There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Tinkering with a word guessing machine to see if you can make it smart is like breeding horses to be faster and faster expecting one to give birth to a locomotive. Word guessing machines are cool but they're never going to actually "understand" what they're talking about.

In one sense, taking on any engineering challenge you haven't done before always causes you to learn something new, so there's always progress. In the case of this particular program (Artemis) there's a lot of reason to be skeptical of what we're getting for the money. The original Apollo was done in a hurry with an all-hands-on-deck attitude, and amazing progress was made. When that program ended and the space shuttle program was created, there was less urgency, and politics dug its heels in. The only reason the shuttle program was allowed to happen was because different parts of the shuttle were manufactured across almost all 50 states. That made it inefficient, but also politically possible. The program itself wasn't as successful as originally hoped, and for reference if the cost of 1 kg to orbit on a (partially reusable) Falcon 9 today is $2700, then the space shuttle's cost of 1 kg to orbit was almost $55,000 in inflation-adjusted dollars. When the shuttle program was scrapped, funding to NASA for Artemis was only approved on the condition that NASA use all the same contractors and parts that the shuttle did. That's why you have two solid rocket boosters and shuttle engines powering the main stage, and a big orange foam insulated tank. And those 4 shuttle engines are thrown away with each launch. It's the least efficient way to do this, but it's politically possible because it keeps a bunch of money flowing out to almost all of the states. SpaceX is developing a new launch platform called Starship that's supposed to be fully re-usable, and the long term cost of 1 kg to orbit is going to be in the range of $150 (some estimates have it under $100). So the whole Artemis program is at risk of being obsolete as soon as Starship is proven to work. I would argue that it's already obsolete and a spending boondoggle, and I'm a space nerd who loves space exploration.

No it didn't. Nobody in "upper middle class" back in the 50's was "going on a vacation every year to a foreign country." Give me a break. And the general standard of living was much worse, particularly health care. Back in that "golden era" the life expectancy was significantly shorter, everyone smoked, and health care was basically anti-biotics, or nothing. They were still doing lobotomies. And houses were a lot smaller, poorly insulated, almost every kid shared a bedroom with a sibling, you had to wash your own dishes (gasp) because there were no dishwashers. Microwaves weren't a thing. Cribs came covered in lead paint. You were lucky if you had one television, and it was in black and white and got 2 channels. The one thing that an upper middle class family could do in the 50's was buy a new car every couple years, and that's because cars were a lot cheaper as a percentage of income, but they didn't have seat belts, airbags, power steering, and they needed constant maintenance and didn't last very long. Someone making minimum wage today lives better than royalty did hundreds of years ago. Get some common sense and learn about history.

What are you smoking? The median household income in the US is roughly $84,000 a year. That would make $133k very clearly upper middle class. You know that there's more to the US than New York and Los Angeles, right?

This makes you no different than any other creature in this world, and I see nothing wrong with that. You need to do your best to exist in the world as it is, and be realistic about what levers and knobs you can actually adjust.

I assure you that the voters are far more short-sighted than the politicians.

Yes. So?

I already vote green party. I look for practical ways to reduce my carbon footprint.

I'm not going to stop living my life, providing for my family, and making sure my kids have as good of a future as I can manage. And if I'm weighing how much effect I can have on their future by a) putting money towards their education, or b) trying to single-handedly save the planet by spending exorbitant amounts of money on ground source heat pumps, super-expensive electric vehicles, etc., then it's quite obvious that I can do far more good by focusing on helping my immediate family, friends, and community.

How much are we really doing by installing a heat pump water heater vs. everyone else who's pushing crypto-currency mining or AI datacenters, both of which consume enormous amounts of energy for frivolous and/or corrupt purposes?

Honestly, it's completely ironic and sad but the combination of COVID shutdowns plus the high gas prices due to the wars in Ukraine and Iran have at least temporarily cut fossil fuel emissions by more than any other environmental program anywhere or any time.

So piss off already.

"Michael Marshall Smith's 1996 novel Spares, in which the hero liberates intelligent clones from a "spare farm", was optioned by DreamWorks in the late 1990s, but was never made. It remains unclear if the story inspired The Island, so Marshall Smith did not consider it worthwhile to pursue legal action over the similarities."

Anyway, we're all saying the same thing here. This is all Torment Nexus stuff. We know how this ends.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

This is exactly correct. Do you really want an 11 year old who's confused about their body to be getting answers from strangers in a Discord server or via Tiktok shorts? Because that's what's happening right now. There are some legitimate support groups that operate through these channels, but it's completely unregulated and for every legitimate channel or server there's a dozen distributing made-up or even harmful medical advice. In some cases it's even predators because it's the perfect place to find minors you can start to pry away from their family and friend groups. The social media companies knew this was going on and I can only imagine their legal departments were either screaming about this problem, or being paid to shut up about it.

The CEOs of these companies are trying to justify inflated stock prices that were high based on the expectation of future growth. You don't convince investors that you're still growing by laying people off, so you have to give them some kind of explanation, and AI is convenient. By the time it becomes obvious that AI isn't actually producing the productivity boost that they're claiming, then they'll be on to the next thing. The reality is that the cheap capital that funded the dot com companies through to about 2018 is gone permanently (due to demographic and globalization changes). The valuations will eventually crash. It's just a game of everyone playing chicken to see who sells first.

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

I agree it would only be a surprise first strike. But if any container ship was potentially hiding a few of these, think of the chaos it would cause in supply chains.