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Because now it’s practically a necessity. Before that, you could easily not put a case on your phone, exercise some basic care with it and you would’ve been fine. None of my previous phones had a case on them. Not a one. Because I don’t drop them, I don’t throw them and I don’t use them for hammering in bolts or whatever. But the camera bump finally got me to put a case on my phone, because the damn thing not sitting flat on a flat surface annoyed me too much.

Gamers when the game has bugs: >:(

Gamers when the devs delay a patch because they discovered it breaks a core system: >:(

They’re trying to fix bugs, not make existing ones worse. Deal with it, princess.

We (as in humanity) can continue to develop both EEG caps and direct implants. The technology is young and there’s no telling what side benefits and additional functionality either one can have.

And the implant, much like early EEG devices, barely works for now. Imagine what they’ll be capable of 10-20 years down the line.

No they didn’t. They had, a mockup of an empty shell into which they might eventually fit the vehicle. And they still have that.

Blue Origin: “Here’s renders and a papier-mâchė model of what our lander will look like. It’s assembled together in lunar orbit, from an automated cargo ship, our own lander and another Orion.” Note that this isn’t what they won the option b proposal with.

SpaceX: “Here’s renders of what our lander will look like. We have a full scale prototype out in Boca and we’re blowing it up to see if our math and simulations are right on how much pressure the tanks can take. It’ll require some modifications, such as larger landing legs and dedicated landing engines.” And their HLS proposal isn’t a vehicle carried in the Starship’s cargo bay, it is the Starship.

what you’re failing to understand is that this 2.94 billion dollar bid was already AFTER they were informed of the budget changes.

I can find no source for SpaceX’s initial bid being higher, let alone 2x higher (to meet your claim that they bid on the same level as BO, not even gonna consider Dynetics).If you have one, I’d like to see it. And if it is the case that SpaceX was picked because they were willing to slash their bid in half, then I would expect BO’s follow-up litigation to be based around that. Instead, BO focused on the claim that NASA didn’t give their proposal proper evaluation and consideration.

I doubt minimizing corporate loss was Lueder’s motivation there. Presumably neither Steve Cook or Jeff Bezos offered Lueders a large enough bribe job matching her qualifications.

That wasn’t my point. The point was that if their proposal had been closer to the budget set aside for the award, as opposed to being double the budget, they might have been contacted to see if they could complete the contract for the lesser amount.

SpaceX didn’t need a mockup to present. They had prototypes of the base vehicle and a proposal for necessary modifications to perform the contract duties and an established track record of developing ambitious rocket engines and launch vehicles. BO had bits and pieces of other things they were gonna bolt together and a pretty model of how it’ll look like, we swear, scout’s honor. But if you’re talking about the Blue Moon that eventually won the secondary bid, that’s not what they initially proposed.Blue Moon Mk2 is a variant of a lander that’s been in development since 2016, so two years longer than SpaceX’s Starship prototypes. The one that’s planned for a lunar landing this year, Blue Moon Mk1, isn’t the one they bid for HLS. It’s a robotic lander, smaller than the HLS’s Mk2. So fancy that, they won a HLS contract when they bid a variant of something they were already working on, much like SpaceX did. And remember, BO is developing a lander. SpaceX is developing a fully reusable super heavy lift rocket, an interplanetary transport craft and a lunar lander as part of the same package.

AFTER being told to do so. That’s the entire problem. Blue Origin and Dynetics both came forward and said they’d gladly match that bid, but since they didn’t get the special information that was only given to SpaceX, they couldn’t know this.

Finish reading my post. SpaceX’s initial bid was 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, they agreed that they can do the job for 50 million less than what they originally bid. BO’s and Dynetics’ proposals would’ve suffered a much larger hit. And sure, BO got the secondary contract for 3.4 billion, after rethinking their entire proposal. So why did they not submit that one in the first place? If they had, they might have gotten a similar call.

Is it? Starship has been in development since at least 2012-ish (as the “mars colonial transport” or “its” or “bfr” or a few other names). It hasn’t done a succesful mission yet. ULA’s Vulcan was anounced in 2014, and it works just fine. So I don’t really think it’s actually faster or better, but it IS more showy.

The first time Starship was spoken of was in 2012, yes. The very first idealistic designs of it. The design that’s actually being tested is from 2018. So 5 years to go from “Alright, this is what we’re gonna do” to full stack flight testing. Roughly on pace with their previous rockets, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 took about 4 years.

