I genuinely believe the strong SLS contingents in NASA are shrinking, and the Bridenstein administration seems to have taken some small steps to reshape the agency.

No skin in the game either way, but isn’t it pretty optimistic to blindly say “but the bees are alive.” She’s a face on Instagram, do you actually know a single thing about the results of her efforts outside the promotional videos she uploads?

Goes to show you folks can’t really intuit the way survival pressures and techniques work. If mom fights to protect the unborn egg and looses (likely since these animals are not well equipped to defend themselves), she dies and doesn’t make more babies. If she gives up on this one, she goes on to reproduce more. This…

By all statements out of SpaceX (plus common sense), Starship will fly many uncrewed launches before carrying crew. By flying an uncrewed Starship to orbit and later boarding the crew they retire a lot of the launch risks that will take hundreds of flights to make safe, simply by skipping that phase of flight on this…

How do you figure low gravity makes it unstable? It’s not going to float away. The CoM works the same. The physics of making a stable object are really straightforward, they simply keep the CoM low and within the leg footprint. This isn’t a major design challenge, simply a bullet point on the list of things to get…

Sounding like the concern trolls saying “Hey, they need magnets and nets and (blah) to stop the boosters from falling off the drone ships.”

NASA would always prefer to have a primary and backup, that’s just reality. But there’s no indications here they selected a less than ideal contender - they seemed to pick the top contender in their book, and they simply didn’t get a backup due to budget fuckery.

No, it’s a non-issue.

The drone ship landings are flat and solid, but otherwise a very challenging environment in terms of dynamics and motion and stability.

Your ‘problem’ supposes that not only will Starship be less capable of finding a safe touchdown point than the old Apollo landers were, but also that they expend no effort on features like self leveling landing legs, or perhaps the shocking (!) idea of knowing their CoM and making sane design choices that make tipping…

Calling this the surprise choice, or less reliable than the other competitors, is to not really be paying attention to the last few years of space industry happenings.

Doubt it - video over USB-C isn’t something that just comes for free, you need to implement it in your onboard chipset as well as firmware — Nintendo didn’t even implement Bluetooth audio. That’s how they deliver these consoles at these prices and volumes - stripping absolutely everything they consider extraneous.

With the latency involved this is really only viable as a capture/record device - even casual players would find themselves frustrated by the latency involved in getting live video from a bit of USB hardware onto the screen in Windows — that level of latency is not a ‘pro gamer’ complaint.

This is clearly, obviously an HDMI capture device that requires you to provide your own dock.

And how many times have you reported this homicidal asshole?

Not much innovation in Windows phone. Dead end platform. Funny you disparage the lack of innovation when other platforms have actually developed this feature and offered it for sale longer than Windows Phone stayed on the market.

I imagine it’s not so simple - for instance, to explore the deep ocean you can bring an entire industrialized ‘village’ to the location, with heavy equipment, machine shops, etc.

There’s a really broad market of speakers between the $5 dollar store specials you mention, and a $100+ “Marshall.” For instance, I’ve got a nice Huawei that really pumps out the volume, and the battery lasts for hours and hours, and it’s microusb. The startup sounds are obnoxious, but how often do you really have to…

And what, exactly, do any of these speakers bring to the table above and beyond what a cheap ~$30 speaker does?

Luckily I’ve been remote for ages, and many of my peers have been too. We haven’t leaned into video at all with the new changes -- but many of my friends who previously worked in an office are now sitting staring at video walls for hours a day, and it makes me wonder if their typical office days were so ineffective…