It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

Who do you think's going to type in the prompts to the AI to make the visuals? Studio executives?? When SQL came out, it was marked as a way for managers to write database queries in a friendly language, with the implication that database programming would become a thing of the past. Ever worked on a project using SQL? And who wrote the SQL? In the world of software, at least, the "this technology will cause technical people to lose their jobs" more often seems to instead cause the creation of new sub-industries around the tech, with the truly gifted being able to specialize into the harder problems, and for us consumers we get increased quantity (or decreased price) at the expense of reduced quality. So far what I've been seeing with AI is repeating this same pattern, not the engendering of Skynet.

The idea that software not signed by some entity in the country that they represent is installed any high-level official's phone is absurd. How did the world get this way?

I've been using this site for over twenty years, and it's a been most of a decade since I've commented. This is the best thing I've seen on here since then. Whatever you do, keep drumming up the fight against ignorance and propaganda, and the people who've fallen victims of it. I don't want to get personal, but lets just say that I know from intimate experience what brainwashing does to a person, and the tremendous cost of clawing one's way out of it. Division in modern society is inevitable--and we must fight against those who seek to destroy rational thought!--but without empathy for those infected by bad ideas, shortchanged by their personal experiences, we'll end up punishing and alientating those victimized by bad actors exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities that every one of us has, we will push them out of sheer self-defense into voting in the people who will undo us.

There isn't really any proof that Waymo vehicles are driverless, only that the driver isn't in the vehicle. If you compare a dozen dubiously driverless vehicles to a million collecting data every moment and already doing a pretty good job at autonomy, which do you think will succeed?

The fact that the driver is not in the vehicle does not mean that there is no driver.

I believe that this was figured out in the amateur observer community before NASA confirmed it. I saw it go by in my twitter feed. Not sure I can find it now...

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm pretty sure their less-than-polite phrasing meant "biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or *jetpack* flying".

Everyone knows Amelia Earhart was a big part of aviation history in that era, but I strongly suspect that she didn't moonlight as the Rocketeer.

Linear Energy Transfer

It's not radioactive. When high-energy particles strike it, they break apart into lower-energy particles that are more harmful. So, you need enough shielding to catch the particles that break apart in the top layer of your shielding.

While radiation mostly results in transient errors, it can also cause latch-ups that blow a gate off of the die. For rad-hard equipment in space this is mitigated by silicon-on-insulator fabrication, so that you can't have a latch-up between the substrate and a silicon feature.

We could have REAL ZOMBIES! YEAH!

:-)

I hear you. Going to be an interesting future, if we live.

Someone who broke their neck and was suffering from paralysis. You can control a chair or exoskeleton. People who can not hear today have cochlear implants, this is not all that different and might (eventually) work better. Or speak, or see. Other people who are disabled in various ways.

Oops. To continue: I'm just not seeing that it is so hard to access. But then, I use a Linux desktop, which has always come with a proper PDF renderer, there has never been a need to download "Acrobat".