That sounds nice and all, but there's really no legal way to do that. The money was collected illegally, so it has to be returned (with interest) to the people it was collected from -- the importers.

It's going to take years to find out just how corrupt, and we'll never get the full story. What we can see isn't even the tip of the iceberg.

Heh. The usual metric is "mission success". For a manned flight, that includes getting the people down safely. For a typical unmanned flight the mission is "get the payload to the right orbit". If you manage to land the rocket after that, that's gravy.

Zipline is still around, still making deliveries in Africa and some other places, and also doing some in the US, for Wal-mart.

There isn't any launch platform with no failures, ever, that's not how you measure reliability. Reliability is measured on percentage of successful launches (payload reached target orbit), and Falcon 9 is, indeed, the most reliable orbital launch vehicle ever, by a wide margin. Here are the platforms with >= 100 launches (the 100-launch line is kind of arbitrary, but you have to draw a line somewhere and platforms with very few launches don't have meaningful statistics):

#1 Falcon 9 (including Falcon Heavy): 637 successes of 640 launches, 99.5% success rate. If you focus only on the block 5 variant (most-flown version, currently flying), it's 572 out of 573, 99.8%.
#2 Atlas V: 106 of 107, 99.1%
#3 Delta II: 153 of 155, 98.7%
#4 Space Shuttle: 133 of 135, 98.5%
#5 Long March 2/3/4: 503/521, 96.5%
#6 Ariane 5: 112 of 117, 95.7%
#7 Soyuz: 1889 of 2014, 93.8%
#8 Kosmos: 559 of 610, 91.6%
#9 Proton: 382 of 431, 88.6%

Soyuz has to get props for the sheer number of launches, of course, though that's probably mostly because the Russians couldn't afford to build another platform. Soyuz isn't a particularly great rocket in any way -- smallish payload, good but not great reliability -- but they kept using what they had. It's also worth noting that assuming Falcon 9 maintains its current launch cadence (which it won't; Starship will probably start taking its launches eventually, and if that doesn't happen, the cadence seems likely to increase), it will match Soyuz' launch count around 2033.

As does using Windows.

With the ESA supplying the spacecraft, most of the software is likely to be competently written and/or open-source. This will prove to the Martians that there is indeed intelligent life on Earth.

It's a good question and one I'm working on trying to get an answer to. By giving AI hard, complex engineering problems, and then getting engineers to look at the output to determine if that output is meaningful or just expensive gibberish.

By doing this, I'm trying to feel around the edges of what AI could reasonably be used for. The trivial engineering problems usually given to it are problems that can usually be solved by people in a similar length of time. I believe the typical savings from AI use are in the order of 15% or less, which is great if you're a gecko involved in car insurance, but not so good if you're a business.

If the really hard problems aren't solvable by AI at all (it's all just gibberish) then you can never improve on that figure. It's as good as it is going to get.

I've open sourced what AIs have come up with so far, if you want to take a look. Because that is what is going to tell you if good can come out of AI or not.

I would think it goes further. If the company has already failed (ie: no longer exists) then the action is not taken by the company but a former employee of that company (even if said former employee was the CEO). Former employees are not granted special authority over PII or over company-owned information.

Irrelevant. PII protections are not subject to company discresion.

The conversations are not private, but PII laws nonetheless still apply. Anything in the messages that violates PII privacy laws is forbidden regardless of company policy. Policy cannot overrule the law.

Now, in the US, where privacy is a fiction and where double-dealing is not only perfectly acceptable but a part of workplace culture, that isn't too much of an issue. The laws exist on paper but have no real existence in practice.

However, business these days is international and American corps tend to forget that. Any conversation involving European computers (even if all employers and employees are in the US) falls under the GDPR and is under the aspices of the European courts and the ECHR, not the US legal system. And cloud servers are often in Ireland. Guess what. That means any conversation that takes place physically on those computers in Ireland plays by European rules, even if the virtual conversation was in the US.

This was settled by the courts a LONG time ago. If you carry out unlawful activities on a computer in a foreign country, you are subject to the laws of that country.

Really? I don't think I've ever used NTFS on any machine I've owned.

It's a good thing for you that most people do. Those ads your'e avoiding fund most of the content you consume. You can only freeride as long as enough others are paying the toll to subsidize you. I do the same, but I won't be surprised or angry if it becomes impossible.

Obviously many others had thought of it. Hastings' brilliant idea was to pivot from what was working (DVD rental by mail -- which itself was pretty innovative) to streaming while the DVD business was still good. That seems like a blindingly obvious move in hindsight but it's actually really hard when you're in the thick of running a successful business to step back and think "We need to completely change our business strategy, even though it's working well".

As geekmux mentioned, Blockbuster was incredibly well-positioned to do both of the things that Netflix did, first to pivot from brick-and-mortar DVD rental to rental by mail (possibly exploiting their broad physical store base) and then to streaming. They had deep relationships with every player in the content industry, large and small, they had near-universal name recognition and positive perceptions in retail video distribution. But they did neither, they just kept running their business until their market disappeared. That's what usually happens, and it's not because the CEOs are stupid, it's because it actually takes someone with both vision and guts to see and act on broad market changes before they happen.

It's possible that cetaceans have a true language. They certainly have something that seems to function the same as a "hello, I am (name)", where the name part differs between all cetaceans but the surrounding clicks are identical. The response clicks also include that same phrase which researchers think serves the purpose of a name.

But we've done structural analysis to death and, yes, all the results are interesting (it seems to have high information content, in the Shannon sense, seems to have some sort of structure, and seems to have intriguing early-language features), but so does the Voynich Manuscript and there's a 99.9% chance that the Voynich Manuscript is a fraud with absolutely no meaning whatsoever. Structure only tells you if something is worth a closer look and we have known for a long time that cetacean clicks were worth a closer look. Further structural work won't tell us anything we don't already know.

What we need is to have a long-term recording of activities and clicks/whistles, where the sounds are recorded from many different directions (because they can be highly directional) and where the recording positively identifies the source of each sound, what that source was doing at the time (plus what they'd been doing immediately prior and what they do next), along with what they're focused on and where the sounds were directed (if they were). This sort of analysis is where any new information can be found.

But we also need to look at lessons learned in primate research, linguistics, sociology and anthropology, to understand what ISN'T going to work, in terms of approaches. In all three cases, we've learned that you learn best immersively, not from a distance. If an approach has failed in EVERY OTHER SOCIAL SCIENCE, then assuming it is going to work in cetacean research is stupid. It might be the correct way to go, but assuming it is is the bit that is stupid. If things fail repeatedly, regardless of where they are applied, then there's a decent chance it is necessary to ask that maybe the stuff that keeps failing is defective.

You really can't. Not with conventional weapons. Not even with nukes, really, though with nukes you could kill pretty much everyone in the population centers. Is that what you're proposing?