Maybe they’re comparing the minimal implementation on a home network. But even then I’m not sure the claim holds up.

People learned IPv4 when they were younger in a more incremental manner and take it for granted now.

However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.

However, it's risky to assume that scrapping a crappy system will result in things being better. The current shitty system was almost certainly the result of scrapping and replacing something else that had some problems.

Anyway, hopefully this works well, because we'll probably end up copying it at NASA.

A big factor, however, is that much the tech NASA needs to develop for space applications has no commercial viability outside of NASA. We're the only potential buyer. And since it wasn't directly motivated by a specific NASA program and funded by a NASA project dollars, it has little chance to continue development once the SBIR contract ends. For many technologies, SBIR funding is the only fundamental tech development funding they get at all.

How can a private company develop a technology only the government needs when the funding from the government is extremely irregular, inconsistent, and insufficient?

I guess they could have a bunch of irons in the fire so they have a decent shot of getting some funding for anything they can do to stay in business. Maybe some of them eventually turn into SBIR mills.

Building spacecraft and space transportation systems like the shuttle came later and is a very different type of task.

Unfortunately, the more flamboyant manned space flight and science missions have gradually come to dominate NASA, and much of the fundamental tech research that made it possible in the first place has been deprioritized and defunded.

Maybe the answer is that strong typing should somehow continue outside of the individual programs and be embedded in file formats as well?

Getting a large contract in place can be a miserable slog and take a huge amount of time and effort to sort out, particularly with the cumbersome government contracting rules and laws. Good contract documents are also really challenging to write. Often times the results will be non-optimal, terms will be interpreted in ways you didn't intend, or you with you had put some more info in there. In many cases I believe the timeline to get a good contract in place can be comparable to the work that we want to perform. That's just silly.

Use of contracts for tech development creates large disconnects and significantly reduces our control and responsiveness to changing needs and ideas. If NASA employees are doing the work we can easily pivot when circumstances change and re-prioritize labor and much more quickly drop bad ideas as we learn new things. We can start investigating something without completely knowing what we're doing and figure it out as we go along. That sort of thing is harder to do with a contract. If the work is being done by a contractor, changing anything is vastly more difficult and complicated, and often not even worth the effort.

If we have a device or something developed by a contractor they often manage to contaminate it with some kind of proprietary info making it much more difficult to use and communicate the data. The tools and devices we develop internally don't have that problem and we're free to use, adapt, and communicate technical info about them as much as we want. Also, if we develop something ourselves, we inherently more deeply understand it and can more quickly make modifications or test out new ideas. That's less often the case when work is done on contract. IMO many of our most valuable developments are done internally due to the enhanced flexibility.

Not that all contracts are bad. There are plenty of cases where using contracts makes great sense and works out terrifically. However, you often just have to hope the right sort of company has decided to exist because doing it ourselves is often not an option. I have absolutely been told about a contractor: "I know they're not the best, but they're the only one interested in doing this work. If don't fund them for too long they may lose interest and then we'll have nothing".

There are plenty of other problems unrelated to contractors as well. But over-reliance on contracting is a big one.

Apparently the highest average speed rail line in the world averages 318 km/h and the straight line distance between Paris and Berlin (through Belgium and Luxembourg) is about 875 km, the time could be about 2.75 hours, which wouldn't be too bad.

In reality the lines wouldn't be able to go straight and you might want to avoid going through any countries other than France and Germany. The best case scenario would probably be a little over 3 hours, which still wouldn't be too bad.

In reality, the biggest problem was they had no incentive to invest in new lighting technology research, although they had the money to do so. It takes a lot of effort to develop a new technology, and significantly more to make it practical and affordable.

I think the story of the development of the blue LED which led to modern LED lighting is more illustrative of the real obstacles of technological development.

Companies/managers don't want to invest in R&D bc it’s too uncertain and they typically are more interested in the short term.

And it’s hard for someone without deep technical knowledge to identify a realistic worthwhile technical idea from a bad one. So they focus on what they can understand and what they can quantify ().

And even technical people can fail to properly evaluate ideas that are even slightly outside their area of expertise (or even sometimes the ones that are within it )

Anything that requires applying things in novel ways that doesn’t have lots of examples out there already seems to be completely beyond it.

Also, it often comes up with very unoptimal and inefficient solutions even though it seems to be completely aware of better solutions when prodded.

So basically it’s a fully competent programmer lol.

I imagine you could use that argument to shoot down pretty much any explanation.