One of NASA's biggest problems is they have to make multi-year plans but have a yearly budget. They also have to appease Congress people from fifty states. They are additionally bound by the whims of Presidential administrations. So they make plans which get tweaked by Congress and then have to fight for the money to carry out those tweaked plans.

Another huge issue was the Constellation program was just plain stupid and wasted a ton of money and resources within NASA. The original concept of the CEV was a design that could be launched on man-rated Atlas V or Delta IV vehicles. That could have gotten a crew vehicle in space not too long after the Shuttle was to be retired. Mike Griffin then came in with the ESAS report and screwed it all up. It was decided the CEV would launch on all new Shuttle-derived boosters. This spread the project around to states with Shuttle component contractors so Congress liked it.

The Ares rockets reused some Shuttle components but were different enough to be effectively new untested and unqualified designs. The five segment SRBs were problematic because you can't just make a solid rocket engine longer and call it a day. The Ares I first stage being a solid rocket was asinine as it necessitated a massive and complicated escape motor be attached to the CEV for every launch and then just discarded. It also had serious vibration issues that would have killed or crippled the crew on launch. The Ares V just turned into a megaproject due to its size.

The CEV design was also compromised in that it was designed to launch on the stupid Ares I. It ended up (as Orion) just being a fat Apollo capsule. This means a couple compromises. Instead of having integral launch escape motors it relies on a heavy disposable system. The Dragon 2 and CST-100 both use their maneuvering system as their launch abort systems. Far less wasted mass on launch. The second compromise is the Orion relies on its Service Module for propulsion and has a minimum ability to maneuver without it. The Dragon 2 can run with a minimal "trunk" attached when doing a crew-only launch like the Demo-2 mission. This all puts the Orion at a pretty high minimum launch mass which means it always requires a heavier launch vehicle.

The Orion is a stupid design with no extant launch vehicle because the program it was born from was stupid. A lot of this stupidity is from Congress requiring a piece of the NASA money pie be spent in their states/districts. Congress' whims effect a lot of technical decisions which affect schedules and feasibility of projects.

I used to dislike the reboots, it felt sort of like someone invalidating my investment in a character or something. At some point I reflected and realized super hero comics were a lot like mythology. In myths there's a lot of common elements to any individual being or individual but rarely some canonical telling. Retellings in different regions take on some local flavor.

Looking at comics through that lens I learned to enjoy and appreciate reboots. Sometimes they're entirely money driven cash grabs or I just don't like the rebooted character but the same could have happened without a reboot. A series getting a new writer and artists can change the flavor of a comic as much as some sort of official reboot. If I dislike that I can go back to old stories and enjoy those.

For just practical reasons I like to see series reboot. A series going without some sort of reboot just stops making sense after a while. There's too much backstory to keep track of with really long running series. I've always been annoyed at the "* see events of a comic you don't follow for this to make sense" call outs. For a long time, at least to the late 90s neither Marvel or DC published their big omnibus trades with decades worth of a series in them so you couldn't even find the old book or series they referenced.

Yes.

Oh no those poor poor persecuted white males! Won't someone please think of them? They've been kept down for so long! They just need a chance for some equality.

Fucking listen to yourself. Complaining about comics being "woke" is absolutely fucking absurd. Comics have been "woke" before "woke" was a fucking thing. The fucking X-Men are an allegory about racism and bigotry! The Justice League and Teen Titans have been pretty inclusive for the past fifty years. A good number of early Silver Age writers were Jewish yet writing under Anglo-sounding pen names because they in fact were subject to racism and bigotry in the publishing industry.

The only people bitching about comics being "woke" are racist bigoted assholes that can't seem to stand the idea that non-white non-male humans exist and simultaneously desire to be treated just like white males. Those non-white non-male humans also want to see someone that represents them in whatever media they're consuming or at least someone they can identify with.

If you can't deal with a Muslim Ms. Marvel or a black Spider-Man the problem isn't with the comics, the problem lies with you.

Hey!

Wait, no, you're right.

More than it should? What should people choose to do with their Internet connections? How much bandwidth should streaming use?

