When it comes to reducing your ability to spread COVID to others, epidemiologically speaking, he wasn't wrong.

The problem was that he also had a large gathering at his house at the peak of the pandemic. Rules for thee, but not for me.

And yet those groups tended to practice social distancing, wore masks, etc. Some photographers used perspective to make it look like there were dense crowds, but shots taken from other angles revealed that this was not really the case.

For all the stupidity on both sides, red states had much higher case fatality rate despite their very deliberate undercounting of the death toll by limiting testing. Blue states did not overreact. Red states didn't take it seriously, and a lot of people died as a result.

The only place where blue states did badly was New York, and that's because they got hit first, before anybody knew how to deal with it. When you take New York out of the numbers, the difference in fatality rate between red states and blue states is staggering, and blue states had much, MUCH lower fatality rates.

I knew someone personally who died of COVID. He was overweight, but he was not particularly old. What you call unnecessary, I call common f**king sense.

The biggest mistake the blue states made was that they opened too soon. California was within a few weeks of reaching zero cases when they reopened the first time. Had they been going for eradication instead of merely keeping hospitals from collapsing, the death toll would have been massively lower, and the next surge might not have even happened.

The other big mistake was opening up restaurants. As soon as they did that, cases massively surged. Restaurants could have continued to do takeout, but the state decided that profits were more important than people.

With the sole exception of the impact on kids' education, to the best of my knowledge, red states did not do better by ANY objective metric. Feel free to provide citations, though.

You and The Onion jest, but there are people who could easily afford a TV and who use other technology but don't own a TV for religious or philosophical reasons.

In the pre-internet days I knew a family who didn't want their children exposed to TV so they didn't have one.

If Apple thinks it's bad for the consumer, it must be good for us.

Actually it says a lot about how shit their security is if they can't even allow third party software distribution without it being a serious issue.

I bought Apple BECAUSE of "it just works" and not having to worry about crap from 3rd party vendors....

If you want all out choice (good or bad) there are other options.....I wish they'd just let Apple continue to be apple.

California's population in 2023 was 39 million and had ~100,000 deaths attributed to COVID and California had some of the strictest COVID policies.

What's your point?

You mean the... wait for it... Apollo lunar module?

Didn't say it was't. I just said it was a lunar mission, but not a mission to the moon.

No question about that. Any mission where the astronauts return home in one piece is at least partially successful, because that one ultra-critical part still went right.

I have to disagree with that. Yeah, the shuttle design sucked in a lot of critical ways, but we mostly have the military to blame for that, because of their requirement that satellite retrieval be a critical feature in any future NASA craft. Pretty much all of what doomed both of the failed shuttle missions ultimately stems from that design decision and the compromises that came out of that decision (specifically, the need to put the shuttle on the side of the stack stemmed from the need to use the SSMEs to have enough lift capacity to bring large satellite payloads to orbit).

Challenger failed because of that. Columbia failed because of that.

Sure, there were other causes. Challenger also failed because warnings about the o-rings were dismissed by middle management and not brought to the attention of the people who could do something about it. It failed because nobody saw the leaking plume and thought, "The tank could blow. We need to do an early SRB sep and an RTLS abort or an abort once around (depending on alitude).

Columbia also failed because NASA failed to deal with the foam problem that had plagued numerous previous shuttle missions. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have any plan in place to repair critical leading edge tiles in orbit. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have a plan for launching a rescue shuttle if something went wrong. Columbia also likely failed in part because NASA didn't replace the oldest bird in the fleet with one of the newer, much lighter versions, which weighed about four tons less (112.4 pounds per square foot of wing area on Columbia versus 107.5 pounds per square foot for Endeavor, for example). Maybe that small difference wouldn't have made it survivable, or maybe it would have.

