I was actually impressed with that board; no hint of pricing from the manufacturer so I took the time to look up somebody selling it.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? $963.75? And for all its super high power CPU and ample IO the RAM maxes out with 8GB in a SINGLE SO-DIMM slot! Then, let's see, you still have to make your own enclosure.

I fail to see how there could be a single user who would not be infinitely better served at far lower cost by an Intel NUC or similar.

Maybe we do this to get going fast and we immediately set about improving it

Is 2032 your definition of "get going fast"? That's the year this hare-brained scheme is supposed to reach the level everyone is interested in; 130 tonnes to LEO. The Falcon Heavy is due to fly NEXT YEAR, and has 53 tonnes capability compared to 70 for this thing in 2021.

Don't design it with o-rings this time

What do you think "five segment SRB" means? The segments of the solid rocket booster are bolted together, and each joint sealed against the raging fire inside by several o-rings plus heat resistant putty. All because it's "too hard" to transport them from the factory to the launch pad in one piece.

In the 1960s, Goodyear already had a proposal for a very large nonrigid airship to carry outsize rocket assemblies. It was never funded.

The entire Manhattan Project, start to finish, including not just the basic science and hugely diverse intricate engineering, but all the civil engineering of building vast infrastructures, and employing 130,000 people, cost only $26 billion in 2014 dollars, and took less than four years.

This is just bolting together a bunch of decades-old parts, but will dwarf that expenditure. It is the swan song of what was once a daring and imposing nation, and clearly will never be completed. All the Congressmen who vote for this budgetary pork, and the President who signs off on it, should be tried for corruption. Those at the heart of championing and designing this abortion should be tried for conspiracy to bankrupt the nation.

Github FAILS the requirement for reliability due to being subject to DMCA horseshit. Will somebody please start the next github in a jurisdiction untouchable by DMCA and other thuggish regulations.

And stay there.

In a system with no property tax, there would be no disincentive to hoard property.

So? I apologize in advance; there is no way to say this politely; you can take your loaded term "hoard" as well as your consensus and your bowing and scraping to government, and stuff them. You started the name-calling when you characterized real property ownership as "hoarding".

If you get off on seeing people's wealth seized by force and redistributed, fine; viewpoints and opinions are the most basic rights everyone has. But if you give support and comfort to those doing the seizing, expect a little blowback.

Now, if you want to get to basics and discuss the pros and cons of allowing private ownership of what is called "real property" (basically land) in the first place, that is fair game.

Er, if you find a file whose contents seem REALLY random, you can be pretty goddam certain that it's encrypted. Even binary files practically always contain valid strings in the header - database files, exes, mpegs, jpgs, etc, etc.

You've got your tinfoil hat on backward if you think ITER will save anything. Cold Fusion is a fallacy and will never replace oil.

You are confused/uninformed. ITER is plain old conventional tokamak style hot fusion. This has nothing whatever to do with cold fusion.

Funny that you want to sideline the politicking when the Democrats are the fuckups.

You are arguing with an anonymous COWARD who won't even put his own identity on the line.

"isolationism ... That's largely what brought the US into the last world war"

The declaration of strategic-economic war against Japan represented by the oil embargo led to the US getting involved in war. This led the Japanese navy to estimate that it had two years of fuel left. It should not be bewildering that a nation being being thus strangled might retaliate, and that retaliation could only take the form of shooting war.

The embargo was calculated to respond to Japanese action in its own region with which the US disagreed - the invasion of China and the colonies of Southeast Asia.

Without entering into a discussion of the pros and cons, it was the OPPOSITE of isolationism which brought war to the US.

since 64 bit addressing is important if you want more than 4GB RAM

64 bit direct addressing is no more necessary to use >4 GB of RAM with ARM than it is with Intel. The magic is called PAE - physical address extension. It allows a multiple of 4 GB of RAM globally, though each process is, in practical terms, limited to 4 GB. For example, the Cortex-A12 core is a 32 bit architecture, but has 40 bits of memory addressability. 32 of those bits are directly set from address fields in instructions, and the other 8 bits are set by page tables. With 40 bits you can utilize up to 1 TB of RAM.

