This is why I believe first manned mission to mars should require staying at least 10-16 years. Hate to say it, but canary in a coal mine. As to these samples, I would think that most microbes on mars are already here. Still I would prefer that extreme caution used and collect these earth or even lunar orbit, and test at iSS.

Offering up a competition to do this is not the way to go. Why? Because a JPL designed approach was already offered up and this is why we are looking at $8-11B to deliver in 15 years.

Need a prize approach in a set of objectives are listed and variable-level prize rewarded based on ranking. Get it done first, and you get $$$, with second getting $. Finally, upon successful return of Up to 1/2 of the samples, they get $ 3B/1B. Finally, limit this to 2-3 groups register for this.

With this approach, it will likely have SX and BO as entities, but it may also produce a 3rd group. This way, a great deal of infrastructure gets quickly developed and will be reused later for Martian/lunar/asteroids missions.

Hopefully, no federal $ is going into this. Or perhaps federals SHOULD produce some $, but require that all of the cells be made in america, with american, if not western elements.

Seriously, some of it, esp. the early stuff is interesting. A lot of words, poetry. Now? Just junk with a lot of cuss words esp the n-word, and is just garbage.

It used to be that we were full of hope, but prepared for the worst. Now, we have a generation that is afraid of everything and prepares for nothing.

Ownership of media was limited BEFORE 1995?6?( give or take ). Before Clinton and GOP pushed a re-write on media ownership, we had some 50-100 companies that owned media (and that was LONG before the explosion with the Internet).IOW, we had competition. Now? Less than 10 companies own American media ( may be 5, I do not recall ).

If we return back to requiring limited ownership (as in how much someone can own), then we would see competition and would see decent media. As it is, we are as bad as China and Russia.

It is LONG past time for us to be able to SUE companies for this, AND to have criminal investigations against the C*O of companies that are breached. Why? Because they are not doing what is needed to protect this data. It is really not that hard to do.

Roll back the Clinton/GOp bill that limited ownership.there is no real competition and all of the majors are as horrible as China daily and RT. Hell, MOST of Aljazerra is better than the trash from America, China, and Russia.

This might be what is needed for the prince to realize that it is better to think long-term for his citizens as opposed to killing short-term critics. IOW, learn from his recent ancestors.

If so, then it Trump will push this in America if he is elected.

And how much of that market share shift is Chrome gaining users on iOS devices?

Because fuck me if this ends up being a repeat of the PC desktop, where Google browbeats everyone to the point that the vast majority of users are all running Chrome.

I've been using Linux on all of my personal devices since the late 90s. I used Ubuntu for many years but switched to Mint not because of ideological reasons around systemd or snaps or what-have-you, but because they did the one thing that companies like Microsoft do to their customers that keeps me using Linux.

They changed the desktop, radically and dramatically in ways that completely fucked how I use my device.

And sure, it's Linux, so I could switch the DE ... but the entire reason I used Ubuntu was so that everything would "just work" on a fresh install and I wouldn't have to do that level of heavy customization.

I can't remember what the new desktop was ... was it Unity? All I know is that this is when Canonical was following Microsoft in thinking that "the future is touch-screens and mobile!"

I don't know what is driving the growing Linux use. But I do know that what really bothers me as a tech consumer is the constant trend-chasing and forced change that impacts the user experience in very major ways. All I want is stability, predictability and boring. If some new tech comes out that has the potential to improve my work flow or my life, I want to be able to evaluate that and make the change gradually on my own terms.

I don't want to be forced to use Cloud storage. I don't want to be "forced" to buy an "AI PC" (whatever the fuck that means) because it's all you can buy. I don't want to be "forced" to use web apps for things that can be desktop applications. I have a love/hate relationship with web apps. On the one hand they have enabled to use Linux at work the last few years because I can use Zoom, Slack, GMail and other work-required tools. But as an end user, I can't stand the fact that the company can push UX changes on me that I never opted in to or wanted.

I miss the days when companies would have to spend resources doing beta tests and focus group their new versions and then people could choose whether or not they wanted to "upgrade" by reading the reviews. These days, changes get push on you during weekly release cycles. Don't get me started on the infuriating Pendo pop-ups that tell you about new features that you couldn't give a shit about.

Canonical violated my trust by doing that very business trend chasing thing that drives me to Linux in the first place. So I switched to Mint and for the last 10 years or so have no reason to switch to any other distro because it gives me that stability and predictability that I depend on.

So it could be ... just maybe ... that people are fed up with companies pushing constant change on them and that for first time in tech history, Linux is the "stable" choice.

Exactly. If it is outside, it is public. This kind of story is just more BS.

Survivorship bias is real, so is the 90/10 rule (90% of everything made is garbage). However, while this is subjective and not at all scientific, it is worth pointing out that "survivorship" in this context tends to mean the things that we look back on and remember fondly. I don't remember much of the new stuff that I've watched over the last few years.

It's possible (perhaps even likely) that that's a function of age: when I was younger everything was new and so I was less critical. It's also possible that there was less available, content-wise, when I was younger and so for that reason as well my standards were lower back then. All I know is that whether it's me or "them", I find myself not watching much of anything new these days, especially TV shows. There is the occasional series. The Last of Us and Mrs. Davis are the two most recent series I remember watching all of. There hasn't been a single new [to me] series I've watched in 2024 yet that I can recall. And I find that when I load up a streaming service I tend to spend more time looking for something I want to watch than I do actually watching something, and more often than not I close it and go do something else.

Then again, "back then" we used to say of cable "200 channels and there's nothing on."

It's the same with their Disney World counterpart, Tomorrowland Speedway, in Florida. My wife and I were there in Februrary and because I had never been to Magic Kingdom before (and was 30 years since being to Disney World at all), I wanted to ride absolutely everything. Speedway was one of the few attractions that I won't ride again when we return.

The big issue is that it feels extremely dated. Back in the 50s, when Disneyland was first built, the automotive industry was at its peak in the USA, and the attraction gave children the opportunity to do a "grown up" thing. Today it feels very out of place in "Tomorrowland." It's the type of mediocre "filler" attraction that feels like it exists more for little kids. Nothing super wrong with it when viewed in that light, but Disney is supposed to be great at theming and Tomrrowland as a concept is something that can find itself outdated very quickly and needs to be constantly renewed. Autopia / Speedway feels more like a blast from the past than something that is meant to showcase the future.

Electric cars make a lot of sense ... but even then, I'm not sure how to make that type of ride really fun. There's no bumping allowed, the speed is extremely slow, the handling is intentionally horrible (I think that's how they tried to make it fun, by making the steering an utter nightmare lol). They need to do something to make it either thrilling or challenging in a not-frustrating way.

So yeah. It was fine for a checklist item but I didn't really enjoy it and won't do it again as it currently exists.