Without a hostage there is no ransom!

The only way you can lose heat in space is through radiation. But radiation carries momentum. Not much per photon, but it was enough to cause the Pioneer probes to move in unexpected ways. This means you have to emit equal amounts of heat towards Earth and towards space. If your resultant is zero, then you're fine. You can even direct some of the heat backwards. It won't do a huge amount, but every bit of atmospheric drag you overcome, the less fuel you need to use to stay in orbit.

So you basically need absolutely gigantic radiators behind the space-based data centre, located inside a parabolic dish that will generate drag of its own (not to mention a potential difference betwen the lower and upper sections).

This is an insane level of complexity. You're better off parking it in a stable orbit between the Earth and the moon, so it's absolutely clear of atmospheric effects. You're still going to need radiators, but it's marginally better as you don't have to do quite so much directing of it. The latency would be horrible, maintenance would be next to impossible, and there's all kinds of other issues to consider.

No, I don't think you can make this workable.

However, space might be useful. This very same issue of heat only being radiated means that you can make wafers with much more even loss of temperature, no dust, bacteria, or dirt, and much lower gravity. If you were to make extremely high quality wafers (silicon or gallium arsonide) in space, then you should be able to make WSI processors, which should in turn reduce the demands that datacentres make.

The time it would take to set all this up would be about the same time as it took for IBM to perfect its stacked transistor topology. Intel was talking 90 cores per wafer-scale CPU a few years back - the shrinkage in transistors since then plus the x10 density IBM proposes might push you to 1800 cores per wafer, provided you can get the quality high enough. Which, in space, is quite possible.

You wouldn't need your datacentres in space. Your wafer-scale CPU plus packaging would be about the same size as a CD drive. You could pretty much dispense with datacentres at that point. A typical tower will have two spare bays. "Cartridge datacentres" could simply be plugged in as needed. A regular CPU-based cartridge for heavy general-purpose computing, a GPU-based cartridge for LLMs. Yes, home users would have power usage through the roof, but then it's no longer your problem.

Gosh, that must be worth at least a trillion dollars.

Better scramble and invest in their hype of... a handheld box that can run AI... like... phones do.

So, I don't understand why it's taken them all this time to add logins to prevent anonymous access.

But that aside... why is "old Reddit" anything more than a skin / display layer over "new Reddit"?

It's the same shite that always happens. Hey, we completely redesigned everything from the ground up, but it's an absolute impossible to just... make it look like it always did.

It's just skinning/theming, effect. This is the whole point of things like GUI libraries and CSS. The content is the same. The metadata is the same. The only thing that differs is how you lob it at the screen. Why that requires keeping running decades of old legacy code, or destroying backwards compatibility is always beyond me.

Same with everything from Office to Windows to websites. "Hey, we're changing how we look, which shouldn't affect anything one bit, but in the process we've trashed the service and half the stuff doesn't work any more and, by the way, there will never be any going back, even though we could offer a "legacy theme" running on the new system as easily as we could build any of these junk new features that we insist on shoving down your throat even if you don't want them."

30 years ago, I imagined and was lead to believe, that in the future things would be commoditised and sensible. I could have Windows laid out how I wanted it. I can have Office use the old menus while still opening all the new files. And I could go to a website and say "No thanks" to the new theme and carry on running the old theme without having to accept that it would an atrocious turd of unmaintainable legacy code that nobody touches (Hello, Slashdot Classic!) even though they could just update it (Hello, SoylentNews with runs on the same backend as Slashdot but has been updated and works GREAT).

Hell I thought that in 2026, I'd be able to type a UK pound sign into a plain text box and it would render vaguely correctly. Let me try again:

£

(That was literally just a Shift-3 on a UK keyboard... not one other site has problems with that, not even SoylentNews based on the same software).

The reason there are extreme left candidates is that the Democrats picked the ONE candidate they will run in the main election. At best they will pick an average Democrat, but because they are NOT using RCV they will probably pick an extremist who appeals to the greatest fraction (far less than 1/2) of them. In RCV there would be a bunch of Democrats and Republicans and others running in a SINGLE election. Yea you can vote for your favorite extremist as #1, but you will also rank people in the middle higher than your opposing side, and since this happens in both directions, the center will win.

It is obvious that opponents of RCV are resorting to outright LIES now. Pretty low.

Sterilization probably is not needed for the Moon. Most things die and we have already contaminated it plenty anyway.

I agree there is something fishy about this. Not only will it leave the 2 landers on Mars without a test platform on Earth, it will also leave PROMISE without a test platform on Earth! I'm also surprised the test platform has a working RTG generator when there probably is a wall outlet it could have used instead, though perhaps they wanted to be absolutely authentic.

Last I checked power plants are not free.

You are lying. It is not becoming. Ranked choice would prevent the extreme left candidates we are getting. You know that.

Also I believe various ranked-choice algorithms will elect centrists, even if the extremes are not equidistant from the center. The main problem is that the candidates have to be distributed in a way that matches the population, it may be that only extremists want to get into politics. In that case ranked-choice will choose the extremists nearest the center and still be an improvement.

I would agree MAGA has moved much more to the right than the "DSA" candidates have moved left. However they have both moved away from the center.

Being rich doesn't make you stupid, but being really rich starts to isolate you in a bubble of luxury and sycophants, and eventually you start to forget what the rest of the world is like, and start making decisions based on the unstated assumption that other people don't matter.

Still, they're the Monsanto of software: if something would be worth doing and lucrative, but is not evil, they're not doing.

This scorpion doesn't seem able to change its stripes.

A problem that not one other developed country has had to deal with in years. Decades, even.

And are you seriously telling me that if the recipient AND the sender were to acknowledge that it was fraudulently cashed that the bank couldn't do anything about it? That the security is on an inked name alone? What ridiculousness. That's just awful consumer protection.

Maybe - yet again - wake up, get into the 21st century as a country, and start putting laws on the side of taxpayers and consumers rather than corporations.

These can be published or accessed, but never both at the same time.