They burn something like 99% of their takeoff weight just to get to orbit. Their biggest cargo is their own fuel.

Where's the research on mass drivers/railguns, or tethers, or any of the "scifi" types of propulsion?

Over in 1. Was going to post the same thing.

PS Redhat, you're not a desktop OS, you don't need hotplugging automounting USB webcams or eleventy config files and a giant daemon to start things, you need them to be stable and simple and manageable.

To the bridge of Khazad-dum!

Oh, you said BALOG...

It's not a bad idea, provided that there's no concept of a conversation. There's no negotiating or acknowledgement that needs to happen, simply a car announcing what it's doing.

Baking in more than this to the spec or implementation will only fuck it up.

Everyone immediately disables SELinux, and people need to reinvent how they manage the system, all for no real return, unless you're one of the .1% who those technologies are targeted at. Make your system normal Unix, not weird Unix, and people will stay interested. Companies don't like moving targets.

Climate has always changed, the concept of "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it. But lets pretend that they're the same thing, because it will gather more clicks.

But they don't have to make new hardware that "runs all past stuff" because the other 999,999 people out of a a million will simply buy the new one.

Whose to blame here?

One day Slashdot is fellating Amazon and Google for their Cloudiness, the next they're accused of corporate evil for being Walmart-A or Walmart-B.

The only thing I see is a consistent bias towards and demand for free crap. Are there any adults on Slashdot anymore?

It's a product of its times - with many more "computer science" people in the field, math says you're much more likely to run across crappy ones than you were before. (Not a bell curve issue, the bad ones are more memorable) Add in the H1B headwobble factor, and you have a lot of shitty java code, doing things because it can not because it should. Add in a corporate culture where time to market trumps reliability or maintainability, and you have a management philosophy that rewards the above behaviors.
Java is shitty because the world has turned.

She's not smart, she's a dipshit AW. And also, not gorgeous. 6/10 maybe, but not gorgeous.

Try leaving your mom's basement some time.

Other than a desire to run the x86 version of Doom on your BeagleBoard, why would you need this when software is just a recompile away?

Bring back Scotti. Also, Tori sucked. Grant and Scotti are all you need. Tori is a tool, good for comic relief when you need a doofus to eat a chili pepper, and Kari was just T&A.

And my problem with that is they they must know that they're underskilled hacks. And they sit there, smirk and headwobble, and then claim you didn't provide Requirements or Do The Needful, and YOUR ass gets chewed out when they fail.

At which point I go elsewhere. Just because there's content out there doesn't mean its valuable. Most of the Internet is crap.

China has a growing middle class, and a growing class of perpetually single men. They need to stop the middle class from becoming so affluent so quickly (where do you park 400 million cars?), and they need to find jobs for the millions of sad horny guys who could easily become revolutionaries. If the cost of food rises a few percent here and there it bleeds excess capital out of the system, inconveniences a few on the long tail, but as a whole (remember, China thinks long-term, and like a single organism) the economy will be better off.