All those gay folks getting married were clearly the reason 20% of the straight adults in the US were on that site, plus some number of gay people (not identified how many of them were married to people of the opposite sex, vs. single or "it's complicated".) (Though some non-trivial fraction of the customers claimed to be single, and just looking to hook up.)
As an old straight married guy, who was not one of AM's customers, I'd like to remind the Republicans that lots of their folks were, and maybe they were talking to the wrong people about the sanctity of marriage.
They happened to be outside the restroom when they heard somebody loading their AK47. And yeah, a couple of people got shot before they subdued him, but fortunately not killed.
He's in bed with pretty much all the same advisors his brother was, and many of the same as his father was. He's the smarter brother, but Dubya's the older brother and may have spoiled it for him. The other likely candidates are Walker and Rubio, and just maybe Kasich will make it into the Final Four.
No, like that Trump guy did in 2008. He's the opening clown act, and he'll get out of the way when the elephants and lion-tamers come in, or at least shut up when the cute chick is on the trapeze.
Jeb gets it, Walker gets it, Rubio gets it but has to deal with it a bit more, but the major candidates all know that they have to let the loudmouth right-wingers say all the nasty things that they'll pretend not to have been encouraging, because this is the part of the race for bashing Democrats and raising money and manpower from the angry people (as well as quietly raising money from the rich people.)
This is the part of the game they WANT Trump for, and Huckabee, and Cruz, and let them play off against Carson and Fiorina and Chris Christie and Rand Paul. He's playing to the GOP audience, and only secondarily to the National audience.
The GOP needs to keep all the right-wingers busy and angry and giving money and bashing Democrats at their state and local levels and in Congress so they can play the long game, in terms of sustained majorities and control or gridlock of Congress and state-level gerrymandering, and they don't want to lose them in the long time between now and when they pick their real candidate. Trump's job is to keep the troops entertained and get them engaged, insult the Democrats in ways the Party Machine Candidates can pretend were somebody else's fault, and kick off a year-long circus. It might end up like last election, with the Official Candidate getting far in the lead too early in the process and opening his mouth too often, or it might go down to the wire with the convention actually deciding between Bush, Rubio, and Walker, but for now they've got Trump to get everybody back bashing Hillary for as long as possible.
Definitely not Trump. It's either Jeb! or Walker or maybe Rubio. (We don't need an other Bush Presidency, and we certainly don't need another "Walker/Bush" either:-)
Sure, Hillary's no nicer than most of the Republicans, and we don't really need another Clinton Presidency either, but I'm hoping the country's dislike of the very dislikeable Republican choices will get her in, plus she really is an effective politician, and would have been President in 2008 if Obama hadn't shown up.
I'm a Libertarian, so I get to pretend to be neutral here, but the Republicans would be even worse than Hillary, and there were lots of reasons for preferring Candidate Obama to her, even though the President Obama who showed up to do the job was nowhere as good on policy as Candidate Obama. I'll vote for a Republican for some office higher than dog-catcher after they've cleaned up all the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Norquist/Koch years, and that's not going to be any time soon. If my party can't get its act together enough to run a candidate, California's solidly enough Democratic that I'll vote for the Greens or Peace&Freedom or write in Joe Biden before voting for Hillary, but otherwise I'd hold my nose and vote for her the way I did for Walter Mondale (:-)
Trump's not the candidate; he's the opening clown act for the circus.
Jeb! not only is showing his support for the spook establishment by coming out against encryption, but he's also lined up with just about all of Dubya's policy cronies, many of whom were his dad's cronies. But he's unfortunately as realistic as anybody. Walker's a stooge for the Koch Boys, and also has a good chance (aargh!) Rubio might be sellable as well. Kasich is currently second-tier, but might have a chance later in the process. Cruz pisses off too many people in the party by being very much his own guy, and not in a sellable "maverick" way. (My perspective on Fiorina is a Silicon Valley local "we saw how she botched things at HP" plus "boy was she an annoying candidate for Senator against Boxer", though while I'm not taking her seriously, the other choices are all pretty sad too; if she's on the ticket it's as VP, probably with Rubio.)
Trump's job this election is about the same as last Presidential election - he's the opening clown act who's there to kick off a really long circus show, and he's getting the crowd riled up to be excited when the next clown car rolls in before the lion tamers and elephants do their act. He's not the guy on the trapeze, he's not the ringmaster, but he's the opening act. He's a good clown, sold them on the job last time, and they invited him back.
