The UK has a head of state (a king) they've spent a thousand years learning should stand around a look pretty with medals and things but that's about it. The US has a head of state (a president) they've spent at least the last hundred years turning into a cult of personality and giving more and more power to.

France has spent a few hundred years violently oscillating back and forth between the two. They've demonstrated it doesn't really matter whether you call it a king or a president, it's how much power you give them.

The first fission reactor in space, the American SNAP-10A had an experimental ion thruster.

Yes, but it didn't go to Mars. That's why I said we didn't have good ion thrusters. The one on SNAP lasted a whole hour and apparently had quite a few problems even then. Getting the things to last long enough and produce enough thrust to be useful even for station keeping is a fairly recent thing.

So, during this story, someone pointed out a command to contextualize the info:
# userdbctl user --output=json $(whoami)

Ok, so run that and I see "hashedPassword". A field that my entire career has been about "not even the user themselves should have access, even partial access to it needs to be protected by utilities that refuse to divulge that to the user even as they may need that field to validate user input. And now, there it is, systemd as a matter of course saying "let arbitrary unprivileged process running as the user be able to access the hashed password at any point".

Now this "age verification" thing? I think systemd facet is blown out of proportion. All it is is a field that the user or administrator injects, no "verification". Ultimately if wired up, the only people that are impacted are people who do not have admin permissions to their system and have an admin that's forcing your real date of birth somehow.

The biggest problem comes with "verification" for real, when an ecosystem demands government ID or credit card. However, most of the laws consider it sufficient for an OS to take the owner at their word as to the age of the user, without external validation. So a parent might have a chance at restricting a young kid (until kid knows how to download a browser fork that always sends the "I'm over 18" flag when it exists), but broadly the data is just whatever the people feel like.

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.

I've started to see warnings in terminal when using keyed SSH, something along the lines of "vulnerable to store-now-decode-later attacks". I assume this is due to not using eliptic-curve codes in my PK generation?

The most recent crashes I've had were all due to external hardware. (usually a dock being unplugged) I haven't seen that recently though so maybe that was addressed.

I've also had issues in the past with not going to sleep / waking back up properly, but again haven't really seen that recently so maybe that too was addressed.

Pretty much 100% of my recent related issues have simply been "system's getting slow, and no my memory hasn't all leaked away, it just wants a restart", and so I DO restart it, and I get all my performance back. It's annoying, but not impactful. Not sure what's getting gummed up under the hood, I don't see anything getting logged or showing up in any monitoring tool.

I tend to push my machine pretty regularly though, and end up being coerced into rebooting about once a month.

I do a lot of photo manipulation, and I HAVE ran into a problem with Finder's QuickLook gradually getting slower after tens of thousands (yes really) of videos and images being quick-looked, but I can just kill the Finder's QuickLook process and it automatically bounces back fresh as a baby. So whatever "general slowness" issue I've been encountering after weeks of uptime could probably be fixed if I knew what needed to be bounced, but nothing is making itself obvious with high cpu time or memory use, so I just have to reboot to get it back.

A bit OT but I do find it a bit sad that windows has decided to do away with the traditional BSoD, not by making the OS more stable, but by hiding it when it happens. "Nothing to see here, everything's fine!" (NakedGun)

maybe not? Look at cache for example, there's L1, L2, and L3, each getting bigger and slower. Just because L2 is slower doesn't mean it doesn't get used.

Or look at some of the older storage techniques like hybrid drives. (such as 1tb of spinning platters, with 32gb of ssd)

Modern SSDs are even doing that. Watch the IO speed when you write a large file, see how it's fast to a point and then gets slow? that's a write buffer getting filled up.

Maybe the same technique could be used with ram, basically on the same lines as the VM files that unix systems (including Mac OS) use?

So there's plenty of precedent for adding higher latency storage, simply because the big increase in capacity is worth a little added latency. Carefully managing what you use it for greatly reduces the impact of the latency.

I suspect Windows supporters will claim Mac users are less intelligent, which would suggest they do MORE stupid things. And if stupid things correlate with crashes, Macs would crash more.

But they don't. So somebody is wrong about something, or there's more missing information.

One, how much is owed to dubious hardware vendors that don't even play in the Mac ecosystem.

The "lasts longer" is not necessarily a statement of durability, it's mostly about being a prolific business product and business accounting declaring three year depreciation.

I'm no fan of Windows and don't like using it, but these criteria are kind of off.

It could be done in a way that Apple does not know the key and is technologically unable to comply. But for such a low stakes system they would obviously never go through the trouble as it would cause more user friction than it's worth.

(You could have a privacy email be created as a totally unique auth key that's just stored offline on a User's apple computers and synced via an encrypted storage system).

Of course Apple could still associate source IPs for logins between multiple accounts.