I have seen a lot of bits about why interstellar travel may never be practical. All of them seem to assume not only travel in the flesh, but round-trip travel. Realistically, by the time we can build something that can travel to the stars, it seems quite likely that we also can download conciousness into a robot. Send a robotic (one-way) mission to build bodies and transmission equipment, then have the real travellers download themselves, or copies of themselves, via radio. No need for life support or suffer through the boredom of even relativistic travel.

1 PeV is approximately 160 microjoule.

Use taxes are definitely enforced for big-ticket items where use can be established, such as automobiles or airplanes.

20 Mbps for $20? Easier said than done in the United States of Monopolies.

KH is Cambodia, not North Korea (KP).

The fail was that the analysis was done in a time when calculating machines were a speciality item few people were familiar with. 15 years later, they were not. It is worth nothing that some countries went with the AT&T scheme and others stayed with the 7-8-9 layout on their phones. Unfortunately the proliferation of letters on keypads (a lot of countries did not have them) in recent years have made 1-2-3 more prevalent.

Given that the standard definition of space (the Kármán Line) is 100 km above mean sea level, *everyone* lives within 100 miles (160 km) of space...

The feature set of the Linux VT console has been intentionally limited from nearly the start, and the line has always been: if you need more than this, do it in userspace. There has been several projects which have, for example kon2 which provided CJK functionality -- not something that one can sanely do in the kernel because of font size; similarly, Arabic/Indic font shaping is just plain too painful. For most people, the solution has simply been to bootstrap out of the console as quickly as possible, most of the time never even showing the console. What you find pretty quickly is that if you want something that is fully featured you end up with something that is as complex as X or Wayland anyway, and then you might as well go straight there. The in-kernel console will remain, of course, as an ultimate fallback. If someone wants to give users more options, more power to them.

... but everyone ever convicted under this barbaric law should have their convictions expunged. Keep in mind there are probably some that are still alive, which makes it even more important.

It seems a bit odd that the groups would be exactly five characters long *except* PABLIZ (which looks more like PABUZ to me.) At the same time, the repetition of the group AOAKN would be consistent with the message *not* being encrypted with a one-time pad.

Two major things: the WP bit doesn't work in supervisor mode on 386, which makes copy on write *very* painful to implement, and the CMPXCHG and XADD instructions which are extremely important to SMP primitives are missing. That has meant needing separate code that only works on 386, and it has not been well maintained and always gets in the way.

Neither. It was by me, but Ingo pushed it to Linus.

The whole point of private free enterprise is that risks can be taken, with the hope of a big payout. Well, guess what, sometimes it doesn't pan out. That's the system, it is how it is meant to work.

The use of Stirling engines has already been planned for future RTG missions, this is just a change of heat source.

One thing that is not really covered is that launching a reactor (unlike *operating* a reactor in *low-earth orbit* like the Soviets did) is that it is substantially safer than launching an RTG. An RTG is at its maximum activity at the point of launch, and in the case of a low altitude launch failure could spread measurable radiation over an area. In contrast, the reactor isn't (shouldn't be) activated until already on an earth escape trajectory. "Virgin" (never irradiated) U-235 is not very radioactive: the specific activity is some 8,000,000 times less than Pu-238. If the reactor ends up having a failure and a meltdown it is already on its way away from Earth never to return, and there really is no better dump for nuclear waste than deep space.