Saturn V is the ride to orbit, not the vehicle for the astronauts. You can't just count the cost of Saturn V against the shuttle, you need to count the cost of one or more vehicles that were never built, because the Apollo would not have been sufficient to the task.

Make that "Little Joe II test for the Apollo capsule". The Saturn V sat that one out :-)

The first big test is next week. They will do a crew escape test from a scaffold, rather than a rocket, with the Crew Dragon getting away from an assumed "exploding rocket" on its Super Draco thrusters, and landing safely for the presumed crew. I doubt the capsule is reusable for much other than drop tests after an escape, and soft ground landings for the capsule are not scheduled to be a feature until well after the start of its manned use.

There will be a full escape test after this, perhaps later this year, in which the rocket is launched and the capsule escapes at Max-Q. Something like the "Little Joe II" test for the Saturn 5 when I was a kid.

Soyuz has killed its own astronauts. Progress is an unmanned Soyuz.

Crew Dragon and Falcon will kill astronauts too. Much as I cheer for SpaceX and hope for a wonderful future, this really is rocket science and people will die. That is the price we pay.

It's actually pretty easy to prompt a visit from the army if you pop up on frequencies where you are not expected, in some countries. Never mind any nice citizen-consulting sunshine-respecting mostly-independent part of the Executive Branch like FCC. Guys with guns come.

There are more licensed hams today than ever before. Part of that is because we modernized the licensing rules and don't have a Morse code test any longer (for which I take partial credit). And they already have a commercial niche. Most of them have jobs. Many of us got those jobs because of the skill we developed through Amateur Radio. In general they pay as well or better than offering ISP service to the boonies.

We don't want to see commercial use of those frequencies, even if such use would help some folks get more equipment, because if that happened, there would not be room for Amateurs any longer.

You should consider that all of the ham HF frequencies together are smaller than one WiFi channel. And they have global range. So, if you offer a good bandwidth signal to some home in the boonies, you have potentially used up that freuquency for the whole world!

I really have noticed people who were looking for me, standing outside of the mailbox store looking confused.

What's the point of the external marker? I never had issues identifying an Uber vehicle when it was coming to pick me up. External markers are obviously needed when you're hailing vehicles on the street, but they don't do that.

I'm familiar with the Microchip implementation. This is a 300-MHz-class 32-bit processor. Not particularly modern and not really fertile ground for R&D.

We did have two or three suggestions from commenters of open MIPS processor implementations, some of which are more modern. One uses a proprietary high-level HDL, which I haven't investigated.

The hostile environment is sometimes present in subtle ways, such as important discussions that occur spontaneously in the men's restroom

Look, if you find your work environment to be hostile then that's entirely your opinion and none of us here can really judge except through what you just wrote.

That said, what you just wrote makes me wonder if I woke up this morning in a parallel universe. Important discussions happening spontaneously in the men's restroom? Seriously?

I have spent my entire life being a man. In this time I can remember exactly zero conversations that took place in the bathroom at work. I have never taken part in one, I have never overheard one happening whilst I've been doing my business there. I do not believe this is some bizarre fluke - there's a strong social convention amongst men that nobody interacts with each other in the restroom. This social convention is only slightly less strong outside the workplace: it's extremely rare for men, even friends, to dawdle or hold a conversation longer than a few sentences in the bathroom. This is one reason why men's bathrooms tend not to have long queues outside them.

In contrast if I had a pound for every time I've been out with a bunch of women and one stood up to say, "I'm going to the bathroom" and suddenly the others all decided they needed to go right at the same time ...... well, I'd be a rich man. The amount of girls-only gossiping that goes in female bathrooms is ridiculous.

If you seriously believe that men are frequently having important business conversations in toilets then I don't know what to say to you. You either work in an extremely weird office, or you live in a country with radically different social norms, or no such conversations are actually happening but you've already decided you're being excluded somehow and can't figure out how or when, so decided to blame potty breaks. In which case you're just paranoid.

Yes they are making an argument. The author of the article explicitly says:

What does all this show? It shows that the key to increasing the number of female engineers may not just be mentorship programs or child care centers, although those are important. It may be about reframing the goals of engineering research and curriculums to be more relevant to societal needs. It is not just about gender equity — it is about doing better engineering for us all

i.e. engineering that is "socially meaningful" is "better engineering" and by logical implication, the reason women were not signing up before is because engineering had no positive social impact and was somehow not good enough.

This is a load of crap that's highly insulting to men, of course. They're seeing what they want to see in this data: that the reasons women don't do high paid engineering work is because of a fault with engineering rather than because of the choices of women. It's a fundamentally biased, feminist perspective.

By the way, despite the name this "Development Engineering" course does not have any prerequisites, like actual training in engineering. Their website says students from any department can apply. So it sounds a lot like they've invented some entirely new course from scratch, called it engineering and are now marketing this as a success for getting women to study tough, high earning subjects. But I see no reason why an employer would desire people with such a qualification.

So here's a different theory: it's just another example of men choosing higher paid work than women. Instead of studying an entirely new subject (specific to one university) which only focuses on very poor parts of the world and thus is likely to have far more constrained earning potential, men choose to do a PhD that has a better chance of letting them pay off their student debt faster (like an actual pure engineering PhD). With fewer men choosing to do the course, the proportion of women rises.

I found the commenter who posed this as a response to RISC-V interesting. The University of California at Berkeley has a completely public implementation, under the BSD license, without patents filed, which your effort appears to be positioned against.

It is a time-limit on damages, which is not the same thing as a time limit on lawsuits. There is still the potential to restrain an infringer who started 6 or more years ago from further infringement through the courts - and totally kill their business - even though damages for the infringement can not be recovered. And you can sue any other infringer.

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.