If by "about to", you mean September of next year, then maybe it might, but I suspect you're thinking of the Boeing Starliner crewed test in a couple of days. Completely unrelated.

• Soyuz: Russian capsule (and service module and orbital module, but the capsule is the interesting part) used for getting people back from ISS (capacity 3).
• SpaceX Dragon: U.S. capsule used for getting people back from ISS since April 2021 (capacity 4).
• Boeing Starliner: U.S. capsule intended to have a second alternative to Dragon for ISS flights (capacity 7).
• Orion: Combination of a capsule (Lockheed Martin) and crew module (Airbus) for Artemis missions (capacity 4).

They're all capsules, but Dragon is basically intended as a replacement for Soyuz, Orion has the ESM (European Service Module) attached, which lets it be useful as a habitat for longer missions, and Starliner has more crew and cargo capacity, I think.

The other key difference is that Orion is designed for reentry from higher altitudes (more heat shielding) than Dragon or Starliner, which are both designed only for LEO (e.g. ISS). A version of Soyuz (Zond 5) did fly past the moon, but I have no idea if the current versions are built to withstand high-altitude reentry.

The hard part is finding a spherical cow that can survive in a vacuum.

You can even break the grid--scale down to production and distribution sides, so an ideal backup solution involves production, distribution, and consumption. You can cover the grid services portion of the equation from any location, but each location helps to improve utilization of infrastructure and reliability.

I want to add a home battery, but real world round-trip efficiency from solar is 92% so I really need to add more solar with the battery. Even just adding something for the "UPS" loads gets hard to justify. My current system pretty much minimizes my annual electricity bill.

Jello Biafra for president!

The whole thing violates a reasonable expectation of privacy. They don't need to know your name to make sure you don't have any weapons on you.

Ponzi schemes work best if you make sure they look like someone "important" invests in them, too.

What I "bitch" about is the wording. It's worded like you could, if you want to, for your own convenience, connect your Steam account with a PSN account. It nowhere informs you that this is the only option and that you have to open up your Steam account to their shabby security practices that pretty much amount to handing over your private information along with your credit card info to whatever ID thief that wants it.

Hmm. Interesting. On Steam, you get that information.

Maybe console gamers are too used to being ripped off and having their privacy violated that they can get away with something like that, I don't know.

About the only downside seems like weight: at 16.9Wh/kg their 1.2kW modules weigh 75kg. Will be interesting to watch.

A former employer used to tell the story of trying to sell facial recognition to the country's federal security service. They set up in airport with a list of 1,000 faces they wanted, and started scanning passengers. When they finished the first thousand of them, they were very very disappointed: that had got a huge number of false positives...

For each of a thousand people, they did a thousand comparisons. That's a million comparisons. Even if the error rate was only one percent, 1% of a million is 10,000 errors. In other words, it reported a false positive (or, horrors, a false negative) for everyone. When it identified someone's grandmother as a male member of the Baader–Meinhof gang, they packed up their equipment and slunk away.

Facial recognition is a guaranteed fail for airport security

I'm currently on the Steam page for Helldivers2. A search for "PSN" delivers 8 results, all of them in the reviews. A search for "Playstation" allows you to find "Playtation PC LLC" as the publisher, a ad link for "all the games by Playstation Studios", two more links for Publisher and Franchise, a link to the data protection shrink-wrap blurb on playstation.com, an epilepsy warning link on playtation.com and finally, in the area nobody would be looking for a line saying "requiring third party account Playstation Network (supports linking to Steam account)".

Emphasis mine.

What would the average user expect? That he may link to his Steam account for convenience.

What "supports" does not exactly convey is that such a link is mandatory.

Time to kick a game off the wishlist. It's way too long already anyway, a little cleanup is in order.

Well, 2 reasons.

First, the obvious one: Ubisoft tells you about this right out the gate. No Ubisoft-account, no playing. It was possible to play Helldivers2 'til now without a PSN account.

Second, and a direct result of the first one, people who don't want to jump through these hoops already don't buy Ubisoft games because they already know what's in store for them. They used to complain back when Ubisoft started this practice, and they don't complain anymore now. They just don't buy the junk, and I'm pretty sure a year from now, nobody will complain about Sony doing this anymore either. People will just add another company to the blacklist.

Which is why I almost exclusively play indie games. They let me launch their games via GOG (or just run the binary) just fine without having the infect the machine with some ridiculously overblown launcher.

It's similar to why I prefer Brother printers, they allow you to just install the driver without having to install their overblown "printer manager" and the kitchen sink.