It looks weirdly like some sort of baby transport accessory. Maybe perfect for iphone air users hoping that a warm, soothing, environment conducive to frequent suckling will help their purchase recover developmentally normal weight?

Yes, it's possible to build and deploy to your own switches to verify that the firmware matches the source. The trouble is, a lot of the code is bloody awful. There probably aren't any backdoors, but I'm sure there are security issues all over the place just because of how sloppy the code is. I don't expect Cisco is any better, it's just Huawei lets you see the situation.

Mostly true but not entirely. For the moment at least there are still applications such as airplanes where fossil fuels have no reasonable alternative. But yes, a large number of things that we currently power by burning long-dead dinosaurs could just as well work with other sources of energy.

And yeah, I think the whole world looks at the Middle East and is thinking: If you all so much want to kill each other, why don't we just step back and let you?

Don't you wanna be a personality?
An ocean in the sea
But you'll never make it if you can't shake it
So don't mistake it, just try and fake it
And I want you to know you don't have far to go
So we'll use all your dough
To buy new clothes and see what flows
And powder your nose for those photos
You're almost on your way to popularity
And we'll teach you to play
With icy stare and punk rock hair
And beatnik flair, we'll take you there

'Cause there's nobody else like you
And we sure care just what you're doin'
After we have gone our separate way
Hey, yeah
Yeah!

So don't you wanna be a big time entity?
Your place in history
But don't be scared of what we said
'Cause there's no end to bein' your friend
But wait out in the hall, we've just received a call
We'll have to dump you all
But don't you try to pass us by
'Cause we own you until we're through

And there's so many 'round like you
And we don't care just what you're doin'
After we have gone our separate way
Hey, yeah
Yeah, hey!

Some born with golden spoon in mouth boy is learning the expensive way that no, money can NOT buy everything. The laws of physics don't care how rich you are or how much money you throw at them. :-)

Even when you try to keep the implementation fairly practical just deciding that there should be a city somewhere without any historical logic for the presence of a city is a strategy with a pretty dubious success rate. Doesn't fail every time; but unless you get lucky and manage to find an attractive chunk of real estate that was missing nothing but critical mass; or you have a very specific purpose in mind like 'new administrative center without restive urban population' that allows you to just tell the civil service to live there unless they like 8 hour commutes and declare victory your odds aren't good.

In this case the Saudis started with that downer; picked a particularly grim environment, likely to get at least a couple of degrees grimmer in the comparatively near future, and treated aggressive deviations from practicality as a virtue. There's probably something they could have done to doom the plan harder; but I'm not sure offhand what it would have been.

True, but there are all sorts of things that we could do, but we don't because, well because we just don't. There are a number of things that come to mind. One is that novel solutions to problems often come from someone scratching an itch. The problem is, they have to notice the itch in the first place, but the problem domain of, well, basically saving the Earth, is broad and it is hard to see the forest for the trees. The problems to solve for space exploration can be much more focused, and I think that does actually tend to drive people towards developing solutions that can then be applied to broader problems. In other words, for invention usually specific to general seems to work better than general to specific. There is also the matter of drive. Not that drive does not exist for researchers working to deal with environmental issues, but still there might be a tendency for the space fanatic to also be able to maintain better focus. Overall, even if what is developed is never used in space at all, I think that working towards the space-focused form of these technologies might actually bear fruit that can be highly useful here on Earth.

Some of the technologies that would enable space exploration could also help us with the goal of repairing our biosphere though. Among our issues here on Earth is our reliance on fossil fuels. Hydrocarbons for energy make little sense pretty much everywhere we might go in space, however. All that energy storage potential for hydrocarbons is completely reliant on a massive supply of free oxygen being there for the taking. That means that basically all technology used for space either needs to not burn fossil fuels, or use systems with self-contained oxidizers. So those technologies are potentially useful for Earth. Beyond that, nearly everything you might do in space is more resource constrained than Earth, so you need to find methods of re-using the same methods over and over. Reclaiming wastewater and turning into fresh water again, recycling, scrubbing and replenishing atmospheric gases, etc. One interesting area is growing crops in limited space and with limited or no light. A more compact, direct way to grow food could massively reduce the area needed for farming on Earth and reduce the environmental cost. Processes to make steel and produce other metals in space, or to produce concrete in space could greatly reduce the energy waste and pollution of the versions of those methods used on Earth. Methods for local in situ manufacture of more goods would reduce the environmental cost of transporting those goods such long distances.
Basically, self-sustaining space exploration would involve the development of a whole host of technologies that would also help back on Earth. Space exploration and mitigating damage to/repairing the biosphere are not necessarily mutually incompatible goals.

