While the hatred of WIn95 eventually dominated, thanks to how much it sucked to support, it shouldn't be forgotten that it was a miracle of backwards compatibility. It's not just that it could co-exist peacefully with Win 3.1 and DOS: it could natively run 16-bit drivers.

That gave people the false impression it was just a desktop shell, but it wasn't. It was a 32-bit, flat-memory kernel and userland, that could seamlessly run 16-bit segmented-memory applications and drivers. The drivers part was everything, both a bit chunk of the cost of development, and the reason it won the desktop space so decisively. And if it gave people the impression it was just a GUI because you could launch it from DOS and use your DOS drivers, that just sold more copies.

Of course, those DOS drivers and 16-bit applications were utter crap, reliability wise, and Win95 did nothing to be more reliable than its weakest link, so it became the support nightmare we all remember. And that wasn't really fixed until the switch to the NT codebase, which didn't really happen until 8 years later when most people had finally stopped caring about 16-bit drivers.

For me it was NT 3.1 to avoid Windows 95. Very similar to OS/2 at the time, of course, given the substantial common code. It was obvious that Windows 95 wasn't a "real" OS, but I was disappointed that there were very few games and I ended up dual-booting. I was delighted with Win2000, which really got the core UI elements right, and more so when Starcraft came out and would run on it, thanks to it actually following the DirectX standard (first big game that did IIRC).

I thank WinNT for getting me into server development instead of desktop when I made the career switch away from mainframes. Best decision I ever made. In a way I should be thanking Win95 though: my sense of "yuck" about it's internals is what really kept me out of consumer software.

Good point. Don't assume the developer suffered massive head trauma while writing this update, since after all the brain damage could have been pre-existing.

Yes, yes, the left loves it's train sets as much as they love Europe. They're not better here, or we'd be using them. Different geography, different problems, different solutions.

More people are able to commute. It's not that they commute faster. More people get to live where it makes them happy, instead of living where it makes city planners happy.

Of course, if this virus finally breaks our addiction to pointlessly dragging people into an office, cities will start to fade and traffic along with them.

You're ignoring the part of the law about reckless driving, though. And cops don't. I've seen cars pulled over for that sort of thing.

If there were a better answer, everyone would be doing it. But I'm sure your 5 minutes of thinking about it makes you smarter than the experts.

The goal of adding lanes is not to reduce congestion, but to increase mobility. More people successfully commute. Now, if you only add enough lanes, the problem will be solved. Pave the Earth!

What you should ask yourself is "why doesn't this happen already?" You don't need to know the answer, only reason that it probably doesn't involve having Clint Eastwood and Chuck Norris in the cab.

Trucks do get hijacked today, it's just rare because the criminal penalties are quite steep, and valuable cargoes have added security, beyond the driver.

That's a problem we'll just have to solve, as humanity continues to grow. Best we start working on it, I think.

But I also think any kind of "green" power should be backed up by enough natural gas power generation capability to avoid blackouts if all the green goes black. Sadly, people don't seem to be able to think that way.

No, the point of the conversation is that Barefoot ignores basic facts when it comes to economics. He does this constantly. He's an economic flat-earther, or electric universe guy.

The launch cost is the only real impediment. Remember, the primary reason satellites cost so much is the heroic effort to keep weight down. There are reasonable designs already for thermal power satellites that there's just no practical way to launch today. But with Starship's (designed) ability to launch 100 Tons to LEO (so 30-50 tons to a middle orbit that you'd want) and a 9m fairing you can have a large central core that doesn't have to fold up, and Mylar sheets for mirrors and folding radiator panels aren't that fancy, nothing like the PV panels used in sats today.

You'd need ground stations across a large stretch of the planet to make it practical, but that's trivial for a consortium of power companies that own land outside cities. A microwave receiving station only needs to be the size of a city block or so to avoid frying birds that fly close, and that's a tiny amount of land for a power facility.

Power sats just don't need to be all that great to come out ahead thanks to no fuel costs and completely predictable duty cycles that allow base load. (They'll always spend some time in the dark, but in a reasonably high orbit and a decent size constellation, you'll always have sats in the light with LOS to a given ground station.)

The problem with electric rocket engines is they have really bad thrust to weight ratios. Where dis you see one with 30 pounds thrust? I've seen claims like that for MPD thrusters, but never any evidence. If you could actually manage acceleration of 0.01g it could really speed up interplanetary travel.

There's no other objective definition. And the only real quantifiable subjective definition is the price you personally would buy/sell at. If we were talking about something with intangible value, like a painting, the discussion might be longer, but we're not.

There just isn't that much launch business yet. Companies are very slow to realize when the landscape changes, and haven't yet clued into what they can do with cheaper launch rates. Meanwhile, SpaceX has significantly increased launch prices as their low launch prices didn't create a new market (though they're still like 70% of competitors).

I think Starlink was created out of frustration with this. It's a business that only makes sense with launch costs much cheaper than people are used to. Rather than waiting longer for someone to get a clue, Musk just created an example new business made possible by the change. Personally, I think orbital solar power is the way to go. Makes no sense with old launch costs, but with Starship? The numbers will make sense.

So how are you accumulating wealth then? Mere complaining doesn't help. If you don't have a theory to present for the right asset class to invest in, you're not contributing.

The worst advice in the world is "it's all a scam, so don't bother working hard and investing". Ordinary people accumulate enough wealth to retire comfortably every day. It's normal. It's what most people do eventually.

If what you're saying is "the normal path where you invest and retire with enough to be OK is all a scam, you should die poor like I will but at least I didn't fall for it" then you're a damn fool.

It;s worth what you can sell it for. No more, no less.

A massive object passing that close undetected isn't impossible, but it is unlikely because it would probably disturb the Oort cloud enough to send more comets than usual inwards.

Apparently from study of impact craters we know that a star passes close enough to send a rain of comets in quite frequently by astronomical timescales. The last one, a small red dwarf, was only 50k years ago, so it will be 2M years or so until that wave of comets reaches the inner system. It was probably visible to early man during the day.

The next one, Gliese 710, will buzz the solar system in about 1M years, and is a fairly large star at 0.6 solar mass. That will make quite a mess of things 3M years or so from now.

There are probably more small brown dwarfs buzzing us than we realize, but these visitors in general are moving quite fast and sending a probe to orbit one wouldn't necessarily be easier than visiting Proxima Centauri. Of course, a million years form now if mankind is still around such things will presumably be trivial.

Wow, you seem really emotionally committed to Apple. Corporations are not your friend. Corporations are never your friend. Apple just wants your money, there's no reason to be loyal to such a thing. Epic of course also just wants your money, equally dumb to be a fanboy either way.