To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

The solution is easy. WiFi 6 is only just starting to come out in the marketplace. If TP-Link hijacks the standard development procedure, solidifies a workable WiFi 8 quickly, and manufacturers/users in Europe, Asia, and Oceana all start using WiFi 8, skipping WiFi 7 entirely, the US will be left with an inferior standard that only they have gear for, with no option to use WiFi 8 for many more years because the only manufacturers making it can't sell in the US.

If someone "in Germany" has already done something you're just now doing, you are 'not' a pioneer.

It doesn't say "...a pioneer among German States".

Last I checked, Munich as in Germany so no, they aren't pioneering the use of FOSS "in Germany"

"This move makes the state a pioneer in Germany"

Um https://www.zdnet.com/article/...

Not anything. I'm sure when Federal troops take over the State Capitol and Newsom is put in prison for unspecified but certainly horrible crimes, the military governor that takes his place will make sure none of this kind anti-corporate nonsense continues.

At this point, we know how important proper hygiene is to our health, but we don't know, yet, what the results are of having all that microplastic inside our bodies. It's probably not good for us, and getting rid of as much of it as possible is certainly a Good Idea on the basis of better safe than sorry. Still, it's probably too soon to assume that it's dangerous.

Yes, there was a time that the 5.25 floppy, DSDD, was king, storing a whole 360K. However, not everybody used that storage format. I had a TI 99/4A that used an external 5.25 drive and formatted its floppies to 390K. Good luck using some sort of PC to read those if you don't know about the oddball formatting!

In my experience it is, how effective it is is directly proportional to preexisting project complexity when the commands are run. The bigger the project, and the more parts that are interfacing together, the worse it performs. But for small, simple projects and creating frameworks, it can be amazing.

I'm not sure what "Building the Metaverse" is supposed to even mean anymore. Is he still obsessed with Ready Player One fantasies?

I mean, if he's just talking about generating 3d assets and the like, then maybe? AI 3d model generation is pretty useful if you don't care about every tiny detail matching up to some specific form. For example, I used an AI tool to make an image of an ancient mug with cave-art scrawled around its edges. It got the broad shapes of the model right, but had trouble with the fine engravings, making a lot of them part of the texture rather than the shape, but overall it was good enough that I just left off the engravings, had it generate a mug without them, then re-applied them with a displacement map. It got all the cracks and weathering and such on the mug really nice, and the print came out great after post-processing (cold-cast bronze + patina & polishing).

(I ended up switching from cave art to Linear A, because I also plan to at some point make a Linear B mug so that I can randomly offer guests one of the two mugs, have them rate it, and thus conduct Linear A-B Testing)

When you're angry about the Klan being portrayed as the bad guys...

It's a cute "attack", but not practical in the real world. The "poison" stands out like a sore thumb on your loss graphs.

It's so easy to get tempted into feature bloat these days. You need a microcontroller for some simple set of features, like doing PWM control on a fan and handling a rotary switch, so you get something like a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32S3 that's the size of a thumbnail and costs like $10, but then all of the sudden you have way more processing, memory capacity, pins, etc than you need, and oh hey, you now have USB, Bluetooth, and WiFi, and surely you should at least do SOMETHING with them, right? But the hey, for just a little bit of extra cost you could upgrade to a XIAO ESP32S3 Sense, and now you have a camera, microphone, and SD card, so you can do live video streaming, voice activation, gesture recognition... .... it really creeps up on you, because there's so much functionality in cheap, small packages today.

The irony though is that nobody really seems to bundle together everything one needs. Like, could we maybe have such a controller that also has builtin MOSFETs, USB + USB PD charging, BMS (1S-6S) functionality, and maybe a couple thermocouple sensors? Because most small devices need all these basic features, and it's way more cost, space, weight and effort to integrate separate components for all of them. The best I've found is a (bit overbuilt) card that has USB + USB PD (actually 2 of each, and reverse charging support), BMS support (1-5S), one thermocouple sensor, and a small charging display - but no processor or MOSFETs.

Neither would have any of the other anti-consumer policy changes that are liable to financially molest you.

JFC....I keep wondering where people leave where food and specifically meat is so $$$$

I live in the New Orleans area....PRIME grade Ribeyes and NYStrips can be had for $10.99 - $13.99/lb.

I llike to buy whole ribeye or strip roasts (usually at Costco) and cut into steaks myself, then vac seal and freeze them.

I know prices are going up...but geez....to me that was $1.99/lb for whole briskets going to over $5/lb (prime) these days.....makes my favorite BBQ meat more expensive.

Pork shoulders (Boston butt) was quite often $0.99/lb just a few months back, but of late the lowest price I find on those is $1.27/lb or so...

A whole top sirloin sub primal is like $8.88/lb this week at our regular grocery store....I'm going to get one of those and cut into pichanas.....sirloin steaks AND...cube up a bunch to marinate for shish-k-bobs.....

If food was really that fucking $$ in SD...I think I'd be moving out of that place pronto.....