The Congressmen and women doing the investigation are all taking money from the Teacher's Union.

They're taking infinitely more money from the corrupt worker hating oligarchs that want no taxes (on them) and hate workers - teachers included. Your sense of proportion is broken and priorities misplaced.

It's attritional warfare. One Russia has dominated from the beginning when it was firing four times as many artillery rounds a day than your Nazi pals. Who knows what it is now when the west can barely supply Ukraine with munitions while Russia happily makes millions of rounds per year.

They can keep this pace up indefinitely. NAFO cannot. Russia could easily roll all over Kiev right to the Polish border if they wanted to and were willing to absorb the casualties.

They don't want to.

Grammar and punctuation are not your enemies.

The budget of the US Space Farce (spelling deliberate) exceeded NASA's only 3 years after it was created.

2024 Pentagon budget - $841 billion
All NASA budgets since foundation, combined - $640 billion

This is why we can't have nice things.

The Pentagon number doesn't include the (unconstitutional) Black Budget, the alphabet soup of intel agencies (some of which have space budgets larger than NASA), or the plethora of mercenaries hired by the State Department.

They erected a half dozen statues to him just last year, one just a couple of blocks from a mass grave of people his followers murdered. Zelinsky visited a cemetery of Ukrainian Waffen SS, a group which carried out multiple atrocities, as part of the WWII anniversary. They're not even subtle about it.

You don't know any actual Russians, do you? The claim that they "still worship Stalin" was BS the day after he was dead.

Today unless we're attacking Grenada or Bhutan it's unlikely that anyone would be able to establish complete air superiority. Air defense platforms which can nail even stealthed planes and missiles are no longer bleeding edge, even Asarallah (Houthis) seem to be able to build them. The only time even Russian planes feel safe attacking Ukrainian positions directly is after all the air defense platforms in the area have been destroyed, and Ukrainian planes won't venture within 150 kilometers of the front.. One of the first things that Israel did in Syria was destroy its few air defense platforms after the troops had fled and before the Al Qaeda headchopper now in charge had time to move competent people to man them.

It's almost certainly disinformation designed to confuse "the enemy" (Russians, Chinese, and the US taxpayers), even the lost lamented dish at Arecibo, the most powerful radar ever constructed, couldn't have done that.

Ukraine's sparse history is mostly made up of allying with a more powerful power, and then stabbing them in the back as soon as it looks advantageous. Not sure I'd want to ally with a country which still constructs statues to Nazi-allied Stepan Bandera and to add insult to injury often locate them near sites where his people carried out atrocities against Jews, Roma, and ethnic Turks and Russians.

My point about coding - which I have been doing for fun since the 1980s (I am on /. after all) - is that it was taken as obvious that it was the future-proof skill. Not many people would argue this now.

As for tools - a tool is task specific. A carpenter without a hammer or saw is clearly at a disadvantage. And carpenters have always had these tools. But Homer, for instance, did not even have a pen or ink. He composed orally. The tools of thinking are experience, memory, and logic. My point is that thinking per se requires no external tools. It is the ultimate in freedom.

This seems like the sort of advice that is going to be exceptionally hard to get followed because it's mostly so dull.

There can be some interesting futzing in principle to keep unnecessary sources of variation from getting folded into build artifacts, normally followed by less-interesting making of those change in practice across a zillion projects; and basically anything involving signing should at least be carefully copying the homework of proper heavyweight cryptographers; but most of the advice is of the "fix your shit" and "yes, actually, have 10 people, ideally across multiple orgs, despite the fact that you can get it for free by pretending that the random person in Nebraska won't make mistakes, get coopted by an intelligence agency, quit to find a hobby that doesn't involve getting yelled at on the internet for no money, or die" flavor; which is absolutely stuff you should do; but the sort of deeply unsexy spadework that doesn't have magic bullet vendors lobbying for it to get paid for.

What seems sort of damning is that the explanation is "our tech sucks".

The 'explanation' is that the demo triggered all the devices within earshot because apparently a device designed to perform possibly-sensitive actions on your behalf was assigned a model line wide, public audio trigger in order to make it feel more 'natural' or something; rather than some prosaic but functional solution like a trigger button/capacitive touch point/whatever; and that the device just silently fails stupid, no even informative feedback, in the even of server unresponsiveness or network issues. Both of these seem...less than totally fine...for something explicitly marketed for public use in crowded environments on what we euphemistically refer to as 'edge' network connectivity.

You obviously have limited control over the network in a situation like this; so nobody expects the goggles to fix the internet or facebook's server resource allocations for you; but having some sort of "can't reach remote system" error condition has been ubiquitous basic function since around the time that dirt was still in closed beta.

I suspect that this is symptomatic of the same phenomenon; but it seems especially weird that they'd be trotting the CTO out to give a, from context, apparently intended to be exculpatory postmortem when the problems with a device you are intended to wear on your face, in public, are 'sensitive to external trigger shared across entire product line' and 'silently fails stupid if network conditions are suboptimal'.

You're overthinking this. All he needed to do was appease shareholders. Many of those being investment bankers by profession... You know, those people that get the big bucks for investing no better than you if you flipped a coin.

His explanation points to something even they have heard of that ian't Facebook's fault. That is all that is necessary these days.

You definitely wouldn't come up with a fresh 10,000 liters of the stuff just lying around somewhere; at least not without resorting to nuclear chemistry or natural gas processing on a pretty heroic scale; but if you purely needed to ship something, anything, to be able to say that the amount provided wasn't zero; the terrestrial supply isn't zero either. I think the US is good for high single thousands of liters on a typical year, from nuclear warhead maintenance; Russia at least theoretically in the same ballpark in terms of warheads that would need their tritium checked, though no assurances either that that is happening or that they'll sell, they had formally stopped doing so at least for a while over a decade back; not sure what the mixture of reasons was between domestic users and not wanting inferences about their weapon maintenance.

Such a sale would be basically ceremonial if it has to come from the existing supply which is already spoken for every year; and there would be no point in Interlune as an intermediary; but if some finance construct wiggles one way if the sales are zero and another way if the sales are merely small, it presumably might be worth someone's time for Interlune to be listed as the supplier to Bluefors, even if it's just them slapping their label over whoever Bluefors normally buys from and doesn't actually change the allocation to different purposes or the total size of the market.

It's adjusting the allocation that would be at least difficult(potentially viable if the VCs doing 'quantum' are paying better than the people doing ultra low temperature MRIs or academic physics, or if you can out-lobby the 'national security' neutron detector market that doesn't get anyone excited but zOMG Dirty Bombs the Homeland!; but probably not cheap); and actually changing the supply that would be hardest, but possibly of actual interest.