Yep, there is a lot of design choices that _might_ have been done differently if it shouldn't land on Mars: 1) hydrogen instead of methane for 2nd stage. Boil off problems when going to Mars. 2) Pica vs tiles as heat shield. Easy to reapply pica on Earth, but not on Mars. 3) Enclosed cargo bay instead of reusable fairings used for Falcon 9 (2nd stage would be shorter and lighter => more payload, but payload adapter would also need heat shield to be reusable.). Fairings can't protect cargo landing on Mars.

It isn't comparable anyway: Spaceship is way over engineered for Earth and Moon operations. It is designed for Mars. A reusable system could maybe be obtained cheaper if it was designed for LEO only. But then Elon wouldn't pay for it.

The heat shield tiles are fragile and can easily fall off during launch. Maybe not as bad as on the Shuttle, but they are a mess for reuse. On Dragon they use picaX which requires a refurbishment. But building a machine reapplying a picaX layer automatically between each launch seems a lot cheaper than inspecting a lot of tiles and replacing missing or broken ones. I think it is done this way to be able to return from Mars. But then again: In that case apply a double layer of pica. The other thing I don't know and can make me wrong, is weight: What is the weight per area of pica vs tiles?

Or efford would have gone into Hurd..

"War is good for business" , rule of acquisition 34.

It might be cheaper on average but price per kWh varies a lot - especially when most of your production comes from solar and wind. Unfortunately, in that case the price is low when those productions are high, and the price is high, when the variable sources are low. That is on truly free market terms, solar and wind have to meet a much lower price than the average to be profitable. It helps, that the two production types aren't in sync, of course.

I have been to Kansas, no lack of wind there . Besides: you can easily let your cattle grass under your wind turbines. Double utilisation of the land.

In Denmark we have a complete online system hosted by our tax authority itself. That is a problem for the 80+ not used to computers, but for the rest of us it is simple. Also, almost everything is reported already by the employers and banks, and we seem to have a far simpler tax system with fewer deductions, which have to handled manually via the webpage.

If you have an Android, you have nothing to hide.

But on the other hand: isn't that very expensive, unless it is just an existing open source solution you fit for your purpose?

https://www.asim.dk/ It take photos of the TLEs automatically.

I read up on it: Windows XP and server 2003 got it according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... . Without applications, and probably because only security features themselves where tested, not the whole system. As I interpret that, the fine grained access control were tested, but the gaping hole in some irrelevant network protocol ignored. Probably the same with Android: pKVM is super duper, but it doesn't matter if there is a huge hole somewhere else.

You should just remove network, com ports, floppy drive etc., then it was perfectly secure.

by making it far less useful for the hackers when you accidentally open the mail and follow the links: 1) Secure and sandbox mail client and browser to avoid getting the user account hacked by a unpatched bug. 2) if the link tricks you into typing your password, make sure a password can't be used by itself. I.e. use two-factor auth or VPN to access old internal websites not supporting SSO or their own two-factor auth.

Python is just the comprise language for everything: Easy for beginners, easy to call C or Fortran to get core algorithms fast, lots of libraries for almost everything. With static type checking you can even build large systems with it. No stupid multi-threading to make programs unstable and unreliable. The only none-religious reason not to use it, is speed. But you should always optimise later, so picking another language will look like premature optimization in many cases... or just conservatism, because you happen to just know that better.