So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

Wow. Thanks for posting this, A.C.. In trying to verify any of what you posted (which was all news to me), I found this:
"The cost of lies: A Mineserver story" by Jeremy Reimer
https://jeremyreimer.com/rocke...
      "Creating and shipping a brand new product is insanely difficult. It takes a ton of money, sweat, and time. Even people with tons of experience can underestimate timelines and encounter unexpected difficulties. So telling the story of a failed Kickstarter is not especially interesting.
      This is not that story.
      This is a story about what happens when someone builds up a reputation over decades of work and then destroys it in a couple of years. Not because they failed, but because they lied about it. Over and over again. Until the lies got too much to handle, and they had to create newer, even larger lies to cover them up.
      Why would anyone do this? We'll get into that at the end. But first, the story. ..."

I can still wonder on the use of the word "lie" in that article by Jeremy Reimer versus, say, "irrational exuberance" especially if his kids were involved in making the Minecraft server project happen? But the article does make it sounds like a larger pattern. Ironically, the behavior even sounds a bit like an overly-people-pleasing LLM hallucination?

Having read many Robert X. Cringely articles in InfoWorld and so on way back when, I would be sad if this was all true. Kind of like losing faith in a celebrity of computing from my younger days.

Related (although in general I have not found it that true about most computing people):
"Never Meet Your Heroes: What It Means & If You Should Meet Them"
https://www.wikihow.com/Never-...
        "Itâ(TM)s a proverb that suggests meeting your idols can lead to disappointment. âoeNever meet your heroesâ is a piece of advice that means people shouldnâ(TM)t meet their heroes because they may be disappointed by the heroâ(TM)s true personality. This happens because people tend to idealize people they look up to instead of viewing them as multifaceted humans with flaws, and they may have unrealistic expectations about what will happen when they meet their hero.
        The hero might not have the time, energy, or interest in meeting their expectations, destroying the perfect image that person has built in their head.
        The logic behind this proverb is that many celebrities craft public personas, and the image they portray online or on camera may be vastly different from how they act in real life.
        With that being said, some people say that meeting your heroes can be a positive experience and serve as a reminder that heroes are no different than normal people. ..."

Related by me from over two decades ago: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society"
https://pdfernhout.net/open-le...
        "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. ...
          Consider this way of looking at the situation. A 501(c)3 non-profit creates a digital work which is potentially of great value to the public and of great value to others who would build on that product. They could put it on the internet at basically zero cost and let everyone have it effectively for free. Or instead, they could restrict access to that work to create an artificial scarcity by requiring people to pay for licenses before accessing the content or making derived works.
      If they do the latter and require money for access, the non-profit can perhaps create revenue to pay the employees of the non-profit. But since the staff probably participate in the decision making about such licensing (granted, under a board who may be all volunteer), isn't that latter choice still in a way really a form of "self-dealing" -- taking public property (the content) and using it for private gain? From that point of view, perhaps restricting access is not even legal?
        Self-dealing might be clearer if the non-profit just got a grant, made the product, and then directly sold the work for a million dollars to Microsoft and put the money directly in the staff's pockets (who are also sometimes board members). Certainly if it was a piece of land being sold such a transaction might put people in jail. But because the content or software sales are small and generally to their mission's audience they are somehow deemed OK. ...."

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In the US, SMPTE is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charitable organization."

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

This seems like a situation where it's very hard to get excited about the idea that it's the regulator's problem. Did some Canadian fed technically have the authority to inspect? Quite possibly. Is there some sort of justification for even the cost of performing the inspection, much less any undesired knock-on effects of the notion that literally all vessels must be inspected no matter what, in a case like this? Seems harder to make that case.

There are a lot of situations where large portions of the public have no choice but to use products and services that they have no reasonable ability to be "informed" about. Either it's simply not possible if you aren't in a position to legally compel honesty from the vendor or it's a case where "informed" is PhD-level work in the area, or a combination of the two; but some rando's aggressively contrarian submarine that loudly and proudly skips all industry certifications and is available on boutique scale for very wealthy customers doesn't seem like one of those cases.

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.

Mos sensible post I've seen in this thread. Are you sure you're on the right web site? :-)

With over 15,000 residents per square kilometer in the center of the city you wouldn't want ANY drones overhead where if they lose power, lose contact with the controller, hit something, etc. there's a high likelihood of personal injury. Now with the introduction of robot air taxis into he mix there would be even higher risk. In that sort of situation requiring permits and flight plans makes absolute sense.

MidJourney was the first sizable AI company to become profitable, having done so back in 2022.

The funny thing was that I knew him for like six months online before I realized he was fully paralyzed. He's been covered in the Finnish press a number of times. Amazing guy. Up until recently he was living in a house he built himself before ALS struck, but the medical service decided he was too far away and he had to move closer. You lose a lot of control over your life with ALS.

He wrote a book about nuclear safety engineering recently, which is a fascinating read, and which I strongly recommend.

If we want billionaires to pay their fair share, we should start by eliminating some of the tax loopholes that allow them to avoid paying the taxes that less wealthy people have to pay.

These loopholes are many, they favor the ultra wealthy, they absolutely can be eliminated, and doing so is far less problematic than this wealth tax proposal.

The proposal here was not for the government to BUY the stocks, just like anyone else. It was for the government to TAKE the stocks. For free. In return for nothing.

And, regardless, the key difference between capitalism and socialism (in this context) is who owns the means of production: private citizens, or the government? Once the government owns the means of production (whether they bought it or seized it), then that qualifies as socialism.

This slider isn't exactly boolean. It is totally possible for the government to own some of the means of production, without owning all of it. That just means that we have a mix of socialism and capitalism going on.

You should give a 90 day window so you don't become an enabler of crime.

The bug bounty is there to incite you to look for bugs at all. If there isn't a bug bounty program, or you don't think it will pay out, then don't go looking for bugs.

If you find a bug anyway, and want to do the right thing, then you responsibly disclose it (whether you get paid or not). If you don't want to do the right thing, then you just ignore the bug and don't publish it.

If you publish the bug without giving the company 90 days first, then you are harming all the innocent people who are using that product (by telling criminals exactly how to exploit an unfixed bug). That is an evil thing to do. In some places, lawsuits might fly your way because of something like that.