I was thinking the same thing. Or maybe near the pole, to look for water. They already have comms satellites in place to communicate with the far side.

I'd say they are likely to try something that is clearly different to what Apollo did, and what Artemis is doing.

Aiming for too big to fail, because his AI stuff is failing and he needs to be sure that you will be forced to bail him out when it does.

The Chinese government is doing basically what the US government did back in the 1960s. Set a goal, make it happen, fund it properly. Gives private companies the confidence to invest in space, even if they aren't directly involved with government projects.

Except they also do it for stuff like electric vehicles and battery technology, renewable energy, railways, semiconductor manufacturing, steel production, and anything else they feel is strategically important to their economy.

Their goal is "before 2030", so 2029 at the latest, and they are on track for that. They either have or are at the prototype stage with everything they need. Their mission is not over ambitious either, it's a medium size lander and proven technologies. Blue Origin is also going with a reasonably conservative lander, but Starship is a much greater risk.

That's an interesting idea. What do they gain from doing a flight around the moon? They get to test the spacecraft in that mission profile, but they have already landed things on the moon so stuff like the comms and navigation is already sorted out. They have a space station so have experience with long duration missions, and the moon is only medium duration.

Artemis didn't test separation and docking in lunar orbit, but Apollo 10 did. The Chinese can already do the docking reliably for their space station.

These days it would make sense to do a fully automated landing and return to lunar orbit first. Apollo 11 was the first landing of the LM because they couldn't do it automated at the time. But if you are in a hurry to get there, going for a crewed landing is certainly an option now.

In any case, they need to fly some more hardware first, even if only in Earth orbit.

There's also been some developments in AI that means that the demand may level off a bit. Google said yesterday that they can now train AI with servers distributed over the globe. If one region has cheap renewable electricity right now, they can move more of it there. So the need to build more capacity and more storage is reduced as well.

There are some similar developments coming from Chinese companies too, particularly around making AI more efficient.

Hopefully by the end of the year we will be seeing reduced prices, and maybe a flood of used storage from failed AI startups.

Fair, though my data -- and Play purchases -- were my bigger concern when they first started talking about just ending legacy GSuite.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

I searched for it and found it. I can't check now; I left Google last year.

That's fake news, actually. A very widespread misunderstanding, but incorrect regardless.

What Google actually did was move "Don't be Evil" from the introduction of the code of conduct to the summary at the end.

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

OTA just seems like such an inconvenient waste of time and resources now. It doesn't help that you need a licence for it in the UK, but even if it was free, it seems like it is easier to just pirate the small amount of stuff that is worth watching. And these days that is approaching zero, and what there is can be streamed anyway.

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.