thePunisher

The paint especially is horrible. When it's brand new if compares unfavorably with a 30-year Toyota.

Answer: install Firefox.

Then stop posting political content.

If you post political content you're gonna get political discussions.

It will be technically infeasible to do so. Or do you mean telecoms? That might be possible, but they'll risk losing customers.

IIRC when the internet was young, there were many closed computer networks such as The Source and America Online. These tried to sandbox the internet, but people just fled to providers which would give them unfettered internet access. The same scenario will play out with HORNET.

My laptop is almost 10 years old an works fine with Jitsi and Linux Mint on Firefox.

That's why I keep calling for a NEW Internet to be created based on HORNET technology. HORNET is basically the same as the Tor network, but with speeds similar to the current internet.

Sites can't be traced or blocked and neither can its users. There will be free speech, along with all its excesses (terrorism, child porn, illegal content sharing etc.).

If everyone migrates towards the HORNET internet authoritarian regimes will either have the choice to block the entire internet (causing massive economic damage) or allowing free speech.

No. Zoom should be banned and its CEO ousted.

The company should be purged from all Chinese influences.

Russia spends a sizeable amount on space exploration, but 80% of it is stolen or defrauded by corrupt officials like Rogozin. Putin is angry about the endless string of failures that result from this, but dares not to come down too hard on the culprits for fear of losing support.

This means that Russia will fade away as a space-power, replaced by China, which is quickly catching up with the West.

All Russia can do now is bragging and brawling about its successes and drawing up an endless number of plans which will never be realized

I have already predicted that all the large markets (North America, Europe, China and India) will essentially close themselves off because they want to become self-sufficient in all aspects, including internet platforms.

Only North America and Europe will allow (limited) access to each other's markets because of the historical ties.

Looks very familiar! In fact, it's the European copy of the Falcon 9 starting to take shape. They've already implied they will copy Falcon-9 verbatim as much as possible.

Ariane 6 is simply a stopgap measure until they can get the Falcon-9-rip-off flying.

The Chinese are not playing by the rules, why should we?

We should only play fair with nations that do the same. The other ones we put in the grinder.

We regressed because we found out that winged spaceships are too hazardous.

Dream Chaser too is dangerous since in the event of an explosion it will likely tear the wings off, making a safe return infeasible.

Not that heavy. A Raptor weighs 1500kg (1.5 metric tons) so 6 of them makes 9 metric tons while the weight at the top of Starship should be almost 100 tons.

My motto is "better safe than sorry" as far as China is concerned. This banning doesn't need to occur at every company, only at the ones which are strategically important, such as defense and cutting-edge high-tech.

Not really. The passenger and cargo area are on top and the fuel tanks are at the bottom, which will be mostly empty after landing.

IIRC Starship has a cargo capacity of 100 metric tons, all of it topside. The Raptor engines at the bottom will counterbalance this somewhat but it will still be top-heavy.

I developed MFC applications and wxWidgets is FAR better than MFC. Much easier to use too. Plus multi-platform.

And what if the lift fails? How are they gonna climb up 40 meters with a huge and bulky Moon suit?

It would be bummer if you had to die on the Moon because you couldn't climb back up into your spaceship.

No, but a friend of mine is and he said exactly the same thing.

I agree. And just because it's a company making billions selling software doesn't mean they're obliged to pay you a great deal of money.

If Beigi was smart he would've asked them to purchase the copyrights as he's the only one legally entitled to do so.

If he's developing his software altruistically he should be satisfied with his credit, well knowing that his project will now be overshadowed by Microsoft's and will eventually pass into oblivion and be forgotten.

I don't see Starship landing on the Moon. It's just too big and unwieldy and will likely topple upon touchdown.

If Qt hadn't been taken up by KDE some other UI framework (such as wxWidgets) could've had much larger user base thereby rendering Qt much less attractive to developers and undermining their business model.

I personally prefer wxWigets over Qt, but I'm a user of both.

I wonder how much effort it would take to enable Crew Dragon to fly people to the Moon and pull the rug from under Orion's feet?

A slightly improved heat-shield and some rad-hard electronics would do it IMHO. That would save NASA another $10 billion or so.

I find the statement that there's a public desire for a winged spaceship silly. I haven't heard anyone call out for such a vehicle, certainly no chant from the general public. The dream of an airliner-like space shuttle died when Columbia disintegrated upon reentry.

That's no crime. If developers wouldn't be allowed to do that we'd have a major crisis on our hands.

The worst infringement as far as I'm concerned is that MS tricked him into giving up all his secrets before they implemented it themselves.

If Microsoft ever came to talk to me about one of my projects the only thing I'd tell them is: "How much?" (are you willing to pay for it).

5G is a transmission technology so end-to-end encryption isn't useful there. You need end-to-end encryption at the application level.

I agree somewhat. But you have to realize that developing and maintaining software is incredibly expensive and time consuming. I, for example, hate Android for spying on me all the time, but I realize that developing such a complicated operating system takes a lot of effort and Google isn't doing this out of altruism.

There's nothing wrong with selling proprietary software. What really irritates me are companies like Redis who pretend to be open-source and start whining when other people (like Amazon) earn money from using their software.

I believe open-source is about altruism. It's not a business model to gain users and thereafter trick them or forcing them to pay.

IMHO the Qt company is simply using the corona-crisis as an excuse to jack-up prices. They would've done so in any case at some point.

The Qt company is very shortsighted since KDE has meant a lot for them in terms of legitimacy and valuable feedback. The KDE developers also made some important contributions, such as KHTML (the basis for WebKit and Chromium, used in billions of web browsers).

Why don't they apply this new license only to their Embedded and mobile versions? That's where the real money is being made by Qt anyway.

It was foolish of KDE to use commercial product as a base for their free desktop. They should've use wxUniversal (the self drawing version of wxWidgets).

Now, the only option they have left is to fork QT, which would put enormous pressure on them since it would require a lot of effort to maintain.

Even ethnic Chinese from Taiwan have been known to spy for Communist China (like the Chinese American who stole the plans for the latest U.S. nuclear warheads at Lawrence Livermore and is now teaching at a university in China).

The Chinese have a strong group identity and their nationality doesn't matter a great deal to them. In their mind they're Chinese, no matter where they live.

It took ASML a long time to perfect these machines, but once they nailed it I'm pretty sure it's no big deal for anyone to duplicate it if they knew how to avoid all the pitfalls.

It would save the Chinese decades if they stole ASML's secrets instead of trying to figure it out on their own. Most likely they will simply take the shortcut and then start selling the machines at half the price ASML is selling them for (as they do with almost everything).