Sorry but from an outside perspective that just sounds nuts. So let's take your 'worst case' - $129M overall cost making it $434 per entry - you're saying there are only 297,235 (129M / 434) tax payers in the US? A quick search from me shows the number of filings to be at 145M+. If everyone could file for free, that $129M would be 88c per person.

And I'm speaking from experience. I'm in the UK. I've recently filed my annual self-assessment tax. I used the free service on the UK government web site and the thing that took the longest was working out how much to put as charity donation. Whole thing done in less than an hour and a half.

I seriously cannot comprehend the approach where you have to pay to be able to pay someone. It's...well...it's nuts.

Motorola/IBM too, same time period. I talked to the head of their chip division at the time. POWER (not PowerPC) was doing investigation into vertical chips.

Mind you, this guy also told me there would never be a chip faster than 2Ghz due to thermal limits so...yeah.

Or laundering.

I'm not American, but I know there already is an asteroid defence programme. I was listening to people involved in it on a podcast, Science Friday, the other week. Interesting stuff.

On the 2.5Bn years bit - yes, but don't start don't finish. We have no idea how long it will take to develop the techniques required for this, and there will always be a good reason to put it off until tomorrow. Needs to start and just become so embedded over time that future generations don't even question why we're doing it - it's just patently obvious to them. Won't happen in my lifetime, but then a lot of things won't happen in my lifetime that are getting worked on today and that's fine.

There's often a "we should fix problems on earth before looking to space" theme. We can be as equal, progressive and fair as we like and an asteroid still wouldn't give a damn and wipe us out anyway. Should we survive asteroid attacks, the sun will expand and burn the planet dry anyway.

We have to do both. Defence of the Earth (dramatic phrase, but see subject above...) has to be studied, funded and run. Along side that a long, probably multigenerationally long, programme of "how do we survive when the Earth is uninhabitable" including the ability to leave Earth and live elsewhere. These programmes are fundamental to long term survival of the human race.

I think one of the problems is that it all sounds very dramatic, big and sci-fi. But it isn't - we have direct evidence that the risk already materialised once and wiped out most life. We also have evidence of the expansion of the sun. All these things are certain, so we have to look at them as reality and not fiction.

Interestingly, I would regard never learning how to write PHP over 21 years as one of my greatest successes.

So AI ingests the text books to learn about the subject so it can...create text books?

Some is from London at least, because I ended up behind one of the training cars a while ago.

I'm sceptical, but I'm not on the "never" path. It was going through one of the most annoying parts of my drive - for those that know the area, just outside of St Pancras heading up to Pentonville Road. At that point you have a lane split, comically bad driving, buses overlapping the lane, psychotic cyclists ignoring lanes and red lights and pedestrians on a tiny sliver in the middle of the three lanes continually trying to kill themselves in ever more novel and entirely unexpected ways.

If they tested it there and they still want to launch - huh. I'll be very interested to see it.

Why not PDF - releasing archive documents in an editable format isn't the way forward either. Obviously in this case it's more of a statement than a technical choice, but...yep, archiveable read-only is the way forward for things like this. They shouldn't have been editable to start with.

International trade wars are one thing, but reverting to Microsoft Works format is going too far.

I'm reading a lot of "it's simple, just get a...". If you read the article, it says they're "associated with an early Mac computer". That almost certainly means these a GCR formatted disks, and need a drive that can do variable speed rotation.

It's not impossible obviously, but it's likely the best way to do this is with a vintage Mac itself. Which then implies hooking up a mass storage device of some kind to that Mac so that it can be transferred to something more modern. So not super rare and impossible, but definitely fiddly.

Hmm - that site mixes operating systems with SSL usage on the same graph. But the other thing is - it's stats about public facing internet accessible sites. The majority of Red Hat clients are RHEL are internal or data centre, non-public. I'm struggling to get a link that works, but the 2025 estimate is around around 43% market share, and I'm honestly surprised it's that low.

Sadly probably not much. Individuals yes, corporations no. It's the new "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" - literally.

What they've already done - close it. See also Red Hat.

Updates aren't necessarily bug fixes - I had a lot of functionality upgrades on my cars from them as well. And also, you're fooling yourself if you think the other cars don't need bug fixes - it's just that they don't get them until the service. This is the "we never needed updates with cartridges" fallacy - yes we did, we just never got them. I can name 8 bit games for the Spectrum which flat out didn't work, and there were plenty of ROM or even EPROM revisions shipped on older computers before downloadable patches became the norm.

There's now a LeapMotor car in my family too. That LeapMoter also had a slick OTA update without any hassles whatsoever. They're not quite there though - registering the car with their app requires dealer action on order numbers or something, and that's still not sorted out. The OTA stuff though - couldn't fault it at all.a