Ashton never existed - Tate invented him.
Acording to a high tale (may be true or not), since people kept calling and asking of Mr. Ashton,Tate purchased himself a talking parrot and named him Ashton.
That, and there never existed a Dbase I. Of course, nobody would have purchased a Dbase I, so Tate named it Dbase II.
Disclaimer: I used Dbase III when in college (I think I still have a copy of the manual somewhere, written by Tate himself) and I had too much fun!
A point to consider. If your company / department was already able to effectively de-materialize documents and make the whole workflow electronic, *and* the management in charge can handle the change, you may switch from a work-at-the-office model to work-from-home.
On the other hand, if your processes still depend (even partially) on a paper trail, then you will need at least some of the staff to work at the office (and then, probably, you will end with everybody back in the old, loathed open space...)
(From personal experience)
Just a few months ago, Microsoft announced a partnership between Azure and Starlink. I guess these agreements are not mutually exclusive.
Microsoft partners with Starlink for its Azure Space cloud - SpaceWatch.Global
Microsoft’s Azure Space teams up with SpaceX’s Starlink
I guess Starlink + Microsoft + Google want to outmaneuver Amazon (which satellite internet service is still to come).
Also, emphasis seems to be on both speed and low latency.
I am somewhat surprised, that no one has proposed yet, that we should bring Freedom and Democracy to Titan ASAP.
A few years ago (2017 IIRC) someone in Italy proposed a thing called Pipenet - basically small containers traveling at 1500 km/h. Much smaller and cheaper than Hyperloop since it wouldn't accommodate people. I don't know if they are still working on it.
Of course, while this is happening, the Chinese have commissioned a brand new radio telescope, very similar in purpose... only bigger:
China's 500-meter FAST radio telescope is now operational (as of January 2020)
I remember a very old short story by Isaac Asimov - I don't remember the title and the plot is not relevant to the matter - set in an alternate timeline, where Earth is ruled by a bunch of guys dressed like Uncle Pennybags (the character on the box and board of Monopoly: top hat, tailcoat, striped trousers and the rest). Trains are still pulled by soot-spewing steam engines because, you know, you do not ditch a perfectly profitable business, just because some fool has invented the electric motor... (of course, the fool and his likes are promptly taken and institutionalized).
Asimov was up to something.
If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton
