I mean I'm still posting here aren't i?

Anyway did your account get hacked or something? What part of my post is championing oppressive bullshit?

Or you just call anything you don't like oppressive bullshit? How very libertarian of you. What's next, needing a license to make toast in your toaster?

This is a multi-billion dollar corporation with congressman on speed dial. This is basically setting up the justice department to go after the botnet directly. Google is just filing the paperwork to legitimize everything.

True, you can always have leaks, but hydrogen leaks seem to be way, way more common than leaks of other fuels as a percentage of launch attempts. The shuttle was scrubbed on average almost once per launch, and a large percentage of the scrubs were caused by hydrogen leaks (source).

And that's on top of the whole embrittlement problem, which can lead to catastrophic hardware failures if you're reusing parts over a long period of time, which is another reason why folks trying to do reusable rockets (e.g. SpaceX) tend to avoid it. And if you think embrittlement is a risk in something that gets used once, imagine the effect on fuel lines in cars that are pressurized for decades at a time.

It is a really, really nasty fuel, IMO. Mind you, hydrazine is worse in some ways, but that doesn't mean hydrogen isn't nasty. :-)

Weeeellll now. The critical element is the number of satellites, and even one rocket sent into a retrograde orbit with a bag of sand can get the ball rolling.

And it isn't just one orbital shell either. That's the thing about orbital collisions and the energy transfer that happens means that some of the degree will end hip higher, and some lower. Which is to say that some of the debris will deorbit fairly quickly, and some not. Can you tell me what the flaw is in Kessler's argument? I concur with what is on the Wikipedia page - tell us why we are wrong.

I think sometimes that orbital mechanics is very hard to grasp. When I use it in presentations I have to really simplify it. But I'm willing to be educated.

I laughed at the guy who told me that too. I asked "If I have to keep a local copy of everything, why do I need your service?" And I've seen where some dolt couldn't retrieve his PowerPoint from the cloud. All it takes is an outdated certificate. I mean crikey, I have my presentation on my computer, as well as on a couple thumb drives when I'm presenting. Ima belt and suspenders kind of guy. 8^)

Now this isn't against things like dropbox, where you might want to share a large file with people. That's a legit use case.

Trump is obviously senile. He doesn't understand anything except the hamburgers that get put in front of him periodically.

Our country is run by the heritage foundation not by Donald Trump.

Because it means the American empire, which is propped up by the dollar, will have gone down the drain completely and we will still have the ridiculous military and we will use it.

Failing empires will inevitably invade other countries and loot them in order to fill their coffers. And we have a growing Christian nationalist movement and things we are literally protected by God so the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't going to be a deterrent. Jesus will just swap those pesky icbms away.

A good idea! I did see she committed suicide in 2024. That's sad. I certainly feel sorry for her family and her.

But trying to figure it out, what was her issue? I guess lack of impulse control, coupled with a propensity to freak out and become irrational. Did she perhaps find in her childhood that a temper tantrum allowed her to get her own way all the time? Because her not listening to the police when they were trying to just get her to book a flight on another airline, and avoid any punishment for her disturbance indicates her cognitive processes were working all askew. But she was not having a psychotic break. At best, she was listening to react, not listening to take input.

I had to snort when she was Screaming and yelling "No, I did not cause a disturbance!"

Yes, they are. I find it a little disturbing though. Is this how women have always acted, and only being exposed now because of the body cams officers wear? Or is it a product of recent years changes in gender mores, and more and more women losing mental control and espousing violence when confronted for illegal acts? Once upon a time, women served more to calm down their husbands in situations, now many I watch have the woman freaking while her husband tries to get her to be quiet. Because police are likely to let her go without charges if she just keeps her yap shut.

I mean when I was in high school and after in a rock band, raced cars and motorcycles, let's just say I was around my share of "spicy" young ladies. But not one of them were violent. And I only knew a couple in school who were. Now it seems like a trend.

What the hell are you talking about? If my net worth is $100 million and it drops by 90% I'm still filthy stinking rich and will never have to work again unless I blow through the money on extravagant spending.

And those numbers get a hell of a lot worse when you take into account billionaires.

This is before we talk about nepo babies and contacts and networking that you get to do when you're a member of the ruling class. The ruling elite have class solidarity while anyone that really works for a living does not. They take care of each other. We eat each other alive at the slightest provocation.

I will never understand people that defend the ruling class. It is just the most bizarre thing to me. I can empathize with most things understanding the underlining emotions even if I don't feel them myself but that's one that is completely alien to me.

And telling people they can unionize if they want is like telling Jews in Auschwitz they can go find another job. The people running the camp might have something to say about that...

Again I will never understand why people pretend we don't have a ruling class after they've been told and shown that we do. I get the people who never encounter that information, it's not exactly talked about, but I don't get the people that have the information and just pretend it isn't there.

Just a reminder that the steam machine won in the end.

Microsoft is about Azure and Office365 now. Everything else is 'yes we also do that status'

If we are being honest, Azure ain't half bad either, its good for all reasons the past greatest hits were. It does everything it needs to do while being easier to get your head around than AWS, or GCP.

If Microsoft has a problem its that Azure and o365 were huge build outs but now are more or less feature complete. There isnt a growth story, for any company not already on them what can they offer as a compelling reason to move there?

This why you see 'copilot' being shoved into all the things. Microsoft does not have a vision right now, or to the extent they do it is - 'let's market AI stuff, and build out Azure capacity to sell AI model compute, so other people can market AI stuff.'

Long story short the next 10 years of the NASDAQ performance is either going to look like the last ten because AI powers big tech to new heights or its going to get real ugly when the irrational exuberance for all things AI runs out of stream

While I appreciate the benefits of DVD that you highlight, I couldn't in good conscience recommend it as a solution. There's just too much unnecessary waste to deliver media/software via physical media. The DVD itself plus the packaging and then additional pollution from distribution (and driving to the store to buy it).

One thing that could help with many of your complaints is to drastically shorten copyrights.

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

I'm assuming it's cope. We all know the AI apocalypse is coming for our jobs and our livelihoods and in turn all of our property as we mortgage it off to survive but well, nobody has a solution that anyone is willing to accept. The idea of giving people food and shelter without inflicting pain is just not something we as a species are capable of. At least not at the moment.

To address the specific points in this post the reason CGI took over is because it's cheaper, and the reason it's cheaper is that the CGI guys don't have a good union or frankly any Union at all. Hollywood went all in on CGI not because it was the right thing to do but because it broke the special effects unions.

The thing is there were still plenty of jobs they just paid less. What's happening with AI is that they're just isn't any jobs.

We are going to be left with two classes of people, people who need to work and people who don't need the work because there is absolutely nothing useful they can do for society. Like it or not not everybody can be a plumber.

I'm sure they won't be any problems though with tens of millions of people who are permanently unemployable. Certainly that didn't happen shortly before world war I and I I.

The important thing is that we never actually learn anything from history. And that we continue to function like crabs in a bucket while billionaires going on trillionaires occasionally reach into the bucket to devour one of us.

Who knows maybe you won't be one of the crabs that gets devoured. But man they're getting hungry. I mean a trillion dollars of crab meat is a lot.

My stars and garters! Fetch me my fainting goats!

Every now and then nerds will realize that their computer is kind of suck because we don't enforce antitrust law but we always go back to sleep.