Obviously, sooner or later we will want to do things that require our physical presence. And be it because the ping time to Mars really, really sucks.

Robots are way easier to engineer for space than humans, even though space is so unforgiving that that's not trivial, either. The same is true for other planets. Building a robot that works well in 0.2g or 5g is an engineering challenge but doable even with today's tech. Humans... not so much.

But let's be honest here: We want to go out there. The same way humans have found their way to the most remote places and most isolated islands on planet Earth, expansion is deeply within our nature.

So, robots for exploration to prepare for more detailed human exploration to prepare for human expansion.

And maybe, along the way we can solve the problem that any spaceship fast and big enough to achieve acceptable interplanetary travel times (let's not even talk about interstellar) with useful payloads is also a weapon of mass destruction on a scale that makes nukes seem like firecrackers.

Has What If? already done a segment on "what happens is SpaceX's Starship slams into Earth at 0.1c" ?

Barring pretty exciting advances in biotech(along with either the psychology or...less wholesome methods...of keeping people on-task when they learn that their 4-century lifespan will be dedicated to a period of drifting through nothing and a life sentence studying the surfaces of Kuiper belt objects inside a tiny habitube or something) you are going to hit a line where (human) exploration is not going to be readily separable from human colonization; just because shipping times become prohibitive: Anywhere on earth you can just pack some extra canned goods and a few spare parts and be there and back in under a decade even with age of sail era tech; even faster now unless the obstacle is political objections by people who already live there, in which case it's 'espionage' more than 'exploration'. Hasn't really been a notable case of 'exploration inextricably linked to colonization' since humans crossed the Bering straight into the Americas, with some weaker alternatives from the colonial period where it almost certainly wouldn't have been as cost-effective; but would have been theoretically feasible.

Near-earth objects are mostly in the same board. Shipping cost are higher, so presumably lunar mining overseers will receive less frequent breaks than offshore drill rig workers; but the moon is only 3-ish days away. As you move further away the numbers get less favorable; though they still remain within the realm of "there were people circumnavigating the earth in that time, even before we knew how scurvy worked" or at least "modest chunk of your expected working life"; and it may well be relevant that a lot of the more distant objects are either gas giants that you would only ever observe rather than land on, or very small solid bodies that you could potentially just have a robot slap an ion drive on and bring back for your perusal.

Ultimately, it seems like it boils down to an irrational emotional position. Some people, don't know why, just look at a situation and are all "the most fulfilling outcome possible would be making this the next generation's problem!" Leads to enough bad calls earthside; I assume there will be some particularly grim outcomes in more hostile environments.

It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

They're making a reference to AA191 where damage to the pylon caused by removing the engine with a forklift caused it to detach on takeoff. I haven't heard any suggestion that this was the same thing. It's been 45 years.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

First, Lego sets were never "generic". They were exactly what they were, be it a truck, a house, a castle, a space ship, or a dog.

No they weren't. There were sets that were just a collection of various types of bricks. They'd often have instructions for making a variety of things with the included bricks, but all the bricks were generic and not tailored for one thing. None of the things with instructions to build would use all the bricks. These sets used to be very common, but Lego reduced their prominence over the decades. They still make them, though. My sons have one of those sets purchased post-2010 - I think it came in a plastic bucket rather than a cardboard box.

You wait for the "pre-fill data" to arrive, log in to myGov, everything's pre-populated with income earned, tax withheld, etc. You just fill in the expenses you're claiming, offsets, additional income (e.g. foreign income), and whatever else, then click submit. For the last few years, the only things my wife and I have really had to enter manually is spouse's taxable income (she copies the pre-filled number from mine, I copy the pre-filled number from hers) and how we want to claim the Medicare levy reduction for having private health insurance. Takes less than twenty minutes, doesn't cost anything (besides Internet access, but we're paying for that anyway).

In the bad old days before they integrated it into the myGov web site, you used to have to download a Windows application that required Java and fill in all the numbers manually, then either submit online or you could print out a paper form and post it. But it was still free, and just required a PC with Windows, Java and an Internet connection. It sanity checked the numbers you entered, calculated expected refund/liability, etc.

Unless you're doing something fairly complex, you don't need an accountant or commercial software.