Neither Netflix or end users are doing anything wrong by streaming. Bandwidth is not crude oil or fresh water, it doesn't get "used up". What ISPs should be doing is recognizing that putting Netflix OCAs in their NOCs (and equivalents from other services) is not only a good idea but a way to significantly increase network performance. With an OCA a lot of content comes from the cache in the ISP's NOCs rather than over an external network.

Small businesses don't report earnings to the SEC and the SEC has nothing to do with taxes. That's the IRS. Small businesses also only pay taxes on profits so like large multinationals they only pay taxes on the money left after all their expenses. Taxes can't somehow make them insolvent.

It's also downright stupid to suggest taxes on profits are the X factor keeping small businesses from competing with large ones. Joe's Smartphone Shack will never be able to compete with Apple or Samsung in selling their own smartphone due to engineering expertise, economies of scale, network effects, marketing budgets, and market momentum. Corporate taxes have zero to do with competition.

Even before the Tax Cuts and Massive Deficits act small businesses had tons of deductions on their taxes keeping their effective tax rate far below the official rate. Such deductions exist specifically to encourage things like reinvestment.

Wait, if corporate taxes just get passed on to the consumer...how is it that corporate taxes somehow make it unaffordable to compete or exist? If those costs are paid by the consumer then any company doing anything worthwhile is having their tax bill paid.

Corporate taxes are paid on profits which means a business can't really be taxed so onerously it can't operate. That includes money spent reinvesting in the business to expand. In terms of competing in the market, taxes are the least of any company's problems.

This is an unbelievably naive statement, especially assuming you're someone that has used to Internet at least once. Just this /. page (with ad blockers) is loading two dozen different resources from at least a dozen different domains. There's another two dozen resources blocked by the ad blockers.

An uncached load of the page will take forever over a high latency connection. You're looking at half a second for the initial HTML load, another half second for replies to DNS queries for all the resources on CDNs and subdomains (assuming they all land at the same time). By default browsers don't make more than six concurrent HTTP 1.1 connections per server so six resources from any server will take half a second to load but a seventh will be a full second later. Depending on how the page is put together loading of new stylesheets or JavaScript can cause layout changes and redraws.

That's a non-TLS page load. A TLS handshake requires multiple round trips to the server (each with a half second latency). It takes even longer if a non-TLS endpoint redirects to a TLS endpoint. That needs to happen for each server contacts.

Some servers/CDNs will just cut you off if a connection has too high a latency as a high latency connection looks a lot like someone trying to hold open a connection as part of a DDoS.

All of that is assuming no packet loss which is never true; satellite connections have fairly high packet loss rates even compared to cellular connections to say nothing of landline connections.

If the only pages you ever viewed were singular documents on non-TLS endpoints on servers that didn't care about high latency connections...satellite can be workable. For everything else GEO satellites really suck for Internet access. Even streaming video sucks over satellite because any additional latency or packet loss beyond the physically imposed latency can affect playback. Most streaming services don't maintain super deep buffers unless you use their "download" options if they're even available.

Hey look data!

No it didn't. It showed a list of "PRISM providers" which means both data provided under warrant and data exfiltrated from their networks. Not only do the PRISM documents make no distinction between the two but they point out it's the FBI's DITU unit that does a lot of the data collection. They go to ISPs and have them put taps on lines to suck up traffic.

Yes, but it required deep wizardry to get the full performance out of the hardware, so only a small handful of titles managed it. And they weren't vastly more powerful, only a bit more powerful.

The Emotion Engine and Cell were vastly more powerful than their contemporary x86 counterparts (and PowerPC) in one important area: floating point SIMD. The EE's VPUs and the Cell's SPEs could tear through matrix calculations (or scalar FP calculations performed as vectors). They also had good caching and DMA for those ALUs so the CPU core just sort of set up the data streams and let the vector ALUs go nuts. We didn't see that sort of throughput in x86 until the introduction of AVX.

While both the PS2 and PS3 were hard to program for...that did not seem to affect the popularity of either console. It's hard to imagine Sony selling more PS2s through the console's lifetime. The original XBox was possible because Microsoft was fine throwing tons of money at the project including buying Bungie since Halo became a system-seller. While the PC-like architecture was certainly nice for onboarding developers the top XBox games weren't Windows ports but originally XBox titles. If they saw a PC release it was after the XBox release or they were multi-platform games to begin with.

