No, but our aerospace industry learned a lot of useful things about how to operate in space. We can't be risk free if we want to make progress. In order to learn you have to fail sometimes; If we, the taxpayers, insisted on a refund that would likely put this company out of business and a lot of the learning would be lost.

So..what exactly are we learning for $30M?

How to fuck up a launch/deployment of a low orbing space craft?

Haven't we been in space long enough to learn those lessons?

Yes I'm a bit sarcastic....but seriously, what learning are we getting from our $30M.

If this company sucks....should they NOT go out of business and open bids up to more qualified companies for next shots?

I have to disagree, for several reasons. First off, file sizes just keep increasing. Instead of people thinking their televisions at home look great in "full 1080 HD resolution"? Now, everyone's moving to 4K TV, with 8K being the high-end offering. That means streaming television supporting those higher resolutions is going to use 4x to 8x the bandwidth it used to.

Second, any avid gamer knows how big the downloads have gotten for modern games. The regular updates they push out, alone, are typically 35GB to 350GB+ in size. Now, imagine you've got a family at home with at least 2 or 3 people playing online games on their machines. They don't want to have to wait 20-25 minutes to start playing every time it says an update is required first.

Beyond all of that, though? I've found fiber connections used in an office environment are handled a little differently than what people have at home. EG. I can start uploading 4 or 5 large archives to, say, Microsoft Azure cloud storage, right in the middle of the workday -- and nobody else using the office network even notices. That's largely because we have multi-thousand dollar routers in the office and they're properly configured to prioritize certain types of traffic like VoIP phone calls, and to throttle connections intelligently so everyone gets a fairly equal piece of the total connection "pie" as they work. It's not that reasonable to expect residential users to have similar setups, or to even know how to configure them.

My cable provider now offers 2GB download speed service, but it's problematic in the sense most people still have devices with wired Ethernet ports that only handle up to 1 gig. speeds. I have a pretty expensive Linksys Atlas mesh router at home (cost $850 or so for the 3 piece set, a few years back), and it doesn't have a port on it faster than 1 gig. for the cable modem to attach to.

Obviously, the provider is happy to supply their own combo modem/router to use but with a monthly cost attached.

But there's just not a good reason in 2026 to not make a least gigabit connections a standard offering. Nobody's "unfairly discriminating" against services like satellite with any of this. Those technologies have always been considered wireless alternatives to use when you're in too rural of an area to expect anything else. Invest in building out fiber networks and those techs will just become what you use when you're mobile.

From the State House to the US House, Byron has a proven record of standing up for our values. From defending Second Amendment rights, to protecting life, and to keeping radical woke ideology out of schools, Byron will always fight the Left's agenda.

What's inflammatory about that statement?

My question is....

Do we, the US taxpayers get a $30M refund from this company that could not complete their end of the contract?

When you have to cite a decade old model, you're not proving your point, you're proving mine

Sorry...I've never considered it to be "old" as a car....

Honestly? I think your last statement there is a key point that should receive a little more attention. It seems possible --- heck, even prudent -- for a person to question possible negative outcomes from mRNA vaccines, while still fully recognizing that it makes good sense to use one on an existing disease. Even in a nearly worst-case scenario? You're talking about cancer, which surely kills a person if not treated, vs a theoretical risk of some long-term problems from an mRNA vaccine (some of which even anti-vax types admit aren't showing up except in a certain percentage of vaccinated people).

This is a study of people born in a set time period at a set location.

There were LOTS of things happening at that time. Yes sugar was rationed, but there were also a lot less chemicals being made, some new chemicals started up, jet travel became common, the men had come home, but some did not. New medicines appeared. New foods became common besides sugar.

The writers of this study picked one of thousands of potential explanations and ascribed it as the cure. They have NO EVIDENCE at all that reduced sugar was the cause.

This is the WORST possible example bad studies. It's like I looked at one of the cancer maps people make, pick a school in the center and blamed the Principal of the school for intentionally giving cancer to his students.

This study indicates Britain's of a certain age have health benefits. It does NOT indicate sugar had anything to do with it.

A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play....

That has much more to do with people being creatures of habit than being stupid.

I'm old enough to have spent a long time driving cars before voice recognition was a thing. Probably dating myself here, but I remember how excited my friend was when he got a new Nissan Z car and it actually spoke to him, saying things like "Your fuel is low!" and "The door is ajar!"

I spent years trying to utilize voice recognition systems when they came out, and was consistently frustrated. Some required I memorize their specific set of words they understood (cough, Chrysler ...) and didn't do anything else. Others just couldn't understand what I said half the time. By the time any of these systems in cars worked well, I'd given up on them as more hassle or gimmick than they were worth.

At least w/Infotainment touchscreens, you get visual confirmation of what you picked/selected. Voice commands get super annoying as soon as it misunderstands you once and starts the wrong process.

Is that an indirect way of saying you spend an inordinate amount of time and money performing maintenance on your old clunker to keep it running? Cars haven't sold with CD players for a really long time.

I know a 2017 Mazda that still has a factor CD player in it.

And then again, often people put new stereos in cars...aftermarket, etc.

I wonder how many fatalities "Radar Love" has racked up over the many years it's been out?

I have to admit, my foot to this day gets VERY heavy when that song comes on...among some other choice "driving" songs.....

Thus getting back the money Trump extorted for his librabry.

My home server is an old HP Proliant DL380P that's full of DDR3 memory and 18 LFF SATA drives. Even though it's probably circa 2014 or so, it just keeps on reliably doing what I need. Currently running TrueNAS Scale on it with Plex, NextCloud and a TailScale VPN. (May also spin up a dedicated game server for "Pal World" since our extended family have been playing it a lot lately.)

Every time I think about retiring it for something newer -- it just doesn't add up financially to do it. The crazy memory and mass storage prices right now will keep me away from that idea again for a while, I think ... baring a complete main board failure.