Sure. But there is just as much irrationality on the other side. For example, many people urging the immediate cessation of all fossil fuel use believe that this can be done without any significant price to pay, either on the part of civilization at large, or on their personal part, specifically. Or that the cost will be borne by "others." Or worse, simply be forced in its entirety on the energy companies, as if they are solely to blame for our CO2 problem. I often see people believe that the problem of CO2 emissions can simply be legislated away, and that as a result of legislation, big evil companies will stop polluting and "science" will magically step up and save the day.

That said, I'm excited by the advancements in renewable energy science and technology. I just recognize that while there are significant, incalculable costs to doing nothing, making such a significant change to our energy structure is going to incur real cost, and dare I say, sacrifice, including dramatically reducing personal energy consumption, and paying more for every day items to reflect the true environmental cost of those items.

Cows?

Seriously, though, yes methane currently comes from wells in the ground for the most part. But methane is produced by other processes including organic decomposition, to say nothing of the potential to create methane using solar-powered chemical processes. So it's entirely feasible that in the future sources of methane could come from carbon-neutral, renewable sources.

From what I understand, some of the other cloud providers give you some AWS-compatible services and APIs. So migrating from AWS isn't completely impossible.

Correct. Tim Canham says they not only have a way of flashing the flight controller, they can also access a shell on the embedded linux box, which can be used to stage updates to the controller, although at 115200 baud it takes a while to get the file from the rover to the copter, and communications with Ingenuity is low priority right now. There's a lot of imagery and data that will slowly yet trickle in as they are permitted to use the bandwidth. A variety of watchdog timers can reboot the OS if needed as well. What's so interesting is the copter is built out of mostly off-the-shelf, non-hardened bits. It's hilarious to think about a couple of slashdotter troll posts about software testing when the copter is using off-the-shelf batteries that were never really designed for -200 nights (they are heated), and they are using off-the-self bits from Sparkfun for their flight controller, battery charge circuit, servos, etc. Odds are these low-cost components will fail long before some software bug ends the mission.

Too funny. With your perfect 20/20 hindsight you know all the failure paths and can get perfect test coverage. But you're dead wrong of course. All of the mission objectives were met. The new mission objective is to see what else it can do. They are to push the envelope more and more, and if might just crash. That's acceptable and will be very informative if it happens. However it appears that the copter will be flying for some months yet. Likely it may never crash but just eventually be unable to charge it's off-the-shelf lithium batteries. Listen to the interviews with the project's operation lead that I talked about in another post. You might learn something.

You do realize that Ingenuity is a technology demonstrator, right? If it had failed after the first flight they'd have still learned a great deal and got their money's worth. In fact no one, even the project engineers, were even sure it would fly at all. There were many unknowns. Would it survive the cold nights? Would there be enough energy to heat and also to fly? How long would it take to charge the batteries? How would the batteries perform? None of these questions could be answered by testing on earth.

Frankly you know nothing about the engineering that went into Ingenuity, or the extensive testing they did. Nice armchair analysis, though. Linux Unplugged podcast has done two fascinating interviews with operations lead, Tim Canham. Episodes 396 and 406. Very fascinating stuff and he does talk about testing. You might find it rather educational. Turns out they have plenty of power and the solar panels charge the batteries in about half the time they were hoping for. So far it's staying warm and flight times up to 2 minutes are now possible. Pretty amazing. And pretty amazing that despite this glitch it landed successfully. And even better, they know how to fix the problem and have the ability to patch it remotely (perhaps even using Linux shell commands, I kid you not).

Mod parent up. This should be rated as insightful, not troll. The poster is exactly correct.

You probably don't use Google on-line applications then. Google Voice is slow as molasses and often just stops working entirely. Google Docs can also struggle sometimes. Why they thought a ton of javascript was a good idea when GV worked just fine before without it, I do not know. Google also needs JS to run faster so that their tracking and ad systems won't get noticed as much by the end user.

Except a stripped down version of Windows 10 already runs on the pi and has for some time. Not that it's at all useful.

Yes but as far as I know no Wayland implementation supports this idea of per-app remoting yet, so WSL2 won't either. Which is a real shame in general.

I don't think the WSL has any effect on POSIX compliance and government contracts. I wouldn't be surprised if some government requirements preclude running the WSL at all.

No this is fundamentally about developers who are comfortable with Windows and its tools (Visual Studio) but need or want to target Linux. I think it's part of their Azure cloud strategy as well. Develop on Windows, test in the WSL2, deploy to Azure. MS knows as well as you and I that Windows itself has no place in the cloud. This keeps them relevant. Who'd have thought that MS would be maintaining their own Linux distro for Azure deployments?!

The WSL was a toy (although a very interesting toy with system call translation), but the WSL2 is a proper tool, although you could have achieved nearly the same thing with VMware or VirtualBox, since WSL2 is a VM. What's new is the integration MS is building.

Right! That makes the most sense. And it being open source, hopefully this of thing can be modified to eventually bring back application-level remoting to Wayland-based systems. I realize transparent X forwarding still works for GTK and Qt apps even when in a Wayland environment using Xwayland, but it's only a matter of time before that path bit rots in the toolkits. I'm not interested in remoting a whole desktop; I used application-level remoting regularly.

Highly doubtful. Windows, if anything, promotes the kind of UI mess that Linux is famous for. MS started it all years ago when they started using a custom UI toolkit for MS Office. Every Office release since uses a slightly different widget set. Now we have a mess of apps that look and act differently, some skewmorphic, some not. It's particularly horrible with anti-virus and anti-malware tools. In short, only MacOS strives for any sort of UI visual consistency, and even then sometimes not.

Personally I don't find the current state of my Linux desktop to be ugly or unusable. For me quite the opposite. I of don't really care about mythical new users, though. I care most that the applications and desktop environment works for me and my use cases, which it does nicely. I get irritated when developers would rather alienate a user like me who has used, say Gnome for decades, to try to attract new users, which I'm not convinced actually exist.

This is about Wayland on Windows, not Xorg. Somehow they are implementing Wayland in Windows proper and then connecting the Linux applications running in the Linux VM (that's what WSL2 is, a VM) through to this native Windows Wayland server.

Actually it seems like the regime has really made sure everyone knows his name. Disturbingly, since he's designated as an official "national hero," insulting his name or questioning his achievements is strictly illegal. So if someone questions his environmental legacy, for instance, off to a reeducation camp for you. Wonder how long the CCP can keep this up. It's a relatively small elite vs billions of people.