"Hope" is never rational. It is an evolutionary mechanism that keeps people going in two circumstances: 1) Then they have grossly miss-estimated the actual risk to them (a very common problem, see for example all the morons that are afraid of terrorism but are willing to drive a car), and 2) when most are going to die, but a tiny number may be enough to keep the genetic group going.

What is rational is actual risk management with real numbers. Your 1 in 1 Billion is not relevant, as the change that you will be killed by a freak accident soon is already far, far higher and hence completely supersedes that small chance. As such it is not rational at all to even consider it a possibility, except in a theoretical sense. Life is messy, and assuming that very rare things will never, ever happen to you is the only rational course of action. Anything else opens you up to scams and prevents you from taking control of your situation. That is also called dysfunctional.

People are a) stupid and b) very much afraid of death. Hence they are easy marks for this scam.

The reality of things is that there is no suitable cryo-technology at this time that allows even reasonable-quality freezing of anything much larger than a single cell. Crystals will form, it takes far too long and storage temperatures may be far too high for long-term storage. Also, the person is dead at the time this is done which may well be to late for any recovery. The other problem is that for the foreseeable future, cryo-revival will be infeasible and after that exceptionally expensive. Why would anybody revive strongly damaged legally dead people when making new ones is so easy and there are already too many anyways? And then there is the little problem that anybody revived will be displaced in time, with nobody they knew still alive.

This whole thing is just one of the tributes the time-honored tradition of separating stupid people from their money.

Seriously, find out the facts before posting BS. DDR has single word access times (and that is what counts) around 100ns. These drives have around 10...100us latency. A factor of 100...1000 is nowhere near comparable. What you are apparently unaware of is that DDR does not use any command queuing and has really small blocks, while the SSD uses, for memory, very large blocks and it only gets the 1.2GB/s because it knows about a whole set of future requests before it has to deliver them. That does not work for RAM.

If you limit the SSD down to RAM-sized blocks and force it to deliver immediately, it gets completely trashed by DDR RAM, and that is the only sensible benchmark for random accesses to RAM.

Some people really have no clue and only can compare numbers. Pathetic.

Well, basically they are aiming to get some degree of re-use. If, say, 4 in 5 can eventually be recovered, that would be significant cost savings. Seems they still have quite a while to go, but that is actually normal at this stage.

There was zero actual explosives in there and there was a showy, but mostly harmless fuel combustion which does not qualify as "explosion". Seriously, they do this in the movies because it looks impressive and at the same time does very little actual damage.

Actually, any competent engineer can. You mistake "Hollywood" explosions for ones that do actual damage.

The rocket is swaying severely. This could not have succeeded at all. The only thing keeping the rocket upright for a while seems to be some top-mounted side-thruster. Having the rocket hit the barge at zero speed is _not_ enough, it also has to be in a stable position while doing so. I do not see that here at all.

They will have to do some major revisions to the software, including aborting the attempt to protect the barge when the rocket comes in this badly unstable.

Because MS OS "architecture" sucks and they cannot match the performance of the competition without dirty tricks. These tricks come at a high price with regards to security.

Actually, it is not in any sane measurement. This is linear-speed only. For random access, even the original DDR RAM will trash even these disks by a large margin.

If I had ADHD, I would notice with other authors. I don't. Stephenson just is not a consistently good writer and some people cannot judge quality and will read anything if the name on it is just "big" enough.

Not worth the effort. And unnecessary anyways. Some day your vastly overinflated ego will collide with reality.

Simple: People that play the lottery are already stupid. Just remember that a randomly selected person is typically deeply stupid. Capability is power-law distributed, not Gaussian. The 10-15% not stupid ones pull the average score up by a lot.

The tragic thing here is that this abysmally bad level of security is by far not the worst you will regularly find in installation that really need working security.