Blue Origin is far, far from having "caught up". They've had three launches, with a 33% mission failure rate. They are now where SpaceX was fifteen years ago, but with a much worse record (Falcon 9s first mission failure was launch 19, though it did have a partial failure on launch 4 -- primary payload successful, secondary payload failed). New Glenn has done better on booster recovery, but they weren't the ones learning how to do it.

And even if SpaceX never manages to make Starship fully-reusable, they can always punt, build a lighter, fully expendable second stage and have a launch platform that blows every other heavy lift vehicle in the world away.

The Chinese are moving pretty fast but they're also a generation behind.

Honestly, that seem like the least important part of the egg. Couldn't you just throw all the other stuff in a cardbox box? I understand that the shell needs to "breathe", but still...

There's very little difference between and Xbox and a Windows PC these days. They are both running Windows. The Xbox just has an UI better suited to controllers. That's actually not a bad strategy, because it make it easier to write games that work on both.

What I want is to be able to control my home automation without the commands going round trip to a server in the cloud and back, so that everything still works if the 'net goes out. Will this box help me get to that goal? I understand a lot of programming may be required.

Didn't the current administration cut back on funding for the National Weather Service just over a year ago? I remember the cuts as having been directed more towards hurricane/tornado warnings but they can't be considered in isolation.

All true, but it's worth pointing out that if the Starship lander succeeds it will enable us to do a lot more, a lot faster. The whole "15 refueling flights for every moon trip" seems kind of crazy on its face, but if you look at the costs (assuming Starship works and become fully reusable), it makes the total cost per kilogram delivered to the surface of the moon insanely low and enables comparatively massive payloads to be delivered.

Big risk, big (potential) reward. Running both the Starship and Blue Moon projects in parallel is probably a good risk mitigation strategy, but if Starship succeeds completely, Blue Origin's lander will be a relic. Of course, it's also possible that Starship will just fail, or that it will succeed but be difficult to man-rate, in which case it may become the delivery service for lunar cargos, while people fly on Blue Moon.

Ionic 6 is nice, but they are still $30k used, and they support limited V2L, not V2H. Great for camping, so no great for backing up your whole house. That being said, the only things that need to run 24/7 at my house are the fridge, they well pump, and a few light bulbs. My internet comes from the electric company, so I expect my internet will be out any time the power is out. I have a wood-burning fireplace if I need help, and being on a windy coast, openning the windows usually provides adequate cooling.

Can the jury at least decide which one of them has a more punchable face? I know that's a pretty tough question...

The summary says "late 2022" and "29 months ago", so some editor somewhere has made a mistake. 29 months ago would be late December 2023.

And if that works, then I think the days of pi being irrational will soon be over.

Fair, though my data -- and Play purchases -- were my bigger concern when they first started talking about just ending legacy GSuite.

You must have signed up to change over before they backed off. They announced that everyone would have to switch and pay, but I waited because I didn't think it would stick, and it didn't. I have about 25 users on mine, so paying wasn't really feasible.

I searched for it and found it. I can't check now; I left Google last year.

That's fake news, actually. A very widespread misunderstanding, but incorrect regardless.

What Google actually did was move "Don't be Evil" from the introduction of the code of conduct to the summary at the end.

It's a widespread but inaccurate belief that Google kills everything. If you look closer, there's a distinct pattern to what they kill and what they keep, and it's mostly based on adoption. If a Google service -- free or paid -- has 100M+ monthly active users, it won't be killed. That number is a guideline, not a hard requirement. If it appears that a service is on track to attain that sort of "Google-scale" user base, and it has some monetization mechanism (usually a place to put ads), then it will survive.

Paid services are a little different. Google is much more reluctant to kill any service that people are paying money for. That's not to say they won't do it, but they're less likely to, and if they do they'll bend over backwards trying to make it right. Stadia is a good example. Stadia didn't get enough adoption to be worth Google's time/effort, so they killed it... but they refunded every penny of what the users had spent on hardware, monthly subscription fees, game purchase fees, etc. I still have (and use) the rather nice Stadia controllers I got for free. I'd rather have kept the service, but I definitely don't feel like I was ripped off.