Because permanent access to an expensive online resource should be free forever?

You may want it, but it really isn't a sustainable business model.

No, your "pedo glasses" will work fine without a subscription - you only need a subscription to activate longer access to some conversation focus feature (as if you care what the kids are talking about)...

Uh, you bought the car without paying for heated seats. Then, after purchase, you are offered the chance to pay to use heated seats BMW already built into the car because they thought you might want heated seats AND you might be willing to pay a subscription fee to warm your tushie on cold winter nights.

Once upon a time, DEC sold VAX computers stuffed with CPus and memory, much more than you paid for - the idea was in the future you'd want to upgrade and this feature allowed you to do so without requiring a service call from DEC.

The BMW seat warmers are the same idea, writ smaller. It was a stupid idea, I don't defend it, but your anger at it seems based on a misunderstanding of how it was structured.

I think you mean "They'll still be usable without a subscription"

I don't see the "enshitification" - charging a subscription for advanced features, offering a subset of features for free...

Do the subscriptions pay for previously free features, or are the fees for new features not previously offered? I thought it was the latter.

OK. I understand how you misunderstand the issue better now. You haven't thought about how time works. Is knowing meant fixing and deploying those fixes immediately then the advantage would go to the guys guys. It takes time to implement fixes and test them. Even if the fix was immediate there is a propagation issue. Patches don't roll out immediately and the landscape is huge. A vulnerability in an older version will not be treated as a priority. Sometimes patches don't make their way to production at all. Knowing doesn't fix the problem it only exposes it. Give all of this some more thought. You seem at least smart enough to see what you are missing as you perform further analysis if you do.

We don't build high-density datacenters with plans to EVER touch failing hardware. When a node breaks, it's taken off-line, not repaired. When an upgrade is needed, the datacenter is turned-over/forklift upgrade - no one runs into a google datacenter and talks about adding more RAM.

At one time we talked about dropping watertight datacenters in the ocean - this is kinda the same idea, but it includes rockets! (And, relies on wireless technology and solar panels, ocean-based datacenters could be wired into a power grid, with high-speed fiber optic cables in/out of the facility.

Of course, all these ideas started with the datacenter in a shipping container...

A space-based datacenter is far more vulnerable than an earth-based datacenter (an earth-based datacenter can't be de-orbited by rouge control signals, for example), and once size exceeds anything considered 'small' the possibility of space trash corrupting the unit increases.

Of course, this all assumes the insane cost per Kg of lifting anything into space comes down wildly making these space-based datacenters in anyway practical at any meaningful scale.

Maybe I'm being thick (I can accept that) but on earth we cool equipment by dissipating heat into the atmosphere (heatsink, fans, etc), but in space there is no atmosphere. How would you cool a processor without atmosphere? Would you have to create an atmosphere to absorb the dissipated heat, then somehow get rid of that heat?

Yes, I'm aware of liquid-cooling, but at the end of every liquid cooling system I'm aware of there are fans and heatsink/radiators that dissipate the heat into the atmosphere.

It would be interesting to see a computing system built for deployment in space - it wouldn't resemble any current rack-based or other conventional system we have today - it would likely be an interesting collection of optimizations to reflect a different set of concerns a space-based datacenter would have. For example, once lifted into space, a human will likely never interact with a physical device ever again, ease of install/removal is not an issue, etc.

I get that you don't know very much about the situation and feel qualified to comment on Slashdot as though you are an expert anyway. It has been the Slashdot way for the decades I have been here. However your speculation, as indicated by your use of words like probably, give you away. While it is obviously true that *some* of these vulnerabilities are known to *some* bad actors, it is equally obvious to anyone who stops to think and be honest with themselves for even a short time that *all* of these were not known to *all* of them. Let that sink in. Now add to that the fact that *many* of these were not known to *anyone* and perhaps you can start to get a small grasp on the gravity of the change in landscape and it's danger. Claiming there is no danger and it is all just hype is so absurd I can't even think of words that express exactly how absurd.

So American nuclear weapons aren't dangerous because China also has nuclear weapons. Exactly the kind of reasoning I would expect from an AC I suppose.

I know you are but what am I? Herp Derp.

You have the posting algorithm wrong as usual. The algorithm is education and research first, insightful post later, not ignorant post first, then pretend to be an expert.

Would JPL really need an entire, complete rover to test software upgrades? I understand they'll want to send updates to the rovers over the course of their lifetime, but seems to me after, say, 8-10 of working with the unit they've pretty-much nailed down basic operations, and now they are making adjustments to accommodate failures on the deployed units or optimize software and/or power consumption - things of that nature.

Let's ask the other question, how long would it take to make a fourth rover, specifically for a lunar mission? 6-12 months, or would it take years? If one can be built quickly (under 12 months), I say go for it, build a fourth, but if it's going to take years to build a fourth... maybe asking about sending the earth-bound test unit up make sense?

Yes. Finding flaws is a "stunt" ... much in the same way that you posting stupid comments is one.