Manned flight impossible, finds a 19th century study, after examining thousands of years of past data.
Another sensationalist headline that doesn’t stand to the most basic first principles scrutiny.

There are many assumptions behind such claims and they often don’t stand the test of time.

Here's a simple ELI5 glossary:
Orbital class:
Vehicles that go (at least) 100km up (where Low Earth Orbit starts) and also accelerate by 28,000km/h sideways. That way, though they're still falling towards the earth, they forever "miss" it because of how far they've flown sideways. Orbit.

Sub-orbital class:
Vehicles that go 100km up, stay there for a few minutes, and fall back down, because they haven't brought a big rocket to also get them going 28,000km/h sideways.

Here's a simple business glossary:
Orbital class vehicles: Commercial vessels in a market worth billions with far more demand than supply, at every size and shape of payload.
Competition includes
- small sat launch providers (Rocketlab etc). You can "Kind of" include Virgin's 747-launched orbital vehicle in here... and maybe there is some kind of smallsat future for that where they fly a hundred of these off an airfield each month and launch them high up over an ocean... but even then they won't be more than a tiny sliver of the smallsat launch market.
- cheap and cheerful reliable launch providers (Soyuz)
- cheaper and reliable providers that recover some of their rockets (SpaceX Falcon 9, or the upcoming Russian knockoff)
- heavy lift (Falcon 9 Heavy, Delta-IV/Vulcan, Blue Origin's New Glenn etc)
- cheap fully reusable heavy lift (Starship) - which is about to reshape the market entirely because despite being the biggest of them all, it'll be the cheapest too - potentially with time roughly matching the costs of tiny rockets like Rocket Lab's tiny Elektron. It's cheap because no part of the vehicle gets expended (imagine what airline tickets would cost if you had to throw away half the airplane every flight...) and because it returns to launch site rather than to landing site, opening the potential of rapid turnaround.

In contrast, sub-orbital class vehicles are...
$200,000 per ticket, 10 minute long amusement park ride that ends more or less where it starts - on the ground.
This is most of what Virgin Galactic does, as well as what Blue Origin's New Shepherd does.
It's.. how should I put it... not interesting.

Virgin was never a serious project to begin with because it never had a serious goal.
Contrast it to
Rocket Lab - that built itself a commercial spine and industry respect using small vehicles, as well as carve out its own little expertise niche in 3d-printed rocket engines.
Blue Origin - that went to the effort of designing a real heavy lift vehicle and vertical landing tech, and bid using this vehicle on a NASA moon lander system (and lost).
SpaceX - built itself a commercial spine with the Falcon 9, put itself on a path to become the world's biggest ISP by using a lot of mate's-rates launch capability to propose and lift an intended constellation of 36,000 satellites (~1400 are already up there and the service is actively on sale), and then swept the world off its feet with an ambitious plan for not just a launch vehicle... but an entire infrastructure designed around it and using it - a system designed together - stretching cryo fuel, payload and personnel movement around the earth, to the moon and to Mars. If you want to learn more - check this out: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...

And all this happening while NASA is getting its new Artemis program - and is getting ready to put a permanent human presence on the moon and in lunar orbit.

Where is Virgin in all of this?
It's still selling a scant 10 minute $200k joyrides.
C'mon. Who cares?

We are at an inflection point, for sure.
So far, it's been a simple choice. Power-budgeted? ARM. Performance? x86 (with some exceptions).
We just got to a point where ARM & x86 desktop performance are on-par, where ARM is carried by two trends:
1. The performance improvement of x86 is ~30% year on year. ARM is a few hundred percentage points.
2. The power consumption of a properly designed ARM system is between a quarter and a full order of magnitude lower for the same performance.

Apple is going ARM native with its desktop OS and is providing a translation layer.
Windows is going ARM native with its desktop OS and providing a translation layer.

x86 will run on inertia for a (compatibility and change viability "exponential tail long") while (think mainframe), but its death warrant is signed and its fate is sealed. x86 is dethroned.

The gaming world will take decade to figure out how to run if it wants a machine that can run its decades in the making steam library, a higher performing machine that can only run a subset or some hybrid option that can kinda do both. The server world will move much quicker as ARM versions of server OS's have long been out there, and there are fewer software vendors and a greater capability to just rebuild your business apps natively for ARM.

The desktop user who just needs a browser, an office suite and a Teams/Zoom/whatever client will jump overnight the moment the price is right. Whether you're gonna pay a premium for an apple product today or buy a cheaper ARM PC 2 years from now matters little in the grand things of things.

There is no trend, no force, no advantage and no black magic Intel/AMD can pull off that they haven't already, that will make any of these trends exceed what ARM can do, on any timescale - immediate, medium and long term.

