While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

Or some other Weekly World News cast member?

You misspelled "intrusive".

Only the customers with fancy GPUs have anything worth farming, and they probably want to run games on them instead.

Before anybody points this out, a gallon of bleach (the common size) is currently well over their weight limit. OTOH, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be thinking ahead to the possibility of hackers ordering risky combinations of materials that might ignite or release hazardous fumes if jostled. I don't know if Wing's drones drop cargo like other services I've seen either. The videos I've seen have drogue parachutes but things still come down a bit fast. Anyway, it's not a realistic concern *for now*, apparently; but hopefully it's being considered.

I'd like to send an order of bleach, ammonia and thumb tacks to 1000 of my closest friends, via drone.

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

This debate has been going on for at least a couple of decades. I remember back in the Usenet days, when AOL and other early ISP users first started showing up in droves with whacked out untraceable bang paths that people were trying to sort out technical solutions, usually involving some servers tarpitting some domains, with the inevitable consequence that valid users (by whatever definition any given Usenet group had) were blocked.

In a way, AI bots aren't any different than the spam problem on fax machines and email; universal low-barrier delivery meets large scale programmatic swill. AI allows complexity that earlier spambots couldn't dream of, when the most sophisticated way of defeating filters was spelling "porn" as "pr0n" and a bit of header fuckery. In the end there is only two ways to go; either do what filtering you can and accept some degree of false positives, or go to identification systems that will, one way or the other, compromise anonymity, because make no mistake, once you start storing any kind of data linking an account to an actual human being; biometric, picture ID, phone number, mailing address or whatever, it won't take long for the court order to show up demanding you hand over all the de-anonymized account data to find the person distributing child porn, drugs, or calling their local political representative dirty names.

.Probably because France is not really involved (yet) in this war. This might be the best way to prevent it from happening during a real war.

Neo and Android-based Chromebooks, and "good-enough" Office alternatives like Google Docs and I would argue even LibreOffice (I use it almost exclusively these days), mean Microsoft is suffering a differentiation crisis. They'll likely have the corporate lock for some time to come, though they've managed to fuck up Outlook so badly that I have to be wondering if the only thing really keeping the big guys locked in as Teams at this point.

MS's ability to leverage Windows as the platform is decaying, and the "bells and whistles" approach has managed to alienate a lot of users. People are at the point where they use Windows because they have to, but there's enough platform-agnostic functionality out there that the old lock-ins they relied on to keep Windows dominant are becoming more like prisons for their own development teams.

I know MacOS has its critics, and in its own way it has its UI lock in, but after using it now for four years, and my use of Windows now being reduced to an RDP session at work, I have to say the experience overall has been pretty pleasant and productive. The lack of update nagging, the sheer horsepower of Apple Silicon, an actual *nix prompt instead of WSL, printing that isn't an absolute shitshow (and this is saying something because Windows used to be the reigning heavyweight champion of plug and play printer handling).

Windows 11 is its own type of hell, and every time I'm forced to use it I find it a slow, bloated, unintuitive mess. It feels like Windows 7 if you had let your 12 year old kid download a whole bunch of dubious software and now the desktop and taskbar do strange things while spam spontaneously appears. If someone had shown me Windows 11 fifteen years ago I would have gone "Holy shit man, your Windows 7 machine has been rootkitted!"

He had WiFi or 4G on the aircraft carrier? I don't think so.

And if the Strava app uploaded the logged run later when it got connectivity at port or something, by then the ship was long gone.

> "The cloud" just means "Somebody elses C: drive"

Nah. Nobody is dumb enough to run a cloud service on Windows.

True, but I don't see how that's a problem for anyone.

Keep your energy to provide it to Canadians for cheaper. The US has plenty of oil and coal I've been told.