I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?

  Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.

*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.

Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.

"He'd like to see the government encourage more competition"

I think we all would like that, but let's be clear that is an ECONOMIC preference and (in essence) an ideological preference, not a security one.

I do NOT believe that the security environment of the US government - a government were a lot of sites (esp internal) look more like myspace pages - would be materially IMPROVED by having a vast array of churning alternative vendors of uncertain provenance being managed by IT depts that can barely keep up with one vendor, either.

No, the 'security-focused' answer is that if I'm putting your (MS's) code on government-critical and security-critical machines, that code is
- transparent
- only accessible to a hot box of HIGHLY secured and vetted A-team of MS coders (ie vetted to the standard of actually working in the agencies it's deployed in)
- every patch is critically vetted by that same team to the last byte, and yes, this means those patches are going to come out slower to the secure ecosystem.

Let's be clear that this has been the experience for a LOT of people in a lot of companies.

My firm is an ardently left-leaning European manufacturer who is all-in about a host of left-of-center values such as sustainability, DEI, etc etc. ...and we too are compelled to move to Onedrive, despite lots of objections and (by now) many examples of Onedrive's shortcomings.

Maybe the point of this isn't political, it's about a shit piece of software that's not ready for the critical needs to which it's being put, management choices that have little to do with actual staff needs, and IT accountability for following those dumb fads.

WHETHER we're talking about an organization led by an orange-colored nutball, or a senescent child-sniffing grandpa.

As someone in logistics, I'm more interested in the actual performance.

Amazon's operations run at scale that is usefully simulative of real delivery-truck operations, more telling than the performative 'tech demonstrations' of other companies (eg a truck or two that they trot out for pictures when the Sustainability C-suite is giving a speech) where it's impossible to discern if the trucks are providing a value/performance that means EVs are *actually* interesting for businesses.

The comments to the OP referenced article are few, but the one is positive:
"The Amazon Rivian vans are great. Quiet in the neighborhood, and the drivers I have spoken with love them. They also carry more packages than their older trucks. "
+ Drivers love them is a huge plus. They could make all the economic sense in the world but on a practical level, if the drivers hated them they're going to find reasons to make them fail.
+ More packages than other trucks is also huge.

In short, this is promising. Local-region delivery vans that can charge nightly, deliver during the days, lots of start/stops (ie the absolute WORST performance envelope for ICE in terms of efficiency, wear, and pollution!) is a great place to see where EVs can leverage their strengths.

So far, so good. But let's be honest: while the costs for this are large in absolute numbers, Amazon profit was $30bn last year. In terms of what they spend on shipping logistics, $200 million could still be a performative, boutique, tech demonstrator for them.

One question I would also like to know is regarding these vehicles being custom-built for Amazon purposes. I am curious if somehow the EV 'frame' is more amenable to easier/cheaper/more varied internally custom body builds than that of an ICE: that could be a compelling plus in favor of EVs as well? Would Amazon's mentioned benefits - driver preference and better capacity for the kinds of loads they handle - have been available in a custom-built ICE vehicle? If not, why not?

...at least we know in the hands of Uncle Sam, it won't be abused.

"...They are known for their resistance to heat, water, and oil,..."
"...they are persistent and don't break down over time..."

Feels like the latter is a completely predictable result of the former.

...but I know a lot of charities that would be delighted and thrive on $4 million a year.

I like how they frame it as some sort of tragedy, when they control their own purse strings.

...but isn't compelling customers to connect to your ecosystem to simply use your product (particularly when this wasn't part of the original terms of service) pretty obviously an anticompetitive violation of their antitrust agreements/evasions?

"at least it's real (leftists) talking about things (leftists) care about"

FTFY.

The only place you might be able to speak your mind for a moment before getting banned without appeal or explanation is r/unpopularopinion and even that is only a brief respite from the compulsory doctrinal lockstep. r/NeutralPolitics isn't bad either.

I mean, to be fair Reddit DOES fully align with Google's goals politically so them regurgitating each other would be on-brand.

Maybe it wasn't such a great idea to literally connect every fucking thing to the internet with tissue paper systems that were known to be blatantly insecure?

No, no, you just go ahead and connect your refrigerator, toaster, coffee machine, and front door lock to the internet for "convenience", safe in the assumption that your government is doing exactly the same thing for critical infrastructure for "reasons" that have more to do with not losing allocated budgets than any actual value.

FOMO and idiots overwhelm what I would say was a reasonable prediction of how informed consumers would behave. The error here was in assuming consumers were faintly aware of their own self-interest and still retained some ability to defer gratification.

The fact is, despite people bitching constantly about not having enough money, too high of rent, and having miserable lives never able to make ends meet, they still cheerfully drop $20/mo to six different subscription services to watch movies on their $1200 phone and buy a $8 latte every morning with a credit card that is nearly maxed out.

Don't blame /.'s "unrelenting upmoderrated pessimism" for getting it wrong; in fact, I'd argue that /. posters weren't cynical enough. /. to recognize that common sense is truly dead and that the sheeple who formerly skated for free on Netflix would cheerfully and instantly buy their own account, guaranteeing that every other service is now going to implement draconian sharing-policies because it's clearly the route to big profits.

Humanity created plenty of beautiful, wonderful things before governments got into the business of protecting the rights of authors and creators.

Creators will still create stuff, I have no doubt.

What I read (between the lines, since the actual lines don't fucking explain):

- they were getting divorced anyway (both the husband and wife have different teams of lawyers)
- someone at the wife's law firm clicked basically "ok let's call this marriage done" in some online portal
- the husbands lawyers didn't see anything wrong with that
- the judge said "okey dokey, you're divorced"
- the wife's lawyers said "wait! No! We want to undo that"
- the judge said basically that the court had followed the procedures it was supposed to, and if the wife was angry, she should file against her law firm

My inference is: very wealthy couple getting a divorce, arguing over how much she should get. Her law firm accidentally said "ok we're satisfied close this case" and his lawyers instantly agree.

So yeah, her law firm is upset because now not only are they not getting a fat % of the overly optimistic alimony they probably claimed they could get for her, they absolutely are legally exposed to get sued for that full amount themselves.

The hilarious result would be if his law firm helps her sue them. Even funnier if he pays for it.

Could we finally have stumbled on something that both political sides of this country can agree on?

Fair point on orders vs species, my sloppy use of language.

So yes, some coral species are going to fail; that's the nature of specialization.
As long as the ecosystem is stable, specialization is an evolutionary advantage meaning specialists can outcompete generalists. Once things get shaken up, specialists die off, generalists survive until the next stable span as specialists start to evolve into the new niches.

That's how it's worked for a *billion* years. Evolution requires death.

Assuming humans are somehow responsible to fix climate into the Holocene optimal forever with sea levels NEVER AGAIN CHANGING and ecosystems NEVER AGAIN CHANGING is absurdist fantasy.