There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Nor was anything gained.

I'm not particularly worried about it. Our ability to build and deploy Wind and PV (measured in GW capacity) is much larger than our ability to build and deploy EV batteries (measured in GWh capacity). China is deploying around 1 GW of new PV per day within its own borders, and exporting a huge amount to other countries. Meanwhile, the estimates of China's battery manufacturing capacity (EVs, stationary, portables) is on the order of 10 GWh/day.

As you rightly point out, capacity (GW peak) is not the same as production (GWh). A 1-GW solar array won't produce 24-GWh of electricity in a day. For a decent site, you might get a 15% capacity factor, or 3.6 GWh. That's less than the new battery capacity per day - we can't win! But just like there's a capacity factor for renewables, so too is there one for EVs: hardly anyone is filling and discharging their entire battery every day. In fact, most folks don't use more than 20% of their available capacity per day.

They are both growing, but I think that electricity production can stay ahead of demand.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - Thomas Watson

So long as Sony is still making Memory Sticks, I'll be OK!

10 hour movie would have been awesome! I think it would have made a fantastic prestige-TV type show.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

That's about reason #6 why I won't be buying a Vizio.

Soul of a New Machine is a really fun book from the standpoint of the technology and culture of the time. But let's not forget it was widely regarded as just awesome writing: it won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for nonfiction.

Tracey Kidder also wrote Mountains Beyond Mountains, about Dr. Paul Farmer and the work of his medical non-profit Partners In Health. Another excellent read.

It's hilarious that you think that you aren't paying for "free shipping". Amazon just isn't showing it as a separate line item for it.

Just how autonomous was that robot walking next to the First Lady? There have been plenty of whiz-bang demos of "autonomous robots" where that were actually tele-operated. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

I wonder how the Secret Service evaluated the risk to a principal for this.

These kinds of poor outcomes were described thoroughly in the book "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neil. She cites examples in bail / parole recommendation algorithms, HR screening tools, insurance, etc. In her view, a WMD is a computer system that has some/most of these characteristics:
* that makes serious decisions affecting people other than the person using the tool,
* uses proxy measurements (zip code, socioeconomic status) for the thing they're actually trying to quantify (e.g., risk of recidivism),
* whose inner workings are opaque, and/or built on data of unknown provenance,
* are not or cannot be corrected in light of new data or mistakes,
* are difficult or impossible to contest,
* have little to no regulation.

That was published in 2017, well before LLMs and AI really hit the scene. But the dangers were already apparent even then, and f*&k-all has been done to mitigate them.

Large amateur rockets can achieve >Mach5 , which qualifies as hypersonic. You could probably build something like that for
You couldn't build, transport, and launch one for that kind of money - the ground infrastructure and permitting would be onerous and expensive.

Nor do amateur rockets carry munitions in hypersonic glide vehicles. So that part is worthy of skepticism.