Columbia also failed because they deliberately didn't look to see the state of things, believing that nothing could be done, and therefore they did not launch a supply rocket to restock them so that they could extend the mission until they could come up with a solution or launch a rescue shuttle. They did not sacrificially open the landing gear early to cool the wing and allow plasma a path out of the damaged wing during reentry (and increase drag). They did not deploy the drag chute early sacrificially to increase drag. They did not perform all of their turns in a way that would minimize heating on the bad wing or bring the thing down in a continuous curve to increase heat on one side and decrease the heat on the other side. And so on. None of those things were even discussed, because they took it as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing they could do, so they didn't even try.

But at the same time, the number of things they *did* think of, at least during the design stages, is incredible. For example, if they *had* caught the Challenger problem in time to do an early ET and SRB separation, they trained for aborting back to KSC, and the crew could have been saved. Columbia was pretty much screwed without a rescue mission, of course, but the fact that the computer could basically autoland the shuttle (except for the landing gear, which required an umbilical and some new software) meant that *if* they had caught that in time and sent a supply mission and a later rescue mission to bring the crew home, they could have attempted a landing of the shuttle without sacrificing anyone. It meant that if the crew became incapacitated, it could probably mostly bring itself to a landing, albeit a very tile-destroying landing. And so on.

So at least for Columbia, it isn't so much that they believed that they were smarter than they were so much as that they gave up. I don't know which is worse.

I definitely don't think it's worth the expense. They're doing three flights with the design and then throwing it away for a different version in the fourth flight, then throwing it away again in the ninth flight, meanwhile, assuming SpaceX continues on its current trajectory (with Starship block 3 launching in 2026), the Artemis block 2 lift vehicle will be hopelessly out of date years before its first launch (post-2030, with a quarter the payload capacity, and at orders of magnitude higher cost).

It's the best rocket Congress and defense contractor lobbyists could design.

Some of them *use* robots.txt to find out what to scrape.

You can put tripwires in there and feed logs to fail2ban, for instance.

*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

The "AI generated" refers to the 3-bullet-point summary at the top.

There is no particular reason to think the body of the article is AI-written.

There is a similar article on Tech Xplore.

I will concede that neither the TFA nor the Tech Xplore version have a link to Microsoft to confirm the announcement.

That will probably foil my plan to use a VPN to look European.

I wonder how long it will be before someone figures out how to get the update package, unpack it, then re-build it into a package anyone can use. Of course, they will have to do everything in a country that is out of reach of Microsoft's copyright lawyers, AND they will have to somehow earn the trust of people to not infect the "freed update" with malware or other vulnerabilities. Proving you are to be trusted and hiding from Microsoft's lawyers at the same time won't be easy.

About 5.56 billion people have Internet access, but subtract 1.12 billion for China and 130.4 million for Russia, because I'm pretty sure neither has access to U.S. social media, an that leaves 4.3 billion. So it's *maybe* possible that 69.8% of the Internet-using world uses Instagram...

But yeah, a lot of them almost certainly are bots.

Artemis (block 1), not Starship. So more like 50 launch attempts, 1 launch, no explosions. :-D

In all seriousness, three launch attempts, but it felt like 50.

Because an average person reading the headline would think that they are going to the moon, not that they are going around the moon. "NASA plans moon-orbit mission for february" would be clearer and not that much longer.

Yeah, no question. Better to tell them something that they won't understand than to tell them something that they will misunderstand.

Malware asks AI to wait until keyboard and mouse have been quiet for awhile, then open a browser window but move it to the lower-right corner of the screen where it can barely be seen, then ask it to browse web sites where it wants to generate fake ad-clicks, and ask it to click on the ads. The close the browser window, wait awhile, then start over.

Nobody will ever see the ads, but nobody knows that nobody will ever see the ads, so someone will pay for the ads.

But why the fuck would I want anything I REMOTELY like this?

Hell, I can't stand "Edge" too begin with....I remove it from my tool bar......

I don't want any AI running amuck on its own on my computer doing anything it wants.....