Or else some con man is bilking the gov out of a shitload of your tax dollars by selling a piece of junk to gullible wishful thinkers eager to get their hands on a magic bullet.

They just want visitors to have a fuller experience of local life.

Yepp, as I said: The system is built first and foremost to defend itself.

Personally, I don't think that police should have any right whatsoever to enter your digital devices. Yes, including for terrorism and kiddie porn. And I am 100% for us nerds developing defenses against this overreach. This case is a lesson that teaches us distress PINs are a good thing, but we need to improve on them, make it less obvious they were used, etc.

It's not a question of "Germany for the Germans". It's a matter of allowing people who are openly opposed to your culture to become a sizeable minority, while at the same time putting pressure on society in every way in order to extract wealth for the "elites", while at the same time replacing everyone among the "elites" who is actually capable of something with incompetent, corrupt egomaniacs.

If one of these factors were absent, we might yet manage. Competent leaders might be able to keep things together. Not maximizing profit for the few while returning the populations' lives back to peasantry would give ordinary people breathing space to cope with everything and solve issues at the base. Not importing culture war would keep society more cohesive and able to fight back against the exploitation.

The reading comprehension fail is you failing when reading the GP. They were talking about Falcon 9 replacements being two decades behind. The implication was that nobody will catch up to Starship any time soon.

Does that mean that we can unload Texas and/or Florida on to Russia?

HUGE WIN!!

Pork barrel? Nah it'll be the green chile barrel, and I'd be OK with that.

Maybe the could fund replacement emergency spare tires for all. After all you're not really meant to put 100k miles on one.

As a (small) shareholder of both companies, I'm against this move. Not that my opinion counts for much, but these are two companies that are strong each for their own reasons and a merger would muddle that. But maybe that's the point.

We thought the Megacorporations would emerge as vertically integrated all-consumer-products giants. Turns out that a tech bubble beats that.

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here's the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they're redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn't worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they're varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it's run by the state-owned CALT, but they're not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we've seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US.

Are they? The US isn't, it's bending to the whims of an angry, stupid, corrupt and senile old man bent on getting as rich as possible. Needlessly burning allies doesn't put the US in a good position.

meaning Russia and China's nuclear arsenal is effectively useless

Russia's nuclear arsenal is already very close to being effectively useless. Not a chance they've been doing good stockpile stewardship while the entire rest of the armed forces (and its tyres) rots into the ground.

And here comes Node.js....

The split was massively beneficial for GE. Post-split, GE Aerospace went from ~135-160B to ~300B. GE Vernova went from ~35B to ~240B. And GE HealthCare went from ~25B to ~30-40B. The aggregate return of the split was ~300-400%. The new companies have a total market cap of approximately the same value GE had at its absolute peak during the Dotcom boom, dramatically reversing decades of decline. Their value is ~40% more than before GE's Dotcom surge; double that of GE's pre-collapse level (~2016); and ~800% of what it was post-collapse.

It's not just GE. Siemens. Johnson & Johnson. United Technologies. DowDuPont. 3M. Kellogg. Daimler. It's just been the trend to unbundle. Musk's empire is going in precisely the opposite direction. He sustains it with a cult of personality.

Looks like both bookworm and trixie are fixed as of about 3am UTC last night.

Sync your mirrors if it's off cycle. Luckily mine sync around 9am, hopefully the buildbots were busy..

For bookworm you need 8.2.35-1~deb12u1 .

Thank you, Guilhem.

Has it though? In the West, certainly. It's what the MBAs all parrot: focus on your core strengths, divest everything else. Or at least split it off under different names. But there are still Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean conglomerates that make everything from oil tankers, appliances, musical instruments to motorcycles. All under the same name. Somehow they are not too concerned about brand name dilution or core strengths. Like the MCP guy says in Robocop: "Good business is where you find it".

The stock argument is a good point... I'd love to invest in SpaceX the aerospace company, not so much in SpaceX the AI company with a satcom division and its own rocket department. Certainly not if they add an automotive department that seems to have lost its way. Though I don't know if this is about Musk's wants, it smells a lot more like the acquisition of X and xAI by Spacex: a trick to artificially pad the company's valuation, or something like that.