Do we ever place any kind of satellite at the other Lagrange points ? I know about the attempt to get a gravitational detector at L3/4/5, but is there anything currently ?

More likely a coronograph to hide the light from the star and see around it without being blinded.

The way things are headed, the only way people are going to be able to obtain money to pay for those widgets is via social welfare programs.

I used to like Pascal (40 years ago), but then I saw that the strings were within an allocated either 255 or (more recently) dynamically allocated, so in the 1st case you had lots of wasted memory when just storing a few chars, and in the 2nd case, you needed a(n internal) realloc and hence a memcpy every time you add a char to a string. Very inefficient.

I've used it only occasionally on things I knew nothing about (new communication protocols or programming languages I don't know). The 1st two attempts were abject failures: I was trying to get it to write a GreaseMonkey script to modify specific webpages on the fly as I don't know JavaScript. It should have been no more than 2 lines of code (my estimate) but after 8 prompt attempts that were complete failures, it was generating over 100 lines of garbage.
The 2nd attempt was with a very obscure communication protocol, and poorly documented too. I was trying to get it to generate some Hello World and it never generated anything remotely close.
Recently I've used it on things that are more mainstream and it's okay to get started on new projects, to generate demo programs. But after that I do all the coding. I want the bugs to be mine.

Indeed. It is a well known 'secret' that other student(s) took Trumps' finals in his place, paid for by his father. The world would be a much better place if this particular scam hadn't happened. Here on finals they check your identity papers (real ones, not an easily fakeable driver's license).

strncpy() was not intended for null-terminated strings at all. It should have been named copy_null_padded_buffer(). Then its operation would have made sense to almost anyone. People wouldn't have minded the longer name much either, because hardly anybody uses null-padded buffers in modern software.

Note that a null-padded buffer that is completely full doesn't have any nulls in it at all. That's why strncpy() doesn't necessarily add a null termination. It also fills the entire destination buffer with nulls after the end of a short copy, which can be very inefficient when used with null-terminated strings.

TL;DR: don't use strncpy(). It doesn't do what anybody thinks it does.

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

I think I still agree about what this article says about "user interfaces", even if the word user has lost the connotation of 'human' it used to have.

https://www.unqualified-reserv...

btw, I am astonished that there has been almost no progress in designing interfaces to be used by programmers.

Thanks. Any ideas where I can listen to what the encoded voice sounds like?

It was easy: Turn the hue knob to the left for purplish skin, to the right for green skin, and then carefully center it for purplish-green skin.

Oh god. If I spent enough time digging through my ancient Slashdot posts, somewhere back there there are posts of me going, "While I loved the strategy behind Falcon 9, I'm really not keen on this plan to make Starship out of huge carbon fibre tanks, that sounds like a really failure-prone solution..." I'm glad they only spent like a year on that idea before deciding it was dumb; somewhere back there there's also a bunch of posts of me cheering their switch to steel ;) . SpaceX still keep having random COPV problems (most of which they don't even make themselves). Not too encouraging for the notion of the cold gas thruster add-on to the Roadster, where the plan is to replace the back seat with COPVs, so you have a COPV right behind your head.

Electron has been getting by on CF, and honestly I'm impressed, but they've also been only working with very small launch vehicles thusfar. We'll see how neutron goes...

Don't get me wrong, there's a lot to say about printing small rocket parts, such as for the engines. But they were printing basically sheet metal cylinders, which is such an immensely slow and inefficient way to go about it, and it left them with parts that were heavier and less aerodynamic (rougher surface). Crazy that idea ever got any funding.

The one seen over Moscow might have been, with a bit more thrust...

"SapceX has got to be a huge scam too" - SpaceX launches the vast majority of the world's commercial cargo to orbit. The Falcon 9 FT has the highest success rate of any rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt, and is dirt cheap. SpaceX's core operations are roughly breakeven, but that's including subsidizing the development of Starship. Starlink is a money printer.

There are lots of things sketchy about the SpaceX IPO, to say the least, but SpaceX, as a company, has been extremely successful with rocketry.