> so it makes you wonder what the fuss about ALPRs is and how it affects them.
Wow. Poe's Law in full effect here. I'm not sure if you're just oblivious or trolling. If you're oblivious do yourself a huge fucking favor and read up on what Flock is doing in addition to ALPR and how even that is abused by law enforcement.
The war in Iran costs about $95m a day and is already over $43b cost to the taxpayers, just in military spending. That's nearly two NASA budgets in just over 200 days.
The "powers that be" chose to lose a completely optional and ill-conceived war on your dime. Instead of science or helping people they decided to spend money blowing up schoolgirls.
Some types of launches to some classes or orbits have gotten cheaper. Not all launches to all orbits. I don't know if any commercial launch services can even do planetary transfer orbits.
In space everything is an orbital change. To change orbits you need to speed up and slow down, all of that requires fuel. Even using what are known as "low energy" trajectories that use a bunch of gravitational slingshots need velocity changes to adjust trajectories to get the right angle of approach to some large body.
Most commercial launch services focus on LEO because the secondary stages don't need to carry much fuel and their engines only need to fire reliably once to get into a stable orbit.
A planetary transfer requires multiple engine firings. That's much harder than a single reliable firing. It's not impossible but the testing and engineering is expensive.
A science mission often needs to beg, borrow, and steal to get built. There's one shot to accomplish the mission objectives. That's more expensive engineering and testing. Some mission profiles require specific planetary alignments with very narrow launch windows to boot. So there's a lot of expensive work made more expensive by a tight deadline.
The actual marginal cost of the rocket, fuel, and launch is a very small part of the mission cost. Halving the launch price doesn't necessarily affect the cost of anything else.
Starlink satellites are effectively disposable. If a Falcon 9 explodes or fails to get the second stage to orbit they're out maybe a few tens of millions of dollars. If a science mission has some mission-killing failure there's no funding for a do-over.
You're right I was forgetting the Falcon Heavy. But it's certainly not cheap when the government is footing the bill. The Nancy Grace Roman launch cost NASA $255m, far above SpaceX's prices for even an expendable GTO launch.
> But Linux took over the world and it had a crappy UI.
Linux took over in all the places where a good GUI didn't matter. In ran most of the Unix server software on hardware orders of magnitude cheaper than what was needed to run a commercial Unix. Windows ran on that same cheap hardware but was much more expensive for the same capability.
Despite Sun's marketing push Linux was really the dot in most of the dotcom darlings.
There's a vast gulf between Android and a Linux desktop environment. Android is a Linux kernel with the Android environment on top and is not just some Linux distro like anyone uses on a PC. ChromeOS is very similar.
Android and ChromeOS are still Linux distros, with a UI dedicated for their exact purpose. There have been other distros in the past trying to explore different ways of building a Linux, Gobolinux for example tried to get rid of the traditional POSIX filesystem hierarchy. Sure Android and ChromeOS probably diverged more but that doesn't make them any less linux distros. For a start, termux couldn't exist if android wasn't a Linux distro as no emulation or vm is involved, these are typical linux userland and processes running on android.
FWIW and for good reasons current Android UI is terrible for a desktop usage and ChromeOS is too limited for some people.
AFAIK this was the case. I played a lot of Stars! (almost exclusively the shareware) and it had all the races and tech trees. It showed higher level tech trees but those were only available in the registered game. Map sizes were also limited in the shareware. Later versions might have required additional resources for the retail upgrade but I believe the version I had (2.5?) could become the full registered copy with just a key.
They seem to be aggressively blocking IPv6 source IPs. I ran into this problem over the past month traveling. I got nothing but 429 errors until I switched on my VPN (which is IPv4 only) and magically the Wayback machine worked again. The lack of transparency on the part of IA is very frustrating.
The Internet Archive's torrents are a sick joke. I've yet to find one that actually manages to complete. They always get stuck at 90-something percent but that final blocks always fail verification and get retried, fail, and the process repeats forever. Because they're web seeds they're hitting IA infrastructure and not offloading to a real swarm. So their broken torrents are just screwing themselves.
Which results in a plainly broken torrent. I've yet to find a torrent client that can effectively download IA's broken torrents. Of course they're not all broken. So you don't get to know it's broken until you're bouncing back and forth between 98 and 99% for a week.
But they're not compute starved. NVidia's kit is convenient for compute but not absolutely necessary. Chinese labs have been training with Huawei chips already. They also have a huge supply of existing Nvidia gear to use. Just because it's not the absolute latest generation isn't really important.
Also as we have seen, the Chinese labs will just buy their kit through cut outs or do training in locations where there's no embargo.
Wow. Poe's Law in full effect here. I'm not sure if you're just oblivious or trolling. If you're oblivious do yourself a huge fucking favor and read up on what Flock is doing in addition to ALPR and how even that is abused by law enforcement.
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