"Competing priorities" is another (weasel) way of saying "reusable rockets". We've already been to the moon several times with stupid expensive single-use rockets. That's how NASA has operated and is their general mindset, the shuttle notwithstanding. We'll get there by the deadline with a modern single-use rocket but so what? SpaceX's goal is to get there and back over and over quickly with the same rocket. That's what makes their approach much more difficult but ultimately more useful and less expensive. Launching Starlink satellites is a way of funding the goal without being beholden to the whims of politics.

Not only that, but people are relying on third-parties to keep the data available 24/7/365 until the end of time. I can tell you for a fact that if a company goes under, so does your data. I had an SVN repository hosted by a third-party. The company went tits-up and al of that data is now gone. There might be a backup of it somewhere but it's inaccessible to the company's customers. This is really no different that relying on some physical media to store data. Long gone are 7-inch, 5-inch, 3.5 inch floppy disks. Gone are Syquest disks. Gone are magneto-optical disks. Gone are Zip drives. Gone are magnetic tape drives of bunchteen flavors. CD-ROMs are probably still readable... if you can find a drive for them. Compact Flash probably still work. SD cards and Micro SD cards, plenty of those around... if you can remember what was on them because you can't easily label them. Oops, did you roll over one with your desk chair? Sayonara. External hard drives? Oh, did it use some long-dead interface like SCSI? Heh. And the drive is also hopelessly stuck. Not to worry though. Most of that data wasn't important anyway.

No real CS student (aka hacker in the vernacular sense) is ever concerned with A let alone B or C. They are only interested in exploration of technology and how to make it do things that the designers and gatekeepers never intended. Read Steven Levy's book.

Think all of that wind and solar was free? And while we're on the subject, the Salt River Project in Arizona boasts that they are a non-profit company which means that any "profit" doesn't really get returned to the customer but rather to upper management.

Only the UN would expect first-world countries to slit their own throats because a bunch of third-world countries did. Sometimes I wish that line from Heavy Metal were true "The UN? It's been turned into low-rent housing."

I live in Arizona. No time change here. Plenty of obese people here and people are having strokes all the time.

I had an HP laptop that had this feature. The screen is so bouncy that it makes the experience useless. And fingers are not precise pointing devices. Do not want.

It seems like each streaming service comes out with a new series when none of the others does in order to string you along thinking that something else good might magically appear.

Right, so only Webster and Britannica are allowed to not only define and explain things but also you can only go to them for said definitions and explanations.

Meh. I want a lamp that floats around and follows me like in Dune.

Exactly. By the same token, putting in 80 hours a week at work is meaningless if your work product is garbage.

What a load of crap. You know that whoever gets to decide what gets walled off from all of humanity forever is going to use it as a political weapon. Oh, you want to mine rare earth metals? Did you contribute to my last campaign? No? Well, then I guess that chunk of land with all the rare earths is going to be set aside for nature. STBY. Now if you'll excuse me, my taxpayer funded via an NGO private jet is waiting to take me to my estate in Hawaii.

I get notifications that people (aka real world friends) have posted a photo but when I go to look at it, it's something they posted a month ago. The app insists on showing me crap that I don't care about. Facebook is the same way. I mean, yes, from a business point of view, it makes sense. Meta doesn't make money on friends communicating with their friends. But I dare say that Gen Alpha is the only group that cares less about what their friends are up to than what a shit show the rest of the world is. Probably why Gen X and Gen Y don't use Facebook much anymore.

For too long, too many people have had bullshit jobs that created nothing, produced nothing, but somehow managed to make everyone else's life more complicated and expensive. Oh, and they got paid a lot more than people who created and produced something of value.

I agree. Life is not a two hour exam. Rote memorization is pointless, as any engineer will tell you. You always have the ability to go look something up for two reasons: 1) it frees up your mind to think about implementation and the bigger picture and 2) you won't have the problem of misremembering something. Sure, your mind naturally remembers stuff that you use or are exposed to on a regular basis but you can't force it to remember something that you don't use. When I was a TA, I would see engineering students that aced a test but couldn't design, build, and demonstrate a project to save their life and vice versa. Which one would YOU hire? To this day, I'm baffled by universities requirements for doctoral candidates for engineering. You have to take this qualifying exam that essentially expects you to have remembered ever course you ever took from freshman year. So what? That sure as hell doesn't make them a better teacher. It's the ones who have worked outside of academia that make the best professors. It's like taking martial arts classes. Ooo, look, you can do all these "forms" but you can't defend yourself in a street fight.