The Xbox 360 was almost as goofy as a machine as the PS3, the design of the Xenon was definitely influenced by the FP performance of the Emotion Engine. It relied heavily on streaming data through vector ALUs for a lot of graphics tasks. While not quite as bad as the Cell it wasn't exactly a bog standard CPU design. I doubt the XBMC project had anything to do with Microsoft going the Xenon route with the 360. IBM wanted to make high power (processing and electrical) PowerPC chips and Sony and Microsoft were willing buyers.

But back to my statement: researchers with certain classes of problems like cheap hardware to do the work. The PS2 and PS3 were attractive to people needing to do a lot of embarrassingly parallel matrix/scalar FP math with little need for shared memory. The CPUs of the PS2 and PS3 were ideal for this sort of processing and the fact they had Linux and Ethernet available made for relatively easy clustering. The departments building these clusters also got some free advertising from "OMG doing real work with video games" fluff articles. There were even official distributed processing projects supported by Sony on the PS3, there was a Folding@Home client you could set to run when the system was idle.

Both fell out of use because x86/x86-64 CPUs improved and later GPU compute became a thing. The PS2 lost out to cheap PCs with Pentium 4s and Athlons for Beowulf-style compute clusters. The PS3 lost out to cheap PC compute nodes with mid-range GPUs with several times the compute power of a single Cell chip.

Researchers investigating certain classes of problems seek out low cost commodity hardware to do the work? I'm shocked. Shocked!

The PS2 and PS3 had powerful CPUs (well SIMD ALUs) relative to contemporary x86 chips. The fact they were packaged in relatively inexpensive consoles with Ethernet ports and had Linux available made them attractive machines for compute clusters. They certainly were no worse than a cluster of cheap Dell or HP desktops.

They fell out of favor because commodity PCs got much faster and had things like gigabit Ethernet and way more memory. A 2008 era Dell desktop would be as much or less than a PS3, have better computing specs all around save for graphics, and have more robust Linux support. After 2010 the PS3 wasn't at all competitive and GPU computing was a useful thing and made the PS3 vastly outclassed.

So the PlayStations were interesting when they were new and then unattractive when they ceased to be more powerful than the competition. This is so shocking.

Just imagine how fast you'll hit your data cap of your "unlimited" plan!

More seriously, the case of streaming is actually really amusing when it comes to 5G. While in theory you'll have tons of bandwidth on your 5G connection, streaming services by design use Just-In-Time delivery so they buffer a few seconds or minutes of media ahead of the playhead and don't pull down more data until the playhead hits some particular time stamp (proportional to the buffered content).

This exists so streaming services don't send you an entire media file (at their expense) if you stop playback or pause for some long period of time. It also lets them swap out lower bitrate portions of the content when network conditions start to suck so you don't get the dreaded "Buffering" spinner.

So high bandwidth links to individual handsets doesn't really help the situation for streaming services. Buffer sizes can't really be adjusted much because the device memory doesn't really increase significantly with the higher speed radios. Services also don't want to buffer data to you that you don't actually watch because it costs them money.

With streaming the only case where streaming is improved is where there's increased bandwidth available in a congested cell. Millimeter wave microcells give your handset a ton of bandwidth it won't really use.

I used to really hate Python's regex, I had gotten used to Perl's inline regex and just thought that's how the world should work. Then I spent some time to actually understand how Python did things and my opinion completely reversed.

Python strings are objects rather than just an array of bytes in drag. They have a lot of really useful built-in methods that handle the simple transformations you might do with a regex in Perl. The RE module is also very expressive with a lot of helper methods and returns objects rather than primitives. I find doing text processing in Python much easier than it was in Perl and that was Perl's main claim to fame.

As for map/reduce/filter...I have no idea what you might find problematic about them. They behave as I would expect them to behave.

Let's also not forget Apple stores with their Genius Bars are locates in shopping malls. They're (Apple nor the mall itself) not insured or in some cases zoned for their techs doing component-level repairs. They would also need to meet all sorts of OSHA requirements with respect to ventilation and chemical exposure and likely other factors.

Some rando doing shit in their garage on a YouTube video does not have the same issues with liability or regulations as a commercial entity in a space zoned for consumer retail. At least not until they puncture a LiPO battery and burn their garage down.