The problem with Dvorak is that it makes using vi much harder :)

This is yet another case of people confusing the Internet with the World Wide Web. The Internet is not information -- it is a network over which information is transferred. As such it is made up of networking equipment, routers, switches, cables, etc; the collective weight of which is surely many thousands of tons.

You've never driven through Nevada, have you?

Yeah, sorry, typed the wrong word (I would have put 'balanced' there in retrospect), but didn't realize until after I'd hit submit.

The stability question isn't about the tensile strength and other mechanical properties of the structure itself, it's about the orbital mechanics. A ringworld orbiting a single star is stable on a "peak" position, where any movement away from that position results in net gravitational forces that move it further away. In contrast, the stable lagrange points are positions where small amounts of movement away from that position result in graivtational forces moving it back towards that position -- a "valley" by comparison.

On the abstraction layer -- I suspect you've never had to work on a codebase that was written without abstraction and then later ported to different hardware platforms. Too much abstraction results in code that is bloated and slow, but too little abstraction results in code that is buggy as hell and impossible to maintain. Slow but correct beats fast but wrong every time in my book.

Because "free" means that you can do what you want with your body, your life, and your property. It does not mean you can do whatever you like with someone else's body, life, or property. Your freedom with an employer is the freedom to quit and go work somewhere else, not to decide what the job entails.

This isn't necessarily Amazon's fault. In an attempt to fight traffic congestion, a lot of cities have started limiting how many parking spaces companies are allowed to install at their offices, so as to force employees onto the public transit they wouldn't use voluntarily.

From what I've been reading, the current theory seems to be that one engine failed, the pilots made a mistake diagnosing it and shut down the wrong one (this happens distressingly often), then panicked and did a no-flaps, no-gear landing despite the backup options that existed to deploy either one. That meant a high landing speed, no brakes, and a plane that "floated" in ground effect longer than normal so it touched down halfway down the runway. Then it hit the antenna berm/wall. Note that some distance beyond the wall are things like trees and houses, so letting the plane slide further into those would not necessarily have produced a better outcome.

The investigation will answer these questions. If the above is true then while the wall would be a contributing factor, it would not be primary cause.

SSTOs still have some advantages over landable/resuable staged boosters. Most people think the idea of propulsive landing is unlikely to be considered safe enough for a crewed vehicle, whereas an SSTO spaceplane has a lot more backup/abort options since it glides to a runway. That SSTO also has a theoretical faster turnaround time as well, since it also takes off horizontally from a runway. No need to restack your rocket, you don't need an expensive Starship-style launch pad and water deluge system, etc. It also helps the sonic boom problem that has been in the news for Starship lately, since the transition from supersonic to subsonic happens at higher altitudes.

But yes, there's less interest in aerospikes and thus less funding now that SpaceX has changed the market.

And whose fault is that, anyway? Ironic, isn't it?

You really need a 360 degree view of the car *while parking*. 360 parking cameras are amazingly useful for precisely positioning the car, every car should have one.

As far as exporting that view over the web to an app, yeah I don't see the point to that.

I remember that someone (might have been NCSA) had a page that indexed all of the new web sites for the current week. Manually updated, of course. :)

Their revenue yes, but looking at the same graph of their stock price is a very different story. Peak was $82 in Y2K, and it's never been higher than the mid $50s since. Adjusting for inflation is even worse, that $82 peak is $152 in 2024 dollars.

Yes, there are some dividends in there, but any shares bought at the peak and held for 24 years are still in the red.

You missed the fourth bullet: cost. Soldered-on ram reduces manufacturing cost, by omitting parts (the socket), by omitting labor (manual labor to install the dimms), and by reducing the defect rate in QA.

PC laptops are commodities, it's very difficult to differentiate on features so people buy them based on price. That places a huge premium on reducing manufacturing costs so that you can squeeze out as much margin as possible, and even if the above items only save a dollar or two per laptop, that matters. This is the real reason manufacturers do it, there's no conspiracy about forcing later updates.

Ultimately, the reason they can do this is because the vast majority of customers are never going to upgrade the ram in a laptop, they just don't care.