Its cheaper for manufacturers because they can roll out updates at the last minute and set options via software. So it benefits the manufacturers at the expense of the customers. It will be interesting to see if any manufacturers go back to physical buttons to grab more customers or if there is a hand-shake agreement between manufacturers not to do so. I've yet to find anyone who actually likes the touch screens

I'd love to see this happen, but getting either lunar lander launched into LEO next year sees highly unlikely and a 2028 landing even more unlikely.

It took 3.5 years to go from Artemis 1 to Artemis 2 - basically the same mission except with people. This sadly isn't the 1960s anymore.

Trying to fight tracking and privacy violations one by one is a losing battle - there will be an ever increasing number of ways to surveil people. This can only be fixed by making the collection of this type of data from ANY source illegal - and I doubt there is the political will to do that.

The data is too valuable to corporations and the government.

MS goes to a lot of effort to make sure customers us copilot, onedrive etc. to the point of making it quite difficult to avoid using those products.

Maybe if they concentrated on building apps that people actually wanted to use, they would do better. I understand that in the short term MS benefits from access to people's data, but in the long term they will continue to lose customers.

Yes - but its difficult. Its a very large and high reliability life-safety system. It has to work with aircraft that are over half a century old and aircraft operated by other countries.

I agree that it seriously needs an upgrade, but its a very difficult thing to actually implement.

This is what happens when the government is no longer trusted. Its possible the account was used to post something clearly illegal, but given the behavior of this administration many people including myself leap to the conclusion that the govt is trying to suppress constitutionally protected free speech. To be clear I do think this is an attempt to restrict free speech, its just a sign of how bad things have gotten that that is my immediate conclusion

Its easy to forget how bad TOS was. Giant space amoebas. Race wards between people with black on the right or left side of their faces. Space Rome. Streaming series have gotten a lot better than in the days when the competition to Star Trek was Lost in Space and Gilligan's Island. Culture has also changed. TOS was extremely progressive...there was a (wait for it) black woman on the bridge. Now the writers are stuck between trying to keep the feeling of the original series which is ultra-reactionary by todays' standard, or somehow trying to be at the cutting edge of progressiveness today.

The problem with being cutting edge progressive today is that explicit racism, sexism etc. are pretty rare, no one is going to care what genders or races or sexual orientations are in the bridge crew. So the shows have difficulty figuring out how to be on the fringe of progressiveness and at least to me the restuls ends up feeling artificial, with totally irrational actions somehow succeeding.

I don't want copilot, at all. I use a different AI. I don't want onedrive, I use a different cloud storage app. I don't want edge, I use a different browser. I don't want recall - ever, its a security nightmare.

I want an OS that will run the apps I need. At the moment, a couple of those are not yet available on Linux, but when they are, I'll convert my last remaining windows computer to Linux.

None of the approaches to cold fusion appear to have any chance of success. There is quite a bit of effort going on in hot fusion, but its not clear how long it will be to the first power plant - it might be quite a while.

You can give them $9000 to "reserve" a flying car. Maybe they sell you a flying car in the future maybe they give you back the $9K without interest. That is NOT the same a s "for sale now".

It appears to be certified as an ultralight under part 103 which means it can only be flown over non-congested areas. It has a range of 20 miles, at 62mph.
It can carry 220 pounds. Something like 28% of Americans report weighting more than 200 lbs, and clothes and a briefcase mean that probably 1/4 of Americans are too heavy for this. Its not in any sense a "car" since it has no road capability.

Its very difficult to think of an actual use case for this. Its a fun toy for people who can spend almost $200K on toys, but not really practical. How many people need to fly between 2 locations that are in non-congested areas, and where each has 240V service next to a landing pad. Also in non-congested areas its not going to be significantly faster than a car, and slower unless you have a takeoff / landing pad at your house.

I've started using one of the new AIs for some mechanical, thermal and high power electrical engineering. Its surprisingly good. Of course it makes mistakes but not really any more often than would a human engineer. It seems to do better at these sorts of problems than it does at coding - which surprised me.

There are some issues with installing solar at home. We did it a few years back and have had issues with roof leaks and some general system maintenance issues. The installers are separate from the solar companies are separate from the equipment manufacturers, and even if we are willing to pay out of pocket for repairs it can still take a long time to sort out who can fix the problem.

Sadly the best thermoelectric generators are not nearly as efficient as conventional thermodynamic engines. I don't know if there is a fundamental limitation or in principal they could get close to Carnot efficiency. Also thermoelectric generators usually have a max temperature lower than that for thermodynamic generators so they are starting at a lower Carnot efficiency

A lot of people use computers as tools to do their work without doing any deep research. They might reasonably expect that an "encrypted" drive didn't provide keys to a 3rd party and use it to store proprietary or otherwise protected information. An attorney pursuing a case against Microsoft might be surprised to learn that they can access all of his notes.

I'm sure the information that MS has the keys is included somewhere in the vast EULAs but I also bet that very few non-technical users are aware of that.

Many people and especially young people have *real* online friends and removing those social connections could produce feelings of isolation and likely depression. I think it would have been far better to regulate the sort of content that young people could access without isolating them socially. Its easy to say that they should "go out and make real friends" but that is very difficult for some people.