Damn, Windows has really improved in the last 25 years. Wouldn't know since my last Windows was Win2k and my computers only run macOS or Linux and have crashed less that 10 times combined in the last 20 years or so. A well, whatever. Good for people still using Windows, I guess.

... Fantasy worlds out there that would look epic as a AAA fantasy blockbuster triology. Raymond E. Feist comes to mind. Bernard Hennen, Guy Gavrial Kay, Brandon Sanderson and countless other top-shelf fantasy authors and epic worlds. Can't we just leave LOTR be? It's gotten an excellent film adaption, one that will stand the test of time if it doesn't get diluted with trash like it already partially has. Please stop right now.

I think we may be truly witnessing the dawn of western culture and it effing hurts.

... to all their competitors, grab the deckchairs and some popcorn and watch everybody else tear each other to shreds. Brilliant move if you ask me. 8-)

... in at least one key aspect: The cash going around is almost exclusively from the deep and wide warchests of large megacorps. Which means if a bubble pops it likely will just be a little fart for regular people and we can get rehired for our bullshit desk jobs.

Shouldn't the super-fast rotation of massive black holes counteract at least some of their gravity vertical to it's axis? Could that - at least hypothetically - eventually cause a black hole to break apart into bits of regular non-black-hole matter, if it spins fast enough?

Sorry if I'm sounding silly here, I'm a 5th-grader when it comes to astrophysics but perhaps someone with knowledge could offer some insight?

How many billions did that game make them? Seriously, this just be one of the highest grossing videogames ever, no? How long has it been going? 9 years? That's pretty epic if you ask me. This game was nothing other than an epic success (no pun intended).

> "Our vehicles are giant paperweights right now through no fault of ours," one wrote on Reddit.

No fault? None at all? That seems... counter-intuitive.

I get it that the technology failed spectacularly, and that this is a serious problem for which people need to be held to account, but my car is working just fine.

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Modern devices and machines appear to me like some hilarious Brazil-style cyberpunk joke-reality. Imagine an effing cyberattack bricking a lock on your car or engine-starter. LOL! Well, I guess it's not called "Internet of Trash" for no reason.

... is likely going to be the mid- to further out future of coding. Presumably de-compiling into some human-only language not intended for re-compiling is going to become more and more of a thing. No need to go through all the hoops of countless programming languages and frameworks just because some naked apes like to each turn their own little software world into a stack-religion.

Some form of containers is going to remain though. Especially to isolate problems and find bugs isolating logical components into different chunks is likely to remain a thing if source code isn't available.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

After a few months of Windows 95, I switched to NT 3.5. Much better.

What APIs and functions exactly are being banned? And even if, migrating a PWA to something a little more old-school is trivial. Back in the day we even did async FEBE before XHTTPRequest even existed. Given, (re)loading zero-width frames to transfer data back and forth is quite steam-age Ghetto-style by todays standards, but the upside is it also works in browsers from 1998. 8-)

It's worth noting that Nikola wasn't his first scam, either.