I'd be terrified from the moment I was selected all the way until I was back on Earth, but I think I'd have trouble refusing the opportunity to be the on-site tech for a mission like this.

Give me a handful of space-rated USB flash drives with my favorite reference materials and utilities, a diaper and a barf bag, and I'm there. Maybe a large bottle of gravol and some stimulants to counteract the drowsiness. ...And I would never talk about the diaper or barf bag.

Classic has the same bugs it always did, New is OWA in a browser app window and is missing features a lot of people care about.

Either one can have a wide selection of connection and authentication issues that are more or less unforgiveable but nobody seems to care because MS is really the only one who has the entire kitchen sink in their product reasonably well integrated.

It's also the last thing I'd have sent on this mission. I guess with modern communications it's nice to have an email client on your spacecraft, but with the lag you're not using Teams and you're not going to be attending any meetings. Do you really need all the extra crap?

I'd rather have them running older, more robust hardware with more efficient and more stable code on them than anything Microsoft provides.

A dummy load and some chemistry to use oxygen would do the same job with zero human risk.

If they're not putting boots on the Moon, they shouldn't have their asses in the rocket.

I have to say I'm enjoying it for home use.

I added Talk, and now I don't need Microsoft or Zoom to make a video call. It's adding calendar support to MailInABox. I use the SMB connection ability to backdoor my way into my NGINX-hosted web pages for ease of editing.

More "information wants to be free".

Once code is published, anybody can learn from it and be inspired to create their own version of it. Trying to police that is impossible.

Accidentally released is another.

If your process results in making your code public... too late? You published. Learn something from that and update your process.

What does giving in to Trump's demands get you other than more demands? The background noise of random insults and threats will continue regardless.

There's little doubt that there's fallout from Trump's behaviour. Everyone is doing their best to route around the US as much and as rapidly as they can... but international trade generally changes slowly.

Yeah, that's because you see the meat as more than meat. You see some metaphysical attribute that must be respected.

That's crazy.

I care about the mind, and as a consequence the body housing it. A mindless body is just meat.

You can absolutely grow a body without the portions of the brain that support higher function. We know, because every once in a while it happens naturally. If you're up to creating a gene-corrected clone, you're up to breaking the bits that result in extended brain development.

Now, can you do it easily with gene editing, do you introduce something into the environment, do you brute-force break something mechanically? No idea, but you have a lot of more difficult problems to solve before you get there. This particular concern is far from a show-stopper.

Absolutely the latter - we have no reason to believe the brain is special and not subject to age-related degredation.

On the other hand, if your brain was in good enough shape wouldn't you like the option to have a healthier body?

Not necessarily true - it's much, much easier to correct a defect when the organism is a single cell than once it is fully grown.

If you were creating a person, it would be evil, but we're talking about a lump of meat without higher brain function. Your inability to recognize what a brain is or accept your mortality, driving you to believe without evidence in an immortal soul? That's you failing hard at growing up, clinging to childish fantasy as a coping mechanism.

That's fine, but the world would be a much nicer place if you'd be ashamed enough of it to keep it to yourself.

I'd love to have a nice slab of spare parts, custom made for me in case of injury.

You'd have to fight back the idiots who would claim the bodies had souls. That's probably the biggest hurdle, the people who would violently try to stop you because of their sky daddy fantasy.

But even if you defeat them, you have the accountants. That spare body isn't going to grow and remain healthy without a lot of effort. It will need to be fed and cleaned and exercised. During growth it will need to be monitored and probably adjusted with chemical cocktails to ensure it turns out similarly to you - you did want all the bones to be the same size as yours so you can harvest those, right? As long as you're cloning an entire body, you'll want to correct any genetic defects you can - especially for those things that might lead to needing a clone body for spare parts. You don't want to get liver cancer only to find your clone has it too. That's all going to cost a lot of money.

In the end, the real solution is to be able to grow parts as they're needed, not grow an entire body requiring expensive maintenance that you might have to throw away after you harvest one critical part.

It's insane. I'd rather have 100 million in a happy wealthy society where I can walk around freely without worrying everybody (including my bodyguards) might want to kill me than have 10 billion and have those problems.

I imagine the WTO is a lousy tool for a country that can't burn bridges fast enough while demanding everyone do as they're told without reciprocity.

I think the USA is going to have to learn the hard way that the international economy has been very tilted in its direction for decades, and all the things the people in control don't understand and hate were the very things maintaining the tilt.

Once that's gone, I don't think the circumstances for restoring that tilt will exist. It's gone, and the average American is going to be poorer when the dust settles.