Last election's circus was about telling the Tea Party that they weren't going to get one of their favorites or even anybody from their wing of the party, because none of them were electable, and they were going to have to vote for somebody from the Corporate Party Machine Wing, but their participation was appreciated and the party wanted them to spend a year bashing Democrats before the real candidates had to behave themselves in public. (Unfortunately for them, Romney never quite got the "behaving himself" part down, because he didn't always realize he was in public rather than among friends who'd appreciate remarks about the 47%.) There was really only one other electable candidate, Jon Huntsman, but Romney already had the "Billionaire Mormon Ex-Governor" slot lined up, and he'd shown the party machine that he was happy to play their games, while Huntsman was too independent.
Flat screens are fine; reading on curved surfaces is tricky. I've got one that tells me the time and date, and runs for YEARS on a single charge!
Back when such things were new and would have been shiny if they weren't black, my wife gave me a Casio GPS wrist-watch. It was amazingly cool to have (not that it worked that well as a GPS), but it was really about as big and clunky a thing as I'd want to wear on my wrist. Most of that was about thickness, but anything bigger than about 1x3 is annoying if I'm wearing short sleeves, and even wristwatches can't get much bigger if I'm wearing long sleeves. I've got a couple of other semi-fancy watches that can tell me the phase of the moon or the tides in addition to time and date, but realistically don't wear them that often. (The tides one is useful for planning surfing, but unfortunately isn't actually waterproof enough to wear while doing so.:-)
But these days, I'm not only old enough to have worn wristwatches for some years (though I seldom bother now), but I also need reading glasses. I'm thinking of getting a (gasp!) analog watch, that tells time with a dial! (Ok, it might be a digital emulation of an analog display, and I'm not going to be retro enough to get one that actually needs winding, but I probably wore digital watches for 30 years, since the LCD ones came out.)
Sure, I can understand why, if you're building a ZFS server with tens of terabytes of disk and tens of GB of RAM, you can dedicate an SSD to accelerating it. But more commonly, I'm using a laptop or older desktop that doesn't really have enough horsepower to do that, and may not have room for both an SSD and a spinning disk, and I'd like to just throw a random USB stick on their to use for caching. Windows had something like that for a while (never really helped much, and now that my work laptop has an SSD it doesn't use it at all), but is there some way to accelerate my boring desk-side lab box at work by plugging in a 4-8GB flash stick? Or to accelerate the wimpy server we're using for OpenStack?
Most current keyboards have evilly put a nearly-useless CAPS LOCK KEY next to the A, where the CONTROL key belongs. This encourages awkward finger positions and hand strain, and ALMOST NOBODY NEEDS THE "YELL AT PEOPLE" FEATURE ANY MORE!
These guys did something interesting, putting a "Mouse" key there to shift some other keys to use for mouse functions, but it's a mistake; they could put that somewhere else and put the control key where it belongs.
Another feature they could implement, if they can license the patent at some non-outrageous price, is the "Half Keyboard" strategy, which lets you do single-handed typing by folding QWERT and YUIOP over in the middle - it either does the left or right half depending on whether you're hitting the mode key. Back when keyboards still used serial ports instead of USB, they made some small half-keyboards for Palm Pilots that were reasonably priced ($75-100), and some full-sized computer keyboards that were priced for the "Your Corporate Ergonomics Department Or Insurance Company Will Pay $400 For This" market, which were basically a standard keyboard with an extra shift that you could use either left-handed, right-handed, or both.
Unfortunately, one of the features of their split keyboard is that you can fit the two halves together into a one-piece keyboard (which sometimes makes sense to do), and putting a 6 on both halves doesn't work well for that. Maybe if they could put a small, easily-removable extra 6 they could still do it, but that's getting messy.
The big problem with their keyboard? It's that "Mouse" key where the Control key belongs, next to the left pinky, where most current keyboards evilly put a Caps Lock. Having an on-keyboard mouse isn't a bad thing, but the control key is a big ergonomic lossage for most programmers with most keyboards.
On my current laptop, the number pad also gets used for the easy-to-reach versions of PageUp/PageDown/Home/End and one copy of the Delete Key. Very annoying when I accidentally hit the NumLock.
