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.

Then, considering that this is at the Swizz and German border,

A swiz is a swindle as any fule kno.

and AAC is better than Ogg for the same bandwidth

Is it? When I followed such things that was the case for a while, but the encoders started getting better. Heck the MP3 encoders got so good they were surprisingly close. I thought all of the codecs of that later gen ended up basically on a par.

Anyway didn't Opus wipe the floor with all of them being better in every combo of bitrate and latency than the competition?

Yep.

But also I'm guessing they are suing Snap because they consider them to be a much softer target than, say, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Samsung or Tencent (like they'd care lol) who would likely kerb stomp them into the next millennium without even noticing.

Big enough to matter, not big or experienced enough to put up a good fight. And also holy shit they've been having a terrible time of it on the NYSE! Halved in value this year (and 1/10 from the covid peak). I expect they are perceived as not likely to want a protracted and expensive legal battle, and Dolby have identified the weakest zebra worth eating in the herd.

Patent troll fuckers.

General Protection Fault outranks Colonel Panic and says drop and give me 20 reboots.

Yeah that happened to me! Turns out the stuck was just a bit loose. After thoroughly cleaning it and reseating, the crashes vanished. Fortunately because DDR5 is stupid expensive now.

Once storage became cheap and bandwidth was no longer an issue (in the home), I just ripped all of my content to use FLAC and called it a day. I've stored all the original media somewhere safe where it won't get damaged. For commercial content and devices to replay that content using other encoding methods, I'll let those folks duke it out with Dolby. Wake me up when it's over.

It depends on what you want.. If you want a non upgradable appliance that kinda just works as long as you do it the Apple way, they are fine.

The advantage of a PC is you can pick your components and upgrade them, but with the downside that you may have issues like the one I described.

Had one just this week. Of course we were zapping a Raspberry Pi with 8,000V.

That's the reason why Windows has more crashes. Very varied hardware. I had an issue where sometimes the machine would fail to come back from sleep or hibernation, which turned out to be because sometimes the PCIe link training either failed or came up with a different result for the GPU. Setting the BIOS to force it to PCIe 4 fixed it. Similarly a friend had random crashing which was fixed by running his RAM slightly below rated speed.

Some people just have crap hardware too. Weak power supplies, failing drives, inadequate cooling.

Macs only do better because Apple tightly controls the hardware. Prebuilt Windows machines are probably similarly reliable, at least from people like Lenovo and maybe Dell.

There are 5 Linux laptop at home. None crash. Except the one my wife uses, when she touches the screen. It just goes dark with a few bright pixels on the top line. Nothing in the logs. Last week I changed the inside screen cable... and the problem disappeared. Must have been some kind of short because the cable is twisted in weird ways in the hinges. So I don't think it was an OS problem !!!

Is there any other kind? Every photo of him I've seen looks like the result of a poorly formed query processed by a janky LLM.