... has forced american consumers to buy ridiculously oversized SUVs and pickups for the last 2 decades. The best selling car in the US? F150. Don't tell me someone living in the suburbs needs one of those gas guzzling and impractical (unless you really need to chuck half a ton of building material in the bed) vehicles. Manual trades yes, most people? No.

I'm not even an american, mouth breather.

They going to arrest some old people and put them on the first flight home because they've barely heard of twitter and tiktok never mind used them yet the guards don't believe them?

Or will this be limited to certain age groups?

What a cretinous BS idea.

Mars has a very thin atmosphere. There'll be next to no drag on it so it'll probably remain in orbit pretty much forever unless perturbed by something or deliberately crashed at some point if comms are ever restored.

If a dept in NASA is using a NASA facility the actual cost is zero to NASA though obviously accountants love all the internal dept budget costings but in reality they're meaningless.

"The Venetian atmosphere is corrosive to many materials but it isn't toxic"

Oh really? Go suck on some SO2 and see how you get on.

"On Venus there is no need for radiation shielding"

BS. There's no ozone and at the height these balloons would float the UV and assorted stuff from the sun would fry you in seconds.

"holes in your balloon are not fatal"

Wtf re you smoking? Archimedes principle holds on Venus just as on Earth. Lose your lifting gas and you sink and on Venus you'll soon start to cook.

... use the 1.85 million unemployed in Japan to pick the tomatoes. I doubt they're all wannabe rocket scientists or AI devs just waiting for their break.

Won't anyone think of the lost profits??

The chances of 2 separate cosmic ray events flipping the exact same bits in program code or its data at the exact same time to cause the computers to return the same defective result is so infinitesimally small that it can be discounted as a realistic scenario.

If this was a cosmic ray then it clearly affected part of the avionics that didn't have triple redundancy. Perhaps they should be looking at that.

I doubt it could make the slop any worse. Might even improve it with a bit of extra random dither occasionally!

No chance of it being slightly out of spec RAM that was sold anyway or perhaps issues with the MB or power supply , no sir, its cosmic rays!

There are and always have been people who like buying old stuff whether its tech, classic cars, clothes or 101 other miscellaneous things. The only problem with tech is that once it breaks that may be the end of it because even an electronics expert cant repair something that requires a replacement ASIC that's no longer made (eg pretty much every 70s, 80s and 90s electronic toy).

I dont want to pay a subscription to a media company ( I already have to pay a license fee for the BBC and that's enough). If theres a film I want to watch and keep I'll buy it on dvd otherwise ill wait for it to turn up on FTA TV.

FTA:
"and the company resolved to migrate its backend to Scala, a more robust language."

If they were serious about performance they'd have skipped all languages except those that run bare metal. Modern C++ is a seriously powerful and fast - albeit perhaps too complicated - language without all the gotchas of older C++ and plain C.

It would even get close to emerging. Free floating RNA and DNA precursors + fatty acids are a tasty lunch to a lot of microorganisms.