Blue Origin has never fired a single thruster in space. New Shepard launches straight up, never pitches over, and coasts up to the Karman line; before free-falling straight back down. The fear is that Starliner will undock, maneuver a bit away from station, and then not de-orbit through lowering its perigee with the malfunctioning thrusters. The test pilots could be stranded in orbit at that point. Blue Origin has no experience with a de-orbit burn.

And in 24 years they have never put a rocket into orbit. ULA has launched only one rocket using two Blue Origin BE-4 engines. Engines which are lower thrust, higher mass, and needlessly larger than SpaceX's Raptor. SuperHeavy / Starship / Raptor was only on paper just 8 years ago and has flown 4 times. Blue Origin has had 3x more time and nothing to show for it.

Marketing capital is spent directly into the economy; pulling up every business that makes swag, posters, brochures, commercials, billboards, etc. There's no reason to tax that expenditure for redistribution since it's already positively affecting the economy. We tax income, not expenditures. The companies selling the swag will record the income as taxable. It is taxed, just not twice.

I guess you don't have a cat. I used a grocery bag daily when cleaning out the litter box.

You're missing the point. Rather than a variable scalar dollar amount, with race conditions galore, the list of transactions is only appended to with constant data. The list implementation may have a bit of state requiring an atomic increment, but the data is constant. Don't pass around mutable data if you can help it, because then it's inherently dangerous to work on concurrently. That's the point of functional programming. It's not the perfect tool all of the time, but it has its moments.

Banking systems actually do quickly sum up your most recent transactions since the last snapshot was taken (end of month closing date). Your balance is not a variable, it's a constant at a specific point in time. Each git commit with a hash is also constant. Anyone working with the previous hash (which use to be the HEAD hash) is not screwed, that hash still exists. It's constant. The head of a branch is just the constant at a given time. Any database can be written to not lose historical data, and when a VIP asks what happened last month, you can generate that report without going to IT for tape retrieval.

Take a banking system for example. Transactions are only ever added to the database. Any corrections/deletions are actually new transactions added with a full history of what happened; rather than just a variable representing the current balance. A balance is just the sum of all positive and negative transactions that have cleared by a specific time (the input parameter to this function). So your analogy to a text file should be more like how git version control works. Prior to commit, we rely on undo/redo of characters in the editor. Once committed, we have snapshots of each atomic change, still with undo/redo over time; rather than a single flat file without version control.

I plug in my phone to charge, to develop and debug apps, and to listen to music in the car via the head unit's aux jack. The cord is not going away any time soon. I'm not buying a new car just for wireless music.

Only reason I see to upgrade the OS is for DirectStorage support (DMA from NVMe storage to GPU). MS is choosing to not port it back to Windows 10; even though it's still a DirectX 12 family feature. I don't see older hardware being incapable of this. Anything with PCIe 3.0 should be fine, so Ivy Bridge and newer? 3.5 GB/s from an M.2 drive.

The SRBs has to be completely torn down, cleaned, resurfaced, and rebuilt; at a cost higher than buying fresh new ones.

What bullshit. My Dad has had two surgeries this fall where each hospital stay required a negative test; which was performed at a local clinic 24 hours prior to admission. No problem getting test results.

USB external storage is not fast enough for new games. The PS5 built in SSD peaks at 5.5 GB/s. USB 3.1 peaks at (theoretically) only 1.25 GB/s. Unreal Engine 5 has already shown it will utilize all of that built in bandwidth to load assets in real time. The PS5 has a PCIe Gen 4 M.2 port for "internal" expansion though. Pop in a Samsung 980 PRO and it will keep up at 7.5 GB/s.

4 identical slashdot articles posted, 68(?) more to go. Really, one for each batch or orbital plane?

"Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!"

"life and liberty and being safe in your own home" First two are from the Declaration of Independence; not the Constitution of the United States. Last one doesn't appear in either document. All they're saying is IF they drop this thing, they'll be buying everyone new windows for their homes. Local folks like Boca Chica Girl (who laughed at this) are going to be outdoors watching this launch anyways; so this really affects less than 20 people.