Although the site provides a rather large range of launch inclinations, even down to ~25 degrees if you dogleg around the Florida keys, the real price here is polar launches. You launch South, and the booster comes in over open water for the catch. You wait 12 hours for the Earth to make half a rotation under your ship's orbit, and then you come in for a ship catch from the South, thus alleviating any problematic land overflights.

This is particularly interesting for shipping cargo to a South Polar Basin base on the Moon; a polar orbit on Earth translates beautifully to a polar orbit around the Moon, from where you can land straight in the Aitkin polar basin.

"Debian is made by humans" makes as much sense as "holes dug by humans with shovels" when you have an excavator on site. AI is a force amplifier, an insanely fast and good one at that. It can not only write software, it can package it, port it, reverse engineer drivers for your favorite hardware and everything else a human might be able to do with a computer, but can't find the time, knowledge or motivation to do. AI is what basically turns all software into Open Source software, since AI isn't stopped by binaries and raw assembler code, unlike most humans.

Refusing to use AI just makes it look like somebody is more concerned with refusing to change their little hobby than the quality of their software.

> Loss of (human) cognitive function through its overuse.

If the whole anti-AI discussion has shown us anything, it's that most humans weren't very good with the whole "cognitive function" thing in the first place. Tons of parroting of long debunked arguments, complete lack of reflection, complete lack of forward thinking (spoiler: AI isn't stuck at ChatGPT3.5 from 2022) and other nonsense.

About the only valid concern against AI for Debian should be copyright, which is still a bit fishy, but since the rest of the industry doesn't seem to care, they might as well just role with it. Everything else just boils down to QA, you obviously shouldn't accept any AI change blindly, but you shouldn't do that with humans made ones either. If somebody spams your bug tracker with low quality AI slop, feel free to block them. Use AI for what it works for right now, and everything where it still fails at, check again in a year or two.

AI is the most powerful software since the invention of software, it's the stuff that was sci-fi just five years ago. Refusing to make is of it just makes people look inept.

There is no reason bitcoin can't slide back to being worth a dollar a coin. There no guarantee of value behind it. You can argue about whether fiat money is any better once the US went off the gold standard, but there is still a bit of irreplaceable value there; "the full faith and credit" means you can use it to transact business with the government, both by contracting to do public works for which the government pays you, and paying taxes and fees which are used to perform government functions and give you tokens such as licenses which show that you've contributed your share. Money's very liquidity for these purposes is a source of value, even if you can't redeem your picture of a President for precious metal. By contrast, Bitcoin literally isn't worth anything unless you can find someone (for some reason the phrase "bigger fool" comes to mind) to trade you something for it that does have value.

Wait a minute, they showed the Artemis crew a story about a guy who is drugged and kidnapped by his space agency and wakes up 11 light-years from home with the rest of his crew dead to bolster their spirits?

...on its face as it boots up?

It may not be as much as we need or hope for, but I still about fell out of my chair laughing. Now I can make things shitty without even getting up!

...that this sort of thing was a possibility when the first ATX power supplies came out. I still say that if you can't disconnect the power source, especially if it's a difficult to remove battery for a laptop or phone, you can't really turn it off.

...not guilty plea, even if you are caught with the chicken head bitten off and you're covered with blood, because it leaves the door open for a plea deal, which you can sometimes swing by saving the government the cost of a pointless trial. It's just one of the rules of the game.

This is what happens when you lack the ability to express emphasis in your output. Perhaps he should have posted his opinion in Markdown for clarity.

I know of several legacy industrial systems running DOS, as they depend on software with built-in drivers which must communicate with long EOL ISA or PCI interfaces. It's expensive, but there are sources for legacy hardware (as well as old surplus) for this very market. Yeah you might pay USD$10K for a machine capable of reliably booting MSDOS 3.3, but it's cheap compared to the $250K CnC lathe or mill for which there are no more modern controls.

I once warned a manager at a smallish company that their fantasy of doing manufacturing would never happen partly because of a lack of QC and the lack of anybody with authority to shut a project down if it was not meeting spec. "We need that guy!" the manager said, and I came back, "If you had that guy you'd fire him the first time he told you something you didn't want to hear." Musk is in a pickle right now and I'm sure he really doesn't want to hear that the tank failed an X-ray inspection and the whole craft needs to be taken apart to make sure it's OK, thereby missing the launch window. And I'm sure the QC guy knows that. So as I warned that guy who once asked for my advice, this is what he got.

She hunted and pecked through the beginnings of a reasonably successful career as a magazine copywriter back in the day. I tried to tell her it would be worth her while to spend a few hours with Mavis Beacon, but she insisted she had her way of doing things and that was that. Two index fingers, staring at the keyboard instead of the screen. Meanwhile, I was younger than her but did learn touch typing on a manual in high school. Anyway a year or so after I gave up trying to convince her to spend some time learning to type properly, I walked in on her as she was working and she was holding her hands in the home position, index fingers hovering above F and J, eyes on the screen, and doing a good 80 wpm as she pounded out copy. When I pointed this out she looked at her hands and said, "I don't know about any of that, I just adjusted what I was doing to get a little faster." Well, that's why they teach it that way, but some people gotta ice skate uphill, y'know.

Jobs and Wozniak got rich off Apple, Gates and Balmer off Microsoft. Sinclair was already rich. Tandy, Commodore, Atari, and IBM had hugely popular machines but no "rock stars" single-handedly responsible for their development, and bad business decisions ultimately killed them. Similarly Coleco, which had a great chance to undercut the PC with the Adam and its cheap letter quality printer, but they were too ambitious and by the time they worked out their manufacturing problems the PC had taken root. But the PC killed the rest of the industry by killing itself, making the first clones possible which could run object code generated for other manufacturers' machines, which was Microsoft's second stage to orbit after providing Level II Basic for the TRS-80. It wasn't MIcrosoft's intent, but imagine what today's computer ecosystem would look like if all software was still architecture-specific and there were a dozen or more popular models to choose from.
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Apple and the rest had room to grow because the big names like DEC, Data General, and even IBM were focused on business and saw them as toys. They bought and ate anything that looked like it might compete with them, such as the CP/M office systems which might be a credible threat to minicomputers like the DEC PDP series. That was another gap IBM threaded by being IBM.

Waste Management used to have pretty good customer service, if they missed a pickup you just called, they'd send a truck out. Bin broken, call and they'd come fix it. Easy peasey. Now, all you can get is a call center in India that insists you got service even when you did not. They have missed three pickups in a row now. When my wife finally got a human being after 3+ hours on hold with multiple calls, the rep was completely unsurprised that it ended with a cancellation request and offered no pushback. There are three other companies doing trash pickup in our subdivision, one of them will now get our business, and apparently we're not alone.

Hal's insanity trigger was actually revealed in the book version of 2001 itself.