The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

When was the last time you have seen somebody use a soldering iron with has mask and gloves? In contrast to europe, american solder is still lead based.

They would be too bright, and too expensive. Those 5mm LEDs (outdated crap) have LED dies of a less than 1/20th of a mm^2 inside.

High-end power LEDs that put out the equivalent of a 100W incan bulb are 2-4mm^2.

A disk the size of a traffic light would be able to draw 10000s of Amps, and be bright enough to illuminate a stadium (if you could drain the waste-heat away). Driving it with lower currents would be a collosal waste of dies.

So the wavers are cut into conveniently sized pices that have reasonable power draw and thermal conductivity and then later are put together according to the requirements.

Not just the production way is low-tech, this type of LED is depricated for everything but the cheapest crap available.

Modern LEDs are basically all SMD, the high power ones typically mounted on a solid metal core PCB. And those are acutally manufactured in a more modern type of way.

If Boeing was interested in getting people into space, more than a handful of them would be there. The fact is that it has taken a company that was outside of the system, with a tiny fraction of Boeing's funding, to make more progress than Boeing has.

And of course it's in the U.S. interest to make sure the Russians have an active and completely up-to-date source of rocket engines for their nuclear missles.

In this vein, I wonder what it is we are paying the Chinese to do?

There isn't that much to gain from economy of scale, as those types of cells are already produced in 100s of millions per year. So we are realistically looking at something like halfing the price at most, not cutting it down by an order of magnitude or something.

I think we need to take a serious look at the "many eyes" theory because of this. Apparently, there were no eyes on the part of parties that did not wish to exploit the bug for close to two years. And wasn't there just a professional audit by Red Hat that caught another bug, but not this one?

I have to say I'm even less confident in the plan to couple it to DNSSEC.

Sure. We're better. But we need to be even better than that.

I'd say more than just the "community". We have a great many companies that incorporate this software and generate billions from the sales of applications or services incorporating it, without returning anything to its maintenance.I think it's a sensible thing to ask Intuit, for example: "What did you pay to help maintain OpenSSL?". And then go down the list of companies.

OK guys. We've promoted Open Source for decades. We have to own up to our own problems.

This was a failure in the Open Source process. It is just as likely to happen to closed source software, and more likely to go unrevealed if it does, which is why we aren't already having our heads handed to us.

But we need to look at whether Open Source projects should be providing the world's security without any significant funding to do so.

Jeff, I'm sorry that you're paying more. I'm envious that your state is implementing single-payer, though! California considers and rejects the bill every session, so far.

MVP itself is not-for-profit. Interesting that they think the pool in the two states they focus on is now that much more expensive. I can't imagine why.

Thanks

Bruce