So how can this be allowed if there is so much graft around this technology that is flowing through thousands of hands in the government offices?

Here is an example: https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/news...

This here: https://simpler.grants.gov/opp...

Funding Opportunity Number: FM-MHP-26-002
Assistance Listing: 20.245
Funding Details: $52.7 million expected total amount to award

Executive Summary:
The objective of the HP-ITD program is to advance the
technological capability and promote the deployment of
intelligent transportation system applications for CMV
operations, including CMV, commercial driver, and carrier-
specific information systems and networks, and to
support/maintain CMV information systems and networks to
(i) link Federal motor carrier safety information systems with
State CMV systems; (ii) improve safety and productivity of
CMVs and commercial drivers; (iii) and reduce costs
associated with CMV operations and regulatory
requirements.

Eligible Applicants
1.1 General
The HP-ITD awards are available to States, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto
Rico, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin
Islands. FMCSA may award HP-ITD funds to eligible applicants that have an approved program plan as
outlined in the Fixing Americaâ(TM)s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act. Individuals and businesses are
not eligible to apply for HP-ITD funding.

This entire thing is premised on the idea that there will be *more* information available to the federal government to work with, not less. They are fully committed to using these ALPR cameras that are everywhere now to track everything all the time and to put every truck driver out of service for any inconsistency in their visual data and thus hand out more fines, more court time, more oppression.

This is just one single program, one example, there are so much more, there is so much money at stake, never mind the actual flock graft itself.

Maltodextrin is easy to buy online and I imagine you could get it in stores that sell supplements for athletes (it's a common quick-energy booster, being a very rapidly-absorbed carbohydrate). The emulsifier and color you don't really need, though I suspect you could find them pretty easily if you wanted. The emulsifier is mostly to increase shelf life, and the color is for color.

Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

All true, but it's worth pointing out that if the Starship lander succeeds it will enable us to do a lot more, a lot faster. The whole "15 refueling flights for every moon trip" seems kind of crazy on its face, but if you look at the costs (assuming Starship works and become fully reusable), it makes the total cost per kilogram delivered to the surface of the moon insanely low and enables comparatively massive payloads to be delivered.

Big risk, big (potential) reward. Running both the Starship and Blue Moon projects in parallel is probably a good risk mitigation strategy, but if Starship succeeds completely, Blue Origin's lander will be a relic. Of course, it's also possible that Starship will just fail, or that it will succeed but be difficult to man-rate, in which case it may become the delivery service for lunar cargos, while people fly on Blue Moon.

Fair, though my data -- and Play purchases -- were my bigger concern when they first started talking about just ending legacy GSuite.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

I searched for it and found it. I can't check now; I left Google last year.

That's fake news, actually. A very widespread misunderstanding, but incorrect regardless.

What Google actually did was move "Don't be Evil" from the introduction of the code of conduct to the summary at the end.

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.

There's no free option for new signups. Lots of us who set this up still have the legacy free G-Suite accounts. I'm not sure what triggers the "you might be using this for a business" check. My family is still using mine and Google isn't telling me we're a business.

The biggest problem with it, frankly, is that Workspace accounts have lots of restrictions that regular gmail accounts don't have. There's lots and lots of stuff that just doesn't work, and the list is growing year by year. This isn't specific to the legacy accounts, though, it's all Workspace accounts, because Workspace is intended for business use. I've had to migrate various things to a personal gmail account, even though I'd really rather keep it all on my primary account (which is a legacy G-Suite/free Workspace account).

The "upgrade path" thegarbz mentioned is mostly that you can convert your legacy G-Suite account to a regular Gmail account, porting all of your data, Google Play Store purchases, etc., over to it. That won't have a custom domain, but if you want to keep your custom email address you can use one of many services (probably not free, but quite cheap) to forward.

Depends on your definitions, I suppose. You could argue that engaging in blatant market manipulation and insider trading from the Oval Office for 16 months and only netting $750M in profits represents a failure. Someone more competent could have made a lot more.

It really should matter. If we can just decide the text means whatever we want it to mean, what's the point in writing it down?

Yes! This is the way. Unfortunately, our system is so dysfunctional we can't even pass normal laws now, much less enact and ratify constitutional amendments.

Surely not that. That would be dumb. And awful. And utterly corrupt.

Sigh.

Will it catch the president, who has been on a rampant insider trading and market manipulation spree for his whole second term?

What about congress?

What will the SEC do when it flags top politicians? I think all of us know the answer to that question.

Is it? What crimes, exactly? They might be defeating some copy protection, but the entity that owned the software is defunct, so no one has standing to sue.