Today long-term tech development is heavily done in an academic setting, and while there are some companies that do think long-term (Qualcomm and other telecom companies tend to be on 5-10 year tech cycles, aerospace is on 10-20 year cycles, biotech and life science is on 10-20 year cycles), generally a lot of it has shifted to academic circles and universities now. Unfortunately, I think this has put a damper on things.

One thing Bell Labs did do correctly was by being part of a company, they had the needs and desires of a market and consumers to act as a pull, a "Why" so to speak. Even with some of the more speculative research they did, there was always an eye towards how would this get deployed to a market as a product and thus become a technology available to the broader world. Academia does not have this; most academia lives in a bubble. WHen you read academic papers, they all follow the same outline: 1) there's a problem in the world, 2) a new technology is hypothesized to solve it, 3) here is an experiment and data to show it cna solve it, and 4) that problem might be solved by this new technology.

While generally most papers I read have mid- to good- experimental design and data and decent conclusions, it's the first part about a problem that is almost entirely made up from nothing. In my field at least, when I read an academic paper that is supposed to relate to my field, the problem they are identifying isn't even a problem at all; it has no relevance to the field or what people want. As such the technology is funded, experiments are done, a paper is published, and it dies on the vine because it turns out no one wants it because it was never a problem in the first place.

It's noticeable that when it comes to silicon and chip-based technologies, academia does very little; the silicon industry basically took it all over through the formation of SRC. SRC unfortunately just got gutted by the Trump administration, but for a long time SRC and the industry ran all of the new technology development; there wasn't anything like chip architectures or new interconnects or anything coming out of academia at all; it was all industry led and academia only did niche stuff like graphene and organics and the like.

Industry at least provides a pull for a new technology academia has to push it and it rarely results in anything useful. It's different for different fields, but in my field at least I haven't found a single university program that's even remotely relevant; the Bell Labs model is sorely missed.

I think it's arguing that given their unassailable position with their monopoly, they had the freedom to focus on long-term technology development. I do believe competition and the need to report quarterly earnings creates incentives and pressures to focus on more short-term thinking, but I don't think having a monopoly is the only thing that would create fertile ground for more long-term tech development, nor was it the only factor for Bell Labs as the article points out leadership with vision was a key factor too.

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.

NASA still needs to explain why. Never in history did we do science or major projects like this for no reason. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about this; the original effort to go to the moon had geopolitical context of surpassing the Soviet Union and the dual-purpose military use of rockets-turned ICBMs. Columbus sailed around the world not to prove it was round, it was to cut out the Middle-Eastern middle-men in the trade of Asian goods in Europe; it was about money and geopolitics. Every major advancement in history has either an economic driver or a geopolitical driver. With that, the Moon, Mars, and the whole bit are just too far away, too costly, too dangerous, and don't generate enough economic or geopolitical benefit.

Or, if they do, they aren't articulating it well. Without that driving purpose, this moonbase or Lunar Gateway or whatever just simply won't happen.

It is not illegal to announce intended plans. The articles themselves say it will require approval by Congress.

I know it's knee-jerk to hate on the executive branch and Trump, but using terms like "illegal" becomes hyperbolic and meaningless if its overused and used in a factually incorrect way.

It's not ASML that'll be the problem. They'll buy a system and it'll be there in crates ready to be isntalled long before:

A) the permits are in place. This is Texas, so maybe "faster than California", but it'll cost.

B) The water and power is secured; again it might go faster but it's 18-24 months. However,

C) This is Texas, the power grid has been unreliable. Since foundries run 24/7 fully automated to produce the kinds of chips he's talking about, they'll need reliable backup power. Backup generator lead times are, as of today, around 48-90 months. This is very hard to go faster, as these gensets have specific bottlenecks, namely the castings for the crankshafts are typically done at specialized facilities, cannot be made to go faster, and have slots secured years in advance. Maybe you pay through the nose to buy someone else's gen set, or you're robbing them off of old recycled ships and turning them into gen sets, but they'll be pieces of junk; a real risk. I bet the EUV system will be ready years before the power requirements and backup gensets are ready.

D) labor - thanks to Elon's MAGA tendencies, we're now starting to face a labor shortage. We have a major skillset mismatch in that the kind of people to operate these tools typically aren't trained in America, so to go fast you'll have to, shocker, bring them over via H1-Bs. Heck even construction to build these fabs is facing labor shortages, particularly in places on the Southern border like Texas because construction is heavily staffed with Hispanic people, who are getting harder to find today thanks to Trump and ICE.

So yeah, odds are this is going to cost 2-5X as much as it should and take 2-5X longer than it needs to, and probably still won't be able to operate when "done".

I remember when Tesla was a capital P Progressive brand. It's stunning how much the world has turned.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, however if you're in Uber's position you can't afford to look at the now. The fact is, they attempted to build their own robotaxi and failed, which left them in the position of being a ride-hailer app only. That makes them vulnerable if there is only one player to provide automated taxi services. And so far, Waymo is really the only successful player in this. Tesla on the other hand, as much as I dislike the company has had naysayers against it for many years and while it never beats those naysayers when they say they will, the fact is that A) they are profitable, B) they have a large chunk of cash, and C) Elon has made many investors a lot of money, so if he asks for more investment he'll get it, and he is directly talking about muscling in on Uber's territory.

So while I think Musk is a clown, you can't discount what he can achieve when he stays focused. Right now he's vulnerable because the political focus made him distracted, which gives Uber time to support more players coming into the market. On top of that, if they make 12 bets on alternatives to Waymo or Tesla and only 3 or 4 of them make it, those 3 or 4 who are successful will be much smaller; operating through Uber's platform will give them revenue and allow them to survive, and that gives Uber control over them the way they'll never have over Waymo or Tesla.

So it's the smart move on their part.

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.

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!"

There are 2 up for election this year, and 3 in 2028. That's 2 years, not six. Justice seats go up for election on even numbered years. In 2 years you could have 4 to 3 Democrat majority in the Ohio Supreme Court.

I think you're overplaying it a bit. I do see that the Republican crowd has elected a 6-to-1 Republican/Democrat set of justices in the Ohio court. But frankly if the Ohio Supreme Court overrules something like this, then A) Ohio got what it voted for, and B) it would directly fly in the face of the MAGA crowd who elected those guys. Ohio state supreme court justices do not serve for life like the US Supreme Court, they ahve 6 year terms and mandatory retirement at age 70. So if they clearly ignore a Constitutional Amendment that allows tech bros to come in and go against the wishes of rural AMerica, I think you'd see a MAGA backlash in the next election cycle. Some lessons have to be learned the hard way, and if that happens then Ohio got an expensive lesson in hard-right populist propaganda.

Genesis 2:4-25 describes a different order, with Adam created first, followed by plants, animals, and then Eve.... so which imaginary story are you clinging to?

Because, evangelicals, you know, the people who are making all the decisions in the US right now believe God snapped his fingers, opened his ass and shat out the world for us humans to abuse and consume to our hearts desires! The notion that us little humans could ruin something God created or even grasp the understanding of the almighty is beyond arrogance!