Those old enough to remember the 8086 will recall that it was a 16 bit architecture, but had 20 address pins, so could address 1 MB of RAM rather than just 64K. 4 of those pins were set using segment registers. The segmented memory model was actually more flexible than the flat memory model, because even individual processes could manipulate their own segment registers to address the full 1 MB range.

The only way I could make sense of it was that I interpreted the issue of "jumping on red" is that they are starting in anticipation of their own green when the intersecting roadway's goes red. There is often or usually a delay between the two, so it does give such scofflaws an advantage to flout the regulation and only endangers them if the guy in the intersecting roadway is also a scofflaw and is running his own red. Yeah, I know, that is an all-too-likely possibility.

In my locale, many or most drivers are actually ultra-cautious and add THEIR OWN delay between their own light turning green, and starting off. This infuriates me on general principle, since it indicates an assumption that the system is defective, and I suppose it depresses me that it actually IS defective.

The system should be bloody well designed so that when you are first in line and you see the change to green you have an iron-clad immunity to instantly plant the accelerator on the floor. Not to speed, but to damn well get to the speed limit without taking all goddam day.

The accurate way would be "able-bodied".

But that's not all that precise. To the sprinter, the mere brisk jogger is disabled. To the brisk jogger, the dog-trotter is disabled. To the dog-trotter, he who can but walk is disabled. To he who can but walk, the shuffler is disabled. To the shuffler, the crawler is disabled. To the crawler, the wriggler is disabled. Where do you want to draw the arbitrary line?

You're going to have to define something about being capable in context. Perhaps 70th percentile of entire population in "speed of jogging the length of a crosswalk when motivated", plus perhaps 70th percentile in visual acuity and hearing, plus maybe 30th percentile of mental alertness. Something about ability to swivel his neck should also be in there. And you're going to have to publish precise specs so the poor crosswalker knows how hard he has to exert himself, and whether he should just give up the attempt. Actually, you still need real-time feedback so he knows he's pacing himself successfully. Should he bowl over the 80 year old lady with the huge armful of groceries to save himself? Or knock the groceries to the ground, pick her up and sprint with her?

A better solution (strictly in theory) would be to give everyone entering a crosswalk a token which is surrendered on making the goal safely. The traffic light will then never turn green until the token count reaches zero. If some lengthy timeout occurs with the token count never reaching zero, the intersection is frozen in both directions, an audiovisual alarm annunciator set, and the authorities are summoned to evaluate and clear the situation. Unfortunately the DOS potential of such a scheme is huge.

In a more useful vein, one could suggest that separating the vehicle grade from the pedestrian grade in congested areas (cities, certainly) is the proper solution. With all vehicular traffic moved to a dedicated subterranean grade, you eliminate such vexing problems, including not only pedestrian safety, but also vision impairment due to precipitation and sub glare, traction hazard due to ice and snow, etc. Also, the surface of the city becomes one big pedestrian mall / prark. We have to decide which level bicycles belong on. OK, so I'm a utopian science fiction writer at heart.

Really all that should be fixed is to put a bigger gap between the countdown reaching 0 and the light actually changing.

Sigh. Completely misses the point. The "about to change" signal is ALREADY a sign that the change is about to occur. The countdown should relate precisely to the real world. You should know for damn well certain what is to happen when it reaches the end. Not at some ill defined point after that. Your idea just promotes craziness.

Light will change in 7 seconds ...6...5...4...3...2...1
CLICK. Only kidding; light will change in 5 seconds...4...3...2...1
CLICK. Gotcha; light will change in 3 seconds...2...1

Yes; the "about to change" (yellow light, flashing walk sign, countdown) had bloody well be long enough to actually have a fighting chance to respond in time. There probably should also be a dramatically lower speed limit within x meters of the controlled intersection so you don't need to make the "about to change" last for an eon as everyone speeds along at 60 km/h.