I'll disagree a little bit: we have heavy lift rockets bringing mass to orbit at a greater rate than any time in history and new larger and more efficient rockets on the cusp of being brought to use, with next generations planned for the future. Space launch technology -- the actual raw launching of mass to orbit, where it can be useful -- has advanced. And mass to orbit means more fuel -- if we really wanted to get something out there faster.

And that's where our statements arrive at the same conclusion: there's little need to do anything but super efficient deep space probes. While I can quibble with your implied assertion about newer technology not making a difference in ability, in a practical sense given our funding of deep space research, the big tech upgrade has been to data collection devices and communication. We'll have to have way cheaper lift capability before extra fuel to cut time off a project makes any kind of sense. But it is now at least plausible as an option.

(Also, this appears to be the only thread that isn't making Trek or Aliens jokes)

Congrats to you as well! :) Baby is only slightly premature, being induced at 2.5-3 weeks early due to size.

"The Mandalorian & Grogu" is set to be .. the biggest blockbuster...

I'm glad to hear that this movie, which is about to start filming, has already been determined to be so popular with the public, that they will be lining up around the block to get into the theater.

How many years all together have the Republicans spent investigating Hillary now?

Nice idea.

If you pinch "imply" hard enough you can make it mean "infer"

That statement itself is enough to pinch all the linguists out there. :P

What makes that the "correct" version? It seems the line has quite the history and has taken on many forms. Fwiw, Wikipedia justifies "implies".

I ought to be jealous of you. But i'm much too lazy.

Let's get turbo encabulated!

No idea on the men-vs-women thing.

But it seems absolutely crazy for the DRMed media sales industry to remind people that their media could Just Work and be normal, instead of requiring specific proprietary players (a different one for each media source). They shouldn't even mention piracy, because that just plants the seed that people could instead have standard format files, where things are much more convenient than the awkward situation with DRMed media.

If we want people to just accept that things are shitty and must always remain shitty, then it's probably best to not encourage people to think about the topic at all. Shhhh! Don't bring it up, and pretend that the idea of a convenient media library, where users have the choice to use whatever player software that they want on whatever device that they want, simply doesn't exist at all.

This reminds me of how in the 1980s, things like FPUs and MMUs were separate chips. Do you want an 80387 with your 80386? Do you want a 68851 with your 68020? But then the newer CPUs just came with that stuff.

Even if 90% of the machines sold over the next few years never use it (think of how many 80386 chips were running MS-DOS as a "fast 8086" and never went into protected mode), it's nice that on the software side you'll eventually be able to expect it. In 1988 you couldn't assume floating point was fast for everyone, but by 1998 you could.