>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

BOOK:
The Mindful Way through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
https://www.amazon.com/Mindful...

No drug necessary.

The Underlying issue is: Why are some people depressed?

If we understand that, it is very likely that no drug will be necessary. People won't become depressed.

Windows is crashing because users are doing things that cause crashes.

This issue needs to be investigated in MUCH more detail.

I don't have crashes.

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

What "excellent film adaptation" are you talking about? There's one old animated adaptation, and that's is. There's also a movie that bears the same title, but it's apparently a coincidence: nothing except the title and names of some of main characters matches, thus I don't see how it could be relevant to Tolkien's books.

The first thing about adapting a book is reading it at least once, and Peter Jackson skipped that step.

That's a blockade done against human drivers, who (usually) know how to drive off the railway track, and the blockaders are only protesting rather than actively trying to murder. They stop cars from passing but don't trap them on the tracks.

What GP suggests is that by people simply standing there, the self-driving car's software will stop on the track without aggressively trying to escape.

Here in Poland we have campaign teaching people how to get out of a railway crossing if you get stuck. A bunch of differently-smart humans didn't even contemplate driving through the bar gate, and in some cases didn't even evacuate the car either. The bars are designated to break easily when forced by a car, but somehow in a stressful situation drivers regard them as sacrosanct. As Waymo cars behave that way in about every potentially dangerous situation, I'm afraid they'll do the same when on a railroad crossing as well.

Another piece of evidence: a link in the summary goes to https://support.microsoft.com/ which is currently tits up. Apparently they're hosting that site on Windows and/or staffing it with their employees.

This is the crux. Optimization of supply chains to eliminate inventory makes them frail. Or, to quote Wirth:

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

The last of the US federal helium reserve - including land and equipment - was sold in 2024.

Is joke of course. Was angling for the same joke.

3He is normal helium atom with an extra neutron, hoped to be used in some forms of fusion. It's not considered radioactive. Emitted by the sun it's trapped in lunar rock possibly at concentrations of up to 50 parts per billion but more likely 5-10ppb. The utility of extracting it from the Moon is hotly debated. On Earth isolating it from normal helium involves the same sort of centrifuge used to isolate isotopes of uranium, radium, hydrogen but there is far less of it than in lunar soil.

This is not actually the case in the subject at hand. It's all normal helium. When cooled enough all other gases will precipitate out as they freeze - including Hydrogen - leaving only helium as a gas and so easily isolated. That's actually why it's valuable since it's the only gas that will boil off at temperatures so low that the conductors immersed in the fluid will superconduct supporting the currents necessary for the intense electromagnets used in imaging and such. /Explaining nerd jokes since 1983

It seems that Helium can be re-used if the original use is very careful, so that it is not lost.