I do find it bizarre that a country like the USA has so much automation in use for elections. It's not as if it's really that difficult to do using more traditional methods. I'm in the UK. Voting is by paper ballot. When it comes to counting, it's done by hand with appropriate oversight. None of this stops the result from being announced the day after the election. Indeed, for some constituencies, they've made the counting into something of a race to be the first to complete the count. Now, I can understand the practical issues with countries like China and India but the USA could easily follow the same reliable and safe method.

Trust might be part of it but it's not the only thing. One of the things that keeps the Oracle database relevant is that Oracle continues to develop the product. When I first started working as a DBA, there was the usual 'wars' over which DB was better. Sybase vs Oracle, MSSQL vs Oracle and even DB/2 vs Oracle. The reality is that Oracle has been successful because of substantial new features. Take Sybase and the biggest new feature of the last 20 years was an increase to the maximum DB size. The other thing to look at is the features that enterprises use/need. Where I am, we lean very heavily on both RAC and dataguard. If you want high availability then you need those. Now, I do realise there are plenty of alternatives now and they are increasingly good. But quite often, the advantages can create problems. Yes, you can redevelop your application for cockroach but then you have to deal with the problems that will create. Some people make that work but many are not interested in the work that is needed. You can also consider non-relational databases. The problem here is that you start to lose some of the more fundamental database features that you relied on (such as data integrity). At the end of the day, Oracle really is amongst the best of the RDBMS databases and that's unlikely to change.

I don't really see an issue with SpaceX carrying the astronauts to the moon. It always seemed bizarre to me that the relatively tiny Artemis capsule would dock in lunar orbit with a much larger and more capable craft that is only going to take the astronauts to the surface.

I'm sure a lot of us are thinking this. Why is this the case? Are all screens equal? OLED vs LCD. TFT vs IPS? Are e-ink readers like remarkable any better? Lots of questions but so far it seems the only answer is that screens are worse than books without a reason. Hopefully this will lead to improvements in screens such that there will be comparable comprehension to books.

On the other hand...I don't think that Apple has ever been much of an innovator. What they are good at is recognizing the right time to enter a market. At that point they do a really good job of packaging the product and it inevitably is successful. Have Apple realized that the time is now?

I don't know much of the details of this bill. However, this is something that has already happened in the UK (and I guess a lot of other countries). The main motivation for this was that it was a tax dodge. In the UK, contractors were able to take a very small salary from their company and then pay the majority of their income via share dividends. For IT contractors in particular, this made sense to avoid the 40% tax threshold on income. The main issue was that many people doing this were effectively full time employees with only a single customer who they were working full time for. You might change customer occasionally but you could stay with that customer for many years. These days, you need to show you have income from more than one source or that you have a contract that allows things like subcontracting. For those of us affected by this, most of us managed to get well paying permanent jobs. Maybe not quite as lucrative is before but actually not too bad once you consider the benefits.

It's about your intention. If your development methodology is to rapidly prototype and test your rocket, then failures are expected and you make plans to learn from them. On the other hand, if your development method is to produce a final product for the first launch then it's reasonably expected to be successful. In the case of the Vulcan, it's clear that with a mission beyond just getting the rocket into space that this failure was not reasonably expected. As you say though, space is hard and we know from many other programs how things can still go wrong.

vi was introduced in 1976. Keep in mind that ed was written when using teletypes was still fairly common.

There are some major issues in the UK power industry from a customer perspective. Most relevant to this discussion though is that all electricity prices are based on the cost to generate electricity using natural gas. Because of the war in Ukraine, gas prices are high and consequently electricity prices are high, regardless of the source. It's criminal but that's the UK government for you.

It might be the case that new panels don't have a problem with degradation but that's not the case on older ones. My LG OLED TV is around 6-7 years old. Within 2 years, it had hearts in the top left from playing BOTW and a number of blocks on the bottom right from youtube. Within the last year or two it's developed a series of faint bars across the lower third of the screen that I can only attribute to subtitles.

Why would anyone chose to provide MS with useful information in this case. Other is going to be the most common reason.

The EU will save us.

It's worth watching. In some respects it is very dated. It's a universal truth that science fiction will always get computer technology wrong. Yes, given all the concerns about AI, it does seem to be relevant still.

I wish I could give you a point for your comment but alas I have no points. However, you're right. The Oracle thing is interesting but it's clearly the equal pay issue that's caused this problem.

Why is this only happening now and not 10 years ago?