Arianespace has fallen behind, but they’re not out of the picture. They’re still by far the largest competitor to SpaceX, and they’re aiming for their 7th generation Ariane to be a reusable design.

Arianespace is an Airbus and Safran subsidiary, so it’s not like they don’t have the engineering oomph behind them.

Sure, but that applies to the UK too. London has a higher cost of living than Los Angeles; averages being averages, this is weighed against lots of cheaper places to live (with massive unemployment and stagnated economics).

Cost of living in the UK is about 12% lower than the US, including housing costs. But the average salary is about half of the US salary. So you can see that that doesn’t really cover it.

Source: https://livingcost.org/cost/united-kingdom/united-states

Just looked on that link for the UK. The average is listed as £63k, which is $85k.

So you’re not exactly disproving the point that that type of high salary is a US thing.

Sure, but the specs aren’t directly comparable.

They also still manufacture the RPi 4, which starts at £33- which is £23 in 2012 money.

but they’re not cheap any more

People say this, but they really are still cheap.

The original Raspberry Pi Model B launched for £22 in 2012. The entry level Raspberry Pi 5 is £46, but adjusted for inflation that’s only £32 in 2012 money. So only £10 more expensive in real terms.

Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is only £14.40, which is only £10 in 2012 money. Compare this to the original Raspberry Pi Model A, which launched for £16.

People look at the headline cost of the high end RPi 5s (£115 for the 16GB model, £76 for the 8GB), but fail to recognise that there was nothing comparable to these in the Raspberry Pi lineup before, and these are not the only models in the Raspberry Pi lineup now.

Ask a non-protesting friend or family member to take it with them about their daily routine?

I’m sure my mum would be happy to look after my phone for a day if it meant getting one over on the authorities. And if anyone asks, I’m just a good son who likes to hang out with his mum.

I was really impressed by how lightweight and gorgeous it is.

Maybe a controversial opinion here, but the one thing that everyone says about it is that it looks gorgeous, and I really don’t see it. Never have.

Even back when I first tried it out, maybe 15 years ago, I thought it looked strangely retro. Nowadays, compared to the eye candy that is completely standard in GNOME, KDE, MacOS, Windows etc., it looks incredibly dated.

It’s all hard edges, low res icons, ugly fonts, and eccentric design choices. Yeah, it can make window elements transparent, but you can’t dine out on that one trick for ever.

The real competitor for green aviation isn’t hydrogen, it’s bio-fuel. Bio-kerosene, bio-gas and bio-ethanol all have useful roles in aviation, and are essentially carbon neutral over their lifecycle. Zero carbon at the proverbial tailpipe is a lot less important when that tailpipe is at 30,000 feet.

ReactOS is a very fun project, but anyone expecting it to be a real useable OS is absolutely mad. It’s been going for almost 30 years, and they’re almost at the point of binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003…

Good advice in general; even contractual fuckery aside, you can’t guarantee a company will even still exist this time next year.

Or places which are already heavily inhabited/productively used. Inland river valleys are some of the most desirable real estate, in human habitation terms.

Major river dams are often only feasible in countries which either have lots of sparsely populated wilderness (like North America), or which don’t have a problem with displacing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying whole communities (like China). Takes it off the menu for a lot of the world.

Would it particularly affect the performance if the sphere ends up covered in barnacles or coral? It’s what’s inside that matters (it’s just a big hollow tank).

You’ve pretty much just described ActivityPub and the Fediverse.

Anyone can spin up their own instance. You can self host on a machine in your house, or with any cloud provider. You can broadcast messages in Twitter-style or Reddit-style format. Anyone can navigate to your web address and see your messages. Anyone who federates with you can see it on their website. FOSS Android apps are available.

You can’t force anyone to actually read your messages of course, but that’s a different matter.

What OS are you going to use on your Smartphone if you remove software from Google and Apple?

People in the FOSS community constantly talk about the best ways to minimise use of Google, Apple and Microsoft products. That is an absolutely valid motivation for choosing to use one project over another.

If someone is willing to use the behaviour of a company or its owners as a factor when choosing a software stack, presumably it’s valid to apply the same sentiment to development teams of smaller projects too.

It was 16 but only with parental consent and only with a marriage partner 21 or younger.

16 with parental consent is quite common. Mississippi I think is 15. Some allow marriage younger than this (some have effectively no minimum age), but with the requirement for consent to also be sought through the courts.

Turing made a strategic blunder when formulating the Turing Test by assuming that everyone was as smart as he was.

I wonder how sophisticated this fraud is? They could have it rush to 50k, and then “catch up” by running more slowly for the next few 10s of thousands to cover the tracks.

canonical is (or at least I think it is) South African

Canonical is British. Headquarters are in London.

The founder, Mark Shuttleworth, is a South African born British citizen, hence the African name for the distro. But it is and always has been British.

Maybe I’m just tired at the end of a long day, but I’m also completely unable to parse that headline. Somebody’s mum is fingering what now?