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.

Do we really need stories about rescue efforts after every disaster?

No, but some of us like the news - even that which you find repetitive. I find it interesting that, with all of the modern technologies now available, old-fashioned ham is still useful. Every time a disaster happens, even more time elapses and ham gets even older - and so the news is even more interesting. To me, this is just as anachronistic and interesting as if amateurs were using hot-air balloons to effectively deliver rescue supplies.

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.

There is objectively less innovation, literature, and even art from the Islamic world in the current day. You can measure scholarship per capita and it is not even close. They are squandering their human capitol on petty bickering and tribalism.

I just bought the USB-Serial adapter. Native serial ports on laptops are gone and they're not coming back. I know most of those adapters are total crap (so many fail when transferring block data at even just 57600), but chipset manufacturers don't even include serial port lines on the southbridge anymore.

3 ports means I can plug in a Keyboard, Mouse, and have one port for a USB Thumb Drive, Serial Adapter, Ethernet Adapter, DRM Dongle for whatever I'm actually doing with the laptop. If USB keyboards reliably came with USB hubs built in I could reduce that count, but you can never be sure what the site will have when you get there. Most USB keyboards aren't well equipped. In a pinch you can obviously use the keyboard on the laptop itself, but it's not as comfortable and most places have random USB keyboards sitting around.

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.

A whitelist is less susceptible to abuse than a cop, in that the whitelist is a file that can be examined and is not susceptible to bribery.