If the "more digital" cars made in the U.S. are going to be less capable and more expensive than their Chinese competitors, one wonders if this will give even more energy to the resergence in interest among car buyers to purchasing slightly older, more "analog" cars (e.g., cars that still have fuel injection and automatic transmissions, but predate big touchscreens and multiple computers).

My "fun" car is a 2010 Nissan 370Z convertible. My neighbors call this my "analog" car. When I look around, I see more people interested in buying cars from the early 2000s. They don't want to learn to drive stick, and they still want a car that starts easily on winter mornings. But they like knobs and levers rather than touch-screens.

Like, an advanced digital car (like BYD) is very attractive too, but not if you have to buy the U.S.-made competitor that's substantially more expensive and less capable. If you're going to have to make that kind of compromise anyway, you might as well just buy an older car - I wonder if that's the calculation more people will make.

IMO Starship is demonstrating that âoefail fastâ development doesnâ(TM)t scale up well. I donâ(TM)t think even SpaceX though test-flights would number in the mid-teens before missions could be flown.

Fun fact: âoeOperation â" Annihilate!â (Spock goes blind after a bat thingy attaches to his back) was filmed at TRW Space and Defense Park (now Northrop Grumman Space Park) in Redondo Beach.

Perhaps a spacecraft could also use Solâ(TM)s magnetic field to get to Mars. There are robust magnetic fields at Sol, Jupiter, Earth, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Ganymede, and Mercury.

My recollection is that PJ finally ended Groklaw over privacy / anonymity concerns about email. But Iâ(TM)m sure she must have also felt burned out by that point.

My recollection from the old Groklaw days is that the heart of the disagreement turned out to not even be code, but API definitions. SCO claimed to own the definitions of some APIs, but (when finally pushed to be very specific) not their implementations.

â¦that a slashdot summary feels the need to explain l337.

If the clone is AI-generated, I donâ(TM)t think it can be copyrighted, based on [Thaler v. Perlmutter, 2023]. Calling the clone âoeproprietaryâ is a slight misstatement. It could be protected as trade secret maybe, but I donâ(TM)t think itâ(TM)s copyrightable, based on what courts have ruled so far.

Space-hardened GPUs are rare, costly, and generations behind datacenter-class hardware, as are CPUs. And as others have pointed out: The heat dissipation. The electrical energy. The connectivity. The launch costs. The maintenance. Nothing about this makes any sense. He might as well move car manufacturing to space.

Hypothetically, suppose we knew for a fact that some sort of seemingly aircraft-like objects were flying around that were not built by human civilization as we now know it, and are also not an unknown phenomena of nature.

All of the following explanations appear improbable in the extreme, but which explanation would you consider to be the *least* improbable?

A. Extraterrestrials (biological or robotic)

B. Time travelers

C. Travelers from an alternate dimension or alternate timeline

D. An ancient advanced civilization that has been hitherto undiscovered (for instance, living deep within the Earth's crust, or deep undersea)

E. A supernatural phenomenon such as ghosts

F. Other (explain)

Personally I think the least improbable answer is D. Not that I think that answer is within the realm of realistic, but at least it requires fewer violations of the physical laws that we know than the other explanations.

> As much as I'd prefer that there were starfaring alien civilization...

Elizondo didn't say they were aliens; he said they were UFOs. I've heard a few Air Force pilots opine on this same topic: they believe there's definitely some strange phenomenon that we don't understand. Not necessarily aliens, but something.

When a government agency funds something that works, the headline is always, "NASA builds this..." or "DARPA builds that..."

But when a government agency funds something that doesn't work, the headline instead is, "Lockheed mess up this..." or "Boeing messed up that..."

Did DARPA "create" this as the headline says, or did they just fund somebody else to do the research, design and implementation?

http://www.laserfocusworld.com/articles/2012/07/northrop-grumman-demos-850-ghz-integrated-receiver-circuit-aiming-at-terahertz-photonics.html

There doesn't appear to be any sexting icons. How can they expect this to catch on? ch'uh

Wikis are great for this.

Democracy works only in theory as well:

"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until a majority of voters discover that they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury."

              - Alexander Tytler

The Soviet Union lasted for almost a century despite the flaws of communism. We in the U.S. have lasted for a little over two centuries. From a purely empirical standpoint, neither economic framework has yet proven itself to be stable in the long term. (A couple of centuries isn't really long enough to prove long-term stability. If we make it to a thousand years though, I think that'd be a pretty good argument.)