In reality, customers are slower at ordering from a kiosk than verbally giving an order to a human employee.

Of course the kiosk is slower. You can tell the counter clerk, "Quarter pounder meal, medium, Diet Coke." They have one screen and can touch three buttons in sequence to enter that order. At the kiosk, at least locally, the same order requires going through multiple screens, with transition time between each of them. So long as the kiosk lacks some sort of quick-entry option, it's going to be slower for many people.

I often wonder what will happen to all of the colonization plans if it turns out that carrying a fetus to term requires the woman to stay in >0.75G gravity for the whole nine months.

...by the lowest bidder on a government contract.

SLS and Orion are both being built under cost-plus contracts. There's no reason for Boeing or Lockheed Martin to cut corners. SpaceX, by contrast, is doing its parts of Artemis on fixed-cost contracts.

The Shuttle had a long history of LH2 leaks. Given that, once Congress forced LH2 on NASA for the first stage of the SLS, you would think that NASA would have busted their butts designing an incredibly good set of connectors for the fuel transfer system. Instead, both wet dress rehearsals and now the first launch attempt have all come up short due to... LH2 leaks.

(And yes, I'm aware of all the things that make dealing with LH2 a hard problem.)

From the above you might infer the 3nm fab is outside Taiwan, like in Arizona where TSMC is building a new cutting-edge fab. But no, this current 3nm capability is in Taiwan

TSMC has always been notorious for keeping their leading edge processes exclusively on Taiwan. Changing that seems to have started. I suspect because: (a) some of their big customers are saying they want chips for sophisticated weapons systems made in the customers' countries and (b) the world is looking more insane and a crazy PRC general could take out all of TSMC's capabilities on Taiwan with a dozen ballistic missiles with big conventional warheads.

I saw part of The Hunt For Red October the other day, including Connery's deadpan, "Most things in here don't react too well to bullets." Most things in a fab don't react too well to the pressure wave from a large explosion.

It's not a good time to propose building new thermal power plants of any type anywhere in the Southwest. All of the potential cooling water supplies are over-committed, and none of the state legislatures are willing to take on changing their laws on water allocation. Diablo Canyon has the advantage of being ocean-cooled, but not coincidentally new California regs on how much heat can be dumped into coastal waters kick in just when Diablo's federal licenses expire.

One of the reasons that wind and PV projects have been so popular in the West is that they don't require cooling water. The two nuke projects under consideration in the West -- the NuScale prototype at INL and the Gates/Buffett proposal in Wyoming -- both use air cooling despite the significant hit to efficiency simply because acquiring water rights would be a years-long project all by itself.

My understanding is that the real behind the curtain goal is to shovel money to produce parts at the 5nm node and below. Which means Intel is going to get the lion's share, since there's no other American companies that are going to make that attempt. If you want money for a 28nm fab, the scale used for most of the automotive chips in production, tough luck.

From time to time I read articles written by people in higher education who advocate for dropping college level math requirements for most students, and dropping algebra and above from the HS curriculum required for college admission. Almost invariably, they also assert that the world would be a better place if only the engineering students were required to tack on a couple of years worth of liberal arts classes. (Liberal arts sans math, that is; the classical definition included plenty of math.)

The first question the CEOs need to answer is "Why do your companies push so much CS talent out of the business once they reach an age of 45 or 50?" The US is not short on CS talent already educated. It's short on talent already educated that is young enough to accept insane hours and low pay.

These would be the same leaders, at least on the business side, who do their damnedest to chase people out of the field by the time they're 45 or 50? The US has a huge amount of technical and engineering talent that business refuse to employ.

When I was in graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin in 1978, you could buy window decals that just said "The University" in the Texas burnt orange.

I've said all along that the whole Twitter thing smacks of the world's richest man being bored and thrashing about.

No mod points today, so a thumbs-up instead. I wonder if Gwynne Shotwell (SpaceX COO) wakes up in the mornings thinking, "Today we'll put another nail in the ULA's coffin."

I have to believe that she has a small team looking at the question of how much money it would take them to do their own complete crewed lunar landing mission, to be announced next time the ULA says the Artemis landing will be delayed another year or two.

Doesn't seem to say whether they'll have their own methods for accessing the DOM, or depend on JavaScript libraries.

I only code for my own use these days, and only have one piece of JavaScript I maintain. It's a GreaseMonkey script that runs on every page I download. It goes through and changes the fonts and sizes of most everything to match my standards for what looks attractive. I started it years ago on a day where I encountered too many pages that made you want to go find the designer and ask, "Did you study ugly and unreadable in school, or are you just naturally gifted?"

I assume that the Webb telescope being an enormously better infrared platform has something to do with it.