I even wonder why they haven't done it much sooner.

We didn't have good ion thrusters back in the 50s, 60s and 70s and after that launching nuclear reactors into space was considered a bad idea, not without reason. A nuke plus ion engines isn't a slam dunk either, ion engines produce very little thrust and reactors are heavy even if you don't have to bother shielding them much, so there's an efficiency threshold you need to hit before it's worthwhile.

NASA has realized that beating, or at least competing with, the Chinese to a moon base is probably going to require a reactor, so why not demonstrate it as part of a drive too?

the original formulation of relativity and physics in general did not distinguish between rest mass creating gravitation and light speed particles generating gravitation

Maybe you have access to some early draft notes of Einstein's, but in his actual papers on relativity mass does not "create gravitation." Energy, momentum and some off-diagonal terms like stress and pressure gravitate. There is no mass term in the stress-energy tensor, nor anywhere else in the Einstein Field Equation. Mass is not fundamental in relativity, it's a property of a system. That property is the product of energy and momentum (and the other stuff) in particular configurations within the system so in many situations it can be used as a surrogate for the underlying energy, momentum and other stuff.

Physics prior to relativity did indeed say a lot of different, confusing things about mass, gravitation and light speed particles.

"Creating fusion" isn't hard. Kids do it for science fair projects. Here's a guy on Youtube making a fusion reactor.

Making a fusion reactor that produces more electricity than it uses is hard. That's what you're thinking of. Rocket engines famously do not usually produce electricity, and if they do they do it extremely inefficiently, so it's a completely different problem.

we don’t have massless drives

Reactionless drives. A massless drive would be an engine that didn't have any mass, I guess. We have lots of drives that don't involve throwing mass out the back, including solar sails, magnetotorquers, electrodynamic tethers, flashlights, etc. Hard drives have a few. Your car has at least one big one and a bunch of others besides, as does your body. None of them are reactionless though.

Reactionless drives are called that because they violate Newton's third law, which is really a statement about the conservation of momentum.

Individual photons don't have mass, abstract or ortherwise, they have energy and momentum. Individual fundamental particles of any kind don't really have mass because mass is a property of a system.

A system of multiple photons can have regular old non-abstract mass if they're configured properly.

Topics do drift you know. Perhaps I have a different metric, but an Update that causes programs to stop working, renaming files, placing programs and files to OneDrive.

The effect is remarkable similar to a crash. And to me, a failure of Windows that I do not have with Mac or Linux

A computer should be an appliance. I have work to do. Spending time fixing a messed up Windows machine really wrecks productivity It only takes a few minutes of my burn rate and productivity loss to far exceed the cost of having a functioning computer.

For a hobbyist, maybe. For people making money and providing a service, computer downtime is a serious problem.

Oh good to see you came in here to set the record straight. Even Microsoft is wrong. Google Windows 11 is a disaster and find out how everyone is wrong.

Here's your problem. While you focus on a monovariant, that for some reason, the only problem is drivers. What about endless reboot loops, mystery fails on updates, changing names of critical files, moving programs and or critical program files to one drive, causing program failure and/or crashes.

Blaming it on drivers, and not using enterprise level equipment just no longer works. All that is doing is blaming the user, the old concept of "Microsoft cannot fail, only we can fail Microsoft."

The upshot of all this is plain. Windows is fundamentally broken, regressing under Windows 11. And if all the problems are the users fault, they can migrate to an OS where they don't cause all those problems.

Is it boasting though? Not having crashes should be the expected situation. A pity it is considered a flex.

It's like boasting that your refrigerator keeps food cold. 8^)

Well, I do the same things on My Macs and Linux computers. Yet they don't crash. But the same things on Windows machines do. I fear our friends logic doesn't hold up on any level.

might as well post the issues here https://www.windowscentral.com... https://www.neowin.net/news/mi...

Microsoft is saying W11 is broken, while the faithful here claim it is only poorly written drivers. And the anger is so intense that Microsoft disabled comments on social media. Here, they blame the users.

And the users? They've heard it all before... https://www.pcworld.com/articl....

Wut? Is this 2000 or something? I haven't had a driver issue since around 2005, and during installs, Linux just goes out and grabs drivers.

This! I get to see the hell people go through just to have a Windows 11 computer - as well as my own travails. At this point, my Windows machines get used for a few remaining tasks, then put back in the case, while I use machines that stay working.

People can try to blame it on drivers - which is only one of the failure mechanisms. People can blame it on Macs closed ecosystem which means that hardware and software are written for each other - by Apple, which means that.....get ready for it.....it works!

And then there are the weird problems, like renaming audio drivers, moving freaking programs to the cloud and removing them from the machine, as well as mystery changes that you just give up and fix it, then wait for it to happen again.

My Macs and Linux machines don't have this problem. Productivity is much better when you have almost 0 downtime.

I dunno about you, but My Macs get pushed pretty hard. They continue to work. My latest hasn't crashed yet. And my Windows machines on W11 can crash after an update, not particularly hard work.

The meme of Mac Users as stupid is just that - a meme.

The most adroit computer users I know use MacOS and Linux. I group them together because MacOS is Unix, and Linux is Unix-y. Despite the meme of the retarded Mac User, and the smug Linux user, these are power users. I spend almost as much time in Terminal on My Mac as I do in the GUI - sometimes more.

My present Mac Mini has never crashed. Had for over a year now (M4) My newer Lenovo has had update issues, kidnapped files and put them on one drive, causing them to stop working, and mystery audio issues, changing names, also making the associated program stop working. These are not the driver issues claimed by some as the only reason Windows crashes. These are systemic regression of Windows 11.

Regardless, some of us want computing devices that fscking work! not excuses for why our computers work - some times.