There doesn't *need* to be a benefit - at this point, ani-vax is basically a religion. A kind of paranoid schizophrenia mixed with anti-government sentiment. It's become self sustaining.

That said, it started as a cash grab. Disgraced former doctor and un-indicted serial child abuser Andrew Wakefield pioneered the "research" associating the MMR (Measles, Mumps, Rubella) vaccines and autism, and pushed that narrative hard, even though he himself was never anti-vax and openly advocated for separate vaccinations for those diseases. It was later discovered that he not only had a deal with an ambulance chasing lawyer named Richard Barr who was looking for any excuse to sue vaccine manufacturers (to the tune of nearly half a million GBP), but he also had a financial stake in a company that sold those separate vaccines he advocated for.

=Smidge=

The zipline thing seems neato, although it does have its down side, wind. Drones are great in wind, especially copters.

I'll just leave this here also since it's convenient:

"Residents have compared the sound to everything from a massive beehive to a full-on air raid."

Heh heh "air raid" people are nuts. Maybe one will burn up on top of a propane tank, though, and then it will be closer.

This was only counting Slashdot.

There are quite a few people who want to inflict suffering so people are more receptive to their ideas about how to fix it. They also like to push anti-science ideas because they tend to be religious or at least using religion to further their ends.

Not many people are receptive to revolutionaries when their stomachs are full and their children aren't dying.

But we ship out our electronics to be landfilled in other countries.

"When we need medical care, we expect decisions about our treatment to be made by our doctors, not a tech company's algorithm,"

Yeah, that's the expectation of people who are new. They haven't seen an insurance company or Medicaid (or Medicare) deny treatment, or seen an employee at the SSA with no medical training deny an application for disability.

Competent people have a look what the network can take in addition to what it carries, then shape a new thing down well below that. And make sure they can turn it off fast. Sounds a like nobody even checked. Amateurs.

I have seen this extreme level of stupidity only with IBM tech consultants before. They killed the network of a large bank were I also transferred monitoring data, pretty much the same as they did. The difference is my first question was how much data and my second how much bandwidth can I safely use. And the bank had all that very nicely. The IBM morons just built software and then pushed everything on the net and were surprised when that did not work. Fortunately the bank got their crap killed in half an hour or so. And then these idiots asked me where I got my traffic figures. 2 years into their project. Sounds like something like that happened here as well. Just with a teensy bit more damage.

Sure. It's not like a misconfigured router has ever taken down a network before.

Why would it? It doesn't sound like it has anything to do with ATC, it's a recommendation system for scheduling.

Short term, might be possible.

Medium term, not possible yet because the machines will break down and they aren't designed to be maintained by other machines.

Long term, possible but complex without at least having humans do inspections.

If they know about it and don't do anything to stop it, then they share liability. They can both be sued.

CBS reports that:

an L3Harris contractor was working in a remote FAA location and switching old copper wire to fiber while replacing a router. The router that was being switched then started flooding other routers, overloading the system. There were 1,000 attempts to log on every four to five seconds, he said.

The network DDoS'ed itself.

If the system is designed so that a couple of routers in one spot can make it necessary to ground everything, the design is bad. Saying they need $50B stat is wild when it clearly wasn't done right the first time with however much was spent so far.

The FAA uses a fair number of remote controllers. The airspace around Newark airport is controlled from Philadelphia, for example. Radio communication both ways, along with radar information, is carried over a fibre optic link. This incident seems to have been a problem with several route air traffic control centres, which would be connected to their actual radios and radars over a wide area in much the same way. It's (hopefully) not the Internet, but it is an internet.

There are lots of receivers. Many of them are publicly accessible on the Internet. Also, the plane receiving the commands is required to acknowledge them.

So at a conservative estimate it saved them about $200,000,000 in Falcon 9 launches.. if throwing away a booster and Starship costs less than that then they're already making a per-launch operating profit.

The contract price for a launch of a fully recovered Starship+booster is $90 million. We don't know how much it costs to build one, but its going to be more than that. Unrecovered, Starship should be very uncompetitive, particularly with something like Falcon.

SpaceX is at the point where they can start taking the edge off the cost of their testing program by launching useful payloads though.