Likewise on the "Sure." I don't share your view that 20% couldn't be achieved. The designs of all portable electronics today are based on the capabilities of an unlimited supply of cheap, disposable Asian hands. It is feasible to create designs suited to far greater automation.

The UN is in clear need of full US defunding. Make that building to rental lofts.

This is coming from RISC-V SOC developers, and there are a number of those. They need something to boot and run that has a complete set of packages+infrastructure. It's great that Debian is the go-to distro for much of this, as opposed to a fragmented mess of proprietary dead ends.

There is a lot of new RISC-V silicon appearing or about to arrive. Tenstorrent Ascalon is one I'm looking forward to: by this time next year, Jim Keller intends to have a RV64 chip that is competitive with server grade ARM devices.

Perhaps a reading comprehension mishap has occurred here, but there is no rational way to read this such that it should contribute to your decision. Failing to support Linux is not an option Intel has 2025, and dropping Clear Linux OS does not indicate that they're doing this.

Except for printers, IBM still does everything on your list. POWER is one of the few surviving vendor proprietary CPUs in the world today. POWER11 was introduced a week ago, and they're still made in an IBM fab. They make enterprise grade flash storage systems and scalable cluster file systems. They are among the leaders in quantum computing research. They've developed their own inference accelerator hardware to augment their conventional CPUs.

Again. This isn't apparent to people in the commodity hardware and software world, but IBM still sells a complete stack of IBM gear to those that can write the necessary checks. IBM's largest source of revenue isn't either consulting or hardware. It's software licensing. The have a portfolio of enterprise software you've never heard spoken of, and it's a $27e9/year business.

IBM serves a world you don't know or care about. And they'll be cashing those checks long after we're both dead.

IBM is fine. IBM serves institutional customers. Wealthy customers (cities, states, major corps, federal agents, etc.) pay IBM for services. And no, I'm not taking about mainframes. They have zero profile in the start-up, VC circus, so bloggers don't prattle on about IBM, so you and your ilk are ignorant of what that do and why people pay them. Rest assured, however, IBM a going concern with a very secure future.

Texas Instruments went into a nosedive in the 1980s. They bet on and failed at home computers, and Japanese competitors came after TI's bread and butter semiconductor products. TI had to restructure, do mass layoffs, close plants, etc.

A long time ago, I wrote a lot of PL/SQL. My memories of that are not unpleasant. It is one of Oracle's better capabilities, and PL/SQL does fit very well as a procedural language in an RDBMS.

Incorrect. Jet fuel is stored in a collection of tanks at an airport. One tank can be contaminated with, for instance, water, and this can be pumped into a single truck and loaded into a one aircraft. This has happened before. The fact that no other aircraft suffered bad fuel means nothing.

It could also be a case of debris in fuel, severely restricting fuel flow. The engines run at idle fine, but sometime after power is applied and the debris clogs pickups, the engines will fail. This has also happened to commercial aircraft.

Where are you getting that from? The purpose of a RAT is to sustain power. It will deploy automatically under a variety of conditions, including dual engine failure on takeoff.

All this bit of spin tells us is that the aircraft wasn't grossly misconfigured by the crew. Great.

This is going to be bad fuel. But that won't come out for a long time, because it will put the fault on a state operated airline, from a state operated airport, investigated by that state's authority. If India could plausibly pin this on a Boeing design fault they would be shouting it from the mountain tops, and they've had nearly 3 weeks to analyze the complete data set from both flight data+voice recorders. That fact that what we're getting, instead, is spin stories like this, should tell you everything you need to know.

That's the idea. Get this system fully optimized and serialized, we can develop all the farm land into thousands of cute little off-grid gated exurbs. Everything needed to protect ourselves from the hoi polloi when we outlaw their fossil fuel.

Nothing. SpaceX is doing fine. Starship is ambitious. It is also being developed in a manner not suitable to the sensibilities of the Western aerospace commentariat. SpaceX performs many tests, analyzes many failures and refines designs accordingly. This produces great designs at low cost, in less time, and many dramatic RUDs. The Russians did the same. They performed many tests on initially flawed designs and fixed the flaws they discovered until they had confidence in their designs.

The traditional Western, big aerospace way, as we can clearly see with SLS is to take a decade or more and consumes oceans of money analyzing a paper design beyond any conceivable failure mode. This works, but it's extremely expensive, glacially slow, and suitable only for national superpower scale budgets funding cost plus contractors with little to no thought given to a feasible long term business model. That's why all their marquee designs are now historic, and the next one is still nascent, wildly over budget, years late and likely redundant.

So don't worry too much about the deep thoughts of our professional spectators. You can be absolutely certain that Musk doesn't.

You'd think Broadcom et al. would pitch a fit given the billions they've spent developing Wi-Fi standards that include 6 GHz, developing 6 GHz devices, etc. It's not just owners of existing equipment. It's an entire industry that has been investing in 6 GHz Wi-Fi for years now.

I am saying I have no patience for the drearily predictable "quality" and "safety" FUD. There are severe problems in healthcare. Bad enough to risk neglecting our worship of medical authority. Bad enough to risk suffering possible unknown failures as an alternative to our chronic known failures.

This presumes we have quality. Do you believe that, without doubt? I don't. I have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence of failures by doctors, personally and among family, friends and others. Without (hopefully) inviting a deluge of corroboration, I can assure you the people reading this now can bury us in such stories.

Beyond that, we are in desperate need of lower cost solutions for medicine. You're free to attribute the extreme costs we see however you wish, but finger pointing won't fix it: the powers and interests involved aren't listening. What is needed is a disruption, and this looks like a real possibility. I, at least, don't immediately dismiss it with AMA FUD.