True, but it will stop the hardware vendors helping them. They typically have a binary blob, and maybe it has to be validated with a signature before loading. Blob itself is probably encrypted to make reverse engineering difficult.

Cellular and WiFi modems are complex DSPs. Figuring out how they work and re-writing the stack from scratch is a huge undertaking. I'm just not sure it's a realistic goal for the FSF. Their other attempts to open up less complex systems haven't exactly had stellar results.

Because being lied to is "freedom".

Seriously, I've had more than one American use this argument to defend fraudulent advertising practices. Apparently its up to the audience to determine what is true or not despite most of the audience being completely unable to do so.

This morning I read about another ad being banned for misleading information and I thought, "won't this make companies more afraid to use risky advertising techniqes" and my second thought was "good".

Yes, and it's a developing issue. But also we aren't quite at the stage where people can download an app to their phone and screw up the local cell tower. If we were, you can be sure something would be done about it.

In fact when someone found you could screw with Bluetooth quick pairing using a Flipper Zero, it was patched pretty quickly.

For hardening they are both annoying in different ways, but neither is better than the other.

For network admin, GPO and related tech is the better solution for most people. For local, Windows is usually better than arsing around with shitty config files.

Vulnerability wise it depends who is handling it. Microsoft were responsive the one time I dealt with them. On the Linux side, the developer of that component can be helpful, or not. The guy behind systemd won the "worst vendor response" award for his efforts.

Linux is just as vulnerable, and believe me I've tried it and it's not better than Windows for day-to-day use.

The issue is the modems. If the firmware can be modified, it can be made to exceed legal transmission power limits, or behave badly on the network in a way that affects other users.

The same is true of WiFi, but the damage tends to be more limited. Screwing up a cell tower can affect thousands of people.

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

Before Secure Boot, rootkits were common. Back in the day I fixed a huge number of machines that were infected by malware that modified the Windows SATA/IDE driver. You couldn't remove it from inside Windows because the modified driver hid the files from AV software. You had to connect the drive to another machine, or boot a Linux live CD, remove the malware, and then do a refresh install of Windows to replace the deleted driver files.

Secure Boot put a stop to that and many similar attacks. It is a very, very worthwhile security enhancement.

Modern Thinkpads let you disable access to things such as USB boot with a password, and by all accounts it's decently well protected.

They also let you encrypt the boot drive with hardware encryption (no performance loss). Managed at the UEFI level, before the OS bootloader.

While a powerful attacker could still compromise the machine by say adding a hardware keylogger and then returning to collect your password, the reality is that unless you are up against state level adversaries that's not a realistic threat and the protections that Lenovo offers are more than adequate to protect your data even when someone has physical access.

You're still rewriting the proposals to get your figures.
It isn't 100 tons of fuel per launch, it is closer to 150 that they are figuring. Hundreds of m/s is still many tons of fuel.
10 launches, not 16.
400 tons of fuel plus 220 tons is 620T total, that is about 65% fuel, easily enough to reach the moon.
Landing with 220T would need some more, but as I said, i discounted Musk's statement.

Besides, who says we'll go to the moon with v3 instead of the 200t v4?

And with saying a year or more for 5 launches, SpaceX is expending starships faster now. There isn’t any real reason to thing that they won't have 4 or more rockets and be able to turn them around quickly to get the fuel launched rapidly. Lots of testing and development first though. I'll fully admit that.
Basically just figure that starship will have to same reuse abilities as falcon 9, roughly.

Even if electric power, water, sewer, trash pickup, and gas for indoor heating (in areas that get snow) are included in your rent, other services with recurring payments include home and mobile Internet access, renter's insurance, car insurance, and health insurance.

A lot of shows on streaming services are never released on DVD.

They still aren't reducing payload. 200 tons is intended for block 4, block 3 is 100 tons. 100 tons was the planned payloads for the starships I was looking at.
What you might be missing is that a "refueler" starship isn't necessarily restricted to just its payload capacity for fuel transfer. It could be deliberately redesigned for holding more fuel more efficiently, so when I looked it up, the plan is 8 launches. Not to mention that maybe Starship doesn't need the full 1600 tons for a moon mission. Right now, I'm seeing estimates of 8-10, though higher is possible of course. It's active development, things could change. Musk said it could be as few as four, but I tend to discount him.

Looking, it's around 6 km/s of delta-v to land on the moon from LEO. It should have right around 6 km/s when fully loaded (100 tons). So a full fuel load would be mandated. But they're also figuring on the lunar starship having some fuel on board after launch, and tanker starships being able to move ~150 tons per launch.

16 flights would be a worst case scenario.

Looking at figures for SLS for deliveries to LEO vs TLI, you're looking at needing ~60-70% of the payload to LEO to be propellant for TLI. In an ideal sense, around 50% might work, but 55% is probably the realistic minimum.

I moved zero goalposts. Moving the goalposts is when a person initially supports one position, then changes it when challenged. Given that I'd only made ONE post of the topic, that's hard to do.

The discussion was about equivalency, as you say. Personally, I consider "cost" a very important metric when considering equivalency. It's not like I only looked at cost either, I looked at the total payload as well. I considered the number of launches as well, for which Starship would still be cheaper even if it takes 10 times as many launches.

As for it being a "fucking month" of launches, who says? SpaceX is building multiple starship launch points, they've launched 3 falcon rockets in a single day before, 14 rockets in a single month.
If it takes 10 launches for the mission, that would be closer to two weeks, not a month. They CAN keep it up right now. They've done it before. Yes, lots of stuff to scale up, but you should recognize that Starship is still in development, they can build more hardware and ground equipment as necessary to support this stuff.

Also, is it really worth spending 10 times as much in order to send 1/3rd the stuff "in a single shot" in order to save a week or so? Odds are, given the costs of SLS, that they wouldn't save the time anyways - delays and overruns will still let Starship launch faster (once in service).

And you've actually identified yourself as the moron, thank you very much. You see, I'm not the one that called SLS obsolete. You did.

No one will know if you actually know what 'irony' means.