On my last N laptops, the NumPad means that the keyboard is not in the middle of the laptop, which makes typing uncomfortable and encourages my hands to get off-position, cramps my right shoulder and elbow, and encourages bad typing. Obviously that's not a problem with a separate keyboard like these guys are designing, but on separate keyboards I'd rather have them be smaller (so they fit easily in a rack or on a cluttered desk) or else have bigger typing keys.
The "NumPad Embedded In Keyboard" approach, typically at YUI/HJK/BNM or something similar, never bothered me as much, but then I almost never used it.
Cannons, just sayin'. The Second Amendment was about being able to overthrow the government again if they had to, as well as defending themselves against the Indians (who for some reason didn't like having their land stolen), organized defense against bandits, fighting back if the Brits ever invaded again (not counting that inconvenient war where the US military invaded Canada and got their hats handed to them.) Not even worth stating was the need for rifles for hunting and general personal self-defense against robbers and bears and scoundrels who refuse to marry your daughter or who insist you marry their daughter or people named either Hatfield or McCoy, depending on your perspective.
Today? Trying to overthrow the government would really annoy lots of your neighbors, and defending yourself against invading National Guard or police was usually a losing battle before the Drug War militarism of the police, and except in rare cases, is basically just going to get your family and neighbors killed. It's been almost a century since striking union workers defending themselves against company thugs and their bought-off sheriffs was feasible. And most of our gun control laws were because of the Black Panthers legally carrying long guns to protect themselves from the police, or because the War On Drugs encouraged both sides to arm themselves.
I don't know what the current FAA system is written in, but back in the late 80s when I was working on a previous attempt to upgrade it, we had to write in Ada. (Actually, we mostly had to write in DOD-STD-2167 development methodology, and no I don't mean 2167A, but if we'd gotten far enough in the process to be coding, it would have been in Ada, generally emulating systems originally written in JOVIAL.)
I just wrote a rant about AAS in a comment above. What a disaster that was, and the system we got out of it was partly so late and unreliable because the FAA way way overspec'd the first version.
I think this system that failed is part of the same one I helped bid on upgrading in the late 80s. (We were the lucky ones who lost the bid; IBM were the poor suckers who won it.) The Advanced Automation System was supposed to have a budget of something like 4 years and $4B, or maybe it was $7B, but either way it ran way way over that, in both years and billions, before being restuctured, partly because the problem is really hard, partly because the specs were extremely unrealistic, and partly because we were required to use DOD-STD-2167 software development methodology, a very heavy clumsy version of waterfall process.
The important requirement was that if anything went wrong and two airplanes crashed and fell out of the sky, mobs of citizens and Congresscritters would descend on FAA headquarters with torches and pitchforks and budget cuts, so everything that to be ultra-conservatively speced to prevent that from happening. I'm extremely annoyed to hear the FAA saying that except for this failure, they've been running 99.99% reliability this year. Four 9s? The specs we were supposed to meet were 8 9s, and since nobody was willing to ask the FAA to define a failure event, our management was conservatively aiming for 10 9s. (An average system controlled about 100 radars, and the big difference is whether a "failure" means "all the radars are out" or "any single radar is out".) This kind of reliability meant that duplicating everything wasn't good enough, you had to triplicated every piece of equipment, or double-double it, because otherwise the possibility of one piece failing while you had its backup down for preventative maintenance for 5 minutes blew your numbers for the year. (No matter that the radars were connected back to the data center over circuits that had 3.5-4 9s, just because of the usual risk of physical damage.) We later found out that the FAA shut down the then-current 1960s system for four hours a night, running on the backup equipment (which was a 1970s transistorized upgrade to the 1940s/1950s version) to keep the backup system reliable and operators trained.
If you're running a desktop or server on an even vaguely modern physical machine, you've got more cores than you know what to do with, and if the OS wanted to get fancy it could probably use the GPU for decompression or compression. (Also, at least with LZW, decompression is much faster than compression, and compression is something you do with memory you weren't currently using anyway, so it's ok if it's a bit slower.)
On virtual machines, it's a different game, because you're sharing the CPU with other VMs and often only have one core.. You may still want to use it, because memory may still be more scarce than CPU, and while you may have a faster disk array, it's often farther away than the disk on a physical machine.
If some states have taxi driver licenses, or chauffeur licenses, or similar licenses that require you to have a higher level of driving skill or rules knowledge, that's not a significant artificial barrier to becoming a taxi driver (as long as there's not a language restriction involved.)
