Super Dracos are for escape in flight too, including in and past MaxQ. But they are on Crew Dragon, not Cargo Dragon. Cargo Dragon did not carry a crew and wasn't programmed to save itself.

I rented a gasoline powered Chevy Spark a year ago. It's one of the worst cars I've ever driven. The seats felt damned uncomfortable (even though there was plenty of room for me), the dashboard was a clusterfuck to put it mildly and I knew when I was going 65 on the freeway because I knew damned sure I didn't want to go any faster in the thing. It just felt unstable. It was worse than the car I had in college, and it was an under-powered piece of crap from the early 1980s. I hear the Spark EV is a lot better. Then again my last three cars were a '91 Ford Probe, '06 Toyota Prius, and currently a Tesla model S. The only car that I've driven that was worse was the one I learned to drive on, a 1970 Toyota Corona with shitty brakes that barely worked.

Most of us do have a need to transmit messages privately. Do you not make any online purchases?

Yes, but those have to use public-key encryption. I am sure of my one-time-pad encryption because it's just exclusive-OR with the data, and I am sure that my diode noise is really random and there is no way for anyone else to predict or duplicate it. I can not extend the same degree of surety to public-key encryption. The software is complex, the math is hard to understand, and it all depends on the assumption that some algorithms are difficult to reverse - which might not be true.

Most algorithms to do this use the time between keypresses, measured to very high precision so that the lower bits are chaotic. So it doesn't really matter what keys you hit, and it doesn't matter how rythmic your typing is.

The problem with FM static is that you could start receiving a station, and if you don't happen to realize you are now getting low-entropy data, that's a problem.

There are many well-characterized forms of electronic noise: thermal noise, shot noise, avalanche noise, flicker noise, all of these are easy to produce with parts that cost a few dollars.

True randomness comes from quantum mechanical phenomena. Linux /dev/random is chaotic, yes, enough to seed a software "R"NG. But we can do better and devices to do so are cheap these days.

I wouldn't trust anything but diode noise for randomness. If I had a need to transmit messages privately, I'd only trust a one-time pad.

it would be very nice if Windows stopped insisting that its driver for "Unknown Device" is up to date, at newest version and doesn't need to be replaced by another driver supplied by the manufacturer. Once new hardware in Windows is recognized as "Unknown Device" it's about impossible to convince Windows to change it to something more reasonable. Remove the hardware, wipe all traces of its past existence from system, install the correct drivers and only then install the hardware.

Seriously, Microsoft, the first this issue appeared was Windows 95. And it still persists!

Communism has been tried on a large scale - see Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Nope. That was a totalitarian socialist program pushing a collectivism that didn't work. Communism is a post-scarcity society and obviously scarcity was the thing Mao produced best.

Whatever it has been used for subsequently, A113 is a classroom at Cal Arts.

I didn't actually work on GPUs very much at Pixar, the image computer I worked on was the grandfather of the SIMD image processing instructions on modern CPUs. What would become a GPU later on was a very expensive box from Silicon Graphics, I had one that cost at least a quarter Million dollars.

If they actually told us how to program their microengines, something good might come of it. But they'll probably just BSD-license a list of numbers, as others have.

I liked writing bit-slice microcode at Pixar. I really could get every last bit of power out of the hardware.

Maybe you should learn what communism is before calling anyone "commiefriend". (Which I have to say, is really repulsive. It's sort of like picking your nose over the internet.) I think you are discussing the difference between lasiez-faire ecomomics and regulated markets. Communism is a very great difference in scale from that. And it's never been tried on a national scale just as "free market" has never been tried because there are always economic biases that make it impossible. What there has been so far is socialism.

I think you're missing the fundamental economic issue that drives all of this. It's the provision of essentially infinite amounts of credit. This is done by government, not banks. Essentially all home loans come from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, banks and finance companies are really just front-ends for them and sell their loans to the government once financed.

Given infinite credit, any scarce but necessary resource is going to be bid to absurd values.

It is by no means being a hippie to assert that government should not distort the market for credit, and to expect that urban and suburban land values would return to more realistic rates once the distortion was removed. Too bad that lots of people have already invested in unrealistic land values. They would have to lose.

Superconductors just exclude magnetic flux. I am not getting how it matters what produces the magnetic flux - be it ferromagnetic or electromagnetic. My only Meissner effect demo used a permanent magnet.

We have nVidia helping but not making their own Open Source driver. Intel, after a long period of Open Drivers, said it would require BLOBs for future graphical interfaces. AMD helps with Open Drivers more than nVidia so far but doesn't support them.