Absolute and complete lie. Its exactly the opposite. SpaceX did not, and still DOES NOT have a solid design or mockup of HLS. Dynetics and Blue Origin had both.

Blue Origin had (and still has) no experience with human-rated capsules. Their proposed lander had to be assembled in lunar orbit or launched on another SLS. The Dynetics lander was over its own mass budget. It was literally too heavy to do the job it was being proposed for. Meanwhile, SpaceX proposed a derivative of what they were already working on. Blue and Dynetics had no practical development done on their landers, they would’ve relied on the HLS award to even get started on actual development.

The problem is that SpaceX had a bid at the same level of the others, but they lowered it when Kathy Lueders gave them a call (and not the other parties) to lower it. This is spelled out in NASA’s own document:

SpaceX’s bid was just under 3B. Blue Origin bid at a bit under 6B. Dynetics wanted 9B. This information is freely available online. SpaceX was also given the least in design development funding, with 135 million versus Blue’s 579 million and Dynetics’ 253 million. It’s not terribly shocking that a company with a good track record and the lowest bid wins a contract.

No, the contract stated that anything between zero and three were options, based on funding. They said the goal was two, but then budget was reduced. Nobody was told this. The number of contracts was also reduced to one as a result. Nobody was told this. And then Kathy Lueders gave SpaceX a call, and not the others, to share this information.

They needed a lander contract. The entire Artemis project was already fucked when it comes to the timetable, but delaying the HLS contract would’ve made things even worse. And when the budget got cut, they negotiated with the one bidder who was deemed most likely to still get the job done with the lower budget, as opposed to the other two whose bids were wildly over what NASA could give them. SpaceX bid at 2.94 billion and the final award was 2.89 billion. Again, BO bid 6 billion and Dynetics bid 9 billion. Losing 50 million is an easier pill to swallow than getting half or a third of what you need.

Point 1: SpaceX’s entire development philosophy is “test early, test often and learn from failures”. This is a much quicker pace than simulating every imaginable failure scenario and leads to faster progress in development. With the Falcon 9, that process proved wildly efficient and successful, culminating in a launch vehicle so reliable that it’s cheaper to insure a payload on an F9 that already has multiple launches under its belt than a brand new booster. And they’re turning enough of a profit to develop the Starship largely on internal funds, seeing how the early Raptor flight tests were before the HLS contract.

Point 2: Just adding, the Raptor engine is the first full-flow staged combustion engine to ever get off a testing stand and actually fly. The engineering complexity of these things is on the level of the Shuttle’s RS-25.

Point 3: SpaceX were the only ones with more than designs and mockups to present, and they had a reliable track history from working with NASA on the commercial resupply and crew projects. And I see no problem with awarding a contract to a bid that actually fits into the budget.

Point 4: Multiple options was always part of the plan. NASA wants redundancy, so that if one of the providers runs into problems, the other provider can continue (and perhaps even take up the slack) instead of everything coming to a grinding halt. For a perfect example, look at the Shuttle and Commercial Crew programs. The Shuttle got grounded and since it was NASA’s only manned launcher, they had to bum rides from the russians. In contrast, the CC contract was awarded to Boeing and SpaceX. With Starliner’s continued issues, SpaceX has picked up the slack and fulfilled more than their initial contract in launches, instead of NASA having to bum rides from the russians again. The initial HLS contract was supposed to go to two providers, until the budget got cut. Blue’s bid was always the favorite for the second pick.

I think in two languages and sometimes one of them is better for expressing my thoughts, even if it’s not the language that we’ve been using for the conversation so far. And sometimes it just happens mid-sentence.

Why are you bringing up Musk? I fail to see how Neuralink is the killing blow to the very concept of brain-computer interfaces. Your bias is showing.

It’s true that current BCIs can’t do what I outlined as their potential benefits. Hence, why they’re potential. The technology still needs to develop before those potential benefits can be realised. Personally, I look forward to that day.

Your issue, as far as I understood it, was that the brain implants are pointless, cause they do nothing we can’t already do. There’s plenty current medical technology can’t fix, but a brain implant could (one day). Such as restoring sight by bridging cameras to the visual cortex; or restoring control over their body to disabled people, either by bypassing damaged nerves anywhere in the body or connecting prosthetics to the motor cortex. Are those things worth the trouble of going through brain surgery?

