And they're not funded by fossil fuel money, except at two or three steps removed. GWPF is still not receiving funding from oil companies. They are receiving money from people who might ALSO be invested in fossil fuels or who might have vested interests in the results that the GWPF puts out. The larger question would be whether they received those funds before or after their first published white papers. In other words, did they write the white papers because of the money, or did they get more funding because of the content of the white papers?

But it was clearly the point I was trying to make about how you can claim 2nd and 3rd hand funding for both sides that **WHOOSH** went right over your head.

Many Climate Change Think Tanks receive funds from individuals with vested interests in Carbon Trading companies, alternative energy sources, and solar power. Some donations even came from institutions or individuals that receive GRANTS to do Climate Change studies! One person who inherited money from their great grandfather even donated sums while working at a SOLAR PANEL company!

Look, I can write this click-bait with either side of the debate!

Next, you'll tell me that people donate money to the causes they agree with! WHAT A SCANDAL!

Curious definition of failure. I can't speak about the Oasis, but Second Life continues to thrive and remains the largest active MetaVerse with a functioning economy, user-maintained content, and a global population.

The problem of corrosion was figured out at the MSRE at ORNL in the 60's using Hatealloy piping for the salt flow.

The real issue with not building them in the U.S. has been the utter fear-mongering around the word "nuclear" and the fact that molten salt reactors can't breed plutonium for nuclear weapons.

I can't speak for the dogmatic, as I don't know who they are. Certainly, there are Linux fanbois. There are Windows fanbois. God knows there are Apple fanbois. All of them preach the religion of their chosen OS. Meh. I like Linux. I use it on my home desktop, and have been doing so for two decades. That doesn't mean its the best OS for everyone. As I said in my post, use what works for you.

Oh horse feathers. Linux is a joke only to the extent that all operating systems are a joke. The Gnome file picker is a meme? How long has the BSOD been a meme? Yes, there are things about Linux that are broken and infuriating. There are things about Windows and macOS that are broken and infuriating as well. They are different things, but there are just as many of them. If you like Windows, it's probably just because you're more familiar with it and more knowledgeable in how to work around its quirks and limitations. That's fine. Use what works for you. But don't pretend that Windows is somehow superior when it's simply different.

I think that for many people, that's a distinction without a difference. Most of the people on here are pretty tech savy and can fairly easily navigate the labyrinth of prompts and confirmations they put up. I suspect a lot of less technical people get so confused they simply give up. If something is so confusing that you can't accomplish it, doesn't that mean it's hard to successfully complete?

How much of that is the music service and how much is cheap speakers with a cheap amp in a cheap car?

Oh to have a moderation point or two! That one was somewhere between funny and insightful!

There is only one important question here: Can I still play Desktop Tower Defense?

Because a frame work is a general purpose construction that is written without any idea of what the final product may be. As such, it has to offer all sorts of possibilities and capabilities that are not useful and not relevant to the actual product being produced. If I can write a piece of software that does exactly and precisely what my project requires, that may be significantly faster than a similar piece of software that does what my project requires AND what his project requires AND what her project requires ...

They were testing gimbal control, for one thing, to show that the rocket and the flight controller could adjust to engine-out conditions. Secondly, their TFR did not include a super-sonic tag, meaning that they would have been heavily fined if the booster created a sonic boom, so they had to shut down the engines as the starship got lighter, and the air got thinner, or they would have accelerated past Mach 1.

Also, by shutting down one engine and adjusting thrust through the center of gravity, the rocket tips slightly, moving it off shore in case of any need to terminate the flight. Remember that SN4 exploded *after* the engine shut down from the static fire. Yes, SN4 was due to a ground service equipment leak, but still, there's no proof that Raptors don't have hard shutdowns. Even Elon said he was happy they made it to apogee without blowing up, so its clear that they're still not 100% confident in the Raptors.

Finally, the engines relit at touchdown (well, at least two of them did) so it's not like there was an actual fatal problem with the engine as it wouldn't have restarted.

I admit, that when I saw the first raptor cut out, I had a moment of, "oh no," but it rapidly passed when I realized what they must be doing to both manage acceleration and to direct the Starship out over the water.

The number of kills for drunk driving are probably too high. If you have a couple of beers and someone completely sober jumps the curb and runs you over while you're walking down the sidewalk, it goes down as an alcohol-related accident. Meanwhile, the statistics for COVID are probably being under-counted. The number of deaths for this year are around 260,000 above what would be expected. The majority of those are probably related to COVID in some fashion, even if the virus isn't the direct cause.

You do know that, barring a lucky accident tracking down the software bug that caused them to fail to get into orbit, they discovered another software bug that would have resulted in the catastrophic loss of the vehicle on reentry?

Between no end-to-end test of the software, no unified test of the systems, loss of communication because of poorly located and designed antennas, burn out of at least one RCS cluster, reading the wrong clock when initializing the system, burning nearly all of their consumables in the first fifty minutes of flight, and a potentially fatal collision avoided only by uploading a software patch less than 60 minutes before reentry, I don't know how you consider this anything but a near complete failure on the part of Boeing.

This was meant to be a "final dress rehearsal" before NASA put crew on board. If the crew had been on board, as they kept saying during the post-launch briefing, it's likely they would have compensated for the incorrect mission clock, which means Boeing would never have debugged the software, and they would never have caught the second software error and it's very likely that we would have had a Soyuz 1 scenario with three dead astronauts. The fact that NASA even considered not making Boeing do an OFT-2 shows that Boeing's inclusion in the commercial crew program, even after blackmailing NASA into paying an additional $600M above their "fixed price contract" that was already double what SpaceX was paid, was purely politically motivated.