Yes. China is trying to build a Falcon-9 competitor while SpaceX is working to make Falcon-9 obsolete.

Based on the summary this seems to be comparing government-funded space programs while ignoring the commercial space programs. A single Starship, for example, apparently has a similar internal volume to the entire ISS, though obviously it would shrink once you added life support and other hardware required for people to live on board for long periods.

But still, dock four Starships to a central module providing power and other requirements for long-term habitation and you have something with far more volume than ISS for probably a fraction of the cost of a single ISS module when it was launched twenty or thirty years ago.

The wet market hypothesis claims the Covid outbreak began in the Wuhan wet market in December 2019.

We now know from analysis of stored patient samples that it was in Italy by October 2019(*) and have inconclusive tests from September 2019 so it may have been there earlier. I also have been told by people working in medicine in North America that they have found positive stored samples from patients in October 2019.

So wherever it came from, it almost certainly did not originate in the wet market in December 2019 and appears to have been worldwide by October 2019. This explains the 'super-duper scary spread' in spring 2020 because it had been going around for months and as soon as they started mass testing they started finding lots of people who tested positive.

(*) And we already had pretty good evidence of this in early 2020 as an Italian virologist had been tracking an unusual respiratory disease through the winter before it suddenly became The Pandemic.

However, this is getting a bit off-topic for railways, unless it spread by rail.

Yeah. One of the reasons the buses suck so much here is because the bus drivers won't force the scumbags to pay the fare because they don't want to get attacked by scumbags.

Most of this kind of transport planning is created by people who think we're still living in a prosperous, high-trust society where people will obey their dictats. And we're not.

The only reason most people run Windows is to run crappy old Windows software from years ago. So the faster Microsoft kill backwards compatibility the sooner they kill Windows.

Which they probably don't care about as apparently most of their profits come from "The Cloud" these days. Which probably explains why Windows tries so hard to steal all my data and shove into "The Cloud."

I haven't tried it, but I've seen many people online say that they installed Windows 11 on 'unsupported' Windows 10 hardware. Few people care about the rest.

If I remember correctly, the Taliban began as a group protecting children from pedos. So it's possible but seems unlikely.

I agree that suicide is a personal decision, so I don't think a person should be criminalized for attempting it. But it's inconvenient for society, so others should be dissuaded from encouraging it. Even if you remove a humanitarian motive, and please don't but this is slashdot so there will be people who will get mad if one doesn't, there are good reasons why the legal system should act to reduce suicide.

Yeah this. Jet Set/Grind Radio looked amazing on the Dreamcast because it didn't render stuff it didn't have to when creating the cel shaded look. Therefore you could have big complex scenes that performed fluidly at all times. I thought that was the point of this game which I haven't played, get off my lawn etc etc.

There's several OSS FPSes built around this concept, but all of them that I've seen have been pretty lo-fi so it would make sense to me that it would take a commercial title to sell it. Finding out that they aren't doing it is not even funny, but just weird to me.

If you're using your phone for something that winds up being the subject of an investigation, then your phone can be subpoena'd. Even if everything is on the up and up, and everything on your device is ducky, you can still be inconveniently deprived of your device for a time. Therefore you should never use your device for work in any way other than calling in to it, which doesn't leave any traces on your device that it doesn't also leave on the network.

Availability of guns enabled the crime of course, but I don't think that being raised around lots of guns is the whole problem here. Grandma said they're all MAGAs. He was raised around a lot of violent rhetoric in combination with guns. Did he have to be wired wrong, or was being programmed from an early age enough?

You can easily add new bus stops near rail, it's not as easy to add rail near bus lines except by luck.

Safe and clean are going to require some upgrades to society. They would be cheaper than what we've been doing, but then some people would get things for free that other people are paying for, and then lots of people would be mad. And not without reason, but not usually for the reason they'd be mad for.

I have cable, it's expensive and they keep raising the prices while offering deals at now (given how much they've increased our bill) around a third of the price for new customers. I live in a small city so I'm not going to see it any time soon, but fiber is going in somewhat nearby and I'd sure like some of that here.

A doubtful premise given Microsoft history, as I've experienced all kinds of minor upgrades/updates breaking software on various forms of Windows over the decades. But even given that, it won't all run it equally well, and Windows 11 is festooned with more crap which has to be dodged. They've also dicked up the interface regarding snap and multiple monitors in a way that causes my mouse pointer to warp incredibly unpleasantly, but I don't try to do multimonitor on a system I also play games on any more so I'll be honest and admit that's not affecting me in that way.

Your point about the legal status is granted. Otherwise, it has a longer support life than Windows 10 Pro. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft supports it when there's more improperly activated users than legit ones. I'm not depending on Windows for anything I can think of these days, but I assume I'll need it to run some configuration utility at some point.

IME "support" is mostly notional anyway. In terms of what will run, it's true that a bunch of PvP games for Windows require Windows kernel DRM, and will not run on Linux. Or, you have a degraded experience where you cannot connect to most servers, and there may also be no anticheat functionality at all. So yes, if you want to play those games, you will still need Windows.

Otherwise, most games seem to work on Linux now, including a bunch of older games that don't work well on modern Windows. Market share is only a matter of time if Microsoft keeps alienating users.

Assuming you're not dual-booting, the hardest part of installing Kubuntu or Mint is setting the BIOS to boot from the USB drive. After than, even an average Windows user can install them. Plug in the drive, reboot, and the sequence is something like: Next, Next, enter the username and password you want, next, next, wait about 10-15 minutes, done, reboot into your newly installed Linux.

Installing Kubuntu or Mint is WAY easier than installing Windows (I know, most users don't install Windows). I had to install Windows on someone's laptop recently, and it was way more complicated than installing Linux.