Structuring your nation's laws around the longevity of companies is a terrible idea. Most companies should fail, because most companies are bullshit created by ambitious idiots and/or scofflaws and deserve failure. Most companies that have ever existed are gone today. And that's fine. That's healthy.

Artemis II is breaking Apollo 13's record by about 4100 miles. The primary reason they're going further is because they're passing much farther from the moon, about 4000 miles, compared to 158 miles for Apollo 13. The moon is also a little further from Earth, accounting for the other 250 miles.

Agreed. I live in the mountain west, and our forest and mountain landscapes are just covered with fencing, even though most of it is public land, because it's BLM "multi-use" land -- a lot of cattle graze on it. Fences are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. If you think a fence is something you build once and then ignore, you've never dealt with cattle.

Cowboys (and sheep herders) have a term "ride fence" as in "Bob, you're gonna ride fence today", and it's a regular and tedious task that means "get on your horse (or ATV) and ride past miles and miles of fenceline, looking for places where the fence is broken or going to break, and fixing them". It's necessary and expensive drudgery and having all of those fencelines is bad for other uses, and bad for wildlife. I've put down a few deer that jumped a barbed wire fence and didn't quite clear it, slicing their guts open and leaving them in agony as they slowly die.

In addition, there's an obvious tension between the cost of building and maintaining fences and the cost of rounding up cattle when it's time to move them. Obviously if you slice the land up into lots of small fenced areas, the cattle will be easy to find -- but they're also going to graze it out fast, so you're going to have to move them more often. If you use very large enclosures (common on BLM land), then your cows may have hundreds of square miles to roam and feed... but when it's time to move them you have to find them. Luckily they're herd animals so when you find a few you've found them all, but still. And occasionally, singles get separated from the herd and you just lose them, which isn't great since a cow is worth about $2k.

So... if we can replace those miles of expensive and constantly-breaking fences with virtual fences, that's good news for everyone. Wildlife and outdoorsmen can roam unimpeded, cattle can be far more tightly controlled, strays quickly identified, located and reunited with the herd -- via remote control!. This is an innovative idea that is worth quite a lot.

Does it actually bog down a reasonably-speced computer? I don't think it does, I think the sluggishness is just from the sheer volume of stuff that has to be downloaded, and the inefficient way it's downloaded. And the reason the web devs don't notice the awfulness is (a) their browsers have 98% of it cached and (b) they have a GigE (or 10 GigE) connection to the server. They certainly don't have computers faster than your M4.

I think you didn't understand what this feature is. It's pretty much the opposite of annoying, and it has no effect at all on bandwidth consumption. Though I suppose when devs get used to their sites seeming to load faster they'll bloat them up even more...

I mostly run application fullscreen and switch between them. The only exception is when I'm comparing the content of two windows (in which case I tile horizontally or vertically) and file selection (floating).

When an application uses the entire screen without the window decorations needed in a regular window manager, a screen's limited real estate is in fact better used in a tiled window manager.

Tiled windows don't solve a problem. They're just a different workflow. I've used both for decades and neither is inherently faster or better. It's just what you prefer.

At any rate, don't knock it till you try it.

on all my machines. Once you get past the tiled window manager paradigm - if you've never used one before - you realize how fast and seamless it is, and it truly is the least common denominator in terms of memory usage.

I left Mint (which is really a Ubuntu derivative) years ago, and now i3 / Sway let I have the same unified desktop on all my machines, fast or slow, new or old, and they all feel perfectly usable.

I highly recommend spending the time to create a i3 or Sway config file. It's well worth the effort and it's a one-off.

And if you just want to try i3 or Sway on your existing distro, install it and simply change the Window manager for your user in the display manager: it lives totally independently of whatever your currently use, so it's risk-free.

You'd think with the successes of the original 16-bit Apple machines, then the Mac platform, full of third party software of every kind imaginable, it should have been self-evident that third party apps would be natural and beneficial. But people like Jobs just can't help themselves: their instinct is to control their platform and exclude everyone else. So they indulge the Reality Distortion Field hard enough to convince themselves that such a scheme is viable, all evidence of history to the contrary, and capture all the money.

The jail breakers are the real heros. They're the ones that pierced the Field and corrected this dysfunction, where no amount of explaining had any impact. They left Apple with two choices: go to war with jail breakers and become a pariah, or correct the bad thinking that prevailed to that point. Fortunately they chose the latter.

Or maybe unfortunately. The residual tyranny that did survive is more than I've ever considered tolerating. Maybe it would have been better if Apple had self-immolated the iPhone with Jobs' vision.

There is nothing about such a mission that mandates obsolete, 2x order of magnitude money torching. Please stop it with your commie shilling.

It doesn't really matter in the long run. Sooner or later the US with elect another (D) president and the teacher's union and/or some other pressure group will once again cut NASA's space program and take the money. After than, NASA or whomever will be forced to adopt cost effective solutions.

Yeah, it was cool watching those four $146,000,000/each RS-25 engines return to the landing pad. Stupid capitalists.

To what are you alluding?

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Even worse is when they compromise the VPN operators and then monitor your usage until you do something that makes them decide to crack down on you.

People erroneously think of VPNs as privacy protectors. They aren't, not unless you have very good reason to trust whoever is running the server. If you don't, then they're concentrators for likely subversive traffic and its origins.