Taxi medallions and similar restrictions on the number of taxis permitted in an city definitely are artificial barriers, but they're more than that - they're a mechanism for taxi companies to extort money from drivers in return for renting them use of the medallion, and to extort money from the public by keeping taxi rates high (to pay the medallion owners, not to keep taxi driver pay high which is the excuse given for those systems existing), and they also restrict taxi access to parts of the city which can afford to pay more for medallion cabs. Friends of mine live in parts of San Francisco where the chance of a yellow cab driving by their front door today are near-zero, and San Francisco limits the number of medallion cabs allowed to operate. And if you live in a poor black part of NYC, good luck getting a cab, at least without walking out to a main avenue. Uber will show up.
Using "grok" might have labeled you as a hippie decades ago. It only labels you as a hipster if you're using it ironically, or if you point out that you were using it before it was retro when you're too young to have been around then.
If the part were critical, it'd be running hot enough that you had to worry about using the right one. If it's still cold even when you're pumping power through it, you've probably got lots of design headroom for evaluating other parts...
Rockets are hard, but they're just physics and chemistry, which are the easy parts.
We don't have a clue how to build an ecosystem that's capable of supporting human life for extended periods of time without frequent restocking from outside. Biosphere I/II cheated, and even then couldn't sustain themselves. The ISS gets its food and spare oxygen from down home, and only recently even started recycling urine to contribute to its water supply. We don't know how to make real dirt on mars, or grow enough plants long-term without it, we don't even really know all the micronutrients humans need, much less how to produce them in some compact yeast-reactor since we probably won't do a great job growing them.
Until we've got a Mars colony clone running sustainably in a sealed can at the South Pole, it's not worth building a full-scale one in a space station or on the Moon, which are reasonably easy to resupply from Earth if something's going wrong. Yes, it's easier to do on Mars, where there's at least a bit of carbon dioxide and some minerals and maybe some water, but there's essentially no margin for error.
Slashdot Mirror
All those gay folks getting married were clearly the reason 20% of the straight adults in the US were on that site, plus some number of gay people (not identified how many of them were married to people of the opposite sex, vs. single or "it's complicated".) (Though some non-trivial fraction of the customers claimed to be single, and just looking to hook up.)
As an old straight married guy, who was not one of AM's customers, I'd like to remind the Republicans that lots of their folks were, and maybe they were talking to the wrong people about the sanctity of marriage.
They happened to be outside the restroom when they heard somebody loading their AK47. And yeah, a couple of people got shot before they subdued him, but fortunately not killed.
He's in bed with pretty much all the same advisors his brother was, and many of the same as his father was. He's the smarter brother, but Dubya's the older brother and may have spoiled it for him. The other likely candidates are Walker and Rubio, and just maybe Kasich will make it into the Final Four.
No, like that Trump guy did in 2008. He's the opening clown act, and he'll get out of the way when the elephants and lion-tamers come in, or at least shut up when the cute chick is on the trapeze.
Jeb gets it, Walker gets it, Rubio gets it but has to deal with it a bit more, but the major candidates all know that they have to let the loudmouth right-wingers say all the nasty things that they'll pretend not to have been encouraging, because this is the part of the race for bashing Democrats and raising money and manpower from the angry people (as well as quietly raising money from the rich people.)
This is the part of the game they WANT Trump for, and Huckabee, and Cruz, and let them play off against Carson and Fiorina and Chris Christie and Rand Paul. He's playing to the GOP audience, and only secondarily to the National audience.
The GOP needs to keep all the right-wingers busy and angry and giving money and bashing Democrats at their state and local levels and in Congress so they can play the long game, in terms of sustained majorities and control or gridlock of Congress and state-level gerrymandering, and they don't want to lose them in the long time between now and when they pick their real candidate. Trump's job is to keep the troops entertained and get them engaged, insult the Democrats in ways the Party Machine Candidates can pretend were somebody else's fault, and kick off a year-long circus. It might end up like last election, with the Official Candidate getting far in the lead too early in the process and opening his mouth too often, or it might go down to the wire with the convention actually deciding between Bush, Rubio, and Walker, but for now they've got Trump to get everybody back bashing Hillary for as long as possible.
