I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

I agree with you about the distraction and do want to see more buttons/sliders/knobs instead of touchscreen menus.

However, I don't removing the display will actually improve reliability that much. Those buttons, sliders, are going to talk to the car's control system, probably not be directly wired to what they're controlling. The CPU is a major point of failure and it's going to be hard to source particular models in the future.

The idea that software not signed by some entity in the country that they represent is installed any high-level official's phone is absurd. How did the world get this way?

The earthquake also cracked the spent fuel cooling pools that were located on top of the reactors. Those were leaking and a real fear at the time (I was living in Tokyo when it happened) was that if the pools emptied the spent fuel would self-ignite and we'd get a nice cloud of radioactive dust floating towards Tokyo.

The biggest thing that wasn't handled in the disaster planning was that not only was the nuclear power plant damaged, but all of the surrounding infrastructure was destroyed and a national scale disaster around the plant was happening. Japan had just gone through a massive earthquake, upwards of 20,000 people were reported dead early on and the problems at Fukushima were not the primary concern the first few days after the earthquake. The scenario for dealing with failed diesel generators would have been to truck in new generators which could have been handled before the reactors melted down in normal circumstances except it was impossible to get to the plant. The "Heavy Rescue" unit from the Tokyo fire department headed to Fukushima to help. It took them three days to get there because the roads were blocked in so many places. TEPCO was in "everything's fine, it's OK, it's OK" mode and the Japanese political level of the government was the Democratic Party of Japan who had not held power in decades and none of the political level people knew how to manage a disaster and it showed.

By the time Fukushima started receiving the kind of national level attention that it warranted the reactors were in meltdown.

I went from SF to LA in August. We flew and rented a car. HSR stations will need car rental to work, but that's a solved problem.

RTGs (Radioisotope Thermal Generators) don't put out that much power - a few hundred watts at most. An actual fission reactor will produce a lot more.

A Tesla Model uses about 358 Watt Hours/mile. A 1KWh pack weighs about 24 pounds (10 kilos), thatâ(TM)s good for about 3 miles. Definitely heavier than the amount of gas you would need for the same distance, but 2-3 miles is about as far as you would want to walk anyhow.

I've been using this site for over twenty years, and it's a been most of a decade since I've commented. This is the best thing I've seen on here since then. Whatever you do, keep drumming up the fight against ignorance and propaganda, and the people who've fallen victims of it. I don't want to get personal, but lets just say that I know from intimate experience what brainwashing does to a person, and the tremendous cost of clawing one's way out of it. Division in modern society is inevitable--and we must fight against those who seek to destroy rational thought!--but without empathy for those infected by bad ideas, shortchanged by their personal experiences, we'll end up punishing and alientating those victimized by bad actors exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities that every one of us has, we will push them out of sheer self-defense into voting in the people who will undo us.

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm pretty sure their less-than-polite phrasing meant "biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or *jetpack* flying".

Everyone knows Amelia Earhart was a big part of aviation history in that era, but I strongly suspect that she didn't moonlight as the Rocketeer.

I learned to code in middle school, on an actual ASR 33 teletype back in the 70's, mainly teaching myself from books because the teachers didn't get it. By the time I was in high school I was training teachers on how to use computers and we never got to teaching them coding (BASIC, baby, the language of the future!). My kids are in high school now and when I went to the orientation, the vice principal in charge of online registration, who looks to be in his thirties maybe, told us that he "wasn't good with computers" and couldn't get everything to work.

Back when I was in high school, I thought the teachers didn't get it because they'd never been exposed. No one has that excuse any more. It's truly lack of aptitude and interest. If you think you are going to get an assortment of humanities majors to learn how to problem solve and teach coding to students you have another thing coming.

Indeed, people should take in the full context here, not just platitudes. They should look at how China has interacted with Europe and the US in the context of world wars, trade wars, cultural exchange and economic interdependence. ...then they should call Xi on his tantrums and fragility. He chooses to be this way.

Well, the guys who tied onions to their belt laugh at the kids with their toy projects exclaiming "language X is the greatest thing ever". One criticism of Java I saw was that "you need to read a book to understand it" - I laughed all afternoon. Your facial recognition example is classic - you called a library in three lines. I could do the same thing in Java or C with a few more lines of code. If I want to bang something out that works this afternoon, Python is a great choice. Now, go write that facial recognition library. Python is not going to be your first choice.

Your joke was only funny in your mom's basement