All the pundits are so busy comparing bells and whistles, it's analogous to comparing NY-London travel times of a modern airliner to a Concorde.

Yes, Concorde was way faster. But there's a reason it doesn't fly anymore. Costs were an order of magnitude higher too, and with that fast came a ton of downsides making it basically unfit for purpose and irrelevant in all the places where modern airliners, despite being slower, are fit.

If you are any of a number of places that neither has modern subway infrastructure nor the cash to build it, a capability to reduce the initial cash outlay is a big deal. Even if what you get as a result is smaller.

A good way to look at it -
Many companies know how to make a car. But companies like Toyota don't make cars. They make mega-factories that make a million cars a year. There are only a handful of companies that can build such factories.

The Boring Company didn't "build a tunnel". They built a capability to build (more) cheap tunnels. A tunnel factory if you like. And their first one, unimpressive though it may be, is just that - it's just the first one.

Is Musk an endless source of hyperbole? You bet.
Does it mean costs will reduce by exactly x10 if he said on TV they will? No. Those statements are part of the hyperbole. Treat them as such. They might be x3, or x7, or x11, or - if you really understand what they are doing - start at x2 due to all the associated development costs, but get better over time where the cost model of larger tunnels and tunnel boring equipment can't.

Finally, do the approaches of Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX and The Boring Company actually do big things differently, and in systemically far more advantageous ways? Is there substance, or is it snake oil? Well, yes. Yes they do, and yes, there is substance.
And the hyperbole is there for a reason - helps drive the public conversation, the support, the publicity and the investment. That's why they engage in it.

You can look at the Tesla Roadster as an irrelevant gimmick, being a car for 2 people and all. Or you can view it as the first brick of a bigger structure that was to come which is Tesla today.

Look past he service that particular tunnel provides. It's about things like the MkIII boring electric machines they developed. The business model that's available to them, but isn't available to other drilling orgs. It's a first brick, not the end state.

Don't over-buy into Musk's mouth. Watch what he is doing. And pay attention to how it all connects. Because it does.

I think you're hitting the nail on the head there.
We got all too used to thinking about gaming as a niche thing, until you realise how many steam gamers want to jump ship to a platform with a far healthier long term performance posture - ARM a-la M1 - while still being able to run all the stuff they bought over the last 20 years.

I think the bar for M1 macs running (forthcoming versions of) Vmware Fusion and/or Parallels Desktop running ARM Windows (e.g. Windows RT) and using the x86 emulation layer therein, or Qualcomm based ARM machines running naked Windows RT with the same emulation, will be considered good enough when you can download and run x86 games.

Performance under such conditions just needs to be functionally passable. It'll inevitably catch up (and is already on-par with x86 for anything compiled natively).

When I say "Backup Solution" I mean THIS. But you mean THAT.
When I say "High Availability" I mean THIS. But you mean THAT.

Let's stop using shorthand terms to mean a specific way to solve for specific requirements.
We have modern language. We have jargon. We have math.

Be explicit about your requirements.
Need to be able to recover the file from any point in time in the last seven years? Say it. If that's the requirement, RAID is no solution.
Need to have an RTO=1 minute? Say it. Quantify it. If that's the requirement, Active-passive isn't the HA you need.

Let's stop pretending that "BACKUP" or "HA" or "DEVOPS" or any other piece of jargon of this variety means anything more specific than a conversation topic.

Pun aside, I'd pay to know when me and my family are sick sooner and without us needing to do something special because we're feeling bad (at which point in some cases it is already too late).

We have a joke that makes the rounds here in Australia...
That our labor (large center-left) party is what the US calls the democrats...
and our liberal (large conservative center-right) party is what the US calls...
the democrats.

The US basically has what every other country calls "the entire political spectrum" squeezed into the uneasy alliance called the democratic party.

What the republican party is (or has become)... we do not have an equivalent or even a name for. Not a complementary one its members would accept, anyway.

You may as well assemble an endless army of sweet potatoes.

Why on earth would you want an army made of... meatware?

No, Facebook is not like a megaphone.

Megaphones do not have a thousand megaphone company engineers looking at you from the inside, attempting to figure out how to make their megaphone play with the dopamine and cortisol knobs in the audience's heads. Megaphones are not designed to be addictive.

Megaphones also do not recommend to everyone who hears something out of them to go listen to something one notch more polarising and radical. The algorithms of these platforms do.

It is exactly this ignorance, that Facebook is "a megaphone", that is such a part of the problem.

If you mince your words, micro-targeted advertising is a mechanism that leads to manipulation.
If you don't, micro-targeted advertising allows you to influence a high percentage of people by playing on their brain chemistry rathe than convincing them. It's a comeback of slavery.

