Peak capitalism should at least succeed commercially. This looks more like a bad idea that will sell maybe a dozen units and then be forgotten. So it remains faithful to the spirit of Commodore's business model at least :)

It's not premature. It's either unneeded, or "they should have done this a few years ago". And we won't know which for several years.

Remember, it's not only stuff that can be broken instantly. Coded messages can be recorded, and then broken when it's interesting/convenient.

The motive would be to insult the Russians.

That's possible. My guess was that Glasswing detected a backdoor that the feds had insisted be inserted into some, or much, of the popular commercial software.

Odd. My first suspect was either Ukrainians or some of their sympathizers.

Are they planning on using a hypergolic fuel? If not, I wouldn't expect there to be much explosion risk.

It's NOT the opposite. Both sides are doing it.

If it's still going up, it probably has a very eccentric orbit, and so will decay more quickly. But, yeah, it would be nice if there were some way to solve the problem. All I can think of is shooting the small pieces with lasers to vaporize them.

Orbits don't work that way. If something is in orbit, and you hit it hard, one end of the orbit will go high, and the other end will go low. And it will go through the point of impact once in every orbit. (I think "point of impact" means "some point on the original orbit", but it may be more specific.)

We have VASTLY different ideas of "beautiful".

I'm sorry, but Trump really isn't the worst president possible. The worst since 1780 possibly.

I live in London. Can you tell me where I apparently canâ(TM)t go?

This just seems so short-sighted. You spend a bunch of money familiarising with the code knowing that youâ(TM)ll be forced to do it again after youâ(TM)ve forgotten it. This is an opportunity to eliminate an unnecessary upgrade step. Each step of course will risk new and different regressions. Never mind that people donâ(TM)t find working on old code and tooling very motivational.

Iâ(TM)m not so au fait with the Java world anymore, but in C++ land, there are some serious benefits from using new compilers in terms of code speed and better language features and compiler errors/warning they help you write better code. Every time we upgrade, the compiler finds something in our 25 year old code base that shouldnâ(TM)t have worked!

Failing that, stroke something else.

Our former colonies have all made the metric switch just fine. Canada's a bit confused because the building industry tends to be Imperial (or the US equivalents), but otherwise they're switched fine. As a Briton who emigrated to Canada as an adult and married an Aussie, before returning to the UK, I can attest to the fact that you can adjust. I don't do anything in miles anymore, even though I've been back in the UK almost 20 years. For a while I did low temperatures in celsius (I'd lived in Canada) and high temperatures in Farenheit (I'd live on a RAF base in Cyprus in the early 80s and later in the US in my 20s), but then I lived in Melbourne and experienced high temperatures and metric at the same time. It comes down to experiences.

Pints are defined in mls! Please don't go metric in the Aussie way: their beers are tiny ;)