Perhaps it would be better if that wasn't the case...

I view BO's (heh) New Shepard as roughly on par with the risk of everyday commercial air flight. Some factors increase risk, while others (like the fact that the entire spacecraft is thoroughly checked out between flights and telemetered to heck and back) reduce risk. So overall I think it's probably a wash.

It goes straight up and comes straight back down. Atmospheric re-entry heating is a fraction of that of an orbital re-entry.

The capsule is aerodynamically stable on re-entry. The part that should point forward, will always point forward.

The flight is so short that even if atmospheric conditioning failed, as long as the capsule maintains pressure, there should be plenty of breathable atmo for the duration. This is reinforced by the fact that the New Shepard crew are not required to wear pressure suits.

The LES is a simple solid rocket motor - ignite and it will burn, no valves or propellant pressurization to worry about, so it is as sure to work as about anything else in this world, to get you away from the going-boom rocket behind (plus it has already been demostrated both in tests and in a real-life booster failure).

So, I don't think it was that much of a step for JB to ride the first crewed bird, from a technical perspective. And of course there's other reasons why he might want to be on the first flight, but I'll leave it to others to expound on those aspects...

Doing the Vulcan neck-pinch on the punk on the bus with the boombox was a good start...

Intuit has every right to ask the question (and they did, but in the form of a "demand"), and The Verge has every right to decline (which they did). That's the best possible outcome in my book, because it adds just a little bit more out there for people to see, and learn about Intuit's shenanegans.

If Intuit really thought they had a leg to stand on (they don't), the request would have come from their lawyers. But it came from the communications director - who, I'd wager, got his metaphorical wee-wee slapped after the fact for not preparing the top dog to answer that particular question in a way that would be least-bad for Intuit, which of course was bound to come up, and is now trying to save face.

I've never used a product like TurboTax. In my youth, I did my federal taxes by hand, on paper, and mailed them in. Now I use a tax professional. I can do that, but many other people can't for various reasons, and I look forward to the day when such products is legislated out of existance.

My interest in the Pi and Pi-alike boards has waned significantly over recent years due to the requirements to boot from (m)SD or eMMC, with each board apparently requiring some arcane build of U-boot to make it happen (and no two alike). In my experience, the only OSes that really work on these boards are the ones that come from the board makers (respins of Ubuntu, usually), but that add their own repos in .in or .cn - where lord knows what's going on. No thanks.

My interest in these Arm boards will increase again if/when it becomes common that you can slap a SATA or NVMe SSD of your choice onto the board, and install a stock *nix distribution (i.e. from the makers of the distro - Debian, OpenBSD, etc). Of course, I ain't holding my breath...

Consequences...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nasa.gov%2Fcenters-a...

Coming from a company that embeds telemetry and data collection into its products, enabled by default, and makes it difficult amd/or time consuming to completely disable...

... oh, and there's something in a jar...

s/should/shouldn't/g

If it's too hard to list them all on my bill, then I should be paying them. Problem solved.

Everybody has a standards problem.

As long as the relavent standards (especially JavaScript and its ilk) change more often than is practical for anybody but the largest 2-3 browser developers to cope and keep up with, and as long as the browser big-boys (we know who they are) continue their "my way or the highway" meddling by adding non-standards-based features that then most websites end up catering to due to market share (or by implenting standards in workarounds-needed ways), these issues will continue to plauge the web.

I feel like maybe there was a time as IE's dominance waned where things looked like they might be getting slightly better, but it's since gotten worse. I can stack up a half-dozen of the "most popular" browsers side by side and load a complicated website, and get presentations that are none exactly alike. This is not good.

Of course, I'm generally cranky these days by the smart-device environment that encourages the dissolution of the distinction between protocol and presentation, combining both within an (shutter) "app" that exchanges data in a proprietary way. But that's another rant for another day.

I suppose the best that one could do right now is to determine, for themselves and their use case, which is the least of all evils, and if they're technically able and inclined, pick a browser project to support technically, or if not but still willing, contribute funding to same.

Or, if you happen to have enough clout, kick Google in the balls for being evil, and kick Mozilla in the ass for being stupid, and get the both of 'em to change...

Yeah, so? That's exactly what happens on your real desktop/workspace, the paradigm upon which the last 50 years of graphical computing desktop window managment has been based.

"Most of the time you donâ(TM)t care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often thatâ(TM)s just a single, maximized window. Sometimes itâ(TM)s two or three windows next to each other. Itâ(TM)s incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and itâ(TM)s up to you to clean it up."

Yes... it's up to me. And no... if all I want to see is the one window I am (or need to be) paying attention to at the moment, I maximize it. I don't care what's underneath it, just like I don't care what's on my real desktop that's underneath (or off to the side) of the thing I'm working on. And if what I'm working on changes, because I decide it should or because someone/something else decides it should, I rearrange... put the new window or piece of paper on top of everything else and focus on it. Real world, virtual world... same thing.

"Automatically do what people probably want, allow adjusting if needed"

Until they invent computers that can actually read my mind... how the hell is it supposed to automatically know? And, oh, by the way... doesn't that describe the current desktop windowing environment? Operating on a small set of both fixed (and adjustable) prefixes, with the ability for the user to (in most cases) arrange and resize the windows to suit their needs and desires?

Porting the physical desktop environment into the graphical computing environment is an example of a killer application (remember those?). What is being described in the linked Gnome discussion is, in my opinion, not. Not, at least, until they produce a demo and before it is forced into the next version of Gnome as "the default", > 90% of the computer-using population opine that this is the greatest thing they've ever seen since sliced bread.

OP's original quote: The government isn't supposed to know where we travel especially within our own borders

OK, then. Assuming that the federal government (assuming this is what the OP meant) doesn't stop me from travelling within the US, they just know where I'm going, what right of mine does that infringe upon?

I'm not trolling, I'm genuinely asking. For the sake of discourse.

The government isn't supposed to know where we travel especially within our own borders.

Can you cite either legislative or judicial law which supports this?