You forgot two major demand drivers in your account that are the important one.
a. A method of imbuing a currency with trust. If you live in a country with an economy in free-fall and hyper-inflation, you can earn $1000 this month, only to see what you earned become worth $750 the next because your government is over-printing. Often such a government also places legal prohibition on forex trading, and your options boil down to watching your wealth vanish, getting mauled on rates on the black market or move your money to a crypto-currency asap. People do the later, which creates a demand-driven price-push. This also goes to the "what doesn Bitcoin/cryptocurrency actually DO?" question. It produces trust. Which isn't a big deal if your government can do it with other means (vaults with gold and projected stability), but is a very big deal if you live in a failing nation.
b. A computer that can't be switched off. If your cryptocurrency is a glorified operating system for immutable logic that can be run on top of a distributed computer that cannot be switched off, this becomes a platform to do new innovative things on. And you know what happens when a million startups wrote apps for windows? Windows became a platform. And what will happen when a heap of them write apps that take advantage of Ethereum's smart contracts? Ethereum will become a platform. Add uplift to "2nd gen" (where "1st gen" was ProofOfWork/ProofOfBurn currencies like ) and you both become heaps more attractive to institutional investors, offer a source for them to make an attractive yet sensible return on their security, as well as solve the power consumption problem in the way of scaling.

So sure. Bitcoin is still a ways off from a 2nd gen rollout. But don't limit your field of view to just BTC, and don't leave out important components of the demand in your analysis.

It's interesting watching a generally tech-savvy community (like us here) adopt so much wilful ignorance.

(a repost of something I repied to someone in one of the threads of this ost).

Let's suppose that it turns out that donations your site (this, wikipedia, whatever) collects end up, after some investigation, further downstream, actively funding fundamentalist, violent terrorism, or something less sensational but equally bad if not worse, putting more fuel in the furnaces driving mass migration.

Why wouldn't law enforcement organisations taking their job go seriously go take a good hard look at who is inserting the pennies in this piggy bank?

(This form of crowd-assisted donation-for-a-good-cause-facade form of money laundering never ever happens in the real world of course, and we don't have a whole bunch of violent pseudo-state actors glean a meaningful part of their revenue come in through such activity. Totes doesn't happen. Right?)

I want net neutrality as much as the next Slashdotter. But trying to wheel out the idealist pristine versions of net neutrality ideology from days bygone, before it got abused to drive geopolitical-scale harm and mass migration from half a planet that failed at building functional states, and in the process belittling the challenges of modern day law enforcement (rather than understanding them and having a honest conversation about what realistic best-of-both-worlds mix of online rights and law enforcement can/should be achieved) is not intellectually honest. It's stoking an emotion inside ourselves by singing the hymn of one position in a discussion. It's our own little version of Alex Jones.

We can't will the problems modern day law enforcement are there to solve away by ignoring them and going all libertarian (and to those who do... you may whistle libertarian tunes, but you live in the world made liveable by the functioning state around you, I presume you're not where the mass migrations are coming from. If you want your libertarian fantasy so much, you can find the magic land of no law enforcement there...). The problems are here to stay. We have to understand and solve them.

Their survival isnâ(TM)t in doubt.
They donâ(TM)t need to continue funding r&d as aggressively as they are right now.
They can scale it down, and their ridiculous revenue will by far outstrip their tiny in comparison IT costs.
I can see them tweaking r&d and lobbying spend to live within their means.
I canâ(TM)t see them going under.

The losses (primarily from an extreme and presumably controlled r&d and lobbying spend, I presume, not from too little recent vs too high service operator costs) are to be expected.

Theyâ(TM)re on track to become the worldâ(TM)s biggest vehicle owner/operator (both road and drone) as car ownership will plummet (and it will. Fewer drivers, particularly genY+, smaller insurance pools, higher insurance premiums, even fewer drivers, feedback loop; meanwhile cost of ride from uber will drop, particularly when most expensive part of uber (driver) is removed, and at some point offer faster than car drone service. Even more feedback loop. It wonâ(TM)t go to zero, just like desktop PC sales didnâ(TM)t... but itâ(TM)ll shrink substantially with alternatives ). For uber, making the insane investments required in r&d (first In road traffic management, then in self driving, then in large scale drone fleet management per their collab with NASA) is the only right way to get there. Thatâ(TM)s how Iâ(TM)d be doing it. R&d off raised investment capital and loans registers as losses.

I really donâ(TM)t see the problem. Iâ(TM)d WANT them to be doing this if I was a (medium-long term) investor.

Russia has ~1500-2500 nuclear warheads.
They employ MIRV warheads.

"Keeping _some_ away" (and that's the real world, if you look at the (often claimed to be overblown) partial stats of operational systems like Israel's Arrow project.

When there's hundreds of MIRV warheads coming your way, this is hardly going to help you.