Definitely not Trump. It's either Jeb! or Walker or maybe Rubio. (We don't need an other Bush Presidency, and we certainly don't need another "Walker/Bush" either :-)
Sure, Hillary's no nicer than most of the Republicans, and we don't really need another Clinton Presidency either, but I'm hoping the country's dislike of the very dislikeable Republican choices will get her in, plus she really is an effective politician, and would have been President in 2008 if Obama hadn't shown up.
I'm a Libertarian, so I get to pretend to be neutral here, but the Republicans would be even worse than Hillary, and there were lots of reasons for preferring Candidate Obama to her, even though the President Obama who showed up to do the job was nowhere as good on policy as Candidate Obama. I'll vote for a Republican for some office higher than dog-catcher after they've cleaned up all the corruption of the Bush/Cheney/Rove/Norquist/Koch years, and that's not going to be any time soon. If my party can't get its act together enough to run a candidate, California's solidly enough Democratic that I'll vote for the Greens or Peace&Freedom or write in Joe Biden before voting for Hillary, but otherwise I'd hold my nose and vote for her the way I did for Walter Mondale (:-)
Trump's not the candidate; he's the opening clown act for the circus.
Jeb! not only is showing his support for the spook establishment by coming out against encryption, but he's also lined up with just about all of Dubya's policy cronies, many of whom were his dad's cronies. But he's unfortunately as realistic as anybody. Walker's a stooge for the Koch Boys, and also has a good chance (aargh!) Rubio might be sellable as well. Kasich is currently second-tier, but might have a chance later in the process. Cruz pisses off too many people in the party by being very much his own guy, and not in a sellable "maverick" way. (My perspective on Fiorina is a Silicon Valley local "we saw how she botched things at HP" plus "boy was she an annoying candidate for Senator against Boxer", though while I'm not taking her seriously, the other choices are all pretty sad too; if she's on the ticket it's as VP, probably with Rubio.)
Trump's job this election is about the same as last Presidential election - he's the opening clown act who's there to kick off a really long circus show, and he's getting the crowd riled up to be excited when the next clown car rolls in before the lion tamers and elephants do their act. He's not the guy on the trapeze, he's not the ringmaster, but he's the opening act. He's a good clown, sold them on the job last time, and they invited him back.
Last election's circus was about telling the Tea Party that they weren't going to get one of their favorites or even anybody from their wing of the party, because none of them were electable, and they were going to have to vote for somebody from the Corporate Party Machine Wing, but their participation was appreciated and the party wanted them to spend a year bashing Democrats before the real candidates had to behave themselves in public. (Unfortunately for them, Romney never quite got the "behaving himself" part down, because he didn't always realize he was in public rather than among friends who'd appreciate remarks about the 47%.) There was really only one other electable candidate, Jon Huntsman, but Romney already had the "Billionaire Mormon Ex-Governor" slot lined up, and he'd shown the party machine that he was happy to play their games, while Huntsman was too independent.
Flat screens are fine; reading on curved surfaces is tricky. I've got one that tells me the time and date, and runs for YEARS on a single charge!
Back when such things were new and would have been shiny if they weren't black, my wife gave me a Casio GPS wrist-watch. It was amazingly cool to have (not that it worked that well as a GPS), but it was really about as big and clunky a thing as I'd want to wear on my wrist. Most of that was about thickness, but anything bigger than about 1x3 is annoying if I'm wearing short sleeves, and even wristwatches can't get much bigger if I'm wearing long sleeves. I've got a couple of other semi-fancy watches that can tell me the phase of the moon or the tides in addition to time and date, but realistically don't wear them that often. (The tides one is useful for planning surfing, but unfortunately isn't actually waterproof enough to wear while doing so. :-)
But these days, I'm not only old enough to have worn wristwatches for some years (though I seldom bother now), but I also need reading glasses. I'm thinking of getting a (gasp!) analog watch, that tells time with a dial! (Ok, it might be a digital emulation of an analog display, and I'm not going to be retro enough to get one that actually needs winding, but I probably wore digital watches for 30 years, since the LCD ones came out.)
Sure, I can understand why, if you're building a ZFS server with tens of terabytes of disk and tens of GB of RAM, you can dedicate an SSD to accelerating it. But more commonly, I'm using a laptop or older desktop that doesn't really have enough horsepower to do that, and may not have room for both an SSD and a spinning disk, and I'd like to just throw a random USB stick on their to use for caching. Windows had something like that for a while (never really helped much, and now that my work laptop has an SSD it doesn't use it at all), but is there some way to accelerate my boring desk-side lab box at work by plugging in a 4-8GB flash stick? Or to accelerate the wimpy server we're using for OpenStack?
