Exploration may be worthwhile, but it is a totally separate thing and won't provide relief for climate issues. The only possible way it could help anyone on that front is that the select few that go are hard for the desperate starving people to follow. But you'd never be able to build a civilization at any scale there without also figuring out ways to make Earth way better. Any habitat you make that can survive on Mars you could make on Earth, any CO2 scrubbing you can do in a small environment you can also scrub that environment on Earth (problem is the scale is useless for atmospheric CO2).

Plants may be happy to have CO2, but the resultant weather may not be so good for the plants.

If we could "fix" the moon or Mars, then we could fix the Earth easily. Moon/Mars colonization is insanely harder than dealing with even the harshest likely Earth climate changes.

With a more energetic atmosphere, who *knows* what the weather patterns will be, what crops will be feasible, and how much plant life and animal life we can cultivate for food. There is some non-zero chance it somehow pans out with less drama than feared, but significant chance that humanity will suffer starvation and violence that dramatically harms our population. Seems like a bet we shouldn't be taking if we can help it.

If you're suspicious of Kingston linking to a fake Kingston store then I'm afraid you've reached a level of paranoia I don't care to argue with.

So... they pay less tax than most of their workers.

So? Google's profits, after the taxes they pay, get passed on to their shareholders who then pay more taxes. There are reasonable arguments that its silly to tax corporations at all, and reasonable, mostly logistical, arguments for taxing them. There's no particular reason to compare corporate tax rates to personal ones though. Despite popular myth corporations are not people.

Your assertion that Google pays no taxes at all is just wrong. Why are you even worth replying to when you just make things up?

Usually when people say "community ownership" they mean some imagined loyalty that doesn't have anything to do with actually owning anything.

I have no idea what this guy cares about, but he is using words to mean what they actually mean.

Just taking SpaceX specifically,

- Falcon is a giant step in reducing cost to orbit
- Raptor is a very good engine design, considerably better in many respects than anything previous
- the Starship program has already created and successfully tested the world's largest booster, by quite a bit, that also happens to be one of the most efficient AND is reusable.

Slashdot hates Elon Musk, for some good reasons and some bad reasons, but the pearl clutching over a couple of failures is pretty silly. Even if Starship itself ultimately fails, which it probably won't, the booster seems to be a big success and is extremely useful on its own. All of SpaceX a failure? Lol. The entire commercial space industry a failure? LOL.

the whole approach of the tech industry isn't suitable to the endeavor of putting people in space.

I don't know what this means. Do you mean the software industry that people call "tech?" If SpaceX worked like that they'd have sold payload to Mars on the Star Hopper. Meanwhile, the private space industry HAS delievered people to space. If I'm not mistaken it's the US's *only* way to get them there, no?

Ah. So we've gone from "BS excuses" to some qualifications.

Building rockets is harder than hitting the compile button. There is some risk, that is managed as well as possible. Failures are not "BS excuses" anymore than your inability to write a perfect bug free, syntactically correct program the first time.

They are working on it:
https://www.aerospacetestinginternational.com/news/defense/us-air-force-successfully-tests-anti-missile-laser-defence-system.html#prettyPhoto

They in fact do have the money, the population, and the inclination to go to war. The only question left is whether they can win.

The part where he claims to know what was said in secret between Netanyahu and OrangeFatMan.

My mom says there's a lot of white people in Poland.

Yes we all like to see signs that Microsoft is failing but did you notice that Intel is cooked?

Which part?

On the system requirements angle, PC gamers generally don't care anymore, however, MS can certify a few standard tiers, say, 'xbox 2026', 'xbox 2026 premium', 'xbox 2026 ultra' and the software and hardware ecosystem follows those.

Microsoft can curate a store of games regardless of the nature of the hardware. The app stores choosing to let developers run wild has nothing to do with in-house hardware.

For the software modding and third party applications, they can have their software platform do this. Windows being open is a choice (and in fact one they wanted to roll back with 'S', but to no success. They could release/license out 'xBox OS' for this experience.

On the game discs, the consoles are largely killing this anyway, famously Switch 2 game cartridges are likely to be nothing more than a dongle and Sony selling variants with no optical media at all. Online entitlement is their direction, and the industry seems content to screw over second hand market (that's a bonus for them) and anyone with zero internet.

A GPU only costs as much as a console if you go for a GPU more potent than what goes into a game console. An xBox Series X equivalent GPU is like $250.

Most games that release for xBox release on Steam for PC as well. It's generally considered an easy port for bigger market reach. That's why pairing a game controller with a PC is so popular, and steam big picture mode.

I would not at all be surprised for the near future for 'xBox' to be Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc devices under a licensing deal with perhaps restrictions around particular TPM endorsement keys and certified specification levels for performance and portability use cases.