[thinking about how Reconstruction ended]

Did it, though?

This is why I (a Georgian) am doing early in-person voting and not mail-in voting. Between the tactic you mentioned, the possibility of disqualification due to a bullshit “signature mismatch,” and sabotage from DeJoy (who is still the fucking Postmaster General because Biden apparently hates the USPS as much as he does and failed to make board appointees who would remove him), mail-in voting is unacceptably risky unless you have no other choice. And that’s sad, terrifying, and – most importantly – fucking infuriating.

Al Gore, too (never mind the EC vote, which he also would have won if not for the first Republican coup).

I was under the impression that a “rocket” does not include the payload.

Sure, I think you’re totally correct… if the part with the engine is separable from the part with the payload. But with the Space Shuttle, that isn’t the case unless you’re limiting yourself to talking about the SRBs. The orbiter is a spaceplane and that makes it weird, but its main engines are rocket engines (as opposed to a hybrid ramjet or something) and it launches vertically, so I think it’s still fair to also call it a rocket.

Or as another example, consider the problem scaled aaaaaaaall the way down to something like this:

Is the whole thing a “rocket,” or does that only describe the bottom half and it’s called something else from the payload bay up?

Remember, unless we’re talking about Enterprise, “space shuttle rockets” includes the orbiter itself. The orbiter’s main engines were where all that fuel from the external tank was going, after all! From that perspective, I would argue that the main “space shuttle rocket” was definitely much more complex than the Super Heavy booster, because the crew stuff, cargo stuff, spaceplane stuff, etc. was integrated into it.

I feel like your criticism of the shuttle system being less reusable than advertised might have been more applicable if we were talking about the Soviet Buran (which indeed used expendable Energia rockets to reach orbit), not NASA’s shuttles.

Between the orbiter (reused), the boosters (reused), and the external fuel tank (not reused), which parts are not “just a small part” (in terms of technology/complexity/cost, not physical size)?

They would literally be shooting the tyrants.

Non-file based computing is a highly unexplored design space.

No it isn’t; that’s what databases are.

I got a copy of Turbolinux 6 from a Hamfest and never managed to get it installed correctly. A few years later, I did succeed in running Debian and Gentoo in college.

We don’t have to imagine.

Cases like him are why we actually do need the death penalty (and why it’s the Constitutionally-prescribed punishment for treason). As we can see from Trump’s pardoning of him, any lesser punishment isn’t final enough.

I really think the blue sky is bad stuff is overdramatic xbox vs PlayStation kind of stuff.

That’s a very apt analogy, in the sense that they’re both shitty proprietary walled-gardens and people should actually be using something entirely different instead.

Stop pretending that “get rid of the bot” doesn’t count as a suggestion. That’s dishonest.

I don’t even care about the bot itself, but at this point I’m just getting pissed off by all the constant distracting bickering about it.

I am really fucking sick and tired of every goddamn company thinking they’re entitled to colonize my property and hack it to serve them instead of me.

My computer is my property, you fascist fucks, not yours, and my actual property rights trump your Imaginary “Property” “rights” (i.e. temporary government-granted privileges) every single time and in every single circumstance!

That’s a nice thought, but it won’t happen because the ratcheting effect of primarying out moderates only works in one direction, rightward. This is because corporate donors are just as happy to fund fascists as they are moderates.

In contrast, progressive candidates often don’t stand a chance because corporate donors fucking hate them and will spend effectively unlimited amounts of money to destroy their chances, especially if they make regulation and oversight of corporations a big part of their platform. Ditto for the police “union[sic]” and police reform, or AIPAC and opposing genocide, for that matter.

It absolutely infuriates me that having high ethical standards makes me a sucker.

Frankly, at this point the only thing stopping me from saying “fuck it” and starting to blatantly lie and cheat to get ahead isn’t even that it’s “wrong,” but that I’m just too damn stubborn to be a “reasonable man”!

Not “always.” I believe the Tea Party was a genuine grass-roots movement for at least a few weeks or months at the very beginning, before the Koch-suckers co-opted it. Frankly, it had a lot in common with Occupy Wall Street and I was holding out hope for a while that the two movements would merge.

We need to bring back the Bull Moose Party (at the local level, not the Russian-backed spoiler effect garbage like the Green Party is debasing itself at).

Eh, the US military, of all organizations, is probably among the best-prepared in the world for this sort of thing because of all the personnel who specialize in things like logistics, damage control, rapid construction, etc. They’re just going to have a fun time doing their job for real instead of in a training exercise for once.

Obviously having to rebuild the base is an extra cost and therefore less than ideal in a “parable of the broken window” sort of sense, but it’s not as if the taxpayers are gonna have a choice about shelling out to fix it, so who cares?

Switching to Free Software is kind of like planting a tree: the best time was years ago (because you’d be over the learning curve). The second-best time is now.