The Moon is right next door. Thinking that we can pole vault to Mars before we can really even do more than crawl to our nearest neighbor is foolish.

NASA is stuck exploring where politicians and generals allow them to explore. The abandonment of the Moon exploration is what you get when you allow lawyers and soldiers to run an engineering program. There have been tons of paper printed with more interesting and important missions that they could be carrying out, but they can only spend the money Congress gives them the way that Congress tells them to.

Couldn't remember his name, but yeah, that's him. There were a **LOT** of companies and individuals who were rolling-their-own operating systems at the time, some of those folks are still here on SlashDot. Almost certainly there were better ones available out there, but SCP was in the right place at the right time, and Gates (or maybe Myrvold? I forget now.) knew someone who worked there. FWIW, according to Peter, Paterson said QDOS stood for Quick and Dirty Operating System.

My roommate worked on a project with the guy who wrote most of QDOS, which was one of scores of CP/M clone operating systems out there. Peter asked him if he thought Gates had ripped them off, and he said, "No, that's about what it was worth as an OS."

Why in the world would you fantasize that they "couldn't foresee any of these problems?" No one makes a commitment to purchase 100,000 of a type of vehicle without examining what the cost/benefit is and what the initial installation costs are going to be.

I'm continually puzzled why people imagine that Amazon is run by morons who don't know their heads from a hole in the ground. I worked there nine years, eight as a blue badge, with the most scary-smart people that I have ever met in my life. It was an amazing way to finish a career.

Hydrogen has a big problem, distribution. Somewhere between 3-10% of the natural gas used in the world leaks out of pipelines and storage devices, pump hydrogen through that same infrastructure and your losses are estimated to balloon to over 40%. Deploying hydrogen would demand an entirely new infrastructure, which is massively expensive and massively disruptive.

They could sell the thing, since it's their design (I'd want one for an RV), but they're contractually committed to delivering the first 100,000 to Amazon with options for more. That contract was what got them their financing to build the factory in the first place, so I imagine they're pretty intent on carrying it out.

IIRC the actual ask from Amazon is that the power be from renewable sources, not necessarily solar.

Interestingly Rivian probably wouldn't exist without Amazon. They were having trouble getting financing to build their factories, Tesla was having issues with quality at the time and being utterly unimaginative and risk-adverse the banks wanted nothing to do with a new startup needing hundreds of millions of dollars to build a factory. Then Amazon came along and contracted to buy 100,000 delivery vehicles from them, and the banks relented.

In Maple Valley most of it from Grand Coulee Dam and from the reduction of power usage by more efficient appliances and heating/cooling of buildings, although a goodly amount is from their own generation. IIRC Amazon is the largest non-utility generator of renewable energy there is, with wind farms scattered about and solar installations on the roof of many (perhaps most now) of their million+ square foot fulfillment centers.

The folks doing the deliveries are contractors, it seems to be a pretty good deal for them. Amazon will subsidize their vehicle purchase, and give them access to AWS-based tools for things like HR, accounting, route management, and the like. Whether the contractors take them up on the subsidies and such is entirely up to them, as long as stuff gets delivered correctly. It sounds like the contractor in your area prefers to buy used vehicles and beat the crap out of them, good in the short run but probably more expensive in the long term. (I suspect you're in the southeastern US.)

We get a package every few day for one thing or another, in our area I think I've had one USPS delivery and one UPS delivery in the last three months. Everything else has been Amazon-labeled vehicles, at least one of them a Rivian.

It's been most of three decades since pretty much any company's stock price has had anything to do with reality. It's all speculation, Wall Street has become a casino for the richest gambling addicts on the planet.

As a Soviet general told writer Farley Mowat, "The difference between Soviet propaganda and American propaganda is that no no one believes ours."

Indeed. The whole subtext is "Be afraid! Be very afraid! Only we can keep you safe, so give us all your freedoms and money so we can keep them safe too!"

Americans generally don't realize we're the most propagandized people on the planet, mostly because the quality of the mind control emanating from the professional ad agencies is so good. Best mind control organizations in the world. We're number one!!

Ultra-high capacity SSD drives have made a device the size of the Snowmobile unnecessary today, what formerly needed a cargo container of spinning platters can now fit in a footlocker.

You'd be surprised how many organizations have the need to move petabytes of data, mostly archival data which is only marginally accessible on stored tapes or tape libraries that break down as they age. Moving it into the cloud can make it available for analysis or ML training, or other usages which were not practical in its previous storage configuration, and depending on the options chosen and the cost of the previous storage may not even cost noticeably more.

Full Disclosure: I worked on the physical security of the Snowmobile when it was originally introduced, it was a really fun project.

The idea of the Snowmobile was to enable gigantic transfers of data, in the case of the first customer it was a GIS company with a data lake of 20 years of archived data. They built a fence in the parking lot next to the loading bay, ran some serious fiber to it, put in a bunch of cameras, and Amazon brought a cargo container full of racks of drives and parked it there. They then spent the next six weeks transferring their data to the Snowmobile (breaking their backup tape library three times in the process) while the AWS SOC continuously monitored the security of the container and their onsite security monitored the data line. Then Amazon hooked up the tractor, drove it to Portland (again continuously monitored by the AWS SOC), plugged it into the PDX data center, and over the next couple of days moved it all into their racks. Within a week the customer was offering products that their former configuration hadn't allowed.

The customer had estimated that transferring that much data via the fastest available connection would have taken 3 1/2 years, assuming no issues (as if that has ever happened). My understanding is that the Snowmobile was originally envisioned with the Pentagon in mind, as they have entire data oceans of GIS data currently stored on systems so old that they're buying parts on (literally) eBay. Today the Snowmobile is outdated, as a petabyte of data can now fit in a carry on suitcase.