I'm sick of paying $16 for eBooks when the hardcover version sells for $12... I'm with Amazon on this one.

And it's too bad, too. The Raspberry Pi is a really neat little device, but the CPU performance limitations are really tough for a lot of use cases. As I read the description, I was excited at the idea of having an Exynos with modern ARM processors at the $30 pricepoint, but... nope.

I was thinking of a different meaning of the word "stroke".

*woosh*

I'm amused at the mental image of something being destroyed by a "drone stroke".

Or back into the 90s with Starcraft if you consider that DOTA was a port (albeit one with a significant increase in complexity) of Aeon of Strife.

Marlin 2 and Falcon XX were hypothetical, and SpaceX didn't go that direction. They're currently building the Raptor, a methane engine with more thrust than the Saturn V's F-1 engines, and the "BFR", which is basically the same idea as Falcon XX.

He did state publicly that he promised NASA that he could build a rocket comparable to the SLS on a fixed-price $2 billion contract (meaning NASA would not pay a dime for budget overruns), although that price didn't include any second-stage upgrades NASA might require to meet its needs.

SpaceX is actually going ahead with their SLS-like competitor (Codenamed "BFR", I think you can guess what that stands for), and they're supposed to start testing on the methane-powered engines (Raptor) soon, which are supposed to be both more powerful and more efficient than the F-1 engines used in the Saturn V. However, without any customers paying for the R&D, BFR will take a lot longer to build than it would have if NASA contracted SpaceX to do it.

So, yeah. SpaceX offered NASA a contract to build an entire replacement for the SLS for less than a year of SLS funding.

Look at it this way, politicians produce so much hot air that you don't need a life-support system.

Battery swaps are unbelievably more complex to swap than switching a standardized propane tank. EV batteries (for long-range EVs) are massively larger and heavier than a propane tank, and in some cases are actually structural parts of the vehicle. Tesla designed an automated system that works for the Model S, which knows where the bolts are on the battery to remove it from the car as well as exactly how much to tighten the bolts. It'd probably also work on the Model X, which uses the same battery packs. But what about the Model S, which won't? Now you've got to handle two different kinds of battery packs, potentially different sizes and shapes, with bolts in different places... And then, handling it for other manufacturers? It's not hard to create a charge station adapter, but handling battery packs that are completely different sizes/shapes? No way. They'd have to standardize to a degree that would be a severe restriction in car design.

Tesla is just starting their expansion, sure, but the plan shows three superchargers between Montreal and Toronto alone...

They build them along popular routes, with the plan being to have them ever few hundred kilometers. They're programmed into the satnav, so planning a road trip shouldn't be any more complicated than plugging your destination address into the car and hitting the gas peddle, with the car routing you to superchargers as required.

That's a bit odd, no? If I leave my home in Montreal at 9AM to drive to Toronto, I'll stop at noon for lunch. I imagine most people don't drive 6-7 hours without a break.

You don't move to AWS if you care that much about budget; among cloud providers, they have some of the highest costs, and lowest performance. They're also one of the most flexible (in terms of what you can do), but there are a lot of mature cloud providers out there that will give you the same performance for a fraction the cost. Just not necessarily the breadth of services.

AWS is estimated to represent about $3 billion in revenue to Amazon, it's been a very long time since it had anything to do with Amazon's excess capacity.

No, but I certainly wouldn't try to do those 6-7 hour drives in a gasoline car without a break either. If you're going to stop for a bite midway, why not charge up while you're at it? And then you're not increasing the length of your trip.

Battery swaps might make this even less of an issue (a two minute pit stop rather than a thirty minute pit stop), but I'm a bit more skeptical about the practicality of those.

With the charging networks coming along, saying that EVs can't do big trips is (or will shortly be) false. The question is how inconvenient a big trip will be, and I'd argue that as long as your EV can drive longer than you'd want to before taking a break, it's practical.