Most current keyboards have evilly put a nearly-useless CAPS LOCK KEY next to the A, where the CONTROL key belongs. This encourages awkward finger positions and hand strain, and ALMOST NOBODY NEEDS THE "YELL AT PEOPLE" FEATURE ANY MORE!
These guys did something interesting, putting a "Mouse" key there to shift some other keys to use for mouse functions, but it's a mistake; they could put that somewhere else and put the control key where it belongs.
Another feature they could implement, if they can license the patent at some non-outrageous price, is the "Half Keyboard" strategy, which lets you do single-handed typing by folding QWERT and YUIOP over in the middle - it either does the left or right half depending on whether you're hitting the mode key. Back when keyboards still used serial ports instead of USB, they made some small half-keyboards for Palm Pilots that were reasonably priced ($75-100), and some full-sized computer keyboards that were priced for the "Your Corporate Ergonomics Department Or Insurance Company Will Pay $400 For This" market, which were basically a standard keyboard with an extra shift that you could use either left-handed, right-handed, or both.
Unfortunately, one of the features of their split keyboard is that you can fit the two halves together into a one-piece keyboard (which sometimes makes sense to do), and putting a 6 on both halves doesn't work well for that. Maybe if they could put a small, easily-removable extra 6 they could still do it, but that's getting messy.
The big problem with their keyboard? It's that "Mouse" key where the Control key belongs, next to the left pinky, where most current keyboards evilly put a Caps Lock. Having an on-keyboard mouse isn't a bad thing, but the control key is a big ergonomic lossage for most programmers with most keyboards.
On my current laptop, the number pad also gets used for the easy-to-reach versions of PageUp/PageDown/Home/End and one copy of the Delete Key. Very annoying when I accidentally hit the NumLock.
On my last N laptops, the NumPad means that the keyboard is not in the middle of the laptop, which makes typing uncomfortable and encourages my hands to get off-position, cramps my right shoulder and elbow, and encourages bad typing. Obviously that's not a problem with a separate keyboard like these guys are designing, but on separate keyboards I'd rather have them be smaller (so they fit easily in a rack or on a cluttered desk) or else have bigger typing keys.
The "NumPad Embedded In Keyboard" approach, typically at YUI/HJK/BNM or something similar, never bothered me as much, but then I almost never used it.
Cannons, just sayin'. The Second Amendment was about being able to overthrow the government again if they had to, as well as defending themselves against the Indians (who for some reason didn't like having their land stolen), organized defense against bandits, fighting back if the Brits ever invaded again (not counting that inconvenient war where the US military invaded Canada and got their hats handed to them.) Not even worth stating was the need for rifles for hunting and general personal self-defense against robbers and bears and scoundrels who refuse to marry your daughter or who insist you marry their daughter or people named either Hatfield or McCoy, depending on your perspective.
Today? Trying to overthrow the government would really annoy lots of your neighbors, and defending yourself against invading National Guard or police was usually a losing battle before the Drug War militarism of the police, and except in rare cases, is basically just going to get your family and neighbors killed. It's been almost a century since striking union workers defending themselves against company thugs and their bought-off sheriffs was feasible. And most of our gun control laws were because of the Black Panthers legally carrying long guns to protect themselves from the police, or because the War On Drugs encouraged both sides to arm themselves.
I don't know what the current FAA system is written in, but back in the late 80s when I was working on a previous attempt to upgrade it, we had to write in Ada. (Actually, we mostly had to write in DOD-STD-2167 development methodology, and no I don't mean 2167A, but if we'd gotten far enough in the process to be coding, it would have been in Ada, generally emulating systems originally written in JOVIAL.)
I just wrote a rant about AAS in a comment above. What a disaster that was, and the system we got out of it was partly so late and unreliable because the FAA way way overspec'd the first version.
I think this system that failed is part of the same one I helped bid on upgrading in the late 80s. (We were the lucky ones who lost the bid; IBM were the poor suckers who won it.) The Advanced Automation System was supposed to have a budget of something like 4 years and $4B, or maybe it was $7B, but either way it ran way way over that, in both years and billions, before being restuctured, partly because the problem is really hard, partly because the specs were extremely unrealistic, and partly because we were required to use DOD-STD-2167 software development methodology, a very heavy clumsy version of waterfall process.
