Altera has actually been spun off already, 3 months ago. :)

Communism also requires that its principles be enforced by force, because it ignores basic human psychology, namely the instinct to provide for oneself and one's family preferentially to contributing to The Cause Of All and the expectation to see connection between one's efforts and one's gains. And once someone starts acting selfishly, the system is not resistant by itself and needs to be protected by force. That's why all state-level attempts at communism were by necessity authoritarian, and when that option was not available (think kibbutzes), these attempts did not last.

Hmm, one can shoot a satellite from *above* it, thus directing most of the fragments downwards, where they would reenter and burn up - this is what the USAF did in their fighter-launched ASAT missile tests, I believe. One can also try frying the satellite with EM energy without actually fragmenting it, think lasers, masers and other forms of directed energy emitters. I am sure people tasked with actually planning such warfare have come up with other approaches as well, so I would not call the idea a farce.

There is nothing weird about it as long as they cut costs faster than revenue decreases. (Actually, a significant part of this revenue loss is probably due to cutting projects that were not worth keeping around.)

It's not only about fragility, today's phone are actually quite strong, being made from ceramics. It is about slipperyness. A glass phone can literally slide from a flat table once it starts vibrating.

Ericsson makes a lot of products for telco infrastructure and they are actually quite well regarded in this market.

Not sure where you get the information on overcapacity from, but it definitely does not apply to reasonably current-process fabs (7nm/10nm). And one cannot use older-process lines to build chips that would meet today's requirements w.r.t. speed or power consumption.

What I find extremely curious is that Gmail, one of the biggest webmail providers and direct competitor to MS Office Online, still does not support OAuth for retrieving mail from third parties, despite literally years of being asked by many users. This means soon one won't be able to use Gmail as single point of contact for multiple accounts that include an Office one. Which absolutely sucks...

You are conflating gravity assist with the Oberth effect. Gravity assist works perfectly well with purely ballistic flight, however its effect can be coupled with that of the latter.

Look, we are sorry for your sad experiences, but projecting them onto the whole industry might... not be warranted. I work for a huge IT multinational and the raise and promotion cycle here is based on exactly what @NicknameUnavailable describes. Before that I worked for a smaller IT multinational and they did exactly the same. So, not every company in the world operates like a soulless meat grinder, even today.

Well, if by "geosynchronous" one means "where a satellite stays above a single point of Earth's surface", as is the standard meaning, then actually geosynchronous orbits ARE constrained to the plane of the equator, so there is effectively one.

Only that Russian-speaking folks in the Donbas region are not necessarily Russians. Many Ukrainians speak Russian as their primary language and this does not make them Russian â" just like speaking English does not make the Scots Englishmen.

Also, Russia is defending neither itself nor the the Donbas region. They have actually invaded a country, from another side altogether, trying to take the capital and multiple civilian centers by force. You have overdosed on Russian propaganda, I am afraid.

That is not necessarily why companies upstream code that addresses mostly or exclusively their own products. Sure they could maintain their own out-of-tree repositories... but then they would have to update the code for any architectural and API changes that get introduced into the kernel. Once they manage to get their code to the mainline tree, any future changes will have to account for that code so that it does not stop to build or work.

Anybody saying "code should document itself" must have been solving simple problems only. How does one "self document" in code why it chooses a non-obvious algorithm, non-optimal in general case... but actually superior for the kind of input data that the program processes? Or why it issues an apparently useless call to hardware, when the hw doc does not explain that the previous call returns before everything has actually been completed and we need to force internal state sync? You know, the stuff that is not explicitly described in manuals and takes a month to identify the problem and design a fix...

Multiple times, actually, both from orbit and from deep space. The first one was probably Soyuz-1 in 1967, later notable ones include the Genesis sample-return mission that smashed into a desert.