Okay, but would you rather be locked in your unmoving body or get brain surgery and have motion again? Would you rather be blind and deaf or get brain surgery and have your senses back?

“In order to fight monsters, we created monsters of our own. The Jaeger Program was born.”

If Starship Troopers had the player numbers of Helldivers, these articles would be about that game instead.

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If you’re gonna hate someone, hate them for what they actually did, not for what their detractors want you to think they did.

Modern news media is fucking awash with cleverly worded half truths that are repeated so often, by so many who don’t take a moment for critical thought, that they become almost a rallying cry. It’s Hunter’s Laptop all over again, but aimed at the left.

It depends. If you know you have issues, aren’t dealing with or handling them to your satisfaction and want help? Absolutely. Therapy, treatment and proper medication generally require an official diagnosis, not to mention potentially being cheaper when you don’t have to pay for all of it yourself. If you know you have issues, but have also developed effective coping mechanisms on your own and negative effects on your life are overall rare, I think it’s fine to keep going undiagnosed, as long as you’re mindful of your problems and how they affect the people around you.

Couple examples from my own life. I knew I was depressed. My friends knew I was depressed. I thought I was handling it okay, but I really wasn’t. So I got a diagnosis, so I could get medication and therapy, that allowed me to build coping mechanisms to hold it at bay. I’m also fairly sure I’m somewhere on the autism spectrum. Where, exactly, doesn’t matter, since I can manage life and socializing just fine, I simply have to think twice about what I say. And when I’m not sure of myself, I have trusted friends to go to for a second opinion. And then there’s the undiagnosed face blindness. A diagnosis won’t help at all, since there’s to treatment or medication. I had built workarounds without knowing I was doing it, years before I found out face blindness was even a thing

In the end, if you’re unsure, you can’t go wrong with getting a diagnosis. If nothing else, it will at least tell you more about yourself and serve as a guideline for how you manage your issues.

First off…

So I have no idea how you can pretend that you are doing them a service by actauly actively stopping them from making their own choice to go where they can for search of better life.

Now, perhaps it’s creative interpretation on my part, but it came across as you implying I’m arguing for their best interests. Apologies, if that’s not the case.

Secondly, whether you like it or not, there’s more to consider than the lives of these refugees or any that would follow. National security and the security of the Schengen zone. The very likely tensions and conflicts between the refugees already housed here and the newly arrived Russians. I assure you, when emotions run high, it won’t matter if everyone involved are innocent civilians. And our own history of Russia attempting to use the local Russian population as a weapon. That was under Putin’s rule, I don’t find it unreasonable to think he’d do it again.

And finally, I’m not letting you ignore the inconvenient fact that we don’t have the resources. It may not have been the point of the article, but it’s most definitely a factor in the decision. Because the reality is that these people would need help, because practically everyone who was rich enough to snag plane tickets, or had VISAs, and wanted to leave has already left. They did that over the first year of the war. These people need housing, food and healthcare, none of which they can provide for themselves. The reality is that if we let them in, we have a sharp spike in homelessness. Soon after, a spike in people needing healthcare. Around the same time, a rise in crime, as some of the refugees are unwilling or unable to get jobs. Followed by another spike in people needing healthcare. And during all that, families freezing to death in the streets. But I suppose all of that is fine if they’re searching for a better life, yes?

Just out of curiosity, where are you from?

You’ll note that at no point did I claim that turning them away is in their best interests. I’d appreciate it if you stopped telling me what I said.

And yes, forbidding them passage through the country is what “closing the borders” means. Very astute of you. Not like they’d get to go anywhere anyway, seeing how they have neither a Schengen VISA nor a EU passport. So all those masses would be ours to deal with. Again, we don’t have the resources to do that. It’s a point you seem intent on ignoring.

And how can someone so unfamiliar with the situation preach, with such conviction, to the uneducated and clearly right-wing xenophobic untermenschen who actually have to deal with it?

You speak as though we’re closing the borders with a giant “fuck you” to the people on the other side. We can’t help them. Can’t. Not won’t, but can’t. We don’t have the resources to help them. You can talk about the EU being rich as fuck all day, but the reality on the ground is that we have nothing left to give to help these people, because all that wealth isn’t here. We’re stretched thin as it is.

You ever heard the saying “Don’t light yourself on fire to keep someone else warm”? Because that’s what you’re proposing.