The important requirement was that if anything went wrong and two airplanes crashed and fell out of the sky, mobs of citizens and Congresscritters would descend on FAA headquarters with torches and pitchforks and budget cuts, so everything that to be ultra-conservatively speced to prevent that from happening. I'm extremely annoyed to hear the FAA saying that except for this failure, they've been running 99.99% reliability this year. Four 9s? The specs we were supposed to meet were 8 9s, and since nobody was willing to ask the FAA to define a failure event, our management was conservatively aiming for 10 9s. (An average system controlled about 100 radars, and the big difference is whether a "failure" means "all the radars are out" or "any single radar is out".) This kind of reliability meant that duplicating everything wasn't good enough, you had to triplicated every piece of equipment, or double-double it, because otherwise the possibility of one piece failing while you had its backup down for preventative maintenance for 5 minutes blew your numbers for the year. (No matter that the radars were connected back to the data center over circuits that had 3.5-4 9s, just because of the usual risk of physical damage.) We later found out that the FAA shut down the then-current 1960s system for four hours a night, running on the backup equipment (which was a 1970s transistorized upgrade to the 1940s/1950s version) to keep the backup system reliable and operators trained.
Of course, Johnny Mnemonic was set in 2021, but still, whoa! Welcome to the Free City of Newark!
If you're running a desktop or server on an even vaguely modern physical machine, you've got more cores than you know what to do with, and if the OS wanted to get fancy it could probably use the GPU for decompression or compression. (Also, at least with LZW, decompression is much faster than compression, and compression is something you do with memory you weren't currently using anyway, so it's ok if it's a bit slower.)
On virtual machines, it's a different game, because you're sharing the CPU with other VMs and often only have one core.. You may still want to use it, because memory may still be more scarce than CPU, and while you may have a faster disk array, it's often farther away than the disk on a physical machine.
If some states have taxi driver licenses, or chauffeur licenses, or similar licenses that require you to have a higher level of driving skill or rules knowledge, that's not a significant artificial barrier to becoming a taxi driver (as long as there's not a language restriction involved.)
Taxi medallions and similar restrictions on the number of taxis permitted in an city definitely are artificial barriers, but they're more than that - they're a mechanism for taxi companies to extort money from drivers in return for renting them use of the medallion, and to extort money from the public by keeping taxi rates high (to pay the medallion owners, not to keep taxi driver pay high which is the excuse given for those systems existing), and they also restrict taxi access to parts of the city which can afford to pay more for medallion cabs. Friends of mine live in parts of San Francisco where the chance of a yellow cab driving by their front door today are near-zero, and San Francisco limits the number of medallion cabs allowed to operate. And if you live in a poor black part of NYC, good luck getting a cab, at least without walking out to a main avenue. Uber will show up.
Using "grok" might have labeled you as a hippie decades ago. It only labels you as a hipster if you're using it ironically, or if you point out that you were using it before it was retro when you're too young to have been around then.
If the part were critical, it'd be running hot enough that you had to worry about using the right one. If it's still cold even when you're pumping power through it, you've probably got lots of design headroom for evaluating other parts...
You need Step 2. so that you can sucker people into helping you with Step 1.
Meanwhile, we'll see economically viable seasteading before we see a viable Mars project, and seasteading systems follow a similar financial plan.
Rockets are hard, but they're just physics and chemistry, which are the easy parts.
We don't have a clue how to build an ecosystem that's capable of supporting human life for extended periods of time without frequent restocking from outside. Biosphere I/II cheated, and even then couldn't sustain themselves. The ISS gets its food and spare oxygen from down home, and only recently even started recycling urine to contribute to its water supply. We don't know how to make real dirt on mars, or grow enough plants long-term without it, we don't even really know all the micronutrients humans need, much less how to produce them in some compact yeast-reactor since we probably won't do a great job growing them.
Until we've got a Mars colony clone running sustainably in a sealed can at the South Pole, it's not worth building a full-scale one in a space station or on the Moon, which are reasonably easy to resupply from Earth if something's going wrong. Yes, it's easier to do on Mars, where there's at least a bit of carbon dioxide and some minerals and maybe